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Chihayafuru!
Mar. 25th, 2013 05:12 amSo since yesterday I have watched 9 episodes of Chihayafuru on Crunchyroll and I'm really enjoying it! I'm writing this during ads so it may be even more disjointed than usual...
Basically: a teenage girl is introduced to Karuta, a traditional Japanese card game involving 1000 year old poems. She finds friends, a love of the game, and a determination to be the best female player in the world.
Normally I find sport/game plots alienating, but while my cfs makes it hard for me to memorise things these days I used to love memorising poetry, and enjoy memorisation card games in general. Also all the nature/love imagery in the poems makes it really easy for the show to create atmosphere and metaphor. There's the usual "everyone learns an important lesson about teamwork", "characters' important emotional moments happen to coincide with important game moments" etc tropes, but it mostly works pretty well.
The characters are charming and the central friendships quite interesting, all the players have their own believable motivations. The main character, Chihaya, is sweet and friendly and pretty but above all is REALLY AGGRESSIVELY INTO KARUTA, and this obsession is respected by the narrative. She recruits players into her club with Haruhi Suzimaya-esque blunt determination but without the terrifying sociopathy. I will warn that an overweight character's treatment is...mixed :/
You don't need to understand the rules to enjoy the anime, but I've had fun puzzling them out since not everything is explained at once. Afaict it's moderately obscure in Japan except as a memorisation/poetry learning exercise at school, I kind of feel like playing it now, though I guess I'd have to use proverbs or something since English doesn't have a tradition of 2 line poetry.
( the rules as I understand them in case you're curious )
Basically: a teenage girl is introduced to Karuta, a traditional Japanese card game involving 1000 year old poems. She finds friends, a love of the game, and a determination to be the best female player in the world.
Normally I find sport/game plots alienating, but while my cfs makes it hard for me to memorise things these days I used to love memorising poetry, and enjoy memorisation card games in general. Also all the nature/love imagery in the poems makes it really easy for the show to create atmosphere and metaphor. There's the usual "everyone learns an important lesson about teamwork", "characters' important emotional moments happen to coincide with important game moments" etc tropes, but it mostly works pretty well.
The characters are charming and the central friendships quite interesting, all the players have their own believable motivations. The main character, Chihaya, is sweet and friendly and pretty but above all is REALLY AGGRESSIVELY INTO KARUTA, and this obsession is respected by the narrative. She recruits players into her club with Haruhi Suzimaya-esque blunt determination but without the terrifying sociopathy. I will warn that an overweight character's treatment is...mixed :/
You don't need to understand the rules to enjoy the anime, but I've had fun puzzling them out since not everything is explained at once. Afaict it's moderately obscure in Japan except as a memorisation/poetry learning exercise at school, I kind of feel like playing it now, though I guess I'd have to use proverbs or something since English doesn't have a tradition of 2 line poetry.
( the rules as I understand them in case you're curious )
