![[Shakugan no Shana]](/jdf/images/shana_64.png)
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.
Too japanese for me 😛
I thought the reverse gender roles for the main characters was a little weird…and the whole hidden world under the real world is getting tiring(bleach, kamichu).
I watched the first two eps and skimmed the third. Ep three showed some promise but I’ve been hurt too many times to follow through…
Where has all the bloody shonen gone!?
Hmm, good point regarding Bleach, especially with the whole soul-harvesting themes. I haven’t seen Kamichu yet, though. The general premise of “the world isn’t what it appears, and a hero emerges from humble beginnings to set wrongs aright” is a very old premise.
Regarding the shonen content… We had Speed Grapher for a little while there, and Sunabouzu, but those are the only recent titles that come readily to mind that don’t fit the Dragonball archetype (protagonist spends all his time blustering and activating secret techniques/magic powerups/kage-bunshin-no-jutsu, progressing through a neverending stream of increasingly-powerful and decreasingly-interesting opponents) like One Piece and Bleach.
Japanese pop culture may just be moving on, embracing the nekomimi-meido moe/loli creep audience.
Kamichu = 1 tsp azumanga + 1 Tree Spirit + 1 block of boring
From what I’ve seen of SpGr, it fits the same archtype as dbz. It even has the old man fantasy about being with a younger gal or an older chick with big tits – it even has that one. Does it get better after ep 09?
Speed Grapher strikes me as, unlike a DBZ/One Piece/Bleach analog, having an ending in mind. It had a beginning, middle, and end. After a series of “the bad guys throw another supernatural threat against our heroes” episodes, the plot actually gets some feet under it and moves along to a reasonable conclusion, complete with character growth, redemption, revenge, and various end-of-series cliches.
As for the “young chick vs. older chick with big breasts” aspect, Shakugan no Shana falls neatly into that category during the second plot arc, and probably will continue to in the future. I fear that it’s slipping into a romantic comedy…