Some stuff I have consumed lately

[alias_sqbr]

I just finished the anime My Hime/Mai Hime. It's quite good, certainly much better than the very fluffy and fanservicey(*) first few episodes would indicate (though I enjoyed those too). It's a high school drama with magical girls/summons and it both subverts those genres and plays them straight. It reminded me a bit of Puella Magi Madoka Magica only with episodes like "Homura vs the underwear stealing demon" and with more of a kitchen sink approach to plotting and characters. Also, jokes. There's a huge well drawn cast with lots of interesting relationships, it's all about The Power of Love where the "love" is friendly, romantic, familial etc, focussing as much on relationships between female characters as between male and female. Lots of boys being saved by girls, too, which I'm always in favour of. I'm not sure the plot entirely makes sense, and there's a few jarring shifts in tone, and while there are lots of great female characters and even a little canonical f/f the depiction can slip into creepy male gaze-y heteronormativity. Still, overall, I liked it.

Speaking of fanservice (all of boys this time), I also finished the manga of Ouran High School Host Club. It was great. The main character Haruhi is ambivalent about gender and dresses as a boy, when she gets a scholarship to a fancy school she gets dragged into the world of the Host Club, which is pretty much wall to wall satire of romance manga tropes. The cast is mostly male apart from Haruhi (who one could read as genderqueer), but it treats it's few other female characters pretty well. Her father is a gay transvestite, and while the relationships we see onscreen are all straight and there's some quasi-evil lesbians I still mostly like the depiction of gender and sexuality. Also it's just fun, and very sweet.

I've just started Durara!, by the same exclamation mark loving guy who did Baccano!, it's pretty good so far, though I keep thinking of the two main characters as Dave and John from Homestuck.

(*)I've seen shows with more fanservice, but I was impressed by the variety of types. There's even a sexy nun. Be warned some of it crosses the line of consent, though nothing very explicit gets shown on screen.

Comments

[flamebyrd]

I stopped reading Ouran after Haruhi started acting really, really silly (and, I thought, out of character) about her feelings for Tamaki - does that get better?

I enjoyed My-Hime but I cannot actually remember what I thought about it, except that I thought the canon f/f relationship was presented in an icky, dub-con sort of way.

[sqbr]

I didn't think her behaviour was that bad, given the standards of silliness of the series, but I guess it improves? I liked the ending, anyway, but YMMV. It is pretty silly.

Yes, the canon f/f in My-Hime is pretty skeevy.

[flamebyrd]

It was the part where she kept staying home from school because she thought she was sick. I don't know, I was used to thinking of Haruhi being the one source of good sense in the group, it irritated me. But I'll check it out now that it's finished!