Comment on Summer Anime Season Wrap-up and Discussion Thread
Rottcodd@ani.social 3 weeks ago
The last episode of The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity aired Thusday, and it was every bit as wonderful as I’d hoped it’d be. I’d already read it in the manga, so it wasn’t a surprise, but it was still worth seeing. And the series as a whole is now at or near the top of my list for awkward, sincere romances.
Aside from that I watched two surprisingly great older series last week.
The first was Akebi-chan no Sailor Fuku. It’s not so much that I didn’t expect it to be good as that I expected it to be disappointing compared to the manga, which is easily among my top five all-time favorites. And after seeing the character designs when the season was announced, I was sure that would be the case, since they didn’t even manage to look right. The facial proportions are all wrong, and it throws everything off. And I expected the rest of the series to be equally inferior.
But I kept seeing positive mentions of the anime, so finally decided to give it a chance. And it was really very good, even though the character designs never stopped being distractingly wrong. The rest though - the rest of what I appreciate about the manga - they nailed. The backgrounds are lush and beautiful, the tightly focused action sequences - things like Komichi tying her hair back - are just as graceful as Hiro’s originals, and the character interactions and growth and especially the emotional content are all spot-on - just as rich and satisfying as in the manga. It was still inferior to the manga all in all (it really couldn’t help but be), but it was damned good anyway.
Then, on something of a whim, I watched both seasons of Zombieland Saga. Then I watched them both again.
I still can’t quite get over just how awesome that series is. It came out during a period when I wasn’t paying much attention to anime, so I vaguely knew it existed, but that was it And I really didn’t expect a lot of it because I don’t hear a lot about it. But it just swept me away.
The characters are uniformly terrific. Every one of them gets their moment in the spotlight and every one of them shines when they do. The humor is great, and so well-placed. Even in the middle of the darkest drama, they’ll just suddenly drop in a perfectly timed laugh out loud moment. The overall plot is brilliant - hell, just the fact that it exists is brilliant, because that’s something in itself that’s only slowly revealed. Kotaro says he’s forming an idol group to save Saga, and it seems at first that he means to “save” it from being a generally disregarded cultural backwater, but no - he means it literally. And as the plot keeps expanding through the series you find out that he’s right - that Saga really is under threat (and not for the first time) and really does need to be saved.
And then there are the performances, which are easily among the most awesome of any music anime ever. Every one of them has a creative hook that makes it stand out, and the later ones in particular are just astonishing (and in fact I’d say that the show opening for Iron Frill - season 2 episode 4 - is the single greatest anime music performance I’ve seen - everything from Tae on the drums to Junko’s amazing voice to Junko destroying the guitar and pointing across the arena at Ai with the splintered neck (and Kotaro’s laugh out loud reaction) to the epic rendition of Mezame Returner, hearkening all the way back to their first guerilla parking lot show.
And their fans. Starting with the two metalhead guys (“Those guys are seriously awesome”), they just expand, as if the world is just divided into people who haven’t seen Franchouchou yet, and fans. So by the time of their stadium show, every notable character from every episode is there. And if I was in their world, I would be too.
I can’t wait for the movie.
Akebi-chan no Sailor Fuku
Glad you liked it! It was the other way around for me. My interest in The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity began because (1) people were hyping up on how good the manga is and (2) the Akebi staff is working on it.
My first reaction on seeing the poster is “the female MC [Kaoruko] looks like a grown-up Akebi Kao”. There are some stylistic similarities. I could also say that KaoruHana has the Akebi art style without the Akebi mangaka’s weird facial proportions.
wjs018@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Same!
I was also surprised at how much I liked the show. I had somehow managed to avoid spoiling the cold open to episode 1 for myself and found myself cracking up during the first OP. I am never not impressed by Kotaro and the voice acting performance by Mamoru Miyano. His lectures at the chalkboard totally give off the feeling that the director basically just told him to let it rip and the rest of the show just tries to keep up.
Rottcodd@ani.social 3 weeks ago
That opening was what initially sold me on the series. I just followed a link from somewhere - probably a MAL stack - and read the synopsis and thought it looked promising, so I tracked it down and clicked play on episode 1 to find out what it was all about, and was immediately hooked.
Kotaro was one of the many big surprises for me. Those loudly emotional characters generally grate on my nerves (in fact, I dropped How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend in large part because the MMC’s constant shouting irritated me so much), so I was worried at first, but somehow it just works for him. And having Saki punch him early on helped, as did the fact that so much of what he yells is foolishness, and they all know it.
And somehow, in the middle of all the yelling and all the foolishness, he tells each one of them exactly what they need to hear when they need to hear it.
On that note too, one of my favorite parts of unexpected humor is when Sakura stops him on the stairs of the mall/shelter to sincerely thank him for all he’s done for them, and she’s talking about how important he’s been - “And you never gave up! Well… except for that one time, but other than that…”