Chihayafuru!
Mar. 25th, 2013 05:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alias_sqbrSo 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 basic rules (as I understand them) are: each player is given 1/2 of a deck of cards to place in front of them(*) in whatever order they think will help their memory etc and hinder their opponent's. Each card has the second line of a two line poem. A reader slowly recites the poems in a random order, and players try to be the first to recognise the first line and pick up the card with the matching second line. The first to get rid of all the cards on their side wins (if you take a card from your opponent's side you get to give them one from yours).
Winning requires being able to memorise all the poems and card locations, but also making strategic choices like "So far I've heard the words "Spring is...", which could match with two different cards, but one of them got taken off the board before..." or "He seems to do badly on two syllable cards, so when I get the chance I should shift one to his side of the table." etc.
(*)Well, to their right, which is presumably equivalent to a brain wired to read Japanese. Also I think they only get 1/4 of the deck each, so that not all poems have a match in any single round.
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 basic rules (as I understand them) are: each player is given 1/2 of a deck of cards to place in front of them(*) in whatever order they think will help their memory etc and hinder their opponent's. Each card has the second line of a two line poem. A reader slowly recites the poems in a random order, and players try to be the first to recognise the first line and pick up the card with the matching second line. The first to get rid of all the cards on their side wins (if you take a card from your opponent's side you get to give them one from yours).
Winning requires being able to memorise all the poems and card locations, but also making strategic choices like "So far I've heard the words "Spring is...", which could match with two different cards, but one of them got taken off the board before..." or "He seems to do badly on two syllable cards, so when I get the chance I should shift one to his side of the table." etc.
(*)Well, to their right, which is presumably equivalent to a brain wired to read Japanese. Also I think they only get 1/4 of the deck each, so that not all poems have a match in any single round.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-24 09:54 pm (UTC)//edit: I just looked up competitive karuta on Wikipedia, and it looks like you can totally play it with English poetry -- it's the last two lines of a five-line poem on each of the cards you have to pick, apparently. We still don't have many famous artistique five-line poems, but -- !
no subject
Date: 2013-03-26 10:50 am (UTC)There is some appeal to the idea of a limerick based game, even if it would lack some of the gravitas.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-25 12:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-26 10:51 am (UTC)