It looks like my assessment of episodes 2-9 of was in error, and there may have been more truth in my original assessment than I had hoped.

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Tut, tut… Episode 4 wasn’t the way things had to end. No, no, no, there were other ways things could have transpired during the first four episodes of Higurashi no Naku Koro no (the “Demoned Away” plot arc). Thus, our obliging producers provide us with the Watanagashi plot arc.

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In my second sitting of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, Keiichi really needs to talk to somebody. He’s got a lot of issues to work through, and the initial indications look like the writers aren’t afraid to give us what they foreshadowed.

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Having caught up with the current progress of English-language fansubbers on this title, I’m finding Ergo Proxy to be well worth the time. Previous concerns have been largely unfounded.

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Settling in on a couple of shows mid-season is always an interesting exercise, as it affords one the opportunity to trudge through a couple episodes in a row, giving otherwise-marginal shows a better chance to grab hold. Higurashi no Naku Koro ni benefits well from such a viewing.

This show revolves around a boy that moves to a small town with a mysterious past. Specifically, there have been a series of brutal murders. This is a subject that nobody ever seems to talk about. Five years ago, a water project that would have flooded the entire town was halted. Townsfolk refer openly to the lobbying efforts of their mayor and other prominent townsfolk, who traveled to the capital to plead their case. They don’t talk about the bloody dismemberment of a construction site worker. Keiichi, the protagonist of this little drama, keeps running into little hints that something is very, very wrong in this small town.

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On a recommendation, I downloaded a few episodes of Ergo Proxy and finally got a chance to watch the first episode. One episode into a series is rarely a good point at which to make sweeping statements about it, especially when so many people have already seen up to episode 9 now, but here’s my two cents anyway.

One of the first things that struck me about this series before I gave it a shot was the alarming amount of eye makeup on this prominent character, presumably the main protagonist of the show. Her name is Lil, she’s a citizen of the dark-future megalopolis the story takes place in, she’s handy with a gun, and affects the kind of painfully-disinterested ennui that I generally associate with Vampire: The Masquerade enthusiasts and people that own too many Morrisey albums (frequently the same people). Shallow person that I am, this was enough to delay my acquisition of this title.

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This is not a post about the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. I have not jumped on the bandwagon to rabidly obsess over this refreshing island of excellence in a sea of animated mediocrity. Nay, this is a post about a couple of other series that I’ve been trying to follow recently, Shakugan no Shana and Fate/Stay Night.

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I’ve been in a bit of a rut in regards to anime lately. There just hasn’t been a lot of new stuff that has caught my eye. A recent exception to this is Fate/Stay Night, a series that is apparently closely-related to Tsukihime, a title that I just never got around to watching. As a series based upon a videogame and manga that are spin-offs from another video game, manga, and anime, this is a pretty good title.

The basic premise is that Emiya Shirou is an untalented sorcerer that gets thrust into a seven-way war between master sorcerers and their summoned servants. He has no knowledge of what the war is about or what these supernatural servants are, but comehow ends up reflexively calling forth a Saber-class servant. From the reaction of the other mages, this is a prestigious servant, especially for an unskilled knucklehead like Emiya. The plotline alternates between big supernatural battles with arcano-jargon speeches about legendary heros and the personal interactions between two of the competing sorcerers, who happen to be classmates.

So far I’ll give it a B-, the animation and character design are excellent for a television series, the characters are reasonably appealing, but the background details are presented in such a way that it’s obvious that the writers either expect the audience to already be fans of the setting or are willing and ready to perform all manner of research to figure out what’s going on. These aren’t obscure Japanese-culture references that we westerners wouldn’t be in on, but strange western lore about legendary figures like Cuchulain that I cannot imagine are common knowledge to the original Japanese audience. Odd.

The internet (or as some like to say: the Internet) has spawned a number of interesting things. Amazon made it unnecessary to leave your home to get books, eBay helps you get rid of your old crap, and Google helps the Chinese government keep its citizens in the dark about the massacre at Tianenmen Square (ooh look, they “fixed” that a bit), and the Wikipedia lets knuckleheads like me write entries as if I knew something. Then there are the imageboards.

Imageboards are websites that let anybody that browses to them post content, including the attachment of binaries (specifically images). This can lead to the sharing of original artwork, photographs, and such in a way that makes services like Flickr look totalitarian. This also means that under the cover of perceived anonymity you can get some of the craziest nonsensical chaos. There are several out there, but which one should you waste your precious time, bandwidth, and fragile sanity on? For your consideration, I give you 4chan and Wakachan, two english-language knock-offs of Futaba Channel.

4chan is overworked, overpopulated, and rather seriously insane. New content appears in its various categories (most of which relate to the work-appropriateness of the content) almost continuously, including some rather remarkable photography. The bulk of the material, however, is provided for and by anime and manga fans, many of them clearly deranged. If you have a strong stomache and a tolerance for the utterly-inappropriate, check out their “random” channel (/b/). Its current operator goes by the name “moot” and has had to repeatedly reminding his users that the whole operation is a charity case teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

Wakachan, on the other hand, has nimble load times, has its anime content neatly organized by topic. I have generally found the participants of this imageboard to be far more tame than the lunatics at 4chan, which naturally means that its “random” channel is far less interesting. Management-wise it seems pretty stable. It’s like a calmer, more sane and stable 4chan, and might be a good place to get your toes wet.

Both of these systems have discussion boards incorporated, but I cannot speak as to their character. Having seeing some of the stuff these people are willing to put in public, I strongly doubt anybody should be reading what they have to say. Enjoy your intarnets.

This season’s anime offering has been pretty slim on watchable content, hence a severe slowdown in updates. Additionally, the propensity for scanlation groups to go shoujo on me has me rather discouraged. There is a bit of a light at the end of the tunnel in the form of Shakugan no Shana, a title with heavy Mahoromatic influences (without the meido costumes).

The story revolves around an unremarkable high school student (stop me if this sounds familiar) that encounters a cute girl with crazy magic powers that is fighting the forces of darkness… No, it’s not quite like it sounds. The unremarkable high school student doesn’t have fifty beautiful girls corresponding to the twenty-odd harem-anime stereotypes trying to woo him. The unremarkable student, Yuji, is caught up in a strange shadow-reality in which supernatural beings are consuming the very existences of mortals and replacing them with temporary placeholders called “torches.” It it very quickly revealed that Yuji himself is just a “torch,” and that he had died some time prior to the start of the series. He finds himself oddly allied with a Flame Haze, a supernatural being that hunts down and destroys the villainous supernatural beings that are consuming folks’ existences.

Once the basic premise has been roughly established, Yuji grapples with the nature of his existence as a temporary replacement that is doomed to fade away while the Flame Haze deals with a succession of supernatural opponents in big, flashy battles. At least two fansub groups are bringing this title to the English-reading world, so give it a shot.