Why do so many bishoujo games have a token cute animal (for varying degrees of "cute")? The Key anime adaptations featured theirs, with Piro in Kanon, Potato in Air, and Botan in Clannad. Nursery Rhyme has Azu, and Heart de Roommate had Toshibo. I first noticed this during the fake opening for the last Haruhi-chan episode, where apparently Muu-chan (a Haruhi-chan original) and Shamisen double-team this role.

I've not had much time to play Coming x Humming, and I swear that this is actually the name of the visual novel. I have no idea what it's about, except apparently some sort of local goddess from the shrine taking human form to… I don't know. Boink the player character, maybe. Characters in visual novels seem to have a surprisingly blase attitude towards plainly supernatural phenomena; it's hard to tell if this is something generally Japanese, or if it's just easier to tell a bishoujo game story like this, without having to explain all the plot contortions.

I wonder what the first bishoujo game to utilize all these conventions was. Probably something relatively old and familiar, since when I encountered them in Coming x Humming, they had this comfortingly familiar feel. Token cute pet, token childhood friend, token MAGIC… all is well with the world.

I admit that I'm not entirely certain what to think about hearing "Koi no Mikuru Densetsu" as played by the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra.

There's something strangely compelling about listening to pop music, as in popular music that is of interest to the teeming masses, as played by an orchestra. Or a full choir chanting something vaguely Latinesque, going "Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine" or "Rex tremendae majestatis" or "Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi" and so on to the tune, because apparently Mozart's Requiem Mass in D minor is just about the only piece of music in Latin many popular composers are willing to make use of.

That might be a bit unfair, of course. We've got our own example of an alternative, Mahler's Symphony No. 8 ("Veni, creator spiritus, mentes tuorum visita") in the sixth chronological episode of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and occasionally composers make up their own ("Cum historia mutat valde, Razgriz revelat ipsum primum daemon scelestus est"). But I digress.

Part of it might be the sheer effort required in getting all these people together, in a setting normally expected to be a stuffy, bourgeois concert hall, performing with great pomp and professionalism something that was originally sung (badly) in MIDI by a combat waitress from the future in a bunnysuit. The incongruity makes such an arrangement unlikely, which is why it is so fascinating when it actually happens.

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You are killing me here. It is such a sweet death.

I realize that there's something about a concert or some such, but other people have covered that in more detail than I feel like. I have but one gimmick, and I am going to milk that gimmick for all it is worth.

Mind you, I'm well aware that given Tsumugi's inclinations, it would be highly disingenuous of me to ever consider her Mai Waifu material. At the most, I can only observe her from afar, which is probably why the thought "Mugi-chan in a maid outfit" quickly turned into "Mugi-chan in a maid", and all that entails.

I've not been keeping track of the zillions of spinoffs and merchandise coming out of the Evangelion franchise, especially since it appears to be approaching Transformers levels. The original series failed to entertain me, and I include End of Evangelion in this, but my senses for the franchise have been kept sharp by stuff like the Angelic Days manga, which I did enjoy. Of course, I only bought the first four volumes and lost all interest after the announcement that the next volume was going to be about Yui and Gendou, so that may say something about me.

Zyl's post reminded me of the existence of Petite Eva (or Puchi Eva, depending on how you want to romanize it). I've never been a fan or anti-fan of Evangelion, and so someone else will have to take up the rallying cry of the masses ("MILK IT! MILK IT FOR ALL IT'S WORTH, YOU BASTARDS!"), but chibi-sized fun is always welcome. The first nine shorts are more or less single-joke gags, the sort that could fit into a four-koma or two each, but the rest are rather more surreal, and would not have taken place in any world resembling ours even if the characters were de-chibified. Post-Impact reconstruction as imagined by (Azumanga Daioh's) Osaka, perhaps.

Weird stuff happens. Eva-01 is now a delinquent (with a heart of LCL gold) of some sort, Gendou wields the power of his desk, a big fuzzy thing maintains order by turning misdemeanour offenders into turd piles… whatever.

What interests me most is the gathering of the three Ayanami sisters. We have the standard Rei, although we may be stretching the definition of "standard" a bit far here, since she acts more like an accused Rei clone, Yuki Nagato from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Not only that, but the comedy version thereof, from the Haruhi-chan minis. Rei the First here seems more like a normal, quiet girl with superhuman speed and reflexes, rather than the uncanny valley girl she is apparently supposed to be.

At a glance, this seems to support the theory that the original love for Rei from the fanbase (well, some parts of it, to be more precise) was because the fans could insert their own interpretations of Rei's personality, when the original was supposed to have none, or at least nothing remotely human. It's a bit more subtle than the screaming peanut gallery would claim, though; it's not that Rei is assigned with any personality that the stereotypical fanboy would want to foist onto her (like tsundeRei). Instead, we have, through other forms of media, developed a kind of idea about the sort of personality a Quiet Girl would have, and applied that to Rei, regardless of how well it actually fits.

Considering the convenient labelling of every other character in existence into familiar personality types, I think this is not such a specific sin. I suppose the loudness of the complaints are partly because it's easier to assign Yuki Nagato's personality to Rei Ayanami (as an example), compared to the endless debates on whether Haruhi Suzumiya is a tsundere.

Digression aside, we also have Rei the Second, the happy energetic girl from the best moment of the entire original series for me, the Wacky School Life Comedy alternate universe in episode 26. This was further explored in the Angelic Days manga, which brought the Angels back into the equation for no reason I can fathom other than Drama. So it goes.

There's also Rei the Third, little kid version. Not much else to say there, at least nothing that won't seem excessively creepy.

There's a certain peaceful feel to the Ayanami sisters' interactions. They don't appear together all that often, but when they do, as in the Someday In The Rei-n rainy day episode, it's calm, relaxing, heartwarming. Yes, I know they're supposed to be clones of each other, but taken out of context it's just the story of three sisters in a happy family life.

Zyl notes that there are issues with P-Eva's labelling of the sisters as Rei 1, 2, and 3, mostly due to chronology. Any new numbering system will inevitably fall into yet more nitpicking, so I'd personally go with descriptive nicknames. I find no issue with assigning Loli Rei the moniker of Chibinami. The "original", the one we're supposed to associate as the canonical version imported into the Puchi-verse, we may leave as simply Rei.

Rei the Second, the one with the vest, is a little harder to pin down. The temporary name of Bread Rei won't quite do, since it raises questions about the equal validity of calling her Pantyshot Rei. I've taken to calling her Hyper Rei, partly for her enthusiastic personality quite unlike the oReiginal canonical version, and partly because it gives me great pleasure to imagine her using some sort of beamspam. Perhaps I should focus on her brightness of personality and call her Shiny Rei, for she is a drop of golden sun.

I'm writing this post on my Eee PC, away from any wireless hotspots (in fact, I think this place actually inadvertantly blocks out Wireless@SG due to its construction). I'm also not feeling too well (update: fever of 38.5 degrees Celsius) and thus not thinking too clearly; I've forgotten a lot of details (such as full names of characters), and while I'll try to correct the blanks later, I may miss a few (or end up not bothering in favour of medicine and sleep).

Extrange Twittered recently about Medaka Box, which I've also been coincidentally checking out. (Really; I was intrigued by the bishoujo character designs, and was hoping for some form of moe comedy.) In the manga, the titular character, one Medaka Kurokami, is a first-year high school student who gets elected to be the Student Council president, largely because she's the only member of the Student Council. In both the one-shot pilot and the first chapter of the manga proper (which restarts the story and ignores the one-shot canonically), she dragoons her childhood friend Zenkichi Hitoyoshi, who happens to be the viewpoint protagonist, into joining.

It's an interesting story. Medaka is supremely confident in her abilities to do every bit of the Student Council work, to the point where she wears the armbands of every position in the council, from president to secretary to treasurer. Considering her near-superhuman competence in just about everything she does, this is not an unjustified belief. The "box" referred to in the title is a suggestion box she set up to help solve every problem the student body sends her way. Zenkichi is only slightly less superhuman, but a lot more unmotivated as per the usual tsukkomi role.

There's a meme going around that perfect characters make for boring stories. (Good for moralizing perhaps, as in various religions and myths and Silver Age Superman stories, but not entertainment.) With Medaka's hypercompetence, it would seem that she would be some sort of all-purpose problem-solver, but as in a lot of other stories (or anime and manga, due to my personal selection bias), she's still saddled with a fair number of flaws.

"Flaws" may not be the proper way to put it. Extrange called it "tensai-dere", which sparked off the train of thought leading to this post.

I'm not going to have a lot of pictures in this post, mostly because Medaka Box, being a relatively new serialized manga, doesn't have a lot of artwork for it yet. This is why the header image is that of Ayako Takasu, which I'll mention in a bit more detail later. A quick search of imageboards shows some effort, but sadly NSFW. As it is, expect lots of pantyshots and undies under the cut.

You have been warned.

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I didn't really like Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, mostly due to it being targeted entirely outside my tastes. At best, I can say that I understand why people would like it, in much the same way I can say I understand why people like basketball or something, while the actual topic itself completely fails to engage me in any way. In fact, I think my mind sort of shuts down as I wait for the conversation to turn back to things I have the remotest interest in.

Nevertheless, the "Kirameki Yoko Box – Pieces of Sweet Stars" single, specifically Kuro's post about it, did pique my interest, because I found Yoko to be one of the more tolerable characters in the series: for one thing, she doesn't quite shout so much, and shows some glimmers of intelligence beyond being generically violent.

The music video does address, in part, one of my admittedly petty concerns about the original anime: here, Yoko spends about two-thirds of the video wearing more clothes than she does in the series. Suddenly, she becomes far more attractive. I am beginning to suspect that my insistence on this is because a bikini top and daisy dukes don't really provide much material (literally) for the more awesome costume designs seen in anime.

Not much to say about the music. It is, much like the series, aimed at a target audience that does not include me. It's not too hard on the ears, but it does have a lot more techno than I'm really comfortable with. The "Kirameki MIX", however, is a great deal more fun.

I'm not the only one who keeps humming that upon discovery that Tsumugi spends her summer holiday in Finland, am I?

Mugi's holiday adventures aside, I get the impression that her home life resembles one of the two extremes often seen in anime involving very rich ojou-sama types: in this case, the whole Apple Of Her Father's Eye (and it's almost always the father, possibly because it's more acceptable to see guys acting like idiots) thing. Anything for the little lady of the house, cost and consequences be damned.

I can almost imagine Mugi's father (seen in silhouette plus eyebrows in episode two) fountaining tears of joy that his lovely daughter has managed to find such good friends in her high school club. Use the villa? Why of course, anything for the treasure of the Kotobuki family! Unfortunately, the largest beach villa is being used for a meeting with other company presidents, and the old farts just won't see reason, so please bear with this tiny one for now, I promise you'll be able to use the big one next year. For now, we'll prepare the rooms to your utmost satisfaction, stock the fridge with the finest Kobe beef, and bring out the yacht…

Gods help the man who, in the distant hypothetical future, wishes to initiate any form of relationship with Tsumugi. Although with Mugi's apparent interests, this may take another, far more intriguing form.

Fending off such overbearing affection may explain the flower of the Kotobuki family's uncanny carrying capacity.

Spice and Wolf holds an odd place in my listing of Shows I Have Seen And Enjoyed. On the one hand, it has a lot of elements that would otherwise raise it to a Highly Recommended slot, shared by luminaries such as Princess Tutu. Horo is attractive, perhaps even cute, although in a more refined and less sugary way than that descriptor would suggest. The art is clean, and while I can see several occasions of slightly off-model animation, these are never jarring enough to bring me out of the story (unlike Seven Arcs's sins with the Lyrical Nanoha series and Asura Cryin). There are plenty of little touches which give me a little thrill of satisfaction every time they happen, like the way Horo's headwear twitches when she moves her ears.

On the other hand, after I finished watching the last episode, I had absolutely no desire to rewatch the show ever again. And I don't know why.

It took me a long while to craft together this blog post, since I didn't know where to start. (To be clear, however, it hasn't actually been that long; I don't have as much time as I did to watch anime, so Spice and Wolf had been my "I should watch this because of the anime blog" series.) I should be loving Spice and Wolf, but I don't. It doesn't have a lot of aspects I would actively dislike, such as crushing angst and long self-pitying soliloquoys, but I finished the show with an odd sense of discontent. It was as though despite the high production values, I found the show wanting, somehow.

I still don't know precisely why I feel that way, but I do have several ideas which don't seem obviously wrong. Chief of these is the assertion that Spice and Wolf did not meet my expectations.

Now, when people use that phrase, often they mean that it was not good enough, or it fell short somehow. In this case, however, the show may or may not have surpassed my ideas of quality, but it went wide off the mark nevertheless. I had a certain idea of what the show would be, or at least what I wanted to take from that show, but this idea was defeated.

This may be because Spice and Wolf is not, relatively speaking, a new show. Everyone I spoke to about it mentioned surprise at the heavy emphasis on economic theory, to the point of almost being educational. And so I went in expecting a lighter, fluffier, and certainly shorter anime version of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle with a cute wolfgirl. Obviously it would not be as grand in depth and scope, but the applied examples of currency speculations were a great deal more interesting when placed in the context of a society in the midst of a scientific revolution, despite the political upheavals at the time muddying the waters. (I realize that things have not changed much since then.)

What I got was a show which certainly tried to introduce a few concepts, but got sidetracked often by personal drama that seemed, to me, to be shoehorned in for the sake of some action.

It's weird: I could accept Horo's nature of being a wolf spirit taking human form as "normal", or at least normal enough not to interfere in the economic theory. Her superior (and supernatural) senses can provide more information than Lawrence would otherwise have access to, but that is fine, since a free market would theoretically work best with total knowledge of information. (This never happens in practice, which is one reason why economic theories never work as well when applied to real life. Ask ten economists, get fifteen answers…)

But when she takes an active hand in influencing the story by turning into her Big Bad Wolf form, or when her supernatural nature and background affects the plot significantly (the last couple of episodes, for example), it takes me out of economic theory and dumps me into a fantasy adventure. I would actually enjoy fantasy adventures in another context, but the transition here is a little abrupt.

It also felt a little odd that certain concepts, mostly to do with characterizations (how shepherds are used to fending off wolves, for instance), are repeated several times, presumably in order to hammer it into our heads, while others (mostly the financial stuff) are explained once and left at that.

I suspect that this is because the plot is not supposed to be about Lawrence and Horo's adventures in market theory, but more about the action and drama bits. It's certainly more interesting to the average viewer: a giant rampaging spirit wolf attracts more attention than haggling for clothes.

I also suspect that in the original source (light novels, if I'm not mistaken), the intellectual and emotional aspects are more closely integrated. Never having read them, I can't tell for certain.

All in all, Spice and Wolf deserves a rewatch, this time without any pre-conceived expectations. Honestly, I would not say that I have the time to do so, especially with so many other obligations that is Real Life. Perhaps I can put it off for a while, until my initial opinions of it have subsided into dim memory.

But to leave it at my current viewpoint would be unfair to the show, and any recommendations for anime I might make in the future.