Nopy's Blog

At the start of the spring 2010 season, Mayoi Neko Overrun was one of the anime that I was on the fence about so I decided to watch a few more episodes. Well, a few more episodes ended up being more than I thought and I am now up to episode 6 of the anime, which is halfway through the series. In case you haven’t heard of Mayoi Neko Overrun before, here’s the synopsis from MyAnimeList:

A heart warming love comedy. Tsuzuki Takumi is a high school boy, who is running a confectionery “Stray Cats” with his sister-in-law Otome. Otome is an extremely good-natured person and is always running around to help people. One day she brings home a runaway girl Kiriya Nozomi. Nozomi’s closed mind gradually opens to them as she works as a pâtissière at Stray Cats.

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In the previous episode of Angel Beats, it was revealed that Tenshi is in fact a human and her real name is Kanade Tachibana. The SSS also managed to dethrone Kanade from her position as student council president and she is no longer a threat to the group. From what I’ve read though, it seems a lot of people had already predicted that this would happen.

In this episode, Otonashi befriends Kanade and treats her to Mapo Tofu during class, for which they both get locked up in a sort of prison cell by the new student council president. While the two of them are locked up, Yuri discovers that Ayato Naoi is a human and he has launched an all-out assault on the SSS using the NPCs as his pawns. I bet no one saw that one coming.

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I haven’t written a post on anime in a while, so I figured I’d write one today since I’ve got nothing better to do. In episode 4 we saw the K-ON bu (minus Azu-nyan) go on a field trip to Kyoto, so in episode 5 we get to see what Azusa, Ui, and their curly-haired friend (I forgot her name) did while the seniors were away. Some of you may recall my comment about how K-ON is like crack; well, I still stand by that. Absolutely nothing happened in this episode. I mean sure, Ui won a giant stuffed turtle, there was some food, some walking, and some rain, but is any of that really important? So you must be wondering what’s keeping me from dropping K-ON, and the answer is this:

Live long and prosper! Yes, right now Azu-nyan is the only thing that’s keeping me from dropping K-ON!! At first it was Mio, then I just grew tired of her and became fascinated by Mugi’s eyebrows, and now it seems I’m drawn to Azu-nyan’s cuteness. Really, it’s hard not to adore such a cute face. She even has twintails, which is a double bonus, though she also looks nice with her hair straight down:

Doesn’t anyone else feel the urge to just hug her all day? I’m sure that Yui does.

I don’t know how long it’ll take until Azu-nyan’s cuteness wears off, but it looks like I’ll continue to be addicted to K-ON until it does. It wouldn’t be so bad if the show were a little more interesting or maybe had some real humour in it.

In case you haven’t already heard, voting for the first ever Aniblog Tourney begins today. The tourney pits 96 anime blogs against each other and lets blog readers vote for their favourite blogs in one-on-one matches.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like yours truly made it onto the list of 96, but you should still check it out. There’s a lot of interesting blogs there and I’m sure any anime fan/otaku will find at least one that they like.

I wanted to make a post about my initial thoughts on this season’s anime earlier, but due to project deadlines and exams being all during this month, it’s been hard trying to find time to watch everything. So that’s why I’m only writing this now when some anime are already into their third week, but it’s better late than never.

Angel Beats

I think it’s safe to say that Angel Beats was either the most or second-most (after K-ON) anticipated anime of the season. The main reason is probably because one of the collaborators was Key, which also wrote Kanon, AIR, and Clannad (all of which were very successful). There are three other companies working with Key on Angel Beats, but it manages to retain a common theme with Key’s previous works which is life and death. In case you forgot where this theme showed up in Key’s previous works, they were most prominent in: Ayu’s arc in Kanon, the Summer arc in AIR, and Ushiro’s arc in Clannad. The humour usually found at the beginning of Key’s stories was also in Angel Beats with all of the traps that the SSS fell for in the second episode. Some people have complained that the animation quality is poor, character designs were plagiarized, or that the music band was just an attempt at gaining more music fans. I won’t argue that these things aren’t true, but the main selling point of any good anime should be its story. With the way Angel Beats has started out, it looks like it’s following the same pattern as Kanon/AIR/Clannad with the exception that there’s no harem. I’m looking forward to the rest of the series and hoping it’ll stand up to its predecessors.

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