Hey look, I found another cartoon to watch. Hooray for me. How bout I tell you about it?
Chaos;Head is about a (wait for it) socially-awkward high school boy and a (wait, wait, you’ve never heard this before) bunch of beautiful women who intrude in his life, resulting in (oh precious suspense) awkward semi-romantic situations intended to titillate the socially-awkward male demographic. This is all terribly formulaic, all very focus-group-tested and sanitary.
But this isn’t a romantic comedy, no no no, this is a suspense/thriller. There is a string of bizarre deaths in Shibuya, where the protagonist lives. The protagonist is an unreliable witness, which is the key leverage used in telling the story. He is prone to delusions. He lives in a cargo container on the roof of a building where he collects anime-related figurines and plays video games all day. He has an imaginary friend (an anime character he thinks is his wife). He thinks somebody is watching him, sometimes even in the solitude of his own room.
The pacing of Chaos;Head is excellent. The intro and ending theme music are hideous. The character designs are visually pretty typical for a romantic comedy, which adds to the creepiness of the paranoid tale of supernatural horror. The invisible super-swords are retarded. The production quality is uneven; sometimes nice but often lackluster. Clearly this is a product of a production crew with a limited budget and timeline trying to cram a very complicated video game plot into half-hour chunks. So far they’re making an admirable run of it. I look forward to the next episode, and so should you.
Bonus points for including nutty URLs on-screen that you can actually visit online. Nice.
He wears a schoolboy outfit and lives by himself in a cargo container on the roof of a building? or is that picture unrelated?
You know how I know your gay?
@chunkbot: the main character is a high school student that skips class most days, yes. And bravo for turning my own gallery against me. Dammit.
@logtar: because I went and watched abstinent vampire teenage girl movies like some emo secret-cutting pole-smoker? Oh wait, that was you. Sorry, I got confused there for a second.
I think this qualifies as just about the meanest reply to comments I’ve ever made on this site. Snap and double-snap.
well played, sir.
I know this is off topic but i felt the need to ask: when are you (burrowowl) going to watch (then post about) Higurashi Kai? Ive already watched through the entire series, consider it to be spectacular, and like to hear others opinions about it (especially those who are intelligent and can understand and appreciate the series, such as yourself)
Oh I loved Higurashi no Naku Kori ni. I eagerly picked up the second season (ni kai) as soon as somebody translated the first episode… But they lost track of what I liked about it. Showing Rika’s situation basically strangled my interest in the show, killed the leverage that the show’s cyclical story was exerting on me, made it linear, less interesting. I never ended up getting all the way through the third cycle of the second season.
Ironically, I was just mentioning that show on the THAC0 podcast’s forum in regards to their show topic of “When do you stop following a property?” My answer tends to be “when stops providing me with what I want from it.” Sometimes it’s the title that changes, sometimes it’s me. I stopped reading X-Men when my adolescent hormones calmed down a bit and mildly-angsty PG-rated antiheroes just didn’t cut it for me any more.
so, how far did you get? and when exactly (episode wise) did you lose interest?
It has been a while, but it was in the middle of Minagoroshi-hen that I just stopped watching. It was early in Yakusamashi-hen, around when Hanyuu was revealed, that it started to unwind for me. When presenting a mysterious story to an audience, it is important to wrap things up quickly. After getting a very clear look at Rika’s outlook for the first few episodes of season 2, and having that outlook confirmed in the beginning of the second plot arc, it was time to seal the deal. Time to wrap it up. For me there was a building expectation that things were going to drag out horribly over the next two-dozen episodes, which wore out my enthusiasm for the series.
Ni Kai was a very different show than the first series, but it took me several episodes to really convince myself of it.
“I found another cartoon to watch.”
I prefer ‘anime’ to use as a word.
Yeah. C;H is a good anime. And dont forget to play the VN!
@Kairu: true, but “anime” really just means “animated moving picture,” and I try to avoid putting on airs. More specifically, it means Japanese animation, but I see so many Korean names in the credits these days that I can’t really hold to that any more. When I used to watch Speed Racer, Voltron, Gatchaman, Robotech, and Tranzor-Z after school along with GI Joe and The Jetsons, I was watching cartoons. I suspect I’d end up with a lot more search-driven site traffic if I were to drop the “a” word more often, but really it’s just semantics.
There were still many things that remained a mystery throughout the massacre arc (i forget the original names, but the arc im reffering to is the second arc of kai), mysteries including why people scratched at their throats, what happened to Satoshi, who was behind “oyashiro-samas curse”,etc. Honestly, that was my favorite arc, although there was less mystery, there was more character developement. Tragedies were averted, friendships were strengthened, mysteries were revealed. Did you get to episode 13 of kai? Anyhow,if you ever get the time i beg you to reconsider, at least finish it…
I liked this site alot more when it was about politics.
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