Letter Bee episode 13 *dropped*

My patience has now finally worn out with this show. This was an epis­ode where I found myself drown­ing in cheese. In those rare occa­sions where I could break the sur­face of the cheese, instead of gulp­ing in air I was breath­ing in stu­pid­ity. The flowers were spe­cially grown to instantly erupt, Niche’s clothes-disintegrating attack, gen­eric evil bad­dies who flee in the face of someone with back­bone and not once ounce of char­ac­ter back­story or devel­op­ment. Last week caught me in the Christ­mas spirit and there­fore in a fine mood. I watched this in the back of a car that’s way too small for my 190cm frame (ver­tic­ally, not hori­zont­ally) and was not in the mood to con­sume all that cheese when I just had a sand­wich with that very ingredi­ent (it was meant to have some of that tur­key left over from Christ­mas but it fell on the car-floor and, while attempt­ing to pick it up, stood on it). Finally watch­ing Detroit Metal City cheered me up a lot. Watch­ing Let­ter Bee did not.

If I think back to that pilot epis­ode that got me so excited for this series, when has Let­ter Bee shown that level of qual­ity? The first two epis­odes cer­tainly looked like it would carry on the form but since then it’s only pro­duced one qual­ity epis­ode, that being epis­ode 10. There was cer­tainly things to like about Let­ter Bee, in par­tic­u­lar the beau­ti­ful art­work and phe­nom­enal ima­gin­a­tion that went into cre­at­ing Amber­ground. But the pacing, the cheese, the lack of any vil­lain you could take ser­i­ously, the pacing again. At first I thought it was because Pier­rot were too intent on keep­ing every detail on the manga in when a bet­ter dir­ector would have cut out scenes but it was the fillers that even­tu­ally killed my enthu­si­asm. Let­ter Bee attempt­ing epis­odics res­ul­ted in drown­ing in cheese and moun­tains of unfunny jokes. As much as I love you Niche, your under­wear got awfully dull very soon.

2009 has been a good year, cer­tainly a step up from 2008. But this sea­son just hasn’t pro­duced anime that coin­cides with my tastes. With the inex­plic­able pop­ular­ity of Kimi ni Todoke, I’ve finally given up on me ever enjoy­ing a shojo series. Action + Hot Girls just doesn’t interest me, neither does moe or ‘ref­er­ence anime’. I’m look­ing for some adven­ture, maybe some action. Heck, there hasn’t even been a decent com­edy series (no, Nyan Koi is an aver­age com­edy series). In the end, this sea­son has been the sea­son where I fin­ished the least amount of series. This is autumn, that just shouldn’t hap­pen. But the fact of the mat­ter is I enjoyed more series from both winter and sum­mer than this sea­son, and this upcom­ing winter looks like it will out­strip the lot of them. But oth­er­wise I’d like to for­get this season.

Dam­nit, I’ve been whin­ing a lot recently. Expect some more upbeat posts in the future.