School has kept me busy lately — you may have inferred this. My recent Super Fanicom activity amounts to 97% administrative, 2% writerly, and 1% other. And I certainly haven’t had time to keep up with anime in the past week or two. Until yesterday, that is, and during this rare breather I’ll do my best to catch you up with me. Or something like that. At any rate there will be a few of these, in the interest of keeping post length down.

A preliminary note: I think I’m the last person to have discovered Media Player Classic. But if you haven’t, you ought to do so. If VLC is giving you as many problems as it gave me, and you’re on the fence about axing the thing for good, take the plunge, I say — but bear in mind that MPC doesn’t do quick screencaps like VLC does. I haven’t decided yet how much that bothers me.

With that out of the way, let’s begin.

Sora no Woto 8

Was this episode executed brilliantly or what?

I mean, piss isn’t exactly highbrow subject matter. But that’s precisely why I like to see it in a show like Sora no Woto. The average slice of life girl tends not to suffer from such biological inclinations; she may sweat and need to bathe every once in a while, but toilet mechanics are often left to the imaginations of readers. Not so in Kanata’s case. It really isn’t hard to make the leap from moeblob to human (or else the two needn’t be mutually exclusive), as Sora no Woto’s writers seem to have discovered.

And anyway, who can’t relate to Kanata’s unfortunate urinary situation? Who hasn’t been there? The presentation is great, I think — we know what the “conflict” will be from the beginning, and we’re waiting tensely for it to arise, and when it does the level of viewer discomfort spirals quickly from unpleasant to nigh unbearable. So it went for me, anyway. And I found it funny and clever and uncomfortable in an entertaining way, but it isn’t hard for me to imagine the viewer who wouldn’t.

Something that didn’t occur to me until chikorita157 mentioned it is that the entire episode takes place in one room. Strange that I missed it, as that’s the sort of structural novelty that generally catches my interest.

Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn 1

From Twitter:

2.26.2010 4:01:55 Gundam Unicorn 1: What a Gundam protagonist this guy is!

2.26.2010 4:29:56 Gundam Unicorn 1 cont.: I am not disappointed. Definitely not disappointed.

Perhaps Ghostlightning has it right — perhaps the possibility of perfection is greater than what manifests therefrom. When Gundam Unicorn was nothing but raw infinite possibility (I wasn’t about to go looking for the novels, anyway), I could manage to be plenty excited about it. But would I remain excited once I began watching it?

Yes. Yes I would.

On the whole, it feels like Gundam. Only tight — it feels like the 0079 movies, which, I’m told, cut a lot of extraneous bits from the plot of the TV run. And this is not ZZ with its Hobo-Yazan and Bright getting kicked in the head by some pissant wanker. This is serious business. Were Barnagher a little more like Kamille Bidan, I’d already be worried about him. Hell, I’m worried about him anyway.

I don’t suppose I have too much wisdom to dispense re: Gundam Unicorn just yet. I don’t doubt that I will. Ghostlightning covers the “possibility” theme well in his post, so read it; I want to see a little more of the (reverse?) Pandora’s box deal before I comment on that angle. My favorite part is probably Barnagher’s figurative baptism by blood in the Unicorn cockpit, above — it’s as if the story’s telling the poor kid, the newly-initiated Gundam protagonist, to go ahead and get used to the feel of being bloodied before it happens in a combat situation, literally, metaphorically, or (most likely) both.