And all he wants to do is sing. Or swing, maybe.

For some reason this show feels over-animated to me. The art style takes a little getting used to, since I usually see it when used for scenes with a great deal of movement, when you don't have the luxury of examining every line in detail. Seeing it used for the longing stares at faces is a little unnerving.

I have no doubt that there will be a great deal of Drama in store for this show, mostly because anytime fiction deals with the Upper Crust there's going to be Drama about class responsibilities and social insecurities and all that. And yet, the fact that you can probably tell who the important female characters are by the size of their bustline is a little deflating to the inevitable angst.

The show is full of not thinking about things too much, and just going with the flow. Teppei is a little more composed than the usual flustered harem anime lead, either due to his l33t swordsmanship skills or his sideburns. Yuu is clearly the Maid Option, and it's a little early to tell whether she's the hypercompetent sort or the doormat sort (or both). Despite that, she's still the girl I'm rooting for the most, partly because I'm hoping that whatever class struggle backplot she may have will be neatly resolved by a romance.

However, I get the feeling Charlotte Hazelrink is the Chosen Girl of this anime, what with going around in a horse carriage in this day and age, as well as likely having both the largest chest and the smallest brain. Silvie gets to be the Established Fiancee Option that gets Gracefully Turned Down, after a highly-animated budget-breaking sword duel of some sort, leaving legions of Saber fans disappointed.

This is probably not a good show for me to blog, because I can't help but think of stuff like "I bet Teppei's really good with his sword, hur hur" and miss the actual plot in favour of low innuendo. Still, I'm still working my way through the current Summer 2009 season of shows, squeezing them into my very much non-copious free time, so it's probably a good fallback.

I'm a little iffy about the leads. They're not bad, but Saku and Mihoshi just don't really interest me all that much. It feels like they're missing something, some strange chemistry that makes other couples work. Hime is also a little too tempting a target for the plot gods to mess about with in a comedic and yet schadenfreude manner; I've known her for less than an episode and already I feel sorry for her.

Still, I admit that this is entirely subjective, especially considering the existence in general of shipping wars. Even as we speak, the Saku/Mihoshi and Saku/Hime shippers have girded for battle, with the Saku/Fumie faction patiently waiting their turn, or so it may seem.

The comedy is amusing enough for my low tastes. I have a weakness for sudden chibification of the characters as they go through some absurd skit, and Mihoshi's antics lead to plenty of this. Club president Roma's emulation of Excel Saga's Hyatt (what with the blood and the coughing and the dying repeatedly) would be disturbing in a more Serious show, but provides the necessary predictable humour: whenever there is anything remotely resembling physical exertion, Roma loses about half a litre of blood and keels over. Apparently life-threatening conditions are great for defusing tension.

So far I'm watching this mainly for Sayo Yarai, who appears to be there entirely to be kind and a great listener. I don't know if I'm drawn to her because of something I like, or because there is nothing I dislike. Given that I find the other characters at least tolerable, I suspect it is the former, but I cannot quite pin down what. (Apart, of course, from the "kind and a great listener" thing.)

Oh, and if you're wondering about the symbols next to the names in the credits (both opening and closing), they're astrological signs for the Western Zodiac. From the small sampling I've checked, they're accurate as well.

One of the front-running candidates for the third spot of my Favourite Anime listing (behind Card Captor Sakura and Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya) is Hidamari Sketch, and the main reason it hasn't been shunted into the position yet is because I'm not entirely sure why. This isn't exactly a reason in itself to deny greatness, but I felt that I needed to know if it was the show itself which I liked, or just the general style such shows in the genre lend themselves to.

I've not seen Sketchbook yet, and other series involving art students don't come to mind as yet, so I don't know if the general concept of Slice Of Life involving Art naturally leads to a more Artistic sort of anime style. Of course, I know just about nothing about True Art, so I can't tell if this is actually Artistic, or merely pretentious. Whichever it is, at least it's entertaining, which is far more important to me than Art.

And of course, it is difficult to separate the Art of an anime about art students from the Art of SHAFT, when watching Hidamari Sketch. Maybe there is no such separation, and the two build on each other like cheese on pizza.

Geijustuka Art Design Class, or GA for short (regardless of any possible confusion with similarly-initialed series), is not quite up to HidaSketch standards in my pantheon of Favourite Anime. I place the source of the difference squarely on the soundtrack: I love the HidaSketch soundtrack to bits, while GA has some good tracks, but the majority appear to be there merely to give some texture to the background, and could have been replaced with a dial tone. On the upside, I like the opening theme ("Osaki ni sil vous plait", possibly translated from both Japanese and French as "Go ahead first, if you please"), and the ending theme ("Colouring palettes", Tomokane/Miyuki Sawashiro version) is very catchy.

Speaking of voice actors, GA gets points for being very surprising: all the names are familiar, but the voices are different. Haruka Tomatsu (Shiho Sannomiya in Zettai Karen Children, off the top of my head) sounds so much like Mamiko Noto (one million million light-and-airy-voice characters, like Nodoka Miyazaki in Negima, Aoi Futaba in Kaitou Tenshi Twin Angel, Kotomi Ichinose in Clannad… so on and so forth) that I had to double-check the credits. Miyuki Sawashiro is no longer Puchiko from Di Gi Charat, but a loud hyperactive tomboy character. And Yui Horie abandons her genki-cheerful voice for a lower oneesan role in this one.

Since I've only had time to watch the first episode (the second is waiting for another unbroken chunk of an hour or so to watch and jot down my impressions thereof), I'm obviously not going to make a judgement one way or another yet. Maybe the really awesome parts of the soundtrack will turn up in later episodes, or maybe even a later season.

Until then, I suspect I'll be subconsciously and constantly pushing my spectacles up in sympathy with Kisaragi.

For some reason, once you become an established blogger who does okay-ish in terms of site hits, nowhere near the Big Guys but still kind of ego-boosting, a great many people start wanting to recruit you into their blogs.

I'm not entirely certain why. Maybe it has something to do with having developed your own style, or showing that you actually know how to spell, or something along those lines. Why I was not so scouted a few years back when I was blogless (well, I had and still have a Livejournal, but it's more for slice-of-life) is a mystery.

I turn these invitations down. The chief, primary, and overriding reason is because I have enough trouble writing my requisite posts on this blog, much less come up with something new and different for someone else's. It's the time factor, mostly: so many things are happening in Real Life that require my attention, largely because they tie kind of directly into being able to eat, preferably while watching anime with an Internet connection. I have this chunk of hobby time which looks substantial, but quickly gets consumed by all sorts of things, mostly due to stuff I agreed to do during the less hectic times. They're still technically hobbies, but being responsible for them turns them into obligations which I have to do, whether I continue enjoying them or not.

Blogging about a subject in general takes up more time than simple typing speed would indicate. For one thing, I have to keep up with both the anime I want to blog about, and the anime that everyone else is blogging about, and the anime that may or may not be blog-worthy. (These may be the same thing.) While I am doing so, I also have to find something to say about them, rather than the usual "eh, it's good" or "eh, it's not good".

Other stuff like GamerS I treat as a test of my improvisational abilities. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. So it goes.

All this has left me surprisingly little time for my other hobbies; I've been meaning to continue my long-abandoned Card Captor Sakura fanfic, but unless I can justify it by posting it in instalments on this blog (which I doubt will be welcome by anyone), it will have to wait. And then there's the whole genderbending thing to work on, sometime.

I mention all this not to whine, but… well, maybe just to whine a little. But the original intention was to illustrate why I always seem to be posting Things Of No Substance every week, both sometime on Saturday evenings.

I have also received a rather more compelling offer to write for another anime blog; the extra compulsion is because the offer was extended by Real Life friends. In the fevered contemplation that ensued, I was wondering what the reactions here would be if I moved all my standard anime reviews there, and kept the "side" stuff like the CCS episode summaries and Nanoha GamerS here. I could link or crosspost the review-type stuff back here, as a lazy shortcut. There shall be the place for the more respectable face of anime blogging (relatively speaking); I am quite certain that nobody else on the Internet is going to want to host these weird screenshot comics of questionable legality.

Knowing these guys in Real Life and interacting with them on a regular basis allows for some extra accountability: if someone seems to be slacking off, we can commence with the "wtf mate" and smacking each other upside the head, like a peculiarly injokey Stooge troupe.

Honestly, what I'd really like is a year off from all obligations, so I can work on what I want to, when I want to. There's a zillion stories I want to write, but life is not so easy. I should have called this an anime and creative writing blog. I'm still tempted to do so, but the decision never seems to stick, especially in the cold light of dawn.

Time shall tell how it will all end.

I need to start balancing out my reading habits.

If I were to be categorized into a broad fan archetype, I'd most certainly be in the "fanfiction writer" class, albeit dabbling into "blogger" (quite obviously). I've been thinking about it for over a decade now, about as long as I've been an anime fan (actually rather longer, since I started writing non-anime fanfics), and I still can't figure out if my writing of fanfics can be considered to be by choice. Blogging is most certainly a choice: I have lots of things to say about various stuff related to anime, but actually taking the time to type it all out is something that is a conscious decision. In fact, my actual posting schedule (the two-posts-per-week turning up both on Saturday at the last possible moment) might indicate that it's become a sort of self-imposed obligation, a challenge to see how long I can keep this charade up.

Writing stories is another matter: I am forever struck by the impression that if I don't write out the plot ideas that swirl around in my skull, my head will explode. It will be messy.

Currently I'm hammering out yet another story that involves Magical Girls. I've started and abandoned this genre so many times that it's more like I'm waiting for an extended period of maybe a year or so where I can really get to work on just writing, without all the bothersome Real Life stuff getting in the way. Maybe after I've written my mandatory million words of crap in this genre, I can start turning out something of actual substance and value.

The problem I'm facing now is not the old one of cultural bias. I figure that I may as well write everything with Westernized names, and call it "localization". Any complaints that I should have used Japanese names and cultural situations I shall weave together into a banner of I Told You So.

Rather, I am having difficulties in thinking in prose.

Manga, or at least the manga that I read, has an interesting visual flow: the situation is presented to us by means of the panel layouts and their contents, with the text reserved for dialogue and offhand explanations when absolutely necessary. The bigger text boxes and balloons seem to be largely for infodumps, which complement the action on the page. Compare this to many modern Western superhero comics (I have to qualify all of that because invariably someone will probably come up with something beyond my experience), where the panels contain the characters in some dramatic pose or other, while the page is filled with text. The characters just kind of stand there, letting the exposition flow around them. The same amount of dialogue in a single comic book panel will likely be spread out through several much smaller panels in manga; I suspect that the black-and-white nature of most manga has something to do with this.

In any case, I find myself thinking of this story in terms of manga. Here, we have a beat panel, to set up a gag about how the viewpoint character is tailed by his rather odd girlfriend. (Yes, it may be considered a wish-fulfilment story. So it goes.) There, we have a jumpy sort rant about soemthing or other, while another deadpan character does something nonchalant and decidedly bizarre in the background. It's not easy to translate imagery like this into prose, where just about anything that is pointed out in the text should have a reason for being there. Hanging a great big neon sign saying "HERE IS THE JOKE, LAUGH AT THIS" kind of kills the humour.

But since I've run out of shelf space to buy more books, and I've read most of the local library's selection already (not that they have that large a selection), my fiction reading material these days is limited to scanlations and such, which take up little physical space. (I do buy the manga if I like them; I'm waiting for the next Negima Del Rey release, for example.) This may be the source of the problem.

To attempt to correct this, I've been digging out all my old books from dusty boxes to figure out why they're in dusty boxes instead of on my shelves. A cursory reading often reminds me why, as with E. E. "Doc" Smith's Triplanetary:

While not essentially bloodthirsty — that is, not loving bloodshed for its own sweet sake — they were no more averse to blood-letting than they were in favour of it. Any amount of killing which would or which might advance an Eddorian towards his goal was commendable; useless slaughter was frowned upon, not because it was slaughter, but because it was useless — and this inefficient.

And, instead of the multiplicity of goals sought by the various entities of any race of Civilization, each and every Eddorian had only one. The same one: power. Power! P-O-W-E-R!!

I realize that styles have changed over the decades and the Lensman saga is a classic, but it's kind of hard to read something as overblown as that and maintain dramatic tension. Then again, another Dramatic option I seem to have unearthed is Tolkien's Silmarillion, which would probably finish off what's left of my writing style.

Strangely, my current habit of thinking in manga panels does not help me with GamerS: for a gag to be pulled off, the scenes need to be set exactly, with little deviation. Since I am working with pre-existing images, I find that my ad-libbing abilities have been getting the workout more than anything planned. All the GamerS jokes, funny or otherwise, are almost always conceived of about ten to fifteen minutes after I browse through the screenshot collection. So much for planning.

While waiting for my Internet to get repaired (again), I've been marathoning Persona 4, which features, as one of its much-vaunted improvements over Persona 3, branching Social Link options. The overall difference is fairly minor, largely in the conversation options and incidental dialogue; the Social Link results are the same regardless.

Now, if you've never played either Persona 3 or 4 before, the idea behind Social Links is that you meet someone, and then you get to know them better through further repeated meetings, until you form "an unbreakable bond" of Really Close Friendship (and for female characters, possibly something more). Along the way, you help solve some problem or other they are facing in their lives. All of this gives you nice bonuses that help you in battle, or at least the preparations before battle, but that's beside the point.

The branching routes in P4 mean that I get to Socially Link with either one of two choices for each of the school clubs. Back in P3, this didn't matter that much, because the game refused to be clear on which club the Social Link character belonged to until you actually chose yourself (insert Schroedinger's Cat experiment reference here); whatever your decision, you'll be dealing with the same person. In P4, however, you deal with different people. So if you pick the Basketball Team instead of the Soccer Team, you'd be interacting with Kou Ichijo, rather than Daisuke Nagase. The same goes for the Drama Club's Yumi Ozawa and the Symphonic Band's Ayane Matsunaga.

But what about the other, unpicked route?

As I've mentioned before, I have problems with this sort of thing, which I call Visual Novel Route Regret. Basically, all these characters have their problems and worries, some of them really serious, and the game often implies that they will never be free from their woes without your assistance. In P3, it was actually possible, if very difficult, to max out every Social Link in one play-through, and thus solve everyone's problems neatly. But in P4, with the branching, this is impossible, even if the actual game mechanic Social Link maxing is much easier.

And so I have to weigh the Seriousness of the characters' problems against each other. Is Kou's insecurity about being adopted more or less debilitating to his future prospects than Daisuke's inability to get over his old rejected crush? Both have let it affect their performance to the point of depression, so it's not a given that they'll be able to get over it themselves. The Cultural Clubs are a little easier to pick: Yumi's angst about her estranged but hospitalized father, leading to her nearly severing links with her mother, is probably more serious than Ayane's basic lack of confidence in herself. Sorry, Ayane, but Yumi's case is more likely to make her suicidal.

At least the Social Link problems in Persona 4 are not as drastic as in Persona 3, which is a bit of a relief. If you haven't been following a Max Social Link guide but know what is in store for the characters, it's hard to decide between helping Yukari get over her father's death-by-corporate-murder, or comforting Mitsuru after her father's death-by-actual-murder and her arranged marriage to an odious man she hates. Compared to that, Chie's search for a good reason to protect people is a little less world-shattering.

This is a bit of why I'm not very keen on playing the more Dramatic sorts of visual novels: the girls tend to have incredibly depressing (and often supernatural) backstories, which may very well lead to their deaths or spiritual discorporation or whatever. The viewpoint character may or may not know the reason why, in a given route epilogue scene, certain members of the old gang appear to be missing, but the experienced player knows. And that makes it all the more depressing.

On a vague tangent, I have this incredible urge to go write some lyrics for the Junes jingle.

Real Life is working me particularly hard these days. I anticipated this, and posted one of my two-posts-a-week early, but I am left with one more to go. I am afraid this is it.

Unlike many other bloggers of the realm, I don't actually mind the endlessness of the eights that have been the theme of the past few "second season" episodes. I've mentioned before that I wouldn't mind seeing an endless stream of Slice Of Life involving cute anime girls and the sort of comedy I have become used to from the anime I watch. This is what the "Endless Eight" set of episode provide, and my belief has been borne out in practice. I was bored by Sister Princess because the comedy was lacking; I remain enamoured of Lucky Star because the elements were all there. Hidamari Sketch had all this and more, which is why it is one of my favourites.

The continuation of "Endless Eight" to a fourth episode surprised me, because I did not think that it could be done. But I did not think it could have lasted more than one episode either, so I have been just as endlessly surprised by the distinct variations on the same theme. The staff of Kyoto Animation definitely have more imagination than I do.

I have been trying to avoid the… well, not the fandom as such. I do not think these people can be called fans. Former fans, some of them, but not all. Anti-fans seems more like it: jumping into every thread about the series to lambast anyone with a positive mindset for being "sheep" and following "groupthink". This is often aimed at The Fandom, but when people who identify as being in The Fandom complain, we are told that we are over-sensitive. I have never really understood this line of reasoning: if you splatter an area with mud, bystanders may feel annoyed.

After all, I believe that I came by my opinions fairly and independently. But if they are effectively identical to that which is accused of being Groupthink, then there's no real point, is there? How far should I be Different for the sake of being Different?

It is a mystery.

Also, the reason why I'm particularly careful about how I phrase my negative comments is because one of the things I've learned, if only in theory, is that hyperbole and exaggeration seldom apply to the defamation defence of honest opinion. The law of defamation protects reputation and standing, not ego, and it is this thin line I toe.

Of course, I don't expect I'll ever get sued for defamation on my blog, but I doubt many people expected the RIAA or whatnot to sue whatever the latest music-downloader. Best to be safe, and all that.