I’m back for more of the same, with an extra helping of poop.

Star Driver (2010-10-03) Series

Description

On a cross-shaped island in the South, a mysterious and gigantic humanoid robot known as the "Cybuddy" is discovered sealed in the underground ruins for untold ages. A group known as the "Order of the Glittering Star Cross" attempts to remove the seal by abducting a girl named Wako Agemaki, who they dubbed the "shrine maiden" and is the key to activating the robot. A boy named Takuto Tsunashi arrives with his own Cybuddy named Tauburn to rescue Wako. Thus begins a struggle to unlock the secrets of the advanced technology and prevent disaster.

Episodes: 25
Status: airing
Time: Sun 17:00+JST
Duration: 24m

Links: Official Official ANN

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I didn’t need to invent a witty nickname for this one; the show conveniently provided me with one. I wish I could say I was joking. The premise is… well, we don’t quite know what the premise is. What we do know? Shit makes shit for sense. Ridiculousness sprouts eternal. It’s almost so incredibly idiotic that I can’t help but love it.

I’m going to treat this like a Mai-HiME: a show that takes horse excrement and turns it upside down. Some kind soul will pat it on the back and say, “good job, you did something original!” The more observant viewer will shake his head and say, “it’s still shit.”

And I, too blinded by the shininess to be observant and too #AnimeHipster to be kind, will simply put on my shitty grin and nod along with the gratuitous mecha cock rings, the blatant Isekai rip-offs, the Markovian invasion fleet of sparkles, the utter failures at characterizing humans, and the general Jasonian train wreck of it all. What? I’m being gentle here. Ginga Bishounen’s polarizing! Haters gonna hate, lovers gonna love, lolikit’s just gonna piss all over everything.

Excuse me.

Toilet humor seemed most appropriate when dealing with fecal matter.

Otome Yokai Zakuro (2010-10-04) Series

Description

In an alternate history of the Meiji era where humans and magical beings known as "younin" live side by side, half-younin girls team up with army lieutenants to fight younin wrongdoers.

Status: airing
Time: Mon 25:30+JST
Episodes: 13
Duration: 24m

Links: Official ANN

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Er… let’s see what Melative says my first reaction to this show was.

2.5+1=3.5

I saw nothing redeeming in those 3.5 minutes. Quite the opposite: I saw a lot of fail. I’m willing to try again if someone convinces me. Hah! “I’ll be convinced if I can be convinced.” Tautology strikes again.

Super Robot Taisen OG: The Inspector (2010-10-01) Series

Episodes: 26
Status: airing
Time: Fri 25:00+JST
Duration: 25m

Links: Official ANN

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There simply wasn’t anything here for me. I can deal with mecha when there’s an interesting plot hook, when there are cool characters, or when it looks pretty, but when none of those conditions is met, I have to say the prospects are grim.

Can I just say that mecha flagship and fan favorite Kannazuki no Miko victorizes on all fronts? ;)

Sora no Otoshimono 2 (2010-10-01) Fall Series

Genre: comedy, fantasy, romance
Theme: ecchi
Episodes: 12
Status: airing
Time: Fri 25:00+JST
Duration: 24m

Links: Official ANN

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…

… female raindrops.

…

… with humongous tits.

Funny story: I downloaded this episode three times. I deleted it three times. I managed to force myself to sit through it about a total of one time, though it took many tries. I kept second-guessing myself: maybe I did want to sit through another twelve episodes of heaven’s big-breasted dump! Maybe.

Bowel movements dominate the day’s discussion, however, as I was ultimately unable to justify the watching of this. Episode 1 has finally been deleted that third time, never to be downloaded again.

Good riddance.

P.S.

(Has anyone mentioned how weird it is that I’m blogging anime?)

I saw the challenge of the Ultimate Post call-out, and felt the need to show digiboy that picking strong allies is only one factor in deciding the victor. He got Baka-Raptor, he got ghostlightning—formidable opponents, to be sure, but not the best team players. I used science to determine which trinity of anime bloggers would form the best gattai and, swallowing my pride, called up three old enemies: Jason Miao, Sixten, and Pete Zaitcev.

Surprisingly, they answered my call—Jason seems to have gotten over the fact that my sense of humor uses his as its urinal, Sixten seems to have overcome the trauma dealt him when I told him to remove the “amateur” qualifier from his About page, and Zaitcev seems to have finally accepted the truth about my Night Switch series (that it’s not serious, and thusly not a left-wing alarmist allegory)—and here they are, full of fight, ready to put digiboy in his place.

Please, listen to their song.

J.C. Staff’s A Certain Anime Blog Post, Twittered

In 2008, when J.C. Staff announced that they had acquired the rights to do a movie adaptation of Kazuma Kamachi’s A Certain Anime Blog Post (TOARU ANIME NO BLOG), there was much rejoicing in the aniblogosphere. Here’s an idea of how pumped people were for this thing:

“just read the 6 chapters in one go, pretty good stuff. too bad it’s only one novel…” – boo

“I mean, wow Jason.
I still feel like Kamachi and Haimura should reconcile and continue work on Index, give it another 24 episodes, and that might fix the uneven narrative. They could even shoe in a Kuroko arc!
This new story’s lame in comparison.” – Myssa Rei

“Needs more Index. Cutest one there. No way to have TOARU Anything when Kamachi eliminated all partner artists with penises.” – Haesslich

“Riiiiight. Specifically pick up on the gay innuendo that’s used as a gag. And keep repeating Touma penetrating Stiyl jokes because THAT’S what J.C. Staff was getting at. Don’t worry, though, I still love you jason :)” – Beowulf Lee

Yes, these are my readers… and they weren’t particularly enthralled with the prospect of Blog Post, no. But other bloggers were. Ones more into the whole meta thing. And ones more into J.C. Staff (which really should have folded after Takasu passed up on the Minorin buffet in episode 18). And that’s why Author and Sixten are joining me today as we pick apart the Blog Post movie.

First, to clear up some misconceptions people had about the movie prior to its release in Japan, because these were rampant.

4. J.C. Staff announced a movie, so it’s going to be high quality.

The truth of the matter is that you can only have so many minutes of people looking at a computer screen before the audience gets bored. If people were watching basketball on their computer screens, it might be an interesting exercise in breaking the fourth wall. You could have a show about basketball, but it’s actually about people watching basketball—you could get into the mentality of sports fans, and a lot of people would relate to that.

But no. The Blog Post book is about just that, a blog post. There’s nothing interesting about that. I mean, a fanservice blog at least! Melonpan! But it’s just a blog.

And you can only have so many minutes of that, so they chose to make a movie instead of a TV show.

3. J.C. Staff announced a movie, so it’s going to be at least an hour long.

Nope. It’s almost as if the director, after having spent the entire budget on tacos and lapdances—and subsequently putting the animation studio out of employment temporarily—, wrote in to the producers suggesting that they steal footage from other anime rather than rely on J.C. Staff’s, well, staff.

According to Heisei Democracy, a month before Blog Post hit the theaters, JASRAC smelled blood and cracked down on the already-sorry production. Half of the major animation studios whose content had wound up in Blog Post sued, and so half the movie was simply cut. It’s twenty-seven minutes long… almost short enough for a normal TV spot.

2. J.C. Staff set the release date as May 2010, so they gave themselves a long time to make sure the film would be a masterpiece.

For those who read the original light novel, you know there’s some magic even in something as mundane as a story about an animeblog post. Namely, Kamachi described several bits of web technology that simply didn’t exist back in the day. J.C. Staff—always concerned with realism—decided to consult with Google and subsequently scheduled the film to come out only after Chrome’s speed test videos proved that yes, the internet IS faster than a potato gun.

1. There would be graphs.

I am guilty of this one, I admit—I anticipated an anime about a Japanese anime blogger to include at least one or two graphs. Unfortunately, it seems graphs fell out of fashion in the Japanese-language blogosphere shortly after Spring 2006, and we’ve been following in the footsteps of mediocrity for the past four years.

I would insert a graph of graph decline here, but eh. I need to be trendy.

Well, let’s get down to business, shall we?

Sixten: before Jason scares off all our readers—or worse, encourages people to not watch the film—it should be said that even though this is slice-of-life (bordering on iyashikei, no less), there is still that authentic J.C. Staff tsundere flavor. If you’ve considered selling your soul to J.C. Staff as I did, you can’t afford to miss this movie. I know it’s hard to compete with Haruhi’s disappearance, especially when that movie made it clear that it was serious with Windows 95 footage, but I think true fans such as myself may well end up remembering Blog Post as the best anime of 2010.

Author: I also have a brief note before we get deep into the bones of it. Evirus noted something interesting in an e-mail reply to my post about Pizza Hut:

“Did you wonder about all those fuzzy black squares in Blog Post? I hear the majority of the budget came in the form of Pizza Hut sponsorship; once the news with JASRAC broke that poor director was forced to censor all the Pizza Hut boxes in his show for fear of incriminating the chain.”

“Poor director?”

He’s just lucky he didn’t get AIDS from all those strippers. In any event, you will no longer be confused by the fuzzy black squares!

UPDATE: we’ve updated the post to use screenshots from the uncensored version. Er, the Pizza Hut is still gone, but the black squares are, too! No trace of the pizza chain remains.

lolikitsune: No, stop there, guys. We’re at 2330 words, and the limit is 2500. I know Author is a man of concision, but if you drag Sixten into a digestive discussion this could go on forever. Thank you, all of you.

So the only other person who participated in the contest was digitalboy. He picked the team of ghostlightning, Baka-Raptor, and Shin. He thought he would win. I talked to him yesterday—he still didn’t know I was participating, one day before the deadline—and he told me that baaaawwww, his buddies abandoned him.

I suggested that he publish the current working draft for his ultimate post, and he laughed.

I was thinking about making th epost called ‘Fuck You Guys, I’ll Make My Own Damn Ultimate Post’ and then talk about why these kind of projects fail lol – digiboy

Protip to digi, and, well, to everyone.

The secret to success with group projects such as these is to not rely on anyone else. ;)

What is this bullshit?!

Kyoto Animation has almost as many posts as the rest of the top 10 list combined. (It’s six short, to be exact.) It’s not a majority, but it’s a disgustingly large plurality, and it. is. not. right.

Comrades, I urge you to fight the power by blogging about good shows for the next week.

Back in the day, there was this show called Strawberry Panic, and it was fun to mess around and point out all the places where it had borrowed heavily from previous series. These days it seems like nothing is original. At all.

Macross F? Code Geass R2? More like, Macross (variable) and NGE.

What’s new? Where is it?

And why does the repetition suck?