badger11’s take on anime

Hiro gets a major assignment of her career when she gets put in charge of publishing a special edition of the magazine she works for. This edition covers the top 50 national leaders in business, education, etc. Unfortunately for her, she suffers a setback when one of the people, Mimura, she’s including in that suddenly dies from a brain hemorrhage at work. Like Hiro, he was a workaholic until he died at 45. Continuing with the theme of things going downhill, Hiro gets a, unheard of for her, cold and finds out that one of the five reporters working for her on this project is in the hospital (I wonder who has it worse, Hiro or the reporter). This reporter was interviewing 10 people, all of whom are now Hiro’s responsibility.

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Ya know, sometimes it helps to check email more often. As with other bloggers, Darren over at Anime 2 Manga contacted me by email. Anime2Managa is looking for writers. From his email

“…I’ll be giving away free webhosting to staff plus username@anime2manga.com and username@amexd.com email addresses. The authors who will post articles at Anime 2 Manga will also get full credit for their articles and they can somehow use their articles to promote their websites. You see, the articles posted by the staff will be published along with their profile where they can place links to their websites…”

Check it out if your interested. Of course, you can always contact Maestro for an AB blog also.

I can’t recall when I considered an episode of a 12-part show to be a filler-like episode. Until this episode. It’s leaning towards that sort of a designation. Where episode 7 split the time between Hiro and her masseuse having to decide that they’ll have no regrets about putting all of their energy into jobs that they like, this episode doesn’t really have a lot to do with Hiro. Instead it focus’s more on Chiba, a salesman in the book division. One of Hiro’s ongoing assignments is to edit the work of an author. This work, called “54″, is being serialized in Hiro’s magazine. It’s been decided to finally publish 54 as a book an it’s Chiba’s job to pound the pavement and get it into bookstores. At first Hiro is thrilled until she finds out that 54 is going to have a limited release of 20,000 or so copies. Despite the popularity of 54 in the magazine, no one in the book division, including Chiba, is convinced that it’ll sell well. Chiba has no interest in the book and isn’t willing to put any more effort into 54 than he has to.

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Ok, Yet another thing I seem to admit to on this blog. I liked Lucky Star. I went into it not expecting to like it based on other blogs that I read and like. My dislike of the opening reinforced what I’ve read. In fact, I barely made it through the OP. That song was just…is “blargh” a legitimate word? While I had originally planned to watch Lucky Star because its of Kyoto Animation, I then had to watch it just to see how bad it was. One of the things I had set in my mind was that even an outfit like Kyoto Animation could strike out on a show every once in a while. Even though they’ve delivered some of my favorite shows, I was allowing for disappointment. Based on what I read, I thought Lucky Star was it.

Well, I was wrong. Somewhat. I don’t like the OP song. It’s blargh. However, with the sound off, its pretty enjoyable to watch. Other than that, I was chuckling throughout a lot of the show. Granted, the high school girls and their eating styles could’ve been a little shorter, but that’s where I was laughing the most at, what I thought, was the ludicrousness of such a long segment about eating. But the more it went on, the more I laughed because I knew this wasn’t going to wind up anywhere.

I suppose that it’s easy to compare this show (or even Hidamari Sketch which I like, but sometimes find hard to watch) to a show like Azumanga Daioh. For me, Azumanga Daioh sort set the standard for these types of shows. However, the more I watch Lucky Star (well, this one episode), I’ve actually stopped making comparisons. I get the feeling that Azumanga Daioh will be the better of these two shows (actually, make that three shows since I’m including Hidamari Sketch in this group). But I’m not committing myself to that until the end of Lucky Star’s run. I will say that I get a sense of “nostalgia” when I watch Azumanga Daioh which pretty much appears with the first episode of that show. With Lucky Star, I haven’t gotten that feeling yet. I don’t even know if I will, but there’s definitely a sense of humor in Lucky Star otherwise I wouldn’t have laughed as much as I did.

I don’t know if the humor is (or was) subtle, but I did enjoy watching this episode. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at all that I liked Lucky Star when other bloggers didn’t like it. I have a slight contrarian streak. I guess it’ll take a few more episodes for me to decide if it really is that contrarian tendency rearing up its ugly head or that I actually like Lucky Star.

This episode has Hiro and her masseuse feeling dissatisfied at their jobs. Hiro seems to suffering from a bout of journalism ethics when her latest assignment is to write a fluffy travel promo about Yakushima, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Where Hiro’s dissatisfaction comes from her latest assignment, the dissatisfaction of her masseuse, Midoriko, comes forced to get her clients in and out as fast as possible. She’s the spa’s most requested masseuse, so she gets the most bookings. Part of the problem is that she books some clients herself, adding to the clients booked for her by her manager. Since she’s so busy, she doesn’t get much time off, but she normally loves what she does. But the drawback to her workload is little time off and it seems that the workload and management’s pressure to turn clients over quickly is catching up to her. Midorika, who loves what she does and feels that she’s helping people is feeling conflicted.

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I have to feel a little for Chiaki. Stuck on a road trip with Nodame, Mine, and Masumi all of whom, despite being musicians, can’t harmonize together. Funnily enough, these apparent soloists are heading to a music festival. While we know that Streseman is a famous conductor, it shows that he does have a fair amount of clout to get four of his students admitted. All of them from the second string orchestra (Nodame is after all, the S Oke mascot). Admittedly, Masumi was also part of the A Oke, so he’s not really a second string musician.

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