Our usual poster, Grant, had to walk out early and miss most of the showing. I bravely and valiantly volunteered to take on this most sacred of duties and ramble about what we watched for a couple hundred words.

This was also our last week in Alderson, so hurray! We’ll have nice seats again! On the other hand, we’re starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel for shows to watch. Hopefully Gene has some good stuff planned for us in the upcoming weeks (OreImo and Eden of the East at least ought to be good).

Star Driver

AKA Gurren Lagann with FABULOUS instead of MANLINESS.

The first half of the first episode is fairly standard. Main character shows up, meets the two characters who’ll be his sidekicks through the rest of the series, and finally a brief segment with some high school shenanigans. And then the OP happens and suddenly tons of plot gets dropped on us.

Or at least, something resembling plot. The first episode ends after Takuto discovers he’s the main character (a “Galactic Pretty Boy”), and destroys a bullishly masculine giant robot with his flamboyantly metrosexual giant robot. After this, the high school and Kiraboshi conspiracy segments become much more intertwined, with the show setting out to set up some kind of shadow war/organization setting up behind the scenes at the academy where all the characters attend school.

And you know, it does a pretty damn good job of it too. The real world sections sprinkled out just enough hints about the nature of the Glittering Star Brigade to keep me interested and sated until it breaks out the Monster Giant Robot of the Week. The animation is nothing special in the real world, but in the Zero Space segments it has a smooth and sparkly style that is very reminiscent of TTGL. Which is awsome.

I don’t know how well it sustains itself over its (close to done) 25 episode run, but the first few episodes show promise. I suspect I’ll be watching it later this semester or this summer, after I finally get around to acquiring and watching Shiki.

Otome Youkai Zero

In case you missed it, I summarized the show as “Three dudes team up with three lady (half-)youkai to do [stuff that probably won’t matter at all]“. I wasn’t too far off the mark.

To be fair, though, it wasn’t a terrible anime. The comedy was okay, you have your choice of three romances (twins, shrinking violet, or tsundere), and on the whole the show doesn’t take itself too seriously.

At just 13 episodes, probably not a total waste of your time. You can probably find 13 episodes of better anime that you haven’t watched yet, though, so you should probably do that instead.

Gosick

This one’s ongoing if you didn’t know. Episode 6 of 24 should be out soon after I post this.

It’s a mystery show with a teen(?) romance/relationship plot snuggled up next to it. Gosick handles the romance angle with a fairly subdued reuse of the classic “generic guy, tsundere girl” approach (with a slight twist I’ll mention below), but it falls short on the mystery angle.

If you read Sherlock Holmes (or even watched the movie), you might have realized that the reason it’s upheld as a paragon of the mystery genre is that the audience, in the vast majority of cases, is aware of all the clues necessary to solve the mystery at hand. Gosick hasn’t noticed this, or simply doesn’t care. Instead of seeing Victorica put together all the little “fragments of chaos” that we missed or discarded as irrelevant, we instead get to see her pull clues out her ass and come up with brilliant deductions from nowhere. Which is rather unsatisfying from the mystery perspective, to say the least. (This might be better handled in the LNs, where the medium is much better suited to non-visual descriptions)

As for the twist in the relationship plot: In episode two, there’s a brief scene where Kujo and Victorica are on a train, and Victorica is super excited and happy to be able to stick her head out the window and feel open air for once. Inevitably, Kujo ruins the moment and Victorica settles into the tsundere archetype of the Bitchy//Clingy split. I think I would like the series more if we got more of Victorica acting out childish wonder (as might be expected of a recluse being let out for the first time) contrasting against the somewhat dark mysteries she has to solve. We get some of it, but it’s usually drowned out by Victorica bitching at/clinging to Kujo.

Still, I am following it as it airs, so it’s not unwatchable. I think the only things saving it, though, are the uncommon setting and the fact that seeing a mystery-genre anime is rather a rarity, even if it isn’t particularly well-done. (Unlike a certain other detective show we watched two weeks ago, which was just plain bad).