Gosick: Divination During World War I

Today I bring you a brief post with some recommended reading.  On this past week’s episode of Gosick, we found out the purpose of the Queen Berry.  Rather than working as a social experiment as I predicted, instead it served as a divination tool.  They used the results to predict which nations would band together and succeed in World War I.  Naturally, because this is an anime, they were right.  Some among you might scoff and reason that no one should ever put their faith in such things.  You’re probably right.  However, fortune-telling and its ilk were quite pervasive during the war years.

I doubt it was quite like this though...

Why Fractale is a show I’ve seen before (and you have, too)

So soon we’ll see the release of the 3rd episode of the massively (self) hyped work by Yutaka Yamamoto, Fractale. When the 1st episode came out, it receiveda a decidedly tepid response, and deservedly so. This was a Noitamina show. Yamamoto had staked his career on it. Yet there was pretty much nothing about it that was special. The 2nd episode only continued that trend. Indeed, this is a show we’ve already seen before.

Keima and Modern Entertainment Overload

Last night, I finished The World God Only Knows, for whatever reason.  I suppose I wanted to finish what I had started.  However, I’m glad I did, because it sparked this thought in my head.  In the last episode, Keima laments all the time he has spent trying to capture real girls hearts.  It’s kept him from completing all those lovely dating games.  Now, he’s fallen too far behind to ever catch up, so he comes to the only obvious solution.  He must complete multiple games at the same time!  As you would expect, the anime takes it up to insane levels where he eventually collapses and/or hallucinates from exhaustion.  We could just write it off as filler because they lacked enough time for a proper arc.  However, it actually points out a struggle some of us might have: entertainment overload.

Keima, you are such a god modder!

Star Driver 16 – A New Personality

Surprisingly, there wasn’t some big new revelation or twist for Marino’s disappearance, but that things were exactly what most had been speculating for a few weeks now. That Marino was nothing more than a creation of Mizuno. The only thing this episode did to solve that puzzle was provide us with the details. Now did Mizuno create Marino mainly as a way to avoid dealing being abandoned by her mother or was it to avoid Zero Time. I don’t know, and at this point it doesn’t really matter as there are other questions to answer.

Crazy Old Guy

Magical Girl Madoka Magica 3 – That Just Happened

It’s been a couple weeks, and we’re already about a quarter way into this show. I wrote mainly about the art style and potential for things to get interesting in my post on the first episode, and episode 3 saw this show make good on that potential. Now, this should be assumed for any episodic blog post, but, be warned, there are spoilers ahead.

Gosick 03 – Dependency

This post is mostly in sparked by Tsuki over at the Emory Anime Club.  In his post on this episode, he brings up how he doesn’t like Victorique’s increasing dependence on Kujo.  I can understand.  I think some of us want to have a strong female lead that can take care of herself.  However, I think her dependence is natural and her actions logical given the situation.  I figured using Tsuki’s thoughts would be a good springboard to explore Victorique’s personality.

Let's face it, she still the most interesting character here.

2010 Awards, Part 3: Genre and Medium

Well, it’s the final day of our awards, and after covering the music and characters awards, then the special interest ones, we come the actual meat of them, the genre and medium awards. Here are the shows we considered to be the very best in their respective genres or mediums. The ones that we could point to and say, “This is what other anime should strive to be like.” The ones that we fell in love with. The ones that left us wanting more or overwhelmingly satisfied. In short, these were the best anime of 2010.

Note: due to a dearth of good OVAs this year, we have decided to omit that category and to create a new one, Best TV Show With An OVA-like Release Format. (I’ll give you 12 guesses as to which show won that one).

2010 Awards, Part 2: Special Interest

Yesterday, we kicked off our 2010 awards with the Music and Characters section. We continue today with the special interest awards. This is for all the niche categories, for works that we enjoyed or suffered through in some notable and specific manner. As promised, Biggest Letdown is among them, but to complement it, we also have the Biggest Pleasant Surprise, as well as a bunch of others. But why don’t we start off with what is surely the most obvious of the special interest categories…

2010 Awards, Part 1: Music and Characters

So 2010 is in the books and has been for almost 3 weeks now. And just like last year, we here at Borderline Hikikomori have come together to decide on which works of anime released last year we liked the most – and sometimes the least – and in what ways (Because this is an English language blog run and read primarily by English speakers, we considered works that only became widely available to the English speaking public in 2010 as well, even if they had been released earlier).

In order to properly reflect the variety of opinions of the 4 different bloggers here, each category also has a “dissenting opinion” portion in which one of us who might disagree strongly with our selection makes his case for another one that he deems more or just as worthy (It also helped to prevent us from wanting to tear each other’s eyes out during our discussion).

Unlike last year, due to the sheer number of awards, we’ve decided to split this up into 3 parts. We’re starting today with Music & Character awards, while we’ll present the more niche Special Interest awards tomorrow, and finally finish up with the more classic best-in-class Genre and Medium awards the day after.

So, without further ado, let’s look at our Music and Character category winners for 2010.

Star Driver 15 – Time Twister

No Cybody fight this week, but this episode did a lot to bring the two big storylines closer to their conclusion. While I know a lot of people have been focusing on the Mizuno’s endless eight like experience, I thought the far more interesting storyline came from the very short segment between Sugata and Head.