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Feb 08 2008

Categories: anime, episodic review, spice and wolf
Tagged: spice and wolf

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“I pray this situation won’t call for the use of blunt or sharp weapons.”

Episode five of Spicy Wolfgasm continues the silver Thoreni coin trading arc, and the episode is cleanly divided into two halves. The first involve a lot of pointless dialogue and plotting between Lawrence and Milone Company that made me pine for the days of Konata explaining how to properly eat a choco coronet to Miyuki. That half concludes with Lawrence and Milone concocting an elaborate plan to free Horo that got me a bit excited. Awesome! Passwords! Secrecy! Omega watches that shoot lasers! Well, maybe not that last one, but it seemed like Lawrence was going to pull a 007 or Austin Powers to save Horo. Unfortunately, that’s not what we get as the whole escape consisted of Lawrence going into the sewer and then meeting Horo there. Milone did all the work. Um, talk about useless. Lawrence, you’re dangerously close on being inducted into the Rukia All-Stars.

Horo, of course, is moody after such a shoddy rescue job (more on this soon) and being sexually abused by Chloe (theoretical), and spends the second half of the episode like any old ツンデレ haremette. Egads. Is Spice and Wolf turning into a relationship show? The percentage of trading and relationship building in this series is about the same as the percentage of football and relationship building in Friday Night Lights… and let’s just say there’s not a lot of football in Friday Night Lights.

(It seems like whenever I watch FNL, they always have a cliffhanger where a guy or girl walks into his or her girlfriend or boyfriend kissing or about to kiss or hugging or in the throes of passion with someone else. I started thinking… hey! That’s Kimikiss! Only on Kimikiss, they resolve these awkward moments by forgetting about them quickly the next episode. In FNL, murder, stabbings, hissy fits, and revenge sex are involved. As usual, I have no point.)

Market Report and Wolf

DOWN ツンデレ… Horo the Wise? Try Horo the ツンデレ… though the more I think about it, what woman isn’t a ツンデレ by default? When Horo got pissed that Lawrence didn’t go guns ablazin’ to save her, I mean, that’s a typical women’s logic at work right? How exactly is her behavior different from anyone else lacking a y-chromosome? And then she turns vulnerable and sweet like two minutes afterwards. Again, this is ツンデレ behavior… but it’s also typical behavior. Lawrence just wandered into a trap worse than “Does this dress make me look fat?”, “Were you looking at her?”, “If you don’t know why I’m angry at you, I’m not telling you”, and “Maybe you just want to go back drooling at the Yoko gravure book instead of paying me any attention” combined.

(And, if there is a Kyrios/Oharuhi/Oyashiro/Ohosaka, please, no. I’m not sure if I can stand “honey-do list” Horo or “did you clean out the garage like I told you to” Horo.)

(The best analogy I can think of to Horo’s rescue complaint is if I were a Detroit Pistons fan and had Rip on my fantasy team. There’s 2 seconds left for a final shot, Pistons down 2, and I need just 1 more point from Rip to win my head-to-head fantasy match-up for the week. Tay inbounds to Rip, but he jukes and passes to ‘Sheed for the winning triple. Part of me is happy that the Pistons won, but inside I’m fuming that I lost my fantasy week because Rip didn’t take the winning shot. I think that’s what Horo’s feeling… and if every non-NBA and non-fantasy sports reader is out there making the same face Maki has whenever she sees Hosaka shirtless, all the better.)

UP I’m mad at you just to be mad at you… two sure signs of puppy love is being anxious when about to meet the other person (like Lawrence was when Horo was brought to him) and being angry without being angry for the same of being angry. One cannot have awesome make-up tail wagging if there’s nothing to make-up.

UP horo~n… when I saw this image, I thought “horo~n!” and wondered if she just had her smoked cheese potato taken away from her by the mean ol’ Chloe. But soft, vulnerable, sweet Horo is… soft, vulnerable, and sweet. Though I’m still not sold on Horo the ツンデレ. Horo the Wise or Horo the Amazing is much better.

DOWN IMAGIN… I’ve seen that footage of Chloe harvesting the wheat like eight times now. Please, either stop reusing that footage or at least re-animate it so it looks different. At least it isn’t as bad as Gundam Seed.

UP “I wish and hope to meet someone like her”… I think it’s funny that the guys from Milone are eavesdropping on Horo’s and Lawrence’s lover’s spat. It’s like, “Hey, there’s a shitload of profit/loss up for grabs, and the church is involved, but let’s not worry about that and just watch these two for amusement.” This is what people did before Rubik’s Cube, pet rocks, Care Bears, Magic the Gathering, and Sudoku.

UP “A human male would fall for me right away because I’m cute. However, there’s no fit partner for me amongst them. When I tell them, ‘If you touch me, something will fall off, they all turn with fear.'”… wha? Did they try to sexually assault her or something? “Hey guys, I know she’s a witch wolf, and we gotta burn her at the stake… but can we just fondle her a bit before that?” Yep, typical men. I’m not trying to defend or persecute but just stating the facts. Though this scene is funnier if you imagine the guys mulling it over for a second before turning away in fear. “Mmm… well, she could mean my arm, and I could live with it… but if she means that… mmm…”

UP Chloe…. I’m all for catfights, but I don’t think we’ll get any. It’s obvious that Chloe is doing her act to provoke Horo because she knows that Lawrence is traveling with her… or not… because if she knew, wouldn’t she want Horo dead like ASAP? Nonetheless, I’m hoping for a Miller Lite commercial featuring Chloe and Horo now… or Haruka and Hayami… hell, I’d even settle for Sumeragi and Nena or the crazy girl from True Tears and the jealous girl. This is just the kind of insightful analysis made possible by Derailed by Darry.

DOWN US Service Index… probably not a good thing that the US service index is at its lowest level since 9/11. Then again, despite the horrors that 9/11 did bring, it did bring the best out of the country. I still get the chills when I hear The Boxer. (Damn you NBC for pulling your clips from Youtube… damn you!)

DOWN Trading… probably not a good sign that the trading portion of this anime is the weakest. It’s like we expected Yakitate Japan with trading wolfgams, but instead we’re getting Honey and Clover…. but season two. I don’t mind if Spice and Wolf turned into a relationship anime (Kyrios knows there’s not a lot of good ones out there), but it’s ceiling was higher as a trading and wolf fanservice anime (since there are even less of these).

DOWN Griffin…

Griffin: Reminds me of a classic first-person shooter … now what was it called again? “Wolf and Stein?”

*shakes head*

(I gotta admit, I chuckled.)

PQQ: a woman that get drunk and come to my bed at night? How can she not be a keeper?

One bad thing that can happen is if she pukes everywhere. That’s no fun. The second bad thing is thinking that you were, uh, a real Hosaka that night… only to get a, “Hey, did we have sex?” in the morning and immediately making the same face Mako-cakes made when Kana didn’t let Mako-cakes in the house because Mako-cakes wasn’t wearing the frilly dress.

Andrew: @Japan’s interest rate: I’m not wholly convinced it’s too low. The one thing they need more than anything is more spending by consumers. How else do you motivate them?

The low rate is killing them. It doesn’t encourage spending because the Japanese aren’t a borrowing people, plus it’s been low for so long, people start to think it’ll always be low. It hurts a lot because it keeps their currency devalued (it’s plummeting on par with the dollar), and it takes away one of the biggest and most flexible things that a central bank can do. It’s never good to be up against the wall, and that’s a ridiculously low rate does. To stimulate growth, they need to do a lot of painful things in the short term… the biggest I think is that Japan needs to open their immigration policies. It’s difficult to grow an economy when the population is declining. But the Japanese are on the xenophobic side… so that’s difficult… maybe just encourage them to reproduce more, but there’s only so much Sumeragi and Haruka can accomplish.

SCC: one of the best ways to simulate the economy, tell NASA their resuming moon flights, there was this study done, every dollar the government spends on NASA results in 3 somewhere else

OH GEASS NO! I think going to the moon and the space station are just wastes of money. They stopped being science projects long ago, and they’re just pork barrel projects now. What I think NASA should really be doing is figuring out a way to harness solar energy. The Gundam 00 idea of a solar ring with elevators is actually based in actual engineering principles, and the US military is experimenting with a similar concept (the solar plant wouldn’t be as high as in orbit and would transmit microwave to the earth) to provide power for forward troops. If I were in charge of this country, I would definitely toss most of the DARPA, NASA, and NSF money into energy research. Not only is it good for the environment, but being less dependent on foreign oil is always a good thing.

(My second act, of course, would be to enforce the Constitution and make copyright laws that “promote the progress of science and useful arts.” Please tell me how the Sonny Bono Copyright Law of 1998 or the DCMA promote the progress of science and useful arts.)

IKnight: And yes, I find the idea of a world unaccustomed to barter rather hard to swallow too.

You’re complaining about the realism of a show which has a basic premise that a modesty-lacking wolf spirit who loves apples controls wheat harvests on her whim? And that Lawrence hasn’t tapped that once yet?

Giant Humaniod Robot: I’m reading the Scrapped Princess light novels and Raquel getting banged just seems, I don’t know, inherently wrong somehow. Unless the guy was wearing a Soupie-kun costume.

Yep… these are my readers.