The only reason I picked this up was because of Stan Lee’s involvement, which I guess is funny because I’m not a huge fan of anything credited to the man. And most of the things credited to Stan Lee were made awesome by other people anyway. But it still felt obligatory. Maybe it’s because I’m graduating with a degree in comics and no one in comics ignores Stan Lee, as senile as people are calling him these days. Regardless, I wasn’t expecting much out of Heroman, which is why I don’t feel bad about dropping it at episode two.

Hell, I almost went ahead and dropped it at episode one.

Once again, I faced a protagonist I couldn’t sympathize with and whose circumstances didn’t interest me. Joey is a good and sincere kid, workin’ hard at a part-time job while going to school and being bullied by people bigger than him, blah blah blah. Pure-hearted characters with no apparent moral flaws bore me to death, and bullies being bullies for the sake of being bullies is also boring. Why should I care? Joey doesn’t even seem to really care about being bullied. Is it because he’s just that good? Or because he’s really afraid? If it’s the latter, he doesn’t do a very good job of showing it, so he doesn’t even have that going for him. I mean, it would be more interesting if he was seriously intimidated by the bullies, but he doesn’t seem to be, so whatever?

There was pretty much no way Heroman’s birth could have avoided being contrived and silly, so that didn’t bother me. The mech’s design is unique and kinda neat, and I think its serious business expression is a bit endearing. Unfortunately, its relationship with Joey is also boring. Joey gives impulsive, desperate commands, and Heroman complies. Joey doesn’t really do much beyond issuing the command, and Heroman doesn’t provide too much of a conflict point — he doesn’t disobey and he doesn’t overdo things. The perfect giant robot servant. Hurray. Snore.

At the end of the first episode, I was completely disinterested in seeing the second episode, but I felt like I should just so I’m not dropping on the first episode. I put it off. I got the second episode and still was disinterested in watching it. You know it probably isn’t worth it when you more or less have to force yourself to watch it just so you can say you gave it a chance, but there you go. In the second episode, it seemed like they were trying to play off the conflict as Joey being worried about having too much power, but it isn’t like Heroman really did much to warrant this worry. It just felt forced. And the aliens that have apparently come to destroy the earth? With no motivation given, I can only assume they’ll be a wave of generic “bad guys.”

I can’t decide what the target audience of this series is supposed to be. On one hand, the protagonist is in what, middle school? On the other hand, I would say much of Stan Lee’s works for Marvel had an “older teens” demographic, even if a lot of younger kids end up reading them. If Heroman is supposed to be aimed towards middle school kids, I guess I can pass it off as just something I’m not interested in. But if it’s supposed to be aimed towards a more general audience, one that might possibly include myself, then I will call it a disappointment. There’s nothing to set this apart from any number of other mecha action series and I’m bored.

In other news, I like how I always come back from long breaks with a “dropped” post.

And hence this post. Kimi ni Todoke has annoyed me enough to make me post about how I’m dropkicking its ass despite the delighted and downright fawning reception the rest of the blogosphere has given it.

I’ve said before that shoujo isn’t really my cup of tea. Though there have certainly been exceptions (Lovely Complex, Ouran High School Host Club), I think I’m generally disinterested in the genre because I just don’t care for what I perceive to be its stereotypical qualities: idealistic and naive characters, contrived romance, and related drama. And Kimi ni Todoke has all of those in spades.

Let’s start with the first one. Sawako Kuronuma is a sweet, well-meaning, and very naive girl. It does not take long for her to grind on my patience. There is a point where naivete stops being cute and moe and just starts being absurd and thoroughly frustrating. I do not buy that Sawako just cannot understand why her classmates are wary of her. If they call her “Sadako,” then certainly she can derive that they are comparing her to the character from The Ring. As such, why the hell can’t she just cut her hair? Or tie it back? Or do anything practical to avoid being compared to such a character? You can’t even give the argument of pride or not wanting to bend to public pressure because it doesn’t take long to establish that Sawako is very easily pressured into stupid corners. I am just not convinced, and that keeps me from fully sympathizing with this protagonist. It doesn’t matter to me how sweet she is if I think she’s retarded.

There is a difference between being socially awkward and being socially stupid. I know plenty of awkward people and can be rather awkward myself, but they and I still understand what was going on to an extent; we just don’t always know how to react or deal with it. Sawako doesn’t understand what’s going on at all, much less how to deal with it. It doesn’t help that Sawako’s voice, provided by Mamiko Noto, sounds like she’s trying far, far too hard to be cute and naive; her voice is always a strained, high-pitched, and airy whisper, and listening to it for an entire episode at a time is almost enough to make me beat my head against something, especially her “A-Ah…A-Ano…”

The rest of the cast is perfectly idealistic. Kazehaya is popular, pure-hearted, always means well, and of course, has a crush on Sawako. Such traits would be easier to deal with if he had even one flaw about him — if he cared about his reputation and popularity, if he simultaneously had a crush on another girl, if he tried to take advantage of Sawako somehow, if anything. There’s no point in disputing the fact that Kazehaya and Sawako are somehow destined to be together, and some people have praised the progress so far for being slow and natural, but even if I didn’t pick on Kazehaya’s stubborn goodness and patience, I don’t find Sawako’s naivete and amazing ability to misunderstand everything to be a very natural reason this relationship is progressing slowly.

Meanwhile, Yano and Yoshida are more or less interchangable, but slightly more tolerable because they do have some noticeable flaws: they’re insecure and jump to conclusions. The circumstantial nature of episode four makes that flaw especially obvious, but it also makes the resulting drama seem terribly contrived. Certainly high school was a place where people ostracized others, where people were isolated, and where people let jealousy and envy get the best of them. Unfortunately, I don’t find Kimi ni Todoke to be an accurate depiction of that environment. It’s too dramatized and too idealized. Then again, I didn’t pay attention enough or have enough friends in high school to have gone through such drama myself, so maybe that lack of personal experience contributes to my lack of interest, lack of nostalgia, and complete lack of sympathy or empathy for these characters.

Kimi ni Todoke isn’t a terrible series by any stretch and I can understand at least some of the appeal of such an idealistic setting. But at the end of the day, this just isn’t the series for me.

Umineko started off feeling more promising to me because it felt more like a classic murder mystery and less of a weird series of events that happen to annoying schoolkids. I just wanted to watch a “Who dun it?”-type mystery, but that was the wrong thing to want out of Umineko. In the beginning, I enjoyed it well enough: the gigantic cast confused me, but I did kind of sympathize with Battler and his “Objection!” pose. Most of the other characters I was pretty indifferent to and even “Uuu~” girl didn’t really irritate me that much. The murders were entertaining and the suspicious and accusing atmosphere was fun.

But it didn’t take long for the characters to start boring me and for me to stop caring about what happens to them. Battler never really accomplishes much of anything, and the lack of forward progression annoyed me . The beginning of a new iteration always seems to be hard on my patience — I don’t care about the characters or setting or outcome enough to sit through multiple versions of the same basic idea. The fact that I’ve never played a visual novel probably also contributes to my lack of interest, since I don’t care for the endgame shenanigans as a result. I don’t care which witch wins the game; I don’t care how they go about doing it; I don’t care who dies in each part or whose fault it is. So why am I watching it?

The animation wasn’t anything special and I got pretty tired of seeing Maria’s psychotic face every other scene, particularly because none of the other character seem to notice or react to it even when she was grinning in their faces. At least Light Yagami had to decency to grin behind people’s backs. The music was nice and I especially liked the opening theme, but no one really keeps watching a show just for the music, huh?

And that’s that. Second casualty of the season! Let’s see if I end up dropping CANAAN?

In the first place the premise bored me. It reminded me immediately of X-Men, among other things, and didn’t feel like it would take it in a particularly interesting or new direction. The art also bored me. The style reminded me a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh!, which isn’t bad, but it’s not exaggerated in a way I find aesthetically pleasing and not very interesting either. I couldn’t bring myself to actually pay much attention to what was going on in the first episode — the expository was exceedingly dull — but the action was fun in that absurd and hilarious sort of way, though I think it was more “I’m laughing at you” than “I’m laughing with you.” Either way, it’s hard not to laugh at ridiculously named Engrish attacks and excessive fanservice. I thought I might just stay with the series for that, but it kind of gets really old, really fast, especially when the characters are all kind of annoying. At least it isn’t the primary reason for droppage this time though.

The main kid is whiny and useless and has a sister complex, but honestly, he isn’t that bad. The chick and white-haired guy probably annoyed me more, but there’s more apathy than anything else. I’m not sure if apathy is better or worse than irritated; at least the latter has some emotional involvement? Is it better to passionately dislike a show or feel absolutely nothing towards it? The second episode was very much like the first. It had (more) fanservice and action and a bit of boring expository and overt shenanigans that at some point involved dramatically named attacks. But the reactionary amusement faded very quickly into the same apathy and I had no real desire to check out the third episode at all. It isn’t that I dislike Needless necessarily. I just don’t particularly care.

So I’m dropping it. And I guess this is the best way to drop a series because unlike the cases with Kurokami and Shangri-La, I don’t end up hanging on episode after episode hoping in vain that it could get better eventually before finally giving up in exasperation.

I really hope this doesn’t become some kind of annoying trend. Aside from this season’s two big remakes (FMA and DBK), Shangri-La was the only series I picked up. And like last season’s Kurokami, it’s now getting its lame ass dropped for pretty much all the same reasons.

When I read over all the summaries of the series set to debut for spring, Shangri-La was the only thing that really caught my eye. It’s premise sounded really interesting, and you can’t say the idea of using a country’s carbon emissions as a currency isn’t awesome. Unfortunately, that’s this series one and only merit. The premise doesn’t even translate into a plot because I watched seven, long and arduous episodes, and I still don’t know what the plot is. That’s the only reason I stuck with it so long — I really, really wanted to know what the plot was, but I guess if I can’t find it in seven episodes, then the whole thing’s just a waste of time.

Since there’s no actual plot, each episode is just a string of events about uninteresting characters that the audience is unfortunate enough to be following. This was especially painful for me since I much, much prefer character-driven stories over plot-driven stories, but I didn’t give a damn about a vast majority of the ensemble cast, and the few that do seem kindasorta interesting don’t have very many scenes. I could not sympathize with Kuniko, especially since she seemed so purposeless while also being popular for no reason. It didn’t make sense to me, and all her subsequent struggles were just incredibly boring.

Her supporting cast was similarly unsympathetic, especially since we’re given no background on how the current government system has been mistreating the populous. Nobody’s motivation was clear. The grandmother’s secrecy and decision not to tell Kuniko anything was a frustrating and probably pointless excuse to delay the plot. Ryoko was more of a poorly done evil caricature than an actual character. It really annoyed me that they created another character named Major Kusanagi. Momoko’s antics seemed too forceful to be humorous.

The only character that interested me was the lolipop girl; unsurprisingly, that was because she was the only one that seemed to be involved with the plot, whatever it is. Naturally, she only ever shows up briefly and is cryptic with a lot of things she says. Like Kurokami, the main problem with Shangri-La is that it’s difficult to relate to or sympathize with any of the characters. What makes Shangri-La worse than Kurokami is the fact that we don’t even know most of the characters’ motivations. Why are they doing what they’re doing? What are they trying to accomplish? Why should we care?

You can maybe infer that Metal-Age is trying to expose whatever government conspiracy took place however long ago, and you can also maybe say that Kuniko wants to find a way for everyone to “live happily,” but the former is too much of a given, and the latter is too general to be interesting.

I guess GONZO really is ready to kick the bucket then. Maybe I should have known it would be bad when we get really bad fanservice in the very first scene of the first episode? What a disappointment. Crunchyroll’s subs were good, too, and even though the character designs were kind of shoddy (Japan, please stop trying to pass twelve year-olds off as legal), the animation was pretty nice, and the music was decent too. But we all know that those things don’t hold up a show.

It’s a shame, I guess, because the animation is pretty damn slick and the music is interesting. The fight scenes are pretty from a distance, but they’re painfully boring to me. It’s because I feel utterly detatched from all of the characters involved so I don’t care about the outcomes. I don’t care about Keita because he’s whiny and generic and I just couldn’t bring myself to feel sorry for his sobstory. It’s just too convenient. I don’t care about Kuro because she tries too hard to be cute and there’s nothing about her personality that’s interesting at all. I don’t care about her desire to kill her brother, and I don’t even care enough to want to find out more about whatever the hell she is.

The premise was all right enough. The idea of dopplegangers sounded neat enough, but the series has been moving too slow on that front for me to care. The cleverly disguised (or not) antagonists are sneaking around in the background with those snatches of plot, but it isn’t prominent enough to be meaningful. It’s a damn shame. I might continue with the manga since it’s so vastly different from the anime — I don’t doubt that I would have had an easier time sympathizing with Keita if he had been a good-natured computer programmer instead of an emo high school student, and being able to sympathize with the protagonist is pretty key for me. Unfortunately, it’s harder for me to sit down and read manga than it is for me to pop in an episode of an anime.

It’s further disappointing because Kurokami was the only new series I picked up this season. Now that I’m dropping it, the only current series I’m following are Soul Eater and Gundam 00 S2, both of which will be ending soon (well, for the latter, I guess it’s kind of a relief). I have no idea how well the Kurokami dub’s been doing on IATV, but it seems to me that they could have picked a much better series to be groundbreaking with. Then again, they never did announce any kind of official online stream, so maybe it was all irrelevant after all. Not enough people get IATV for it to matter.

Man, today’s been quite the lame day. :\

There is merit in being sneaky and unexpected, and honestly, I’d say Higurashi’s story and plot is pretty unique, but it really failed at getting me to care. Because I felt nothing towards any of the characters, I wasn’t really even inclined to try and solve the mystery myself, especially when it wasn’t even obvious that it was a mystery at first. It was just, lol retcon! Is it just me? Am I just too stupid to figure things out myself or too stupidly impatient to not wait and see? Maybe, but I have a hard time imagining that anyone was really drawn to the cast. It was a generic assortment of moe girls and your usual loser guy. Who cares? Why should anyone care?

Maybe I’m just too used to characters driving the story and not the other way around.

I’m really curious though, did anyone else start Higurashi and not feel like finishing it at all?