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Jun 12 2010

Categories: angel beats, episodic review
Tagged: angel beats

22 Comments »

Change za waludo!

“Whoa! Whoa! Dancing in da shadows!”

TK is like BlazBlue’s Noel, Devil May Cry’s Dante, and FFXIII’s Sazh all rolled up in one. We need to fix him up with Sawa-chan… I think these two are meant for each other, much like Mulder and Scully.

Giant Humanoid Robot: And when TK don’t jive no more, what then huh? What then?

We’ll always have the original, the omega: Carl Kasell. I’m beginning to think that TK doesn’t need his own spin-off series… I think he needs to do color commentary for Madden 11. Gus Johnson and TK? Now that’s a dream team.

(Only thing that would be better? If Gus Johnson and TK were doing play-by-play for a Tomoya x Tomoyo x Kyou threesome. But I don’t think we can get Gus Johnson to agree to do this one.)

My favorite part of the episode? After Yurippe tells everyone that there’s a new threat, one that can be defended against by staying together in groups, she tells everyone to decide on their own what they want to do armed with this new knowledge. And what does everyone do? They go think about this new threat by splitting up! Except for the remaining members of Girls Dead Monster, everyone else split up! Reminds me of a bad slash flick when they give the suggestion, “Hey, it’ll be faster if we split up!” (Yes, faster to be butchered in a horrible way) or “I’ll be right back!” (You’ll see me soon, or at least my intestines.)

(Up until they showed Takeyama’s screen, I would have guessed that everyone would stand behind Yurippe and not leave this world until they defeated this new threat with her. After seeing that screen, I’m not so sure. Also not so sure if Takeyama’s evil Angel-like twin isn’t behind this new threat.)

Speaking of which… we have like two episodes left, and everything is tossed wide open again. Jun Maeda is not letting anything breathe. Angel Beats should have been a 24 episode series with four distinct plot arcs: the introduction arc where the rules of this world are explained. This would include Guild and the disappearance of Iwasawa. The second arc would be the continual battle against Angel, and we can toss Naoi’s story as well as Angel’s MPD scenario. The third arc would be Otonashi– err– Arararagi– trying to make people disappear. The fourth would be this final arc.

(Of course, I’d have filler episodes too, like a complete rip-off of K-On!! featuring GalDeMo, and a requisite hot springs episode and a requisite beach episode. Come on, like you wouldn’t want to see Kanade bobbing up and down on Azu-nyan’s inner tube?)

Wait, they’re going to Guild again? Did PA Works run out of animation budget for making new background scenery? There’s more frickin’ backtracking in this than in Metroid.

Series gag! Classic Jun Maeda signature piece, much like how I enjoy writing sentences with possibly too many meanings. Anyway, I don’t feel like this one was funny… it was only funny if you believed that Yurippe believed any of Naoi’s slop, and, obviously, Yurippe isn’t dumb enough to do just that.

If you told me back when this show started that we’d have a love triangle, I would have guessed between Otonashi, Yurippe, and Angel. So wrong. Who would have guessed it would be between three guys? Even Sunrise made their love triangles seem like women were involved… sure, Shirley and Lacus might not have a chance in hell in winning against Suzaku and Athrun, but it was the thought that counts.

Beowulf Lee: You know jason, I’m pretty sure your blog wasn’t so gay a couple years ago…. What the fuck happened? The worst of it is, it all seems so natural…

Is this your subtle way of telling me that you’re gay for me? Seriously, this blog is a reflection of anime at the moment. I pretty much only write about what’s going on now, and if what’s available now is Mugi x Azu-nyan action in K-On!! with Kaworu confessing his love to Shinji and now a love triangle between Hinata, Naoi, and Otonashi, then so be it. Anime for the most part has incorporated more same sex relationships… or at least potential. Looking back, aside from Shinji and Kaworu, you don’t feel the same sexual tension between Spike and Jet or Sano and Kenshin or Van and Allen that you do with Lulu and Suzaku or Sunohara and Tomoya. It’s simple. Money.

I think most publishers realized that Escaflowne‘s appeal was largely from, in no particular order, it’s mecha battles, the story, the Van/Hitomi/Allen love triangle, and possible non-canon Van x Allen pairings. As good as Escaflowne was, the real money maker during that time period was this Gundam Wing thing. It didn’t do anything better than Escaflowne, but instead of having a normal love triangle, it insinuated that Trowa x Quatre and Heero x Duo were valid pairings. The fangirls (and non-traditional fanboys) went nuts. Did you think Sunrise didn’t notice?

So what did they do next? Hey, if they could get this audience by having boy x boy pairings, why not trying girl x girl pairings? Wouldn’t this create a mega-franchise? Sadly, they did try this… Mai Hime, and as successful and in-grained it might be with fanboys (I’m still cheering for more Natsuki and Shizuru), it never really caught on Gundam Wing-level with the fangirl community. And that’s it. With mecha, fighting, and aesthetically-pleasing ladies, you could win over the fanboy audience. To really capture that fangirl audience, you need viable boy x boy pairings. They learned their lesson. What came next? Their greatest hits of the modern era: Code Geass, Gundam Seed, and Gundam 00.

Basically, in this day and age, you need to branch out and get as big of a pie as possible. If introducing even mildly gay elements helps to that end, why not do it? The only people who notice and pick up on these things are meido-obsessed anime blogs wondering, “Wait, why aren’t there more meido in anime these day?”

(And don’t think Jun Maeda doesn’t know this, after all, he’s probably prepping for being scenario writer for the new Gundam reboot as we speak, so he knows he has every fanboy locked in with Girls Dead Monster and his typical harem antics, why not try to branch out for the fangirl audience by making a three way all-male love triangle? I think he’s devilishly evil.)

(And back on the original question… back when I was forming a meido alliance with Narg and others, this blog had like no visitors. It wasn’t until OH GEASS NO and Itsuki that this blog made it into the triple digits of readers.)

Things missing from this room: a frog suit, a meido outfit, four laptops originally from the computer club, a tanabata tree, and a hard drive overflowing with cleavage shots of a busty meido.

When I saw all these shadow creatures, I had four thoughts: 1, no way Jun Maeda is ripping off Haruhi Suzumiya… totally different shadow monsters destroying this world… 2, there’s a viable chance Yurippe, or at least the real Yurippe and not this one that we’ve been seeing, is behind this world… 3, now we have the smoke monster, where’s the polar bear, and will they find a random hatch?… 4, I really hope it ends with Otonashi kissing Yurippe and the two of them disappearing, but I won’t rule out Otonashi kissing Hinata and the two of them disappearing.

We need to bring back thigh highs as a fashion trend in the US.

(I was listening to NPR discuss the oil spill, and they were saying that pantyhose is great for absorbing oil, but because so few Americans now wear pantyhose, they are getting the majority of their donated pantyhose from transvestites from San Francisco. God Bless America.)

Goodbye and thanks for the memories… gotta hand it to PA Works for keeping the OP/ED up to date. Love to see Girls Dead Monster have their own spin-off series a la K-On!!…

Not a shock that Kanade was like them– a normal student– just with two episodes left, are we going to get resolutions for both her, Yurippe’s, and this black shadow arc? This seems like a more impossible task than cleaning up after the BP oil spill.

(I doubt Jun Maeda would just cheese out by having Kanade die in a fire or a stray drive by shooting… she probably had some sort of disease for most of her life but she heroically overcomes it… and then dies in a fire started by a stray drive by shooting.)

I’d be more suspicious of this guy… I mean… come on! Who works late at night at a school? If he works at the school, he’s probably union, which means that he’s punched out by five. Yurippe should have seen through this.

(Looks like the school using Winding XP… )

Exactly the same look on Yuno’s face when Yuki finally gave himself to her.

Maybe this is like Sora no Otoshimono… and, yes, I haven’t even gotten to the epic meido outfits that are part of the Hiyori’s arc. Let’s just say best case scenario for Angel Beats is meido outfits and a new season… worst case scenario is a rushed ending. Still, Angel Beats is going to end up being a success… no matter how the ending turns out, it’s a poor man’s Evangelion, something that not even the Rebuild of Evangelion could muster. The CDs are doing well and would be more notable if not for Afterschool Tea Time. The show is scoring high ratings for a late night anime series. It’s a success. I’m enjoying it. I want to know how it ends. It ends great, I’m satisfied. It ends poorly, I’m satisfied too, after some bitching, of course, but that’s the life of any fan.

(At least they didn’t have the “Hey, let’s have character A not talk with characters B and C even though the three of them talking could resolve the whole mess in five minutes. Let’s just keep inventing reasons they can’t talk. Oh, since we need to fill some airtime, let’s kill character T, who was just recently portrayed as the 00 Gundam to everyone else’s Taozi.”)

Kimi o kimi o aishiteru /
Kokoro de mitsumeteiru /
Kimi o kimi o shinjiteru /
Samui yoru mo /

(The whole Jun Maeda is a Buddhist thing… you know… there’s no angels with fluffy wings in Buddhism. There’s also no smoke monsters. I think he’s just doing religious overtone soup. Nothing wrong with it, except we never got the SSS Brigade member who keeps calling Kanade an “Infidel” and insists that Yurippe trade her thigh highs for an ankle-length skirt. Okay, maybe this is a good thing.)

ZerotheGreat: Honestly, I just don’t want a train wreck ending, so I’m holding out hope that they announce another season. Also I think the end of the episode was what happens when someone in the office says, “we aren’t Lost enough,” and someone replies, “well we could add a smoke monster.”

Definitely this show is as religious as Lost… which wasn’t very religious. I don’t know about you, but if the whole point of Lost is that they were on purgatory and were waiting at the chapel, wouldn’t the chapel have, oh, religious artifacts? Look closely at that chapel. It is all religions but none but done in a way that whatever one you want to believe it is, it can be. Angel Beats is the same way. I think by being religious soup, you can just duck the question and focus on things that are really important: polar bears on tropical islands. Or in this case, the Hinata x Naoi x Otonashi love triangle.

(And, yes, Angel Beats is the anime version of Lost. Angel is Hurley, with Sawyer and Locke being played out as Otonashi and Yurippe. The Guild is the hatch… the NPCs? The Others.)