Alright, but seriously, recently seeing some more laudatory reviews of _Chihayafuru_ and season 2 reminds me that I didn't really sum up my impressions.
As I previously said, I liked the music well before I watched the show and will be looking for the second season's OST; I also liked the vivid use of colors (the translucent maple brownish-red has long been a favorite color of mine). On the production level, there's little to complain about even if it wasn't as lavish as the previous anime I watched like _Hyouka_.
So why do I dislike it? Let's start with what seems to be praised most, the characters. They're 'vivid' and 'real'. I disagree.
- Chihaya is your stock oblivious enthusiast, obsessed with her _idée fixe _ and devoid of social graces; making your standard male maniac a female is just a gender switch and making her beautiful is the usual eye candy & pandering to viewers & allowing for cheap jokes. Same reason all the 'otaku' female characters in other anime like _Genshiken_ or _Lucky Star_ are beautiful or at least cute. A few shoujo inflections like crying *every damn episode* doesn't change that she's basically your shonen lead: "fighting enemies and growing and making friends and becoming the best there is, yay"!
- Taichi is the golden boy driven by his parents and a silent admirer (or coward, if that's how you roll) - like appears in almost every shoujo manga ever, nothing real or vital or new there.
- Porky is... genial. That's the best I can say. Let's face it, he doesn't get a whole lot of characterization other than that. And eating a lot.
- Desktomu: stereotypical bookworm, shading into 'awesome by analysis' (if he ever becomes awesome, anyway). I suspect if I were to read the manga, he'd never become anything but Chihaya's sidekick/geek-guru.
- Kana: actually, Kana is probably the most interesting of them. She doesn't redeem all the others, though.
- Yamamoto Yumi: I want to throw in an honorary mention of the former Queen. Of all the characters, she was perhaps the most interesting and amusing. But her quasi-fourth-wall-breaking may work for one only if one is already half-checked-out of the series.
So much for the characters. What about the meat of the show, karuta? Here my previous comments remain accurate: karuta is an awful game, it has no depth, it devolves into reflexes, it destroys appreciation for the original poems per Kana, and I feel little but sorrow/pity/contempt for anyone who pursues it seriously. The final master match in the anime, if remotely accurate about such high-level play, demonstrates the shallowness and degeneracy of the game when pushed to the extreme: the master wins through nothing but hearing and honed reflexes. That is not a game, that is a poorly administered psychometric test of hand-eye coordination.
Of course, I could never watch your standard baseball anime either because I would find it unspeakably boring. Which raises a question for me: I watched a fair bit of _Hikaru no Go_ and ultimately came away unimpressed, concluding that the Go aspects had taken over and unbalanced and sucked the life out of the characters and plot, so much as I enjoy Go and playing Go, I considered the anime a failure.
Go is the diametric opposite of karuta, relying on no luck, no randomness, pure skill and pattern recognition, and has tremendous depth. So why did I pan both _Chihayafuru_ and _Hikaru no Go_? I think it's because there's a Golden Mean with regard to what we might call 'didactic' content. If the subject matter is too simplistic, then after a few episodes, the subject is exhausted and one descends into repetition, weariness, apathy, disgust, and self-parody (it is disturbingly easy to imagine a _Chihayafuru_ which started with a slightly fantasy setting, like _Dragon Ball_ and eventually powers up shonen-style like _DBZ_ with secret poems, lightspeed swings, time-traveling players...). While if it's too complex, then after a reasonable progression in protagonist skills, they may leave behind all but the most dedicated viewer and also discover that in order to present a remotely thorough primer on the topic, they've failed to cover all the other aspects a great anime needs.
So for comparison, we might use _Thermae Romae_, _Moshidora_, and _Moyashimon_. Each has 'didactic' content that the protagonists are learning and using (bath construction, American management theory, microbiology & food science), but which I enjoyed without necessarily criticizing it for shallowness or esotericness. What steered them between Scylla & Charybdis? The obvious trait they share is that they are *short*: 1-cours or less. Their depth is indeed shallow (you wouldn't learn very much about bacteria or fermentation from _Moyashimon_), but this isn't a problem because they aren't locked into one particular bacteria eg. and also because they aren't that long; so their shallowness doesn't wear out its welcome and they also fit in all the other ingredients of good anime.
For a final comparison: I keep waffling about whether to consider _Chihayafuru_ something of a shoujo/shonen fusion rather than josei. Where would your popular shonen anime like _Naruto_ fit into my 'didactic' scheme above? It fits into the golden mean, actually, I think. This is because the magic and chakra and spell and combat material is all completely made up at the author's convenience, while other series like _Chihayafuru_ can take only limited liberties with the truth; so _Naruto_ can wax intricate about 'bloodline limits' and 'chakra points', but the author can stop the moment he's invented his necessary plot device or deus ex machina, and so can stroll through Scylla & Charybdis as he pleases. He doesn't have to worry that he's gotten too wonkish because he can just ignore anything he previously said or retcon it, and if the plot needs a break, he can through in some technobabble.
So your standard unrealistic shonen can be a lot like _Star Trek_, where the scriptwriters didn't think of any plausible extrapolations of technology or be consistent with known laws of physics, but just wrote the script by inserting the word "technology" anywhere they needed some technobabble: "Mr Spock, can we technology the technology?" "Captain, the technology won't go that high because the technology will break!"
This 'soft SF' is in contrast to 'hard SF', which does spend much effort extrapolating known technologies and remaining consistent with known physics or at least speculative physics - the most extreme example being Greg Egan's _Clockwork Rocket_ set in an alternate universe where Egan (who has degrees in, IIRC, math) has worked out the novel physics of his setting and shows his characters discovering and exploiting the relevant equations.
You'll notice that Egan is not a household name like _Star Trek_; in particular, _Clockwork Rocket_ is a pretty boring story for anyone who doesn't follow the math or the physics.
This illustrates the problem of 'didactic' anime or fiction (which we could generalize to 'educational games'): adding additional requirements to a work frequently leads to a reduction of one of the original requirements. Tradeoffs exist. 'A & B
