badger11’s take on anime

That’s the decaf right? I won’t be able to get any sleep if its not decaf. Now, are you really sure that’s the decaf?

Alrighty then, my apologies to the spam bots (and to the occasional human who visited) for not posting very much. I’ve got a backlog of sorts, but I managed to keep up and make some comments on other anime blogs. Life got (and still is) in the way, ya know. Yare yare.

I’m planning on doing a post or two sometime after Friday (and hopefully before Christmas but next week is more likely) covering the Shakugan no Shana and Fate/Stay Night DVDs that I picked up recently. What is it about stoic superheroes with swords that I find so damn appealing? And damned if I didn’y cry like a kid who had his ice cream drop onto a sidewalk when Makoto left.

Oh, and if Haruhi really is getting licensed over here in North America…woohoo! I’ll take whatever I can get.

Found this website from links over at Anime on My Mind and Kurogane’s Anime Blog

Unfortunately, it doesn’t say in what form. Could it be the DVDs, some station/network is airing the show, or the novels are being released.

Better bring out the tissues.

According to Kurogane’s Anime Blog and Anime on my Mind, there’s going to be second season of Haruhi and her merry mayhem. Woohoo!

….Yare yare …

This episode shows a little about how hard life is for most of the citizens in the Empire. Despite the fact that its been a few years since the end of war, life is still hard. Alice is angry. Again. Because Oland is late. Again. And so is Oreld. For the sixth time that month. Oreld finally comes in from the date that he was on. Oland is outside with the gate guards because he found a basket with an infant child in it. Oland comes running into the office carrying the baby. Captain Hunks reads a note out loud from the mother. She can’t raise the baby so hopes that the Army can and turn the baby, Dieter, into a solider. Alice is angry at the fact that a mother could abandon a child. The baby wakes up and starts to cry, everyone in the office unsuccessfully try to pacify the baby until Oreld suggests that it needs to have diapers changed. He gets nominated to change the diapers. Turns out the Dieter has good aim and can shoot for distance. No matter what the team tries to do, the baby only stops crying when Oland is holding him. Alice wants to go search the city for Dieter’s mother. Despite Oreld’s objections, Captain Hunks agrees, claiming that reuniting the mother with Dieter falls under the “war relief” category. Alice, Oreld, and Machs follow a lead that the mother might be in the black market section of the city.

Down in the black market, Alice marches from stand to stand asking about Dieter’s mother. Oreld keeps suggesting that Alice be more discrete because there is no real law in the area and being soldiers won’t guarantee their safety. Since their search is going no where, Oreld leads them to somebody he knows who might be able to help. The meet an older man whom Oreld refers to as “Pops” (they don’t really make it clear whether this is just someone Oreld knows and worked for or is his father). The man is surprised to see Oreld, he didn’t believe the rumors that Orled had joined the Army. Pops doesn’t care about the baby or the teams mission to find the mother. When Alice tries to appeal to him, he scoffs at the fact that she’s a Lieutenant and is Orled’s commanding office. He goes onto mock the teams overall mission of “war relief”. How does finding the mother of an abandoned child offer relief when there are parentless children out on the street.

Alice finds that Oland has taken the child out into a nearby park. Alice is depressed because of what Pops said. She knows that helping find the mother of Dieter won’t help all of the other children that Pops mentioned. But she still will try. Oland notices a lady watching them from nearby and realizes that she’s Dieter’s mother. She starts to run away but Alice manages to stop her. The mother explains that she decided to leave Dieter outside the gates of the Army H.Q. as the only way that Dieter would survive. In the end, Captain Hunks gives the baby back to her.

So here we get a hint of how life is for people who are on the bottom rung of the empire’s class structure. Alice’s idealism won’t let her believe that black markets exist without any legal laws and that smuggling is rampant. Oreld tries to explain to her that people who buy things through the black market are breaking laws in order to survive. We’ve seen a little of how Alice lives and we know that Alice wants to level the playing field between the nobility and commoners, but her idealism causes her to be blind to how the other half really live. And we’re starting learn a little more about the other members of the unit. We know that Oland is homeless, sleeping under a bridge and that Oreld comes from the streets. And it looks like next week’s episode is an Alice’s home life episode. So we get to learn more about her story.

This was a pretty fast paced episode and I think we’re at the start of resolving at least one character’s storyline (based on some of the blogs that I’ve read). By the end of the show, we’ve seen that Yuuichi is one mean smartass and a smooth character. Picking up the last episode, Yuuichi is at the school at night. He’s trying to get some answers from a sword-wielding Mai. When he hears a sound and suddenly gets knocked into a wall, Mai (who speaks even less than Yuki did in the Melancholy of Haruhi) jumps by and starts swinging her sword around. Mai tells him that she’s a demon-slayer. From here we jump to Yuuichi at home, handing Nayuki her notebook from the school. Heading into the bath room in order to take a hot bath, Yuuichi finds Makoto already in there. Yuuichi makes a joke about joining her in the tub. Makoto reacts by throwing things at him and storms out, wet and only wearing a towel. When he’s done, he finds her outside the bathroom with a cold. Yuuichi challenges Makoto by getting her to say “Demon Slayer” for ten times, as fast as she can. As she does it, she winds up biting her tongue much to Yuuichi’s delight. Later, in bed, he’s thinking about Mai and what she said when he ears Makoto sneezing as she walks up the hall. He hides behind the door. Makoto sneaks into his room, intent on getting revenge, Yuuichi steps behind her, picks her up and carries her back to her room. He tells her to stay in bed until she’s over her cold.

The next morning, he walks into the kitchen for breakfast. After finding out that Nayuki is still sleeping and Makoto is in bed sick, he suddenly realizes that Ayu is there eating breakfast with them. Akiko tells him that she invited Ayu after she passed by the house. After school, Yuuichi is walking around when he runs into Mai. He still can’t get her to talk. As he’s trying to carry on a conversation with her a friend of Mai’s, Sayuri, shows up. Yuuichi jokingly tells her that the ever silent Mai just told him she loves her. He’s doing this to get a response out of Mai, who still stays quiet. Yuuichi is surprised when sayuri invites him to eat with her and Mai. As they eat, Yuuichi asks Sayuri if she like, he then makes a joke that based on the meal, Sayuri is the perfect woman for him. Yuuichi discovers that he can get more than just a yes or no answer from Mai if he serves her food. After the meal, Sayuri invites him to eat with them again. As he starts to leave the school, he finds Shiori, the mysterious sick girl. As they walk around the school grounds, he tries to find out her last name, but she won’t ell him, saying that mysterious girls are supposed to be more interesting. As they talk, he finds out that she came to the school, hoping to see him because he’s an interesting person. She asks him to help her make a snowman. Yuuichi promises to help her, but only when she gets better.

On his way home, Yuuichi runs in to a recovered Makoto. Makoto is on an errand for Akiko. Yuuichi teases her about being too young to run an errand. Makoto claims to mature enough. Yuuichi decides to torment her further by asking her to by a porno mag for him. He’s surprised to learn that Makoto doesn’t know what a porn mag is. So Yuuichi tells her to ask the store clerk to help her buy one. Predictable, Makoto is angry at Yuuichi when she gets home. As she’s shouting at Makoto, she notices he’s eating a pork bun. Yuuichi tells her that he bought it in town along with the comic book that he’s reading. Makoto runs off to get buy the same things for herself. Later that night, Yuuichi goes back to the school to find Mai. He’s brought some food for her. As he unsuccessfully tries to get her to talk, something is creeping up behind him. Mai reacts, swinging her sword which pulls off a curtain. They discover that Makoto was under the curtain. She was followed Yuuichi on order to scare him but was scared by Mai instead. As he leaves, Mai cryptically tells him to be nice to her.

This was a surprisingly fast and humorous episode. And from some of the other blogs that I’ve read, we should be coming up on a climax and resolution to someone’s storyline. So the big questions are why is Mai at school at night? What are the demons she says she’s fighting? What does Shiori find so interesting about Yuuichi? Poor Makoto gets to be the butt-end of Yuuichi’s jokes and pranks though setting her up to buy a porno mag was funny. There was barely any Ayu and Nayuki to be satisfied with, but understandable since it focused on Mai, Shiori and Makoto.