Nice post on Guilty Crown! I like how you and I both like Hare a lot. I'd be curious to know why she's your favorite.

Also, thanks for the great insights into:

1. Arisa's character.

2. Why Shu considered Inori to be the only one to always stand by him.

If I didn't have such a large backlog of shows to watch, maybe I could habe cared about BRS a bit more. But I simply don't. Visuals have always been near the bottom of the priority list for me. Case in point - watched Kino's Journey in full in 1 sitting on Friday night. 9/10. Far more fulfilling for me than any show made in the last 18 months. Visuals were nothing to speak of at all but such a macarbe, grim setting of countries to make one appreciate IRL beauty and a method of storytelling not seen at that level of quality since Galaxy Express 999. It's things like that which make me watch anime. Visuals rarely impress me.

Thanks a lot for that great VM! I might reply to it more thoroughly in the future.

On the topic of the Direction... I do see where you're coming from here. But I think the reason why the fanservice in Guilty Crown usual works well for me is because the broader aesthetics makes that fanservice relatively fresh.

I mean, most sexual fanservice involves pantyshots, breast grabs (some of these totally outside the realm of how people act in normal life), or nudity (often accompanied by copious amounts of steam, lol). Guilty Crown typically avoids these more cliched (and often facepalm-y) methods by going with sleek, sexy, tight-fitting attire that shows off the curves and forms of the female characters wearing it. The freshness of the approach makes it feel oddly less pandering to me, and more creative, so I appreciate the eroticism of it more than I do more cliche fanservice.

I think it helps that it's usually quick. It doesn't linger long enough to be "in your face", imo.

But yeah, I'll leave it at that for now. I might have more to say later.

I had a look at ep1 of BRS.

Um...what was good about the visuals? I thought they were ghastly. Those character designs were mortifying. The backgrounds looked like a poor man's version of Madoka. Okada's clearly generating yuri subtext for her own kicks. This is beyond a joke. The animation seemed smooth but that's not much when the visuals themselves are bad to begin with.

Yeah, you pretty much summed up how I feel.

And going through Yamato from the 70s has given me more satisfaction than anything from the last year so I may stay back in time for a while.

Saw this on LS's wall:

Just in case you didn't know noitamina -may- be getting back their gold standard next season(whether it lasts though is a totally different question) with Sakamichi no Apollon (Shinichiro Watanabe x Yoko Kanno) and Tsuritsma (Kenji Nakamura).

Hmm, noitaminA have resorted to this because anything they try now within their former target audience just isn't selling. And when AnoHana, Guilty Crown and inevitably Black Rock Shooter are getting them money, what can one expect?

About to do the third and final day or an orientation week stall to round up new people for the local anime club. Still wondering how on earth Nisemonogatari Episode 8 has cuased such a ruckus simply due to brushing teeth...And yeah, all the insanity going on with this January 2012 season has left me unable to enter it and I'll be marathoning Space Battleship Yamato over the weekend instead.

So, how goes it again?

Sounds like Okada is giving you the best of times and worst of times. Same as she always does, heh.

Well... she's being kept in check by Aquarion standards, which is barely restraining her, I guess? But yeah, the way I see it, it turns out she may actually be a good fit for such a series, and the director is at least doing a good job at keeping the through line fairly consistent... basically, it doesn't suffer from a shocking contrast between Okadarage moments and the rest, which is what I've come to expect from her involvement after certain series. Then again, it may just work out because we're still in the school hijinks stage, and I do hope this won't take a turn for the worse when the series goes into serious mode in the second half. I can't say I'm not worried about some kind of trap as well, but as you've said, it's at least definitely fun for now.