The Sighs of Kosaka Honoka – Love Live Series 2, Episode 1

Posted by DiGiKerot in Love Live! at April 8, 2014 on 12:32 pm


Finally, at long last, Love Live is back, singlehandedly saving the anime season from being naught but three solid months of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure memes. What a terrific first episode it was, too.

It’s kind of funny going back and reading how strangely lukewarm I was on the first series of Love Live back when it first started – certainly, what I was writing doesn’t exactly match up with my memories of back then, and most assuredly don’t with the way I felt once the series concluded. It doesn’t really ring true with my reaction to re-watching the initial episodes either, though my re-watch has only progressed as far as the sixth episode at this point.

Still, I’ve been looking forward to this show, which rather awkwardly does nothing to denote it’s sequel status in it’s moniker, returning to our screens – pretty much increasingly so as the months have gone on. Maybe it’s just all the Love Live music I’ve been listening to in the interim bolstering my excitement (though still only the stuff actually used in the anime, for the most part – I’ve not listened to any of the subgroup or character singles or anything).
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Final Notes on Wake Up, Girls!

Posted by DiGiKerot in Wake Up Girls! at March 31, 2014 on 8:31 pm


Wake Up, Girls wrapped up on Friday. I have to admit, going into the last anime season, it was the new show I was looking forward to the most, even if the reasons for that weren’t exactly the purest (or, rather, there was a certain amount of expected Yamakan-related schadenfreude going into it).

As the show progressed, it was probably the new series (as in, not Kill la Kill or Build Fighters or any carryover from the prior season) that I followed most closely week to week, though, ultimately, it ended up being a bit of a weird kettle of fish.
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Random Wafflage: Drowning in a Hole Edition

Posted by DiGiKerot in Free Talk at March 30, 2014 on 11:55 pm


This is the point where I realise, point out, and apologise for that fact that I’ve not updated in a smidgen over a month now. I’ve done what I was fearing might happen, and fallen into that KanColle hole for some inexplicable reason – I mean, I’m not really engaging with it in much beyond the core game. I’m not reading any of the fan comics, and even as far as the ingame content goes, I’m mostly just scanning the translated character dialogue for the particularly cute shipgirls on the Wikia. I figure it’ll lead to less disappointment when the anime inevitably doesn’t capture the characters personality in the same fashion as [insert fanwork-or-tie-in-manga here].
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Mikan Watch #87: Space Dandy

Posted by DiGiKerot in Miracle Train at February 26, 2014 on 9:56 pm


In the bottom-left corner of this scene in episode seven of Space Dandy, AKA the episode which is not a little like the movie Redline. It doesn’t actually say Mikan on it, but hey, there’s clearly an orange on it, so I’ll claim it.

I have astonishingly little to say about Space Dandy. I, on aggregate, enjoy it. It’s a little difficult to know what you are going to be getting into every week, not just on and episode by episode basis, but on a half-by-half one – that’s particularly the case with the eighth episode, where the show presents a particularly hard tonal shift between the A and B parts. The unpredictability of the tone and content of the show is one of the things I like about it, but I do sometimes wonder if throwing up a different title card at the midway point, forcing an effective tonal-reset by suggesting the start of a different story, would have relieved some of the complaints leveled at the show on occasion.

Also, Bea has the best shaped head.


Mikan Watch #86: Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! Ren

Posted by DiGiKerot in Mikan Watch at February 13, 2014 on 1:05 pm


From the fifth episode of second series of Chuunibyou, on the far right of Kumin’s cardboard construction. It’s no wonder that Yuuta is such a lousy competitive napper when he has been provided with such a mentally stimulating practice area.

The new Chuu2 has thus far has been fine, I guess – I enjoyed the first season more when it was being dumb than when it was indulging itself in melodrama, though that it’s being doing that to the detriment of any kind of forward momentum these last couple of episodes isn’t exactly ideal. The MoriDeko baiting of the fourth episode was cute, but it’s not like it actually went anywhere.

That being said, I hear something actually happens in yesterday’s episode, though this is where I presumably grumble about the usual lack-of-timeliness of UK-specific streaming services. Guess I’ll look forward to it sometime next week!