The fans reactions to the spring anime season

I think by this stage I’ve writ­ten quite enough on my own thoughts of the new anime this spring sea­son, but what about the rest of anime fan­dom? Spend­ing my time lurk­ing in for­ums, trawl­ing blogs, wast­ing time on twit­ter and raging at the level of stu­pid­ity (and ignor­ance at their own stu­pid­ity) that ANN for­ums seem to attract, it’s cer­tainly been inter­est­ing to see so many dif­fer­ent reac­tions from dif­fer­ent parts of fan­dom. So hey, lets para­phrase them all in this post!

Angel Beats!

Prob­ably the most hyped anime of the sea­son is also the most divis­ive. I think fans split quite evenly into three cat­egor­ies as I shall out­line using this badly drawn 4-koma.

B Gata H Kei vs KissXSis

Some of the reac­tions to these have been abso­lutely non­sensical. Now the Kiss x Sis reac­tions are pretty much as expec­ted. It’s about pseudo-incest and its only aim is sexual tit­il­la­tion. It’s basic­ally porn, which is what people should be treat­ing it as. People don’t get up in arms because some kid fucks his mother in the latest hen­tai title so why get in a fuss over Kiss X Sis? Any­one who is hon­estly watch­ing this for the com­edy, then all I can say is I admire your detach­ment. B Gata H Kei though, is get­ting sim­ilar reac­tions that Kiss X Sis is. People seem to be split into two cat­egor­ies. One who think it’s more shitty otaku-bait and those who believe these elit­ists are too uptight to see a great com­edy with an ingeni­ous concept. What it is in real­ity is an unusual yet poten­tially great concept executed miser­ably. It’s sad that one has to jus­tify that they’re drop­ping this show not because they’re an uptight elit­ist but because it’s a poor anime.

Senko no Night Raid

This was always going to cause out­rage and heated dis­cus­sions. The basic gist is that, while Ger­many spends its time liv­ing in a per­man­ent apo­lo­getic state for its his­tory, Japan spends a lot of its time pre­tend­ing they’re hor­rible his­tor­ical achieve­ments never happened. Senko no Night Raid focuses in on a period of his­tory that is pretty darn controversial.

What’s not help­ing is people on the inter­net are stupid.

Bring­ing up peri­ods of his­tory that have no rel­ev­ance in the con­ver­sa­tion, using the stand­ard reac­tion of ‘but so-and-so did this so that means this is OK’. Anime fans seem to quite often become defend­ers of the elev­ens, such is the level of weeaboo-ism on the inter­net. Not that the other side is much bet­ter. Leap­ing on this series to sprout gross over­state­ments when the anime in ques­tion has yet to cover any of the his­tory or what it’s inten­tions are. It could be any anime that cov­ers this period of his­tory, it just so happened to be Senko no Night Raid.

(I need to learn how to draw. Not Mis­takes of Youth qual­ity, just being able to draw facial expres­sions would be enough)

Giant Killing

I can see where this is going already. The same thing happened with Cross Game. Sports anime seem to hold this odd aura of being under­rated gems and it is the duty of any­one who watches the show to praise it to the heav­ens. While watch­ing Cross Game I often gave it a hard time. I did love the show but that was because I often felt like I was the only per­son who would dare cri­ti­cise a show that was already being ignored by a lot of anime fan­dom. And so the same thing seems to be hap­pen­ing to Giant Killing. Stu­pid people are ignor­ing it because it’s a sports anime and those who do watch it praise it more than it prob­ably deserves in an attempt to get more people to watch it.

Mayoi Neko Over­run and Hakuouki

Both sides of fan­dom are as bad as each other over these two. The main praise I’m see­ing for Hak­u­ouki is that it has lots of beau­ti­ful bish­ies. The main praise I’m see­ing for Mayoi Neko Over­run is that it has a tsun­dere. Such is the super­fi­cial nature of some anime fans that an anime just needs to check as many items on a list of lazy plot ele­ment and visual eye-candy that the actual qual­ity of the fin­ished product is no longer relevant.

K-ON!!

This is an inter­est­ing one indeed. When K-ON first star­ted air­ing, it took until about 5–6 epis­odes in for the back­lash to occur when waves upon waves of people des­cen­ded in and cried in hor­ror that it was just a bunch of girls doing moecrap. Before that, the moef­ags of this world were call­ing this the best of the sea­son and KyoAni strikes again. I’m not sure whether it’s because of the back­lash it got but this sea­son the K-ON fans have been a lot quieter about their love for this series. It’s become a defens­ive atti­tude of  ‘I know it’s just a bunch of girls doing moe stuff but I like it’. Not only that but their love for this series is not quite as blind­ing as it was when it first aired. So hey, high-five fel­low anti-moe bri­gade on this one!

House of Five Leaves and Youjouhan

Noit­am­ina. Late to the party as bloody usual.

Oh, and as any­one who’s watched Say­on­ara Zetsubo Sen­sei knows, every 4-koma has a 5^th for­bid­den panel of dark­ness.