Letter Bee episode 12

So now that the move has gone down smoothly, it’s time to get back to the bread and but­ter of anime blog­ging. OK, I’m a bit late with this epis­ode, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing it’s a Christ­mas epis­ode, but I didn’t want to cover this epis­ode until the move had been completed.

A Christ­mas themed epis­ode! And it’s actu­ally at Christ­mas time, unlike Hetalia which decided to air its Christ­mas epis­odes in mid-August. It was corny, it failed to advance the plot, it was noth­ing more than filler but you know what? I really enjoyed it. Of course it didn’t have to do a whole lot to improve on the pre­vi­ous epis­ode but it actu­ally pro­duced a story that I could actu­ally get into. Gran­ted, I spent the entire first half of the epis­ode laugh­ing at how utterly ridicu­lous Lag looked with a beau­ti­ful flow­ing beard (and it seems I wasn’t the only one), but the actual story made me smile. But join me again while we laugh at Lag and detach­able facial hair.

*pfft*. Con­nor could sort of pull of the beard being the tubby fel­low that he is. Zazie is one of those people who would look cool if he was wear­ing a tutu and noth­ing else. In fact I’m pretty sure any other char­ac­ter in the series could pull off the beard other than Lag, yes, even Steak. Which is odd when you con­sider that Lag actu­ally has the white hair that should go with it.

I was won­der­ing how they were going to incor­por­ate Christ­mas into Amber­ground without the Chris­tian­ity attach­ments. There’s been churches in Let­ter Bee but no sign of any­one prac­ti­cing their reli­gion and no ref­er­ences to it either. But they bypassed that by chan­ging the hol­i­day alto­gether to just a bunch of Let­ter Bees dressed up oddly. Since it’s dur­ing winter, I guess the beard my be to keep their face warm. Maybe it was an old Let­ter Bee tra­di­tion to grow your beard out until winter to keep their face warm and they shaved it off in spring. I guess they had to change to fake beards when they real­ised Lag has a bet­ter chance lay­ing a golden egg than grow­ing a beard that impress­ive. What am I say­ing, I’m talk­ing right out my arse here. Come to think of it, why do they print the Bee on those hats? If it’s meant to be a secret for little kids then surely a post­man sym­bol should give it away?

D’awww, aint she the cutest little thing? I don’t know why but the scene where she was chop­ping the wood with that tiny axe was quite pos­sibly the cutest thing I’ve seen all year. Actu­ally no it’s not, Zoku Nat­sume Yuujin­chou aired this year and that had that little kid who hatched out the egg. Oh god was that thing ever diabetes-inducing. But back to the story at hand, what I liked about this epis­ode was it finally showed that the Gaichu as hav­ing some genu­ine effect on nor­mal people other than Let­ter Bees. There are these 50 foot metal­lic hor­rible CGI mon­sters all over the place, you would think they’d have a bit more effect on towns­folk than they’ve been shown to have. If the Gaichu are drawn to heart, then why do they hang around in unin­hab­ited areas? And how are they even cre­ated? As much as I take the piss out of these hor­rible CGI cre­ations, there is def­in­itely more to these creatures than they’ve talked about so far. I keep harp­ing back to epis­ode one when Gauche shot one, Lag heard a sound he thought soun­ded like crying.

This epis­ode wasn’t entirely filler though. The epis­ode fleshed out the char­ac­ter of Zazie quite a bit. Orphaned by Gaichu (that seems to be a require­ment if you’re going to become a post­man in this world), he’s gen­er­ally a tough fel­low and I must admit I didn’t like him that much before this epis­ode. OK, they laid it on a bit thick with the whole ‘look at him feed the kit­ten, isn’t he the nicest fel­low?’ but it was him being a lot more aware of his sur­round­ings that made me like the guy a bit more in this epis­ode. Espe­cially com­pared to last time where the guy couldn’t spot talk­ing about Gauche neg­at­ively to Lag was a stu­pid thing to do.

So the let­ter was delivered, Lag cried and the Gaichu defeated. It was a nice Christ­mas epis­ode but I’d kind of like the plot to reappear soon. How­ever I believe the next epis­ode is also filler. Do Pier­rot hon­estly plan to drag this series out so it doesn’t catch up with the manga? Have they not learned from their mis­takes with their other series yet? I know manga read­ers would cry foul at this sug­ges­tion but I wish they would go for an anime ori­ginal end­ing and tie up the plot their own way instead of this drag­ging out.

vote it up!