Okay guys, time for lolikappa to give his thoughts on every series that’s airing this season! Of course I have seen all of them, and the PVs for them, and done research, and shit like that. Obviously. So let’s do this! (I stole some pictures or something from like… Brian Andrew. Who the fuck is that? I don’t even know.)

DRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!

DRRRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrRrRrrrRRRRrrrrrRRRrrrrr

This looks pretty bitchin’ awesome. I mean, the guy in the middle is a butler or some shit, and he’s got a baseball bat covered with SHADOW SPIKES. Clearly he’s going to murder everyone with his shadowmancy. The other guys are also shadowmancers. The first episode is all about how they meet, at this sweetass restaurant. The guy in the middle (who Im’a call Green ’cause I can’t remember his real name) is a waiter there, and the other guys are hipsters who are meeting there for a date. They all get attacked by motorcycles, whose engines are just like DRRRRRRRRR all the fucking time, but it’s chill, because they use their shadows to cut the motorcycles in half. It’s kind of a ripoff of Pride from FMA, but whatever. It’s cool.

Also it looks like it was drawn by the designers of Persona 4, and some totally hot chicks told me that game was bitchin’, so I’m gonna say it was bitchin’ too. So yeah, bonus points for that.

DANCE IN THE VAMPIRE BUNDT CAKE

So… it’s basically Moon Phase, only with more blatant pedophilia. TARGET AUDIENCE: JOSH PINES. Seriously, I’m playing Star Wars RPG right now (yeah, fuck you) and my DM says he wants to watch this shit. So steer clear of this, because that dude is a fucking pedophile. And unless you wanna get tainted like he is, DON’T WATCH THIS SHIT. I mean he’s a pretty good DM, but seriously the dude likes little girl vampires. Creepy shit.

So what’s this about? Well, the first episode involves this naked vampire chick (I mean technically she’s got a cloak) and she eats like twenty guys, and turns them into zombies. Then she uses the flowers in her hair to seduce this salaryman, Kotaro. See he’s secretly a pedo too (viewpoint character or something) and she’s seducing him away from his boringass wife. There was some sketchy implications that Kotaro was a chosen one or something, but I didn’t really pay much attention.

My main concern: WHERE THE FUCK WAS THE BUNDT CAKE? I’M HUNGRY AS SHIT.

SORA NO WOTO

The only thing that could make this picture better would be if it were a flute. And if she were playing it with her vagoo.

Sora no Woto is fucking amazing. I mean seriously, I’m tentatively gonna declare this best series of 2010. I only saw the OP, but that’s already enough. From what I could gather from the PVs and stuff, it’s the story of a wandering soldier known only as the Sky Bugler. She passes through the post-apocalyptic industrial countryside, showing off her badass bugling skills. It’s a heartwarming story of life and love in a world beyond the end of the world. Science has failed, and only music can save humanity at this point, so it’s up to the Sky Bugler. She has a profound elemental connection to the sky, and can understand the nature of the war that came before.

This is one to watch, guys. Trust me on this. I’m an expert.

HANAMARU KINDERGRABBER

No seriously, FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

Apparently someone decided Ichigo Mashimaro wasn’t foetal enough. So now we legitimately have a show about FETUSES RUNNING AROUND. Holy fucking balls. And their dad is a florist. Who looks like Keitaro from fucking Love Hina. Holy balls.

The first episode… NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENED. It was literally 24 minutes of fetuses staring at each other and giggling occasionally. Then one of them SHAT THEMSELF. I feel like I could’ve scrubbed bleach into my eyes for 24 minutes and had it be more productive than this bullshit. Jesus fetusfucking Christ.

NODAME CANTPLAYIT GRAND FINALE

So, this is the seventeenth season of this series, about some chick who plays piano and some guy who stabs people with a conductor’s baton. The chick used to be lame as shit, but in the new series, she’s taken a level in badass, and has ninja skills. You can see that in this picture, where she catches a fly with her bare hands. It’s pretty intense.

Anyway, this series picks up where the last one left off, namely with her discovering his secret identity as a crime fighting Parisian. That’s right, motherfucker’s from Paris. Since she’s British and Japanese, this is pretty intense. But as the new episode opens, she reveals that she too is a crimefighter. Now, with both of them together, they can take on the most dastardly villain of all: Michael Tilson Thomas. It’s going to take all of their power to stop his mad plot to take over the entire world through a particularly intense concert. Everyone will dance to the beat of his baton!

I’m pretty excited for this series, because Michael Tilson Thomas is a badass, and has glowing blue glasses. I met him at a party this one time, up in Mendocino in a barn. He was a cool dude. I almost got glasses like him.

Some promo art of the Big Bad. Look at that badass.

KATANAGATARI

So, “Katanagatari,” which is short for Katamari Gattai Train, is pretty damn awesome. The art style is absolutely gorgeous. It’s by Nisio Isin, and is an adaptation of the original Katamari, but takes the series in a VERY different direction. That guy in the middle there? That’s the Prince of All Cosmos. See, his father, the King of All Cosmos, got drunk as shit one night on sake, and crashed the beautiful Japanese palace into itself, resulting in the cherry blossom petals being scattered to the four winds. The Prince must now set out on his magic train to gattai with every beautiful girl in the land, in order to prove his own self-worth to himself. The whole thing is very metaphorical, and has constant allusions to the Tale of Genji. It’s a beautiful work of art, and definitely one to follow this season.

SEIKON NO QUASAR

So, quasars are the coolest shit in space.

Unfortunately, this show doesn’t live up to the brilliance of its own premise. It’s set in the distant future, and follows the story of that young badass in the front, Seikon. He lives with his four sexyass goth-loli maids in a fucking quasar. That’s right, a quasar. Unfortunately, the quasar recently set a blast of energy at an inhabited planet, and wiped out half of the planet. So now the survivors have come for Seikon, to get their vengeance. Seikon must ride into battle to defend his harem, armed only with his epic scythe, made out of space.

It’s incredibly sweet, but beyond the character designs, there’s not a lot to see here. The writing is mediocre, the fanservice is crap, and the fight scenes are incredibly poorly animated. DROPPED.

That’s all I’ve got time for today. I’ve gotta convince Mace Windu not to kill me, and get his help to kill some Unifying Force bitch. Whatever, I’ve got a Kaminoan geneticist captive to extend my lifespan, because I’m a badass Clone Trooper.

I’ll post my thoughts on the remaining series sometime tomorrow.

For now, this is lolikappa, signing off, underlings.

.lolikappa

GREETINGS, UNDERLINGS!

A new decade is upon us! There are many strange things afoot in the world of the aniblogosphere! A great otaku cleansing is underway! A baby has been born! Certain females have embraced their true calling as agents of the truth of YFR! These are all clearly omens and signs that it is high time to shake things up in the world.

As such, I have stepped up to the plate to rule as notdotq’s new overlord.

Greetings underlings, I am lolikappa, your new lord and master.

Or something.

For those of you who don’t recognize me, I’ve been here longer than all of you, so shut the fuck up and sit down. I’m a duck and shit, I watch animu, I play vidjamagames, I go to school in the frigid east, and I’ve been IRL archrivals with lolikit for like six years or some shit. Traditionally I make one post on here a year, despite having originally been a coblogger or something like that.

So what happened to lolikit? Well, see, last week he made a grave error. He took on the guise of someone he shouldn’t have. He overstepped his bounds. He took on the mantle of the most rapturous raptor, the madman in the sexy hat, the one, the only… Baka-Raptor-Jesus. He reigned on high for a few glorious hours, but was soon struck down by the mighty hand of the real Baka Raptor, and is thus lost to the world. The mighty lizard cast his pale imitator out into the wild world, where his scrabbling family caught hold of his flailing limbs, and dragged him off into the horizon.

(Of course, I was the one who got him to take on that guise in the first place. As Kurosawa would say… just as keikaku.)

So what will notdotq be like under my reign? Not much different. I’m going to try to post every day, even though most of those posts will be meaningless drivel. Maybe there’ll be a Winter Kickoff Shit? Or maybe some ramble about Eden of the East, or Brotherhood, or Bakuman, or Casshern, whatever else I’m watching/reading these days. WHO THE FUCK KNOWS.

And maybe this regime change won’t be permanent. Maybe someday lolikit will return. But maybe, just maybe…

Maybe this is the dawn of a glorious new decade.

.lolikappa

In the “better late than never category,” I started anime blogging on my old livejournal four years ago May. This officially makes me as pro as Jason Miao, and should elicit throngs of fanboys screeching “four more years! four more years!”

I would do a retrospective like lelangir did, but it wouldn’t be too interesting—every few points would be interspersed with “then lolikit gave up aniblogging in an emo rage fit, and closed down notdotq for five months.” Not that I ever stayed away for long, but…

… I do have a habit for, shall we call them, disappearances.

Instead of a retrospective, let’s do a highlights, and without dates, because I care more about the feelings than I do the historical accuracies:

- after one year of animeblogging, notdotq is born on wordpress.com, one of the handful of “first” anime blogs to use wordpress.com, along with jp meyer’s fairy tale of love and courage.

- Jason Miao promises to put notdotq on Blogsuki.

- Jason Miao removes newcomer RIUVA from Blogsuki, refuses to put notdotq on.

- Various bedraggled anibloggers realize that Jason is a cancer.

- Hung builds AnimeNaNo, invites Jason Miao.

- I start spreading my name by creating and maintaining the AnimeNaNo IRC channel. The community is thriving. Mr. Pippers is still an aniblogger.

- Jason still doesn’t join AnimeNaNo.

- So there are no killer lolis in Higurashi, mmmkay?

- Jason says that Japanese anibloggers are better than English-speaking anibloggers. Reason: graphs.

- Beginning of holy anti-Jason crusade.

- Oh by the way Haruhi sucks balls.

- I go to France, where I finish Fate/Stay-night and die a premature death due to suck. While in France, AnimeNaNo takes off like a flock of majestic birds, Japes becomes my friend, and Haruhi 12 blows me away.

- Hung, Japes, and Hinano–later, Japes’ girlfriend, now, his wife–start the AnimeNaNo podcast. Pips and I parody: podcast.dotq.org.

- wait, this is turning into a chronological recounting. SHIT.

Okay. Deep breath.

Here are my top ten moments in animeblogging.

#10. The founding of AnimeNaNo. Shit was so cash.

#9. Blogging Kyoushiro to Towa no Sora, Sola, and Aria the Origination with Shirukii.

#8. That time a newbie added me to her initial blogroll along with the big names–Jason, Jeff, Japes, Omo, etc.

#7. Baka-Raptor informed me that I was the king of trolls. (Or maybe it was ‘trolling king,’ either way.)

#6. Konoe and I enjoy many philosophical discourses over AIM, I publish these discourses (“on disagreement,” etc.), ghostlightning realizes that love needs explanation just the same as hate, various anibloggers begin defending their stances more rigorously, “lolikitean” invented.

#5. Kyousora.com is registered and built. My first exercise in hilarious satirical porn stories, perhaps the genesis of my visual novel project.

#4. Graphs. So fucking many of them. Everywhere. All the fucking time.

#3. When Jason stopped posting for three months. Hell yes. This was also when lots of people (ghostlightning, lolikappa, lelangir) were posting on notdotq. I was being extremely productive and the ’sphere was looking happy.

#2. Miao on My Mind.

#1. So, CCY-senpai, I herd u were maiking a gaem?

I’m going to stop the nostalgia train here because I’m not being very coherent or classy. This was really just a poor excuse to post more.

Love and peace and rock my song,
-Dr. lolikitsune

… and I thought to myself, “LOVELESS OVA?! DO WANT!”

But then it was some new anime that was shitty through and through. It felt a bit like Jojo, what with all the extremely buff and disproportionate dudes being buff and disproportionate. There were some nice jiggle physics, I guess, but they didn’t make up for anything.

I made it all the way through the first episode of Needless, surviving off my masochism, and then…

… I was rewarded.

The ending animation entails three lolis kissing each other, rubbing each other, licking each other, rubbing against each other, and so on and so forth and doing all the things that three lolis normally do whilst removing each other’s clothing, and I went to heaven, dying a million times and coming back to life a million times.

Then the preview for episode two replaced the loliyuri and I cried a million times and died and didn’t come back to life.

Verdict: shit.

(Updated.)

Positively taken with the masterful art-style present from episode one of endearing slice-of-life/comedy K-on!, I hung myself upside down from a tree for three weeks in order to contemplate the meaning of my relatively bland existence. I died and was reborn, and when I examined my robes I found them gray no longer. (They were blood-soaked, possibly the result of the runes.) I took a long, soapy bath and, when the laundry finished drying, I looked at my figure in the mirror.

My Days, Jim, has kindly recorded the words I uttered as I examined my new self:

“I have become moe, destroyer of brains.”

(Thanks, Jim.)

As I stood there, transfixed by my own fixation, I realized that I was missing but one thing: a musical instrument. I was going to revive pop music. I quantum divided my hand into a drill, focused on the tones I most dearly wished to reproduce, pierced time and space and the twelfth wall, and—you guessed it—produced my instrument: a shiny new well-greased flute.

Transformation complete, I stand before you on my wobbly spearlegs.

Now, who will be my three accomplices? I know that I’m the most bad-ass thing to ever set foot on the stage of the world, but a band is four (or five?!?!!?!?), not one.

UPDATE: Please post your interest in joining the band in the comments below, along with your cell-phone numbers. You will receive anonymous texts instructing you where to go for your… *ahem*… auditions.

notdotq brings you this coverage in conjunction with Shirukii. You can see Part 1 of my coverage here. Also, yes, I gave into “Owen’s hegemony” and watched subs. Now with 2500% more title attributes.

» Continue reading this…

I have resurrected my oft-neglected satellite site KYOUSORA.COM, also known as the one and only shrine of YFR.

In part to commemorate this resurrection, and in part to answer lelangir’s sexual advances, I have posted a new story on said satellite site. It’s a 4-koma, and it’s NSFW. Check it out.