Yo, guys. Last night we watched more OreImo and then watched the Gundam 00 Trigun movie. Afterward a handful of us stayed to watch Gene get curb-stomped trade wins on Starcraft II. With that, we totally forgot about anime and the existence of Japan and became the Starcraft club. As a club revolving around the world’s greatest e-sport, we of course love Huk and, that being as it is, let us worship our new lord and master and his secret handshake:

Indeed, it was a glorious night, the spectators watching in thrall as Gene–who was still recovering from his loss in the first game–in the second game employed a bronze-league-confirmed reaper rush before turning to banshees to finish off the offender. Everyone rejoiced at our fearless leader’s victory.

Before that, though, we watched anime. As we are the Anime Club, most of you probably remember that, so let’s get to it.

Ore no Imōto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai 3-4

So far, so good. I am still liking the show. It remains consistently funny and I’m appreciating the satire more and more. Though I can semi-relate to the sort of passion Kuroneko and Kirino show in their love of their preferences in anime, the little jabs at the fandom itself help me take a moment to step back and realize that, yeah, wow, I’ve seen some of these things unravel in real life before. In a way, it’s a good look at how ridiculous ‘anime culture’ tends to be. The clash of fandoms and the negative image that the world ascribes to otaku all seems very familiar, really. At the same time, though, it seems to be treated rather affectionately: a way of life revolving around anime may be crazy and often stupid, but believe it or not, there’s some good in all of it, too.

At this point, I’m not really doubting that the satire keeps up. I’m not going to write an essay on all of it (Gene’s already doing that for every episode pair!), but I really am enjoying the show so far. There isn’t much else to say on the subject, really–I’m just sure we can expect more laughs from OreImo at future showings. At the same time, we can look forward to more posts from Gene as the episodes are shown.

Trigun: Badlands Rumble

Then came the time to watch Gundam 00, but it failed after only four seconds of viewing. Even the weak-but-trusty VLC could not run the twelve gigabyte beast. So it was pushed to next week and out came Trigun. I had not seen Gundam 00, and I had also not seen Trigun at all, so this didn’t make much of a difference to me.

Despite not having seen the show, however, it didn’t seem like it was too hard to catch on to what was going on. Vash doesn’t want people to die, so he tries to keep people from killing people the entire movie.

To be short, I didn’t really like the movie all that much. Still, since I haven’t seen Trigun, maybe my opinion isn’t qualified. But either way, I guess I’ll get on to what exactly I didn’t enjoy about the movie.

First, the art style. I know I wasn’t the only one bothered by it, but I definitely think the art had some problems. It seemed so distinctly shounen (reminiscent of One Piece, in fact; another show I haven’t seen, but I’m familiar with the style) that I found it hard to get into it. Concerning some of the other shounen parts of it: As I think about it, it also sounds silly to say that people need to die for me to be interested, but considering everything that was happening and the nature of most of the characters, I was just a little bit incredulous at the movie’s really tiny body count. It made the ‘kiddie’ feel of the movie that much stronger; this doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, but for some reason it put me off here.

To its credit, it was pretty funny at some points (like everyone whipping out their pistols and not knowing why), and it was at its best when it wasn’t trying to be too serious. Once things got down and dirty, however, everything seemed kind of… forced. The entire fight with Gasback at the end didn’t feel at all dire, because you knew Vash was going to come back and you knew none of the main characters were in any actual danger.

I wouldn’t say Badlands Rumble was a bad movie or anything, it was just ‘meh’. It wasn’t good. I can see fans of the franchise enjoying it, seeing their main character have a triumphant return in a recent film, but to an outsider like me it just didn’t have much impact; I didn’t care about the characters before and I don’t now.

I’ll just have to give the series a try sometime, instead. Let’s hope Gundam 00 isn’t too bad!

And that’s about everything. Thanks for reading, especially if you sat through my complaints. See you next week!