Anaglyph’s Anime Appraisals

Thanks to danbooru my image of the innocence and purity of Yumi and Sachiko has been forever tarnished.

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A rigorous analysis of the episode including a careful examination of the themes and subtext of the narrative using Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment as a point of comparison in considering the underlying metaphor… in pictorial form.

Warning: image heavy.

Loli boosters at optimum

Moe amplifier functioning

Kawaii levels at peak efficiency

Kana: Now I am ready once more to aid Oneesama in her endless battle against the forces of evil. With the powers of this ribbon I am invincible.

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After the first two episodes I wasn’t really sure about Red Garden but episode three has convinced me it’s going to be a good, worthwhile series. So far things seem much less episodic than is usual for anime. Much as I love the medium, a lot of shows have the feeling of being thrown together in a fairly haphazard way; often there’s a complete change of tone and direction halfway through a series, or episodes are strung together with little thought towards creating a satisfying whole; so it’s nice to find a show that seems to have been carefully plotted before the actual animation work was begun. Whether this will hold true as the series progresses remains to be seen, but for now the show maintains a deliberate pace; questions are raised, some are answered while others are left hanging, and new mysteries are introduced.

So what questions did episode three answer? For one thing, the mystery of what happened to our girls on That Fateful Night^TM is revealed, or some of it at least. Also, I can now drop the rather uncharitable appellation Ugly Woman and switch to Lula, which is good because I’ve started to get used to the look of the characters and they no longer appear quite so grotesque. On the subject of names, there seems to be some confusion about a couple of them. Lisa is now being subbed as Lise and while checking this out on Wikipedia I noticed the article referring to Rula rather than Lula. I’ll just go with the names as they’re subbed for now.

Rachel expresses her admiration of Lula.

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Introduction

It was only a short time after I first started watching anime that I became aware of the phenomenon known as the “trap”. My curiosity was piqued by the evident fascination these traps held for ostensibly heterosexual males and the resulting cognitive dissonance that was displayed, not to mention the fact that I myself was not immune to this process; hence I began to study the phenomenon. With this analysis I shall attempt to explain why these traps have such a power over the heterosexual psyche and how any cognitive dissonance might be resolved. Rather than addressing traps in general, I shall focus the study on a single character: Mizuho Miyanokoji from Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru. Mizuho is an unusual example of a trap in that his true gender is not obscured, to be revealed at a later date, but is instead disclosed at the beginning of the anime. Despite this, his power to ensnare is not diminished.

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What’s the “hmmm-ing” about? In a word, ambivalence. The series presents a fairly intriguing scenario but it also has some idiosyncrasies that are a little off-putting. Whether the scenario will be put to good use or not remains to be seen (for those of us not completely up-to-date, at least), but the problematic stylistic choices will have to be endured regardless, so I’m yet to be convinced that this is worth watching.

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Japan is currently in crisis. Adolescent schoolgirls all over the country are suffering from what has become known as Weak Girl Syndrome. Every young women’s educational institution in the country has at least one student suffering from this tragic but ill-defined malady. While the pathology is not well understood, it appears to be a congenital condition with two or more variants. Sadly there are often complications for sufferers of Weak Girl Syndrome and the disease can escalate into full-blown Dying Girl Syndrome. Naturally such a serious problem is reflected in anime; in fact, if it wasn’t for watching anime I wouldn’t even be aware of this terrible epidemic.

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So, does the world wide web really need another anime blog? That’s the question that’s been troubling me for several weeks now (it’s on the list of troubling questions anyway, somewhere below more pressing matters such as “How the hell am I going to make it through Christmas with my bank balance the way it is?” and “Why does almost everyone seem to be having more sex than me?”). Contrary to appearances the answer I arrived at was actually “no”, but I decided to go ahead anyway. Lucky you! Hopefully I’ll be able to contribute something reasonably interesting to the anime blogging community now and then; if not, c’est la vie.

Everyone’s a critic

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