- Last OnlineMar 17, 7:14 AM
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- LocationPortland, OR
- JoinedJan 10, 2022
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Apr 5, 2022
Really really loved this one. It takes a couple episodes to get going and can be kind of hammy (ok a lot hammy), but BOY did this have me laughing, crying, and smiling tenderly by the end of it.
When I started watching I was expecting like, K-ON mixed with some fluffy romance and I was really pleasantly surprised by the more serious and touching route it took, while still landing a lot of really cute humor. Also, that episode 9 reveal!!! Completely expected but perfectly executed :') My heart.
The animation style is pretty and done with care (I LOVE how they draw Uenoyama's
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embarrassed expressions), though I do wish they hadn't had to cg parts of the live performance. Kind of unavoidable for tv quality on a crunch, though.
I'm like, hovering between a 9 and a 10 here because there's parts that you gotta suspend your disbelief for but HECK who cares. I'm giving it a 10 I loved it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Apr 3, 2022
This manga is a bumpy ride but if you're a fan of Bisco Hatori I'd give it a read! I picked this up because I'm doing a reread of Ouran right now and was curious about her other work. I think this manga is a really interesting representation of that - Millenium Snow comes with a couple of Hatori's older oneshots (one from the Love Egoist universe and another separate one), and the fact that she picked it back up after 10 years of hiatus is something you don't often see. In the last volume, she talks a lot about her planning process, and how
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she had to switch things up when restarting this one because her loose planning that style that she used for Ouran just wasn't working out, which I found really interesting. The plot itself is nothing special (it's not super comprehensible, tbh) but I do find a lot of charm in all the characters. I'm a sucker for vampire stories, though, so I might be biased.
I wouldn't go into this one expecting extended character development or a non-rushed conclusion, but I enjoyed it as a chance to spend a little bit more time in the Bisco Hatori verse!
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Mar 27, 2022
GOD this anime is so tender and sweet!! I've never been involved in the BL community before, but I was heavily active in the slash fanfiction community for other shit on tumblr back in its hay day (lol), and it's so funny how tropes are tropes are tropes (etc). I've gathered from reading other people's commentary that wholesome BL is hard to come by, and I hope that the success of this series opens the doors for more!! As a person whose first experiences were with the same gender, it's really, really nice to see this story depicted so tenderly. I watched all 11 episodes
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that were out last week in like 2 days, and went out and bought the first two volumes of the manga on Friday. If you like cutesy slowburn romances this one has all you need to make your heart go badunk badunk :)
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Mar 18, 2022
This show is so cute! But if I had to pick one word to describe it, it would be "uneven." I think the first few episodes are the strongest - then after a while we lose the thread of Miyamura and Hori to meander around side character lane without really accomplishing much, only to come back to Miyamura at the end like we've gone through a miraculous journey with him when it doesn't really feel earned. In the second to last episode, Hori tells Miyamura that she still doesn't know much about him. I found myself thinking the same thing. Our show is ostensibly about
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Hori and Miyamura (yes? it's the title?), but it seems like development for them stops mid way through and then just devolves into... an episode about Hori's kink? It was funny, but, kind of a weird note when we hardly hear from those two after that.
I also found myself often distracted by the art and animation. The bright colors of a lot of the character designs for me didn't seem to gel with the rather normal toned world around them and a pet peeve of mine is those complicated hair designs that don't have much movement to them plastered onto a lot of same faces. The artwork in the opening theme song was really lovely - and every time I watched it I kept wishing it reflected the actual vibe of the show more. Watching this I could just feel the rapid pace the animators must have had to work at - a lot of the animation is just a little off. I think if given a little more breathing room they probably would have been able to execute a much stronger vision.
Still! There's not nothing here. I think that first half of the anime is really strong and sweet. I just wanted more of it!!!
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Feb 28, 2022
I rewatched this series expecting not much more than a guilty pleasure fun romp. I was absolutely OBSESSED with Ouran as a kid, but surely it couldn't be as good as I remembered, right?
Honestly, literally who hasn't heard of Ouran. This review isn't trying to convince anyone to watch it, if you were in the anime community in the early 2010's and into shojo you've seen it. I just wanted to express my genuine appreciation for how well done this adaptation is. The comedic timing in this series is SO stellar, and the life and movement they gave to the visual gags is so
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fucking impressive and genuinely hilarious. I really wish we could get an official release of this series that has proper subtitling of the on screen labels that appear sometimes, the funimation one is really flawed because they only allow for one line of text so if there's too much dialogue they just don't subtitle the labels. Official anime distributors seem to be consistently dropping the ball on this even over 15 years later with series such as Komi Can't Communicate - you'd think they'd have figured this out by now.
I think the second half of the series is overall a lot stronger than the first - I think a lot of people would agree that the early episodes about random one off characters don't really hold much impact, but it feels like they even figured out how to do this better as well in the second half, the two parter with Kasanoda is probably my favorite pair of episodes in the whole show. It's so fucking funny, and involves large character moments for the main cast as well! The only other point I'd ding is that some of the politics in this show don't hold up great - lots of light homophobia/transphobia/not always stellar depictions of lgbt folk. On the one hand, seeing gender-noncomforming characters like Haruhi and her dad was really big for me as a little gay baby with no other exposure to that kind of stuff. On the other, I can still recognize that there's a lot of less than great stereotypes that get played for laughs. The good news is things can be more than one thing! I love Ouran. I really, really do.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Jan 28, 2022
Haruhi was a foundational anime for me growing up. I used to watch it with my best friend in 5th grade on my mom's desktop computer - when we finished the show we moved onto Haruhi-chan, and all the delightfully silly fan content people were making on youtube at the height of its 2008 fandom heyday. I obsessively read theories online, bought the only two volumes of the light novel that were out in translation, and read TONS of fan comics. When endless eight rolled around we laughed, cried, and gave up on the season midway through out of frustration. I caught up so I
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could watch Disappearance and remember finishing the movie in tears, watching it in windows media player on that same desktop computer.
I have such fond memories of Haruhi, and I think I'll probably never quite outgrow it - there's a lot to love about its quirky cast and their zany adventures, and I think Disappearance is genuinely a really great movie. I end up coming back to Haruhi every few years and rewatching the whole show (though I'll admit I usually skip around endless eight). But here's the thing - I can't in good conscience ever recommend it to anyone. And that's because of the ugly thing that rears its head every time I try to rewatch and makes me wince - that being the routine sexual harassment / assault of Mikuru. It really is a shame that the show dedicates so much time to playing that "gag" (that being that she is absolutely devastated and violated by Haruhi, routinely, until she is forced into submission). Fanservice is hard to escape in this field and I have my own set of qualms with it, but it is a whole other territory to use a female character's routine violation for titty shots and then tell you that she's so distraught by it that she believes she's ruined for marriage. I get that we're not supposed to love this trait of Haruhi's, but the way the show plays it it's like it's more of a nuisance than you know, a serious violation of one's bodily autonomy. And honestly! That's just a shame.
I likely will always love Haruhi. But its' gender politics? Woof.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Jan 12, 2022
I will preface this by saying this is not really an objective review.
I've been an anime fan since I was in middle school - going on over ten years now. I find that I go through phases of my life where I'm more and less interested in it. When I was growing up, I struggled a lot socially. In middle school, I felt a lot like Komi. I had so much trouble speaking in class, even just raising my hand seemed impossible. I didn't have very many friends, and I didn't feel very understood either. In high school I got better at speaking but
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still struggled to make connections. Throughout that time in my life, anime meant a lot to me; as an escape, as adventures I could imagine myself having rather than having to think about my life that I wasn't satisfied with.
When I went to college I made a lot of friends who I still treasure very much. I found that I didn't need to rely on anime so much anymore - I was having my own adventures. I still watched it, but not with the intensity and frequency that I used to and it was just an interest among many that formed up my larger personhood.
Lately, I've been feeling a lot more connected with my lonely kid self and finding myself coming back to anime with a similar sense of wonder that it used to inspire in me. I've been going through a hard time lately. I moved to a new city last year, made some friends, and one of those friends turned out to be a very harmful person, who hurt me and others and wasn't interested in changing his ways or taking any responsibility. I stopped talking to him, but it's been hard to pick up the pieces of my life and feel like there is still good out there in store for me. I don't have roots here. That person who hurt me was my closest friend in this city.
I put on this anime one night when an ad for it popped up on netflix and I was dyeing my hair and feeling upset - and it was the only thing that kept me from crying.
I know it is full of tropes that have been done over and over. I know it is very very silly, and most of the side characters are very one note. But rooting for Tadano and Komi made me smile, and it made me feel less alone. And that is enough.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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