An episode centering around Mei and Mika this time. Considering how much focus Mei has had, I'd say that she's right up there with Mika and Manabi when it comes to character importance. She does have the most obvious character hooks, what with her very tsundere feel: a very harsh and humourless exterior, with an insecure and shy base personality, and either innately competent in studies, or highly motivated (driven, perhaps) to be competent.

As for Mikan (as Mika's friends call her), she's probably our Viewpoint Character, in much the same way Kyon was in Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, except that the viewpoint is not so strictly limited to only our designated Viewpoint Character and nothing else. And Manabi is, of course, our title character, with all that entails.

Manabi Straight isn't really the sort of show that lends itself well to episode summaries and thoughts. Things happen, and about the best I can come up with in the end are "well, things happened". It might technically be considered slice-of-life: yes, it occurs in a future with hover-skateboards and PDAs for every high school student and declining birth rates turning into a problem for schools, and the characters have rather pronounced personality traits, but it's still just about them going through their high school life with these circumstances as best as they can together. There's usually not a lot one can say about slice-of-life anime except "things happened".

But I need to write an entry for today, and I suppose this is it.

No, this isn't going to be an episode summary as such. (Unless one really stretches the definition of "episode summary".) My loathing of taking and arranging screenshots has not abated, even with IrfanView and its handy batch-conversion/resize feature; what irritates me the most about doing screenshots is the need to decide which scene to screencap, and which to discard. After I tried taking some objectively interesting screencaps of the episode, I slowly grew more and more irritable, until I finally gave up, and decided to just use the screencaps that I personally liked, and had something to ramble on about.

Not an episode summary; not quite episode thoughts and impressions, since it assumes that you're already familiar with what happened in the episode, and I'm not so much talking about the episode as talking in general, and just using the episode as a backdrop. It's like my Livejournal, except with a thin veneer of anime.

Yes, I do like to hear the sound of my own keyboard.

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One problem with starting an anime blog with a marked dislike of going through an episode taking and formatting screenshots is that I don't actually have a ready-made source of blog post inspiration with the Brand New anime season, only obtainable through raws, or some such. There's been a few waves of introspection among other anime bloggers (before the merest hint of a twinkle of the existence of this blog, full disclosure requires me to admit) about the very large number of anime blogs doing episode summaries, and the relatively scarce number of blogs doing primarily editorials and thoughts. The problem with doing editorials for me, though, is that I don't exactly have a lot to say about a great many things. Sooner or later, I'm going to run out of opinions, and be reduced to "um, it's nice" or "um, it's not that nice".

But I don't like to do episode summaries. The thought of going through an entire episode and picking which screencaps are good to use and actually screencapping the exact moment for best framing and resizing everything and renaming everything and uploading everything and placing them strategically throughout the post and thinking up of good ALT and TITLE attribute captions and making sure that the entire thing retains a modicum of user readability and doing this all with only a basic understanding of Notepad++ and GIMP because I'm a cheap bastard… it all begins to sap my will to blog. I want to just get on with it and be able to get straight to "OMG anime is so cool" and "moe! hanyaa~n" and all that.

Therefore, full episode summaries only when absolutely necessary. I really respect those who take the trouble to screencap everything, and I can never understand the occasional lament that "everyone's doing episode summaries". For me, episode summaries are hard; random ramblings that can be passed off as "editorials" are easy.

To compound this difficulty, this anime season, I haven't really found a lot of shows that not only catch my interest, but that I can also find things to talk about. For the most part, I end up with Thoughts And Impressions that pretty much read "stuff happened, was interesting". I don't have the same passion for the current season's shows that I had for The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya or Zero no Tsukaima or Card Captor Sakura.

This isn't to say that I have burnout on new anime or something, or a call for "the good old days". If anything, I love the current trend towards moe shows (obviously) and harem comedies, and I like many of the newer shows compared to older ones. And it's not that I dislike the current season of shows, as much as I simply can't think of anything to say about them, from episode to episode. I'm watching them, but I may not be blogging them.

I still haven't decided whether I want to blog any of the new season or not on a consistent basis. While I'm trying to decide, I'll just give a very quick run-through of my initial impressions of a few of the shows.

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