This post is mostly stream-of-consciousness; that is, if you accept the controversial theory that I am conscious. Really, I didn’t have anything to say; I was just too bored of playing WOW. So this is going to bounce around like a hyperactive ferret on a pixie stick.
Otome wa Boku was licensed this week. If you’ve never heard of this show, you haven’t missed much; it’s another h-game adaptation. How bad are the lapses in logic? Check out the picture of the babe-er-riffic Mizuho, and then click the spoiler tag below to see what’s wrong with it.
Moving right along, one Robotech fan gets a little too much wrapped up in his idea of fandom. Thou Shalt Not Defy The Fans’ Beliefs. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight… I hereby christen him and his ilk “Robotards.” (Grammar Nazis need not e-mail about that sentence.)
(Oh all right! “HE and his ilk.” There. Happy now?)
Steven’s ordered Godannar. I blame me. (NSFW!) Maybe I should have taken his tack from UFO Princess Valkyrie and posted all the good parts, so nobody else would have to buy it. (Do I have that much bandwidth?) Seriously, fast forward through the launch sequences. It’s like a minute-and-a-half. And they play it in FULL through about the first six episodes. Every. Single. Time. They finally have mercy in the 2nd half of the first season, and mostly do away with it in the second season. I think it looks like UPV has the superior fanservice anyway — not that Godannar is weak or anything! Quoting myself from an earlier review…
As one reviewer stated on Anime News Network, there’s a hallway scene where you can pretty much change the color palette from “uniform orange†to “human skin†and it’s at least hard R.
And this isn’t actually in the show…no, it’s in the swimsuit gallery. (Not terribly NSFW, but let’s not take chances, eh?)
Yeah, I could hang out on that beach.
Girls High got licensed. This proves that some people have no taste. NSFW(?) spoiler: 
G-On Riders still hasn’t. Ditto.
Geneon will subject us to the not-very-funny but definitely-not-dramatic Shana OAV. They’re firmly in the “teen idiocy” genre for this one. Just in case it slipped your mind, there’s the movie (a milking retelling of the first story arc) and a second season coming. There was a five minute trailer for it, which I have thankfully lost the link too, seeing as three minutes of it was either watching waves crash onto the shore, or a chibi Shana threaten Yuuiji with dire consequences if he doesn’t watch the movie or series. The rest of it was Wilhelmina. And it was awful. (She smiled. How wrong can you get?)
I still don’t understand why Steven would be interested in Godannar. NSFW: 
Couple of side notes here: He got amazingly fast service from Robert. Last time I ordered late, late on a Friday night (Saturday A.M. really) my order didn’t ship until Tuesday. Not getting it out on Monday is even more unusual for RACS than Steven’s luck in quick shipping. I like RACS because I can depend on Robert to be in stock when he says he’s in stock, and if I pre-order, he’s going to have enough to fill my order. DVD Empire repeatedly failed to do that. RightStuf can’t ship in a reasonable amount of time. And I pity this poor fool from the ANN forums:
More Haruhi! Shocked I can’t wait! Very Happy I really enjoyed the first series and am looking forward to the next one. I will be glad when my Haruhi vol. 2 LE comes. I had pre-ordered from AnimeNation but they don’t even have it in stock yet. Crying or Very sad So, I cancelled my pre-order and ordered it from The Right Stuf. Cool I am looking forward to watching the Kyon Order bonus DVD.
I’ve had my copy since Tuesday…. Thanks again, Robert.
Meanwhile, Bandai is going to make sure we get our daily ration of Aika fanservice.
Funimation is making sure that Love Hina will still be available, come 2008, as well as subjecting us to XXXholoic, Darker than BLACK, Tsubasa Chronicles, and horror of horrors, Karl Malden’s nose.
Whoops! I mean the new Negima!?. It’s a spastic version of the old Negima! Rumor has it that the third version of the series will add a comma to the title. “Negima!?,” (I think a dollar sign would be more appropriate, if there really were a third series…)
Skipping back to XXXholic for a moment, this just goes to show how much of a negative CLAMP’s character designs are these days. I got adjusted to it in Code Geass, but the screenshots of the characters for XXXholic turned me off. Now that I’ve actually gone and read the description, I wonder if I missed something good.. Well, maybe I’ll find out in 2008.
And going further back, Love Hina is a classic that’s been around so long, its id# at ANN is “168” when you look at the URL…which led to an odd thought: what is the “oldest” show, as in first animé series/movie/OAV in their database? I figured it would be some venerable old classic occupying the place of honor.
I was rather surprised.
So what about the remainder of the First Ten?
- Check the viewer ratings on Number Two.
- Rehhhh?
- This is more what I expected.
- Is #5 still available? Maybe if I have to wait too long for Ikkitousen: Dragon Destiny… (which was also licensed recently.)
- Bwhahahahahahaahahaha!!! C’mon, that’s not even Japanese!
- Nope, far from the last.
- What?
- Okaaaaaaaay…… You knew one of these had to be in the first ten. And here it is.
- Oddly, the tenth anime is a manga… any attempt to access ID=10 redirects to this. (Before you ask, I checked the related anime… it’s #149.)
Continuing with my stream of alleged consciousness, I checked some other blogs over the last few days.
The Fledgling Otaku moved last week. Perhaps not oddly, despite our (former) relative proximity, we never met in real life. (He passed within about four miles of my house on his way out of town!)
Brickmuppet tells of the passing of a great sailor and warrior. I’m utterly flabbergasted at what he accomplished — if his most famous exploits were made into an animé, we’d laugh at how stupid and unrealistic it was! If you follow the link, don’t read anything right away… first scroll down to the picture of his sub’s battle flag. Look at the absolute bottom center.
Don’s apparently still watching Sola. Pray for him. He’s also apparently having weather much like ours in Houston. Send floaties.
Oh, and I got a PG.
Apparently there are two uses of the word “crap” on this blog somewhere. (Three now, I guess). And one that made me really suspicious of a political bent to it: “Shoot.”
That’s right, the nekkid women and bouncing boobs had nothing to do with it…. Then I got to looking a bit more closely at the code I was cutting and pasting to make that appear above. Aha! I went back to the website that it linked to. No wonder it isn’t any good. Look at the bolded part below. (I’ve added spaces so the code will show.)
< a href="http://mingle2.com/blog-rating">
< img style="border: none;" src="http://mingle2.com/img/bb/blog_rating/pg.jpg" alt="Online Dating" /> < /a>
< p> Mingle2 - < a href="http://mingle2.com"> Online Dating< /a>< /p>
Nothing bad, but they hope it will become a popular meme and drive business their way, I’m sure.
Sigh.
Godannar…. I mean, really. He is My Master fansubs would have been cheaper.
Just be ready for the Attack of the Killer Tropes, because Godannar is going to throw them at you. “Don’t respect it” is right….
Update: What did I mean, “IF?” Good lord.
Update 2 (7/10): By the way, have I ever mentioned I hate IE? If you use it, and have seen this post before today, you know why I say that.
The only way a male Mizuho could have cleavage like that is if he’s been taking hormones in preparation for a major operation. Every series is entitled to ask for a degree of suspension of disbelief, but my disbelief won’t suspend that far.
If you think that’s bad, there’s a scene in which we see a picture of Mizuho at the beach with Mariya, years ago…. and “she” is in a bikini in that one too!
It prompted a “WTF???” from the fansubbers. And this prompted one from me:
(probably NSFW) 
Edit: bear in mind, this is happening in a locker room full of girls undressing for gym class. It seems to me that if Mizuho had testicles, not to mention other reproductive equipment in good working order, it should have been GAME OVER right there. I spent half of this series thinking that Mizuho really was a girl, who had become such a tomboy as to even deny that she was a girl; the whole premise of the story was to make her go to a girls school and get over it.
Then someone posted a link to hentai shots from the game….
It has been known for H-game adaptations to make serious changes in the original story. Popotan is a good example of that; about the only thing they saved from the H-game was the character designs for the girls. Everything else is entirely different, and completely unrecognizable.
So in the H-game Mizuho is definitely a guy (BJ’s!) but it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that Mizuho in the TV series was a double-trap. There’s a character in another series (I won’t mention the name) who is a boy but was raised as a girl and who genuinely believes herself to be a girl. “She” was told by “her” mother never to bathe with other girls, but finally does so with some friends, and naturally they notice.
He actually adapted rather more rapidly than I would have expected to the news. But the idea of a character being anatomically normal for one sex but thinking they’re the other sex is far from unknown in anime. So it was always possible that Mizuho was a girl who thought she was a boy, but went to a girl’s school anyway.
But I gather that’s not how they played it in the end. Mizuho graduates and still claims to be male in the end, and no secret is ever revealed, or so I’ve heard. A thoroughly stupid idea for a show…
Actually, the secret gets revealed several times. By the end of the show, at least six people know it, although three started out aware (I don’t remember the names of several):
The school’s principal, Mizuho’s main teacher, and Mariya all start knowing.
Shion, the ghost, and the student government president find out.
I’m not sure about several other characters close to her. The amazing thing is at least one girl sleeps with her and doesn’t find out.
As I pointed out several times during the show’s run, it was totally impossibly, ridiculous.
Edit: I fast forwarded through the last 3 episodes, so for all I know, everyone found out at the end.
I like Godannar, damn it. (Oops. Does that make this PG-13?) I think everyone misses the point about that show.
And no, I’m not going to explain myself. (Sticks tongue out.)
Well, I didn’t consider it awful…. just disappointing in the quality of the so-called villiains. You could have substituted asteroids from space, demons from hell, the RaRa Army, lawyers on steroids… wouldn’t have made any difference. Well, ok, the RaRa Army would have made it a contest of appearance, but still, the opposition was to villainy as cardboard cutouts are to painted miniatures for playing D&D.
What? You’ve never seen the RaRa army? Well, this isn’t a very good picture, but it was the best I could do on short notice…