Catching up on the episodes I got earlier, but didn't get the chance to watch until now.

When I was living alone, curtains felt unnecessary. Yes, privacy and all that, but I figured anyone who wanted to peek into the life of a random guy was welcome to, especially since I believe that a place can only be called "home" if you feel comfortable enough walking around it in your underwear. (Too Much Information, I presume.) And I was fortunate enough not to get a facing with direct sunlight, so it wasn't too bad.

Watching the Hidamari Apartment residents spend so much effort to pick out pretty curtains and treat it as a matter of course makes me feel even more of a dame-ningen: a worthless person, as far away from the life of bright happiness and sunshine and normalcy as can be. A sad deviant, the stereotype of the lurker in the basement, even though there is no basement. No doubt I will be expected to find a basement to lurk in.

This is why I tend not to apply my entertainment too closely to my actual life. Escapism is the key, here.

I do have to say that I can see the fascinating with shopping for furniture, though. Every time I end up at IKEA or some such store with my friends, we end up gawking for hours at the utterly weird accessories and gadgets people come up with just to spice up, say, an alarm clock.

I was going to mention how it seems like the newbies are paired off with each other, apart from the original four residents, but further thought made me realize this was already happening, since the beginning: Hiro and Sae are one set, as is Yuno and Miyako. Presumably by the time we are comfortable with Nori and Nazuna, there will be a whole new set of Married Couple jokes.

The strange thing is that I might have to place K-On as one of my top anime if I based it on my previously-stated metric, which measures rankings by how much the anime has influenced me and my way of thinking. This applies to Cardcaptor Sakura, which taught me that Everything Will Be All Right; The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which taught me that with the right mindset, every day can be a great adventure; and Hidamari Sketch, which taught me about the beauty in simple things.

(Before anyone accuses me of having a narrow reference pool, I also consider, say, the Discworld series of books on the same tier, by teaching me the value of a good laugh. My writing style is directly descended from my attempts at trying to write like Pratchett. I only mention the anime series just now because this is an anime blog.)

With my top three anime as mentioned, I have no problems with their rankings: they have indirectly changed my life, entirely through changing the way I see the world. (I suppose I'm easily impressionable.) And yet, I hesitate to put K-On in my pantheon of greats.

It's not that I don't like the show. Indeed, I love it; it's fun, funny, and great entertainment, especially whenever Tsumugi appears onscreen. I don't mind rewatching it, and indeed do exactly that. And yet, I cannot quite class it as having "changed my life", since it approached the ranking system from another angle, quite unexpected. I have been remiss in not being clearer in my criteria. Cardcaptor Sakura, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and Hidamari Sketch have altered my view of the world in some deep, fundamental way.

K-On altered my experiences in listening to any song that consists of guitars, bass, drums, and assorted stuff that could conceivably be synthesized on a keyboard, by making me picture the K-On girls performing that song. Hardly something so earth-shaking.

It's not as though After School Tea Time fits the music, which can range from "Kimi ni Fuku Kaze" (Full Metal Panic Fumoffu) to the later rock guitar segment of Final Fantasy 6's "Dancing Mad". It is more along the lines of a sort of earworm, except for mental images: you cannot quite get rid of it, despite your best efforts. It just happens. I just see Yui in my mind's eye, flawlessly executing "I'll Face Myself" from Persona 4.

I suppose it's a side-effect of my belief that as long as there is good music and cute girls, I'll be able to enjoy an anime. Therefore, when listening to good music, my mind supplies the cute girls. The thought of the girls of K-On rocking out to something impressively complicated (while in their school uniforms) is also amusing enough to fix that mental image quite firmly.

It helps that a lot of the songs I see the K-On girls play have a lot of what some friends of mine like to call "guitar spam", where the lead guitar gets to show off for pretty much the entire song. I can imagine Azusa staring incredulously at Yui's sudden burst of skill, silently lamenting its ephemeral nature at the next exam.

Since my fellow AnimeNauts co-blogger (who is, I admit, making the vast majority of the posts there, because he is some sort of blog-posting machine) was ordering stuff from Amazon (if you're wondering: the Blu-rays of Ghost In The Shell 2.0 and The Sky Crawlers, among other things; on a completely unrelated note, he does not own a Blu-ray player yet), I piggybacked Hidamari Sketch season 1, licenced by… Sentai Filmworks, it says on the case, and distributed by Section23 Films. Never heard of them, to be honest.

See, I do buy anime I like.

The DVD came in a case the same size and shape as a single DVD, except this time containing two DVDs, with all twelve episodes and two specials. Extra features are the usual DVD credits which I assume nobody watches, the clean opening and ending animations, various Also Available From The Same Distributors, and a downright bizarre ad for The Anime Network, which I will leave to people actually inside the US to bother testing out. Curse you, region-locks.

Subs-only (using the same yellow font that's been on every R1 anime DVD I've watched recently; seriously, is it a standard or something?), and the picture quality looks a little… low. I'm not sure how much of it is due to the originals, and how much is due to having to fit fourteen episodes onto two DVDs.

Well, at least it's widescreen.

I've obviously not seen The Vanishment of Haruhi Suzumiya yet, since it's, yanno, not released. (Well, I suppose it's technically released now in Japan, but I am not in Japan. More's the pity.) I have been listening to the soundtrack, though.

It is amazing.

I don't know how much of it is my bias in viewing anything related to The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya favourably. And yet, while listening to the soundtrack, I can imagine the whole thing in my head, which I admit is likely to pale in comparison with the actual movie. (I blame this on a lack of imagination.)

The themes behind the tracks flow together very well, and so I cannot quite section them off into distinct segments in a mental timeline, but taking the broad view, I can vaguely picture the performance in five acts:

ACT I: Kyon wakes up, has fun with the SOS Brigade (even though he would never admit it), and things are normal, in its abnormality. It's strange and exciting and tiring to keep up with all the wacky hijinks, but Kyon is used to it. This is normal for him.

ACT II: Kyon wakes up, goes to school as usual, and… something is wrong. Something is just so slightly off about everything, not quite the same sort of normal he is used to, and he heads to class, and why is she there. And perhaps more importantly, why is she not there.

ACT III: Kyon struggles with what he believes to be the truth, and the evidence around him. Is this a dream? Was the life he knew a dream? Is this "normal"? What is normal, anyway?

ACT IV and V: I don't know how many people have read the story in its light novel form (translated or otherwise), so I'll just leave the rest unspoken for fear of spoilers.

Perhaps this is what is meant by a musical narrative.

There's also a bonus collection of Erik Satie's works, which appear to have been further injected into the anime fandom consciousness due to his first Gymnopedie being used in the trailer. I like listening to them (I have a CD or two somewhere of various Gymnopedies, although I can't remember where they are), but honestly my love goes out almost entirely to the first and last tracks: arrangements of "Itsumo no Fuukei", which I consider to be the unofficial theme of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

Sora no Manimani is one of those anime series which exists, somewhere, in my backlog. I do not know where it is precisely, or what other anime it is surrounded by. I can only say that, when confronted by questions along the lines of "have you seen it", I have seen some of it, but not all, and what I have witnessed has passed through the veil of memories, leaving nothing. Only I remain.

And yet, its ending theme, "Hoshizuku no Surround", is a regular feature on my playlist. I seem to recall vaguely that CooRie does this sort of song style, but I am not yet desperate enough to dig through my entire song collection to see if I've heard them before.

I don't know why I love this song so much. The opening theme ("Super Noisy Nova") isn't all that interesting to me, and experience has taught me that an anime doesn't need an ending theme (or an opening theme, for that matter) I like for me to enjoy the overall package. For example, Zettai Karen Children is not all that impressive OP/ED-wise (apart from maybe the high-energy fun of the first OP), but it's still very much rewatchable.

And yet, taking my top three anime of all time, all of them have music which I believe I would regularly listen to even if I had never seen the respective anime before. This covers the opening theme, the ending theme, and the BGM; occasionally image songs count. They could be catchy (Hidamari Sketch at number three), clever (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya at number two), or just good (Cardcaptor Sakura at number one).

So, faced with something like "Hoshizuku no Surround", I am tempted to get to work on my anime backlog just so I can watch Sora no Manimani sooner rather than later (or never, in the case of stuff like Sketchbook, which I still need to get around to watching one of these days). There is a treacherous thought in my mind, surfacing from the depths of non-reason and illogic, an Iago of temptation: surely a show with so beautiful an ending theme must have such quality in its other aspects.

I dread the day when my illusions are inevitably shattered.

I'm sure the shippers will be all over Hiro's mumbling of Sae's name in her sleep.

What happened to the newbies? I've been hoping to see more of them beyond their brief appearances, if only because we haven't had much chance to get a firm grasp of their personalities.

Something which gives me pause whenever I'm watching shows like Hidamari Sketch is the way they include stuff that I feel I should know about, but I am not privy to every minute detail from every extra or bonus or omake or spinoff or whatever. These things are usually put in as a bonus for the knowledgeable viewer, and shouldn't detract from the basic enjoyment of the story, but when enough time to be noticeable (generally more than a couple of seconds) is spent lingering on the Oddly Significant Character or something, I get the feeling that I'm missing something.

Hopefully the mystery of the girl in the screenshot will be solved soon enough, preferably within the anime itself.

On an unrelated note: don't worry, Yuno. I've also done that before.

I wonder if I have reached a point where seeing any short-haired girl in anime quietly reading a book (with glasses, although non-glasses is also valid) will result in incessant giggling about "omg it's Yuki Nagato".

I haven't really been keeping up with the anime blogosphere when it comes to gauging Majority Opinion. If I remember correctly, a lot of complaints levelled against K-On was that for an anime about a music club, it didn't have a lot of music in it.

I can kind of understand what they're trying to say, but I've never seen it as an anime about a music club. Rather, I expected a slice-of-life comedy anime, based mainly on the revelation that it was adapted from a 4-koma manga format, and the main character becomes the lead guitarist despite never having played a guitar before in her life. That would satisfy the "comedy" requirements, and 4-koma rarely allow for particularly convoluted uberplots.

What I saw, and enjoyed, was an anime about a group of friends, who happened to be in the light music club. Possibly the clearest illustration would be in the first episode, when Ritsu, Mio, and Mugi discuss the future of the club in a fast food restaurant. I got the impression of An Anime About Friends And Friendship from there, but couldn't pin down why. It was only after reading the entry on Peter's J-List Side Blog that I realized I was making assumptions based on my own cultural biases: I assumed that this was something everyone else (who regularly eat at fast food places) did, and Mugi's initial hesitation was her learning about it, rather than the confusion over the idea of pouring out one's fries on the tray.

I think it was even mentioned outright in one of the episodes: despite the lack of seriousness, and more importantly practice, that the light music club seemed to possess, Azusa wondered how they could suddenly turn competent when it came to the crunch. The answer: the purpose of the club is not to be an awesome band, despite what even the characters might think (and Ritsu's goal of a live concert at Budoukan).

The purpose of the light music club is to play together with friends. I think they've succeeded in that.

It is honestly surprising that until Nori arrived at Hidamari-sou, there was no Internet connection there. I suppose I'm just too used to living my life online.

We've all seen the standard generic lawyer-friendly versions of brands we all know about, but which come with so much trademark baggage that shows cannot even mention them without jumping through a lot of hoops; even something as innocuous as affixing a ™ sign becomes onerous when it comes to exhibiting it in an anime; I think only studios like SHAFT, which make a name for being ARTSY and all that, can do anything along those lines.

More likely, there will be all sorts of regulations and guidelines on displaying the brand: it cannot be portrayed negatively. It cannot be used in a way other than it is normally intended for. The entire brand logo must be displayed. All this is perfectly understandable, since the brand represents the company's name, both literally and figuratively. (Compare regulations on displaying country flags.)

There have been plenty of other writings, some of them even academic, on the significance and implications of all of this. I am not… well, technically I can talk about this with some degree of accuracy, but this is an anime blog, and I post here to get away from work.

But I do find it interesting that we can recognize all these alterations to the brands we know, because they are the brands we know. We know which fast food chain "WcDonald's" is, or "Zony" mp3 players, or "Packy" biscuit snacks. On that note, Pocky represents an intriguing case: outside of Asia, people seem to know it in conjuction with anime and Japanophilia, but it has been so prevalent, even in lawyer-friendly form, that it is recognizable, even cliche.

Not much can be done for an Apple logo, although attempts have been made by keeping the general shape and colouration of an iBook or iMac or iWhatever, which is pretty distinctive, and substituting other fruits. For Microsoft Windows, apparently four coloured boxes is sufficient.

I can only imagine how anime will deal with Tux.

Plans for a more interesting post fell through this week. We'll try again next week, if the guy who actually knows where to go shows up.

Something I've been puzzled about ever since I discovered online forums and chats and fandoms (ie for fifteen years now) is the prevalence of being critical as a default mode, which strikes me as a little contrary to being, you know, a fan. When I first started I was under the impression that it was enough to like something to be considered a fan, a view which has altered somewhat through the years. I also learned in time that a lot of the friction comes from being a fan of one specific thing, and maybe being a fan of other items of possibly the same shade, and then interacting with fans of who are also fans of that shade but have arrived there from different locales and it all turns into one big tangled mess.

What actually triggered the thought processes for this post was not anime, but games. It was just another of the endless debates on storytelling in RPGs, which inevitably segue into "JRPGs" and "WRPGs". The details are banal and ultimately unimportant, but what struck me the most about the flamewar was that a lot of the people who condemn JRPGs for being "all the same" do not seem to be familiar with very many JRPGs: the vast majority of their reference pool consists of Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy 8, and Final Fantasy 10, with 9, 12 (I'll give a pass on the MMORPG 11), and the ones in the SNES/NES era unmentioned. Even talking about the Persona series, much less Shin Megami Tensei, got blank looks. Dragon Quest was unknown. Earthbound/MOTHER did not count, for some unspecified reason.

I cannot comment on the Other Side, as they were not very well-represented, but the more coherent ones hit upon the high points of Black Isle and its alumni (Bioware, Bethesda, now-defunct Troika, so on and so forth), which could be the same sort of narrow vision I am criticizing here. (I consider myself exempt in this instance because, yanno, I am not criticizing WRPGs for all being the same.)

I say "criticizing", but it's more of an attempt to figure out if I can criticize in the first place. Is there a Right To Criticize that is conferred by… what? A degree after several university courses on storytelling in media? Several degrees? Experience in the things we criticize? Or just experience in the general area of things we criticize? If I play a lot of Final Fantasy, can I talk about Star Ocean? How about Ace Combat? Or do I need to play Tom Clancy's HAWX for that?

Let's transfer this to anime. How many episodes of something should I watch before I can say "I don't like this"? How much of a difference is there between "I don't like this" and "I don't like this now", with the implication that there is a possible mindset during which I will like the show in question? What about the difference between "I like this" and "I don't mind this"? Where is the line between "I don't like this" and "this is not good"?

Am I allowed to give a judgement on a show before it has ended? Eyebrows were raised when I named Kampfer as my favourite show last season before the last few episodes, but I do not see any objections mentioned to people slamming Omamori Himari after… what, two episodes? Is there some sort of definable, distinct, discernible threshold of "good" or "bad" that is accepted by the vast majority of people? And if I am not in this vast majority, should I have to join with that majority? Won't that contradict the message of "don't follow the crowd" that I keep hearing when I profess my love of cute girls in anime? Which crowd is the crowd?

Sometimes I get the feeling that I am only allowed to have opinions in sets, rather than individually-packaged a la carte. If I like this, I should dislike that. If I like both, I am deviant.

I realize that I tend to be harsher on the negative aspects of fandom, such as slamming a show with hyperbole, than the positive aspects, such as praising a show with hyperbole. I suspect this is because the negative aspects usually incur more flamewars than the positive ones, and while I am fine with disagreements, I am only fine with them when they are polite disagreements.

Same Hidamari Sketch, same lack of anything substantial to say, same hanyaa~n.

Well, more hanyaa~n this time, because we get new characters. Nazuna and Nori, whom we've seen in cameo at the end of the bonus episode of Hidamari Sketch x365, make… somewhat fuller appearances here, with actual voiced lines, although we don't actually see them doing much other than quick one-off Endearing Character Traits. Hopefully we'll see a lot more of them in the coming episodes, although with the non-chronological order of the episodes (and episode halves, ever since x365), this may not be the case for the rest of the season.

Sadface.

I think a large part of why I enjoy HidaSketch so much is the way the abstractions can evoke the implications of whatever they're trying to denote: for example, we are shown a picture of the mailboxes in front of the Hidamari rooms. Rooms 101, 201, 102, and 202 are in red, signifying the residents we're familiar with from the previous seasons; rooms 103 and 203 are in pink, for the new residents. Different, and yet close. Something we can see and understand in a glance, rather than a dry explanation or description.

Each character (well, Hidamari resident, anyway, rather than the others like Yoshinoya-sensei) has their own symbol. Most of us should be familiar with the four from the previous seasons: Yuno's X-mark, from her nigh-trademark hairclips. Miyako has a cat's pawprint, from the time she tanned on the roof with a bunch of cats. Sae has her glasses. Hiro has her octopus-like hair-buns. And now, we have a computer mouse (albeit an odd-looking one) and what looks like a joke set of glasses a twin-bead hair accessory; Nori and Nazuna, presumably, and I look forward to finding out why.

I also admit to looking forward to see what further symbolisms can be obtained from future seasons of Hidamari Sketch, and how they will be translated back to ASCII for ease of reference and typing.