september's coming soon

I'm not going to try to review this in detail, because Sarazanmai it is what is is.

The good: It's a wild ride of utter absurdity and somehow you still end up really emotionally invested in these kids turning into kappas and diving into the butts of sparkly gigant monsters.

The bad: The purported "plot" just collapses in the end, possibly because the episode count doesn't leave enough time to go into it but I suspect it's because Ikuhara never cared about it in the first place. As a consequence, the secondary cast never becomes anything more than pretty shallow vessels driving the emotional development of the kids, and the philosophical message comes across as somewhat pastede on yey.

But the good by far outweights the bad, so if you've liked Ikuhara's previous shenanigans, you'll probably like this one too. It's a far easier watch than Yurikuma or Penguindrum, even if Penguindrum at least will give you the better payoff in the end.

I read the manga and I didn't see the appeal.

( What the header says, then )

I'll never, ever forget the time someone tried to explain to me that "100% real manga" meant uncensored boobs and blod.

( Hakata Tonkotsu Ramens, spoilers for episode 1 and 11 )

The thing with living in small-ish language spaces is that getting into any foreign thing that isn't strictly mainstream means BUYING STUFF ONLINE AND IT'S HELLA EXPENSIVE. Thinking back, I'm pretty sure that the single factor of international shipping and custom fees is at least 70% responsible for the fact that my anime collection is relatively high quality, or at least made up of things I sincerely enjoy. The only anime I have bought and dropped was Eureka Seven, and my dropping it had less to do with quality and more to do with rage at certan decisions on behalf of the writers. I lived on student loans; I couldn't afford to just "check something out". If I was going to get it, then I was going to be sure it'd be worth it. I read a lot of reviews.

Having a Crunchyroll subscription presents me with problems that just never existed in my life before: At what point should I stop watching? As someone who strives to have Opinions on things, I feel obliged to at least watch it all if I'm going to whine about it afterwards. Thing is, I should be reading Good Books instead of watching trashy anime, or at least re-read good fanfic or something. It should be a hint when I need to remind myself to watch, I guess.

SO ABOUT THE ROYAL TUTUR, which obviously needed reminding:

I don't know what it wants to be. The less funny and less emotionally engaging and completely genre-abiding version of Ouran? The grade school version of Maoyuu? Some weird, platonic student-teacher take on the Otome genre? Except the character design is a lie, and the manga at least is shounen. It obviously isn't memorable, and it's predictable AF, and clearly not interested in a frank discussion of the things royalty needs to learn in order to rule well.

TL;DR summary: In Shinyland (that's the literal translation, boys and girls!), there are five potential heirs to the throne. The four youngest live in the royal castle, and have successfully proven their lacking kingship skills by driving away all their tutors. Obviously, things change when the next tutor in line is Heine Wittgenstein, who to no-one's surprise reforms the four princes by the ideas at the fundament of modern pedagogy.

There's not a lot of plot to it. There is, in fact, like three episodes of just basic classroom leadership (get all the kids present and make them shut up and listen to you) before the tutoring even starts, and the focus isn't the content on the tutoring as much as it it watch the princes have epiphanies, learn about the true meaning of governance, ponder their true desires in life. And as said, it's... juvenile, at this point. Yeah, of course you want everyone to be happy; that's admirable, but the youngest of you is 14, so maybe we should also ponder how you're going to pay for that?

According to a friend of mine who follows the manga, there's at least more drama and succession intrigue going on there. What we're getting here is "spoiled teenagers reconsider their vision of life, gets ambitions" in an artstyle that is a weird mix of bishounen and chibi. It's fairly visible that the anime is really just the setup arc to a bigger story, but that probably isn't coming; there's an anime-original ending that is nothing else than what it of course has to be when a mysterious new teacher comes in from no-where to transform the lives of troubled childreen. Unfortunately, this anime doesn't trust its viewers enough to handle even that take on the realities of life.

More than anything, I feel that this anime was made for a younger audience than most people watching anime in the west. It's cute and it's impossible to hate, but if someone asked me why they should spend six hours watching this, I'd struggle to answer. Like... if you really really like cute teenage boys have non-problems? Because everything else in this anime has been done better elsewhere.

1. It's really pretty and regretably boring

2. And I mean regretably in the sense that it's gorgeously animated, that it's about a genre of music that is so very near and dear to my heart, that it's about women and women's friendship and oh my god that festival scene and don't lie, you KNOW that this would've had a fandom to rival Free! if they had been boys instead

3. I'm torn between celebrating the bari sax representation and feeling offended by it being played by a Japanese teenage girl using a neckstrap, not a harness

4. I mean, this IS pretty much just the girl equivalent to Free! with Makoto as the MC and Rin and Haru merged into one character

5. Nagisa/Midori OTP y/y?

6. If you ever wondered if fandom really loved women as much as it claims it does, look no further than to the fact that this has like five pages of fic on AO3

7. Not that I expect you to care, but Nagisa somehow became the "always opposite sexuality as all the other boys" to me so either he's the gay one or he's the straight one, and I really need that Nagisa/Midori fic okay

I wasn't expecting much when I sat down to watch Love Stage, and I sure as hell wasn't expecting to watch half of it in one sitting, prompting the reaction that:

1. This is better than I expected
2. Gravitation was better

SO DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS DOES
It takes that whole "fell in love as a child and have never let them go in the ten years since" and takes it where it inevitably would have to go some day, because our poor, obsessed love interest didn't know that his first love was a boy.

A moeblob-lovin' otaku with delusions about becoming a manga artist, at that. No, seriously, they bribe him with a body pillow to kiss another guy, it's...

( clickbait )

This story starts sometime in 2014, I think, when see this collection of images of what I think is two boys.



I don't know the series, I *think* it's fanart because it's really slash-looking but for some reason I also think it's not? - and there's something about it that really captivates me. I save it, and wonder if I'll ever know where it's from. It's not something I ever feel strongly enough about to go plastering up all over social media going HAVE YOU SEEN THESE KIDS BEFORE. But I remember it, from time to time, and wonder what kind of story it was from.

Come 2016 and the Yuri on Ice discourse. Specifically the part about how uh no, they didn't "hide the kiss because of censorship" because there's been gay stuff in anime since the nineties at least and IF that thing in YoI was a kiss, then it sure as hell wasn't the first time a same-sex kiss had been shown between main characters in a non-BL anime. Guys, No. 6 happened like five years ago.



I probably wouldn't have ever gotten to know where white-haired kid and is-it-a-girl-or-a-guy came from if a certain subset of the anime fandom hadn't believed in Yuri!!! on Ice like middle America believed in Donald J. Trump, and for that reason alone, I guess I'm grateful for it.

I mean, and JJ.

( but was it GOOD )

ETA: Or just read the manga