Asura Cryin’: This Season for Busy People

Every now and then I get this unaccountable urge to mention anime that is actually still airing, so here’s a remark on the unremarkable Asura Cryin’.

‘Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Zabi . . .

. . . if you think you’re in London?’ (It was almost certainly unintentional, but I’ll take what I can get – and besides, any comedy which has a credit for ‘the Yokel’ deserves some recognition.)

MS IGLOO or, as I like to refer to it, Mobile Suit Gundam: Peenemünde, is a real oddity. Its purpose, as far as I can make out, is to show off the animators’ skill in the production of fully computer-generated mechanical design porn. This makes for storylines which are, judged by normal criteria, probably rather dissatisfying: each episode introduces a weapon, together with a character who operates it, but the weapon is always destroyed and the new character is always killed. However, since the main reason to watch this is the mechanical design porn, the pre-arranged outcomes aren’t really an issue. Indeed, once you know how it’s going to go, you can take a kind of detached interest in the execution.

Varying Degrees of Whut

I find Sora Kake Girl or Sora wo Kakeru Shoujo or The Girl Who Leapt Through Space quite enjoyable, for reasons which escape me. The staff are poking heaps of fun at other anime, past and present, from the same studio, and I suppose I’m in a position to appreciate at least some of that poking process. Plus my lack of anything approaching good taste in music helps me tap my foot to the Ali Project opening. But there are also odd hints in the show that it might turn out to be, like Code Geass, a fertile ground for the parlour game of crackpot theories.

Here’s my first contribution.

Notes on Ballet Bodies

When, in Ride Back’s first scene, Rin dances, she looks to me like she has weight. I don’t mean that she looks like she’s heavy, I mean that she doesn’t look ethereal. It helps that the first few shots we see of her show her testing and adjusting her ballet shoes.

Hakushaku to Yousei: A Bower of Britsploitation Bliss?

Suddenly, Lelouch is out-collared.

Hakushaku to Yousei is not exactly the show of the moment, but it has a certain charm, especially for viewers who, like me, don’t watch many shoujo romances. Besides, I have what you might call a semi-professional interest in Britsploitation, and if 2008 had a Britsploitation anime it was this one. (Apart from the adaption of Black Jeeves, but I’m not watching that.)

The Cloud-Capped Towers, the Gorgeous Palaces

This astounding piece of foppery appears early in the first scene of Tytania. What we have here is a classic high-tech space battleship bridge, commanded from the lovechild of a proscenium arch stage – complete with curtain – and an incredibly opulent drawing room.

Not a Community-Spirited Story

I believe I’m right in saying (and I’m not an economist, so take this with a pinch of salt) that posts by the side of the street like this one are a public good: however much you ‘use’ such a post – walking safely by the light cast from it or holding a telephone conversation over the wires mounted on top – your actions don’t somehow use the post up, and you can’t exclude particular people from its benefits. (Compare Taiga’s cookies. It’s easy to control access to them. Furthermore, eating one reduces the total number available and prevents anyone else from eating that particular cookie.)

It’s rather mean to damage such a post. Ostensibly a victimless crime, it nevertheless creates hassle for some minor local government employee and perhaps uses up some small shred of government money. Not that this is a concern to the tiger or the dragon, as I’m guessing they don’t personally pay any taxes.

I Am Just Going Outside

Char - always relevant.

. . . and I may be some time.

I’m moving tomorrow. I’m supposedly going to have internet access set up around the beginning of October, though I’ll believe that when I see it, and not before. Anyhow, until then there probably won’t be any more posts here, though I may be able to hop online every now and then to answer emails.

(Maybe being deprived of fresh anime will help me force myself to watch the rest of Space Runaway Ideon.)

A Matter of Manners

I’ve been told that if you slurp it you mix more oxygen into the tea to enhance the flavour. This is one place where you have to trade manners off against taste. Do we praise refined sippers for their ascetic prioritisation of appearance over pleasure, or blunt slurpers for their healthy disdain for pretense? I’m a slurper – in private – myself. Given that she’s using a teacup rather than a mug, and drinking at something like a garden party, Yoshika’s probably better off sticking her little finger out and sipping – unless she wants to stick her middle finger up at the Establishment!

(Having taken the tea into your mouth you’ve a choice: taste it at the front before shunting it to the back of your mouth, so that you get the lighter aspect of its taste followed by the bitter aspect, or attempt to hit all of your tongue with the tea at roughly the same time, so as to take both aspects at once.)

State of the Fandom

In Britannian Japan, Region 11 DVD pirates YOU!

‘Someone mentioned me? Great, now I have to reply with Rob Dougan playing in my head . . .’