Well, the endings have begun. Indeed, I’ve put a huge great big section at the end of this post on Hitsugi no Chaika. I was originally intending to do this as a separate blog post, but decided to stick it in here instead.
This post is slightly earlier than usual, as I won’t be around at the usual time. This also means that I haven’t watched some stuff that i otherwise might have done, and partly as a result there isn’t all that much that I’ve watched this week. I managed to catch up on several of the series which I had fallen behind on, though.
Episodes watched this week:
Ore, Twintails ni Narimasu 9
Log Horizon 2nd Series 10
Kaitou Joker 7
Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de 10
Gugure! Kokkuri-san 8
Akatsuki no Yona 9
Akatsuki no Yona 10
Gugure! Kokkuri-san 9
Yama no Susume 2nd Season 22
Hitsugi no Chaika: Avenging Battle 10
Denki-gai no Honya-san 11
Shirobako 10
Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso 8
Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso 9
Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso 10
Danna ga Nani wo Itteiru ka Wakaranai Ken 11
Autumn 2014 Status
series rankings at present:
1. Ore, Twintails ni Narimasu.
2. Yuuki Yuuna wa Yuusha de Aru
3. Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works (up 1)
4. Inou Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de (up 2)
5. Log Horizon 2nd Series
6. Hitsugi no Chaika: Avenging Battle (down 3)
7. Denki-gai no Honya-san
8. Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso
9. Madan no Ou to Vanadis
10. Akatsuki no Yona (up 2)
11. Shirobako (down 1)
12. Sora no Method (down 1)
13. Kaitou Joker
14. Gugure! Kokkuri-san
15. Danna ga Nani wo Itteiru ka Wakaranai Ken
A little story:
The date was June 2012. I had recently decided to actually learn to understand Japanese properly, rather than just picking up a word or two here or there. I was gradually familiarising myself with hiragana, and my knowledge of kanji was pretty much limited to the numbers from one to ten.
It was at that point which I decided that, in order to help me learn the language, I would buy some manga. I picked only manga series which I had already watched and enoyed an anime adaptation of, and which had no English language release. The exploratory stuff was to come in a second order a few weeks later.
However, in amongst the volumes of Saki, Yuru Yuri and KamiNomi, I also decide to get myself something as a distant, eventual goal to be able to read. I decided to buy a light novel, having liked all three of the English light novel releases that I had acquired. I also deliberately picked a series which had no anime, either existing or planned – I figured that a series would serve as a better reward if there was no other way to experience it. Furthermore, I wanted a series which I could be confident that I could enjoy. It was surprisingly difficult to get information about series without anime adaptations, especially given that I couldn’t read Japanese at the time, and didn’t even know of any way to look up things that I didn’t understand (except google translate which doesn’t count).
But pick one I somehow did, and, looking back, I can happily confirm that my decision was a good one.
The volume in question? Hitsugi no Chaika volume 1.
Thus this was the first thing I owned in Japanese which I wasn’t already familiar with. And, in that respect, it holds a bit of a special place in my history.
However, so gradual was my progress that when, more than a year later, the anime adaptation was announced, I was only about 30 pages into the first volume. I pushed ahead a bit with that, but by the time the anime started airing this spring, I was still only 2/3 of the way through volume 1. Which the anime adaptation promptly got through in the very first episode. That kind of sealed away any possibility of my keeping up with the series by reading alongside the anime.
And so it was that the anime got ahead, and never really looked back.
And so it is that I have come to the end of the anime with the light novels still trailing behind (I sort of stopped reading them after the anime began airing).
That said, the anime ending wasn’t exactly impressive. It may not have been an anime original in the standard sense, but it was very different in feel to the rest of the series. I get the feeling that the author gave them a list of things that would happen, and the anime creators just went through it as a sort of box ticking exercise. A lot of the lines in that final episode seemed like they were lifted straight from some sort of summarised versions of events, which meant that they didn’t really fit in. All in all a bit of a disappointing way to conclude a good series. I guess I’ll have to just wait until I get around to reading it in the novels to see what the ending should really be like.
kuuderes_shadow's blog 