An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

It’s International Politics Time! – Gasaraki Spoiler Review

Sit back, relax, and prepare your senses, because we are cracking into some vintage anime!

Vintage mecha shows, in particular, kind of hit differently a lot of the time. I have some theories as to why that is, but the most obvious is that mechs were some of the first things to be commonly animated with CG technology. Classically hand drawn mechas tend to have more weight to their movements than the smooth flow afforded by CG, which especially when you’re dealing with a real robot affair rather than a magical super robot one, can actually accentuate the experience.

This brings us to Gasaraki, a mecha show with real robots (in some senses), strange mysticism, and an extremely dense cloak-and-dagger political plot. Let’s watch it!

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Super Space Squid Battles – Ancient Girls Frame Spoiler Review

This show is a weird one. Ancient Girls Frame is absolutely a mecha show, but it’s only really arguably an anime: it was produced by a Chinese studio. But it gets listed on MAL and other anime sources, and it’s not like I haven’t reviewed more dubious entries on my blog, so while I don’t intend to make a habit of it, I’m going to let this one go.

So, what is Ancient Girls Frame about? Well, to avoid drowning you in technical terms the way the ad copy does, it’s the sort of story where humanity is under siege from unreasonable space monsters, and fends them off with super mechas we found under various rocks. In this setting, we follow a girl who wants to become a pilot of some of that ancient lostech in part to search for her sister, a former pilot, who went missing in action.

Sounds fair enough, but a concept only gets you so far.

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Red Strings of Fate – Tying the Knot with an Amagami Sister Spoiler Review

So the theme of this February seems to be questionable wedding bells, so here we have another variant. In it, atheistic aspiring doctor Uryuu Kamihate needs a place to live, due to being an orphan who wants in to a big time university. He finds accommodation at the Amagami household, but it comes with strings attached: cohabiting with the current youngest generation, a trio of shrine maidens, and a task to ultimately romance and marry one of them to ensure the shrine carries on for another generation. Given the religious differences at the very minimum, this is something of a tall order.

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I’m Reviewing a Show I Hate on My Blog – I’m Getting Married to a Girl I Hate in My Class Spoiler Review

Remember Nisekoi? Now there was a show that I ultimately had a lot of complaints with and deeply disliked… but it wasn’t the fault of the title-founding premise? No, that, like many elements of said former show, seemed extremely promising, and it took a lot of effort for Nisekoi to squander all the good will it did generate and kick itself out of the passing grades.

So, when the pitch for this show could be rendered as “It’s just like Nisekoi, but…”, I’m all ears. Can forcing a pair of natural enemies to make nice (and possibly make out) win this time, or is this going to be strike two? Well the title is suggestive of the answer, so let’s break it down.

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More than Reprocessed, but Not Original – More Than a Married Couple, but Not Lovers Spoiler Review

Remember Love and Lies? The show where high schoolers were forcibly paired off and we followed a boy, the girl he was paired with, and the girl he actually loved? What if, instead of this mismatch happening at the hands of an Orwellian government, it was instead perpetrated by the school, as a “practical exam” for the supposed reason of teaching kids what a real relationship was like?

Now, to be fair, Love and Lies fell short primarily because of its details, not its premise. Still, softening the edges and adding a bit of Toradora!‘s creative DNA – those are odd choices. Love and Lies felt compelling in part because there were actual stakes. This is a little school project that for some reason lasts for an entire year of forced dorm cohabitation, rather than the week that would be an arguably interesting exercise.

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Beneath the Surface – Tomo-chan is a Girl! Spoiler Review

You know how very often the male lead in school anime romance affairs is as dense as a brick? Usually, this holds off the foregone conclusion of a harem, but they went and made a whole show about a single-target romance between an admittedly tomboyish girl and her neutronium brick of a childhood friend. That would be Tomo-chan is a Girl! (the title is excited).

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