Let’s talk about a little thing called the XBAND.

My first exposure to the “online” world wasn’t through AOL or some other prehistoric PC net service. It was through the XBAND that I discovered the slack-inducing magic of interacting with other peeps by means of pixels and text. You slapped this thing into the cartridge port of your SNES or Genesis (SNES for me) and stuck the actual game into the slot on top of the modem. You could play a select few games on the thing, mostly fighting and sports games, and you were lucky to find someone to play with. The only game for it that I really liked was Super Street Fighter, and no one in my area played the game (I literally played, like, two matches the entire time the network was up.). Everyone was all about Killer Instinct. I kinda hated the game, but I had to buy it to take advantage of the fact that it was the only game local XBANDers played.

And yeah, you were limited to people in your local area unless you wanted to shell out cash for each long distance game. And there was no way a broke, jobless high school dude was gonna be able to afford that.

So, yeah, the actual gameplay was pretty shitty on the thing. What made the thing fun was the email and chat functions. It was the first time I had access to this sort of thing. I’d randomly email peeps if I thought they had a cool screen name or bio and talk with them about shit. The character count for each email was pretty damn small, so it was like Twitter if you could only tweet one person at a time.

But I’m writing this post mainly about the chat function. After you played a game, if you put in a secret code before the connection was severed (I think it was Up, Up, Up), you would start up a chat room with the person you just played. Unless you shelled out cash for the XBAND keyboard, you had to use the gamepad to type using the on-screen keyboard. And to make matters worse, it was all in real time. You didn’t type in a message and then hit “send,” everything you typed appeared as you typed it. If you said something, there was no going back. So you had to think ahead before you started plugging in shit.

For the most part, these conversations were idle chat between teenage and college dudes about the sort of shit guys talk about: video games, sports, and girls. I made a few buddies I’d talk to on a regular basis. But that shit isn’t worth an entire blog post. Nope. The XBAND is privy to another embarrassing, soul-crushing moment not unlike this one I wrote about awhile back.

I sucked at Killer Instinct. I would almost always lose against the peeps I played against. But there was one person who I would consistently defeat. Said person had a female avatar. Said person claimed to be female. Said person was pretty nice and all.

Said person also repeatedly wanted me to talk to her. As in call her on the phone. In real life. Even in the Paleozoic year of 1996, there was the assumption that everyone “online” was a guy, so there was that assumption running through my mind. But that isn’t what kept me from calling her up. At worst, I’d get pranked or something and the next time I saw the person on XBAND I’d probably get laughed at. I’d probably be mad but I’d get over it and laugh at it as well eventually. That alone would have made for an amusing story.

But no. That isn’t why I never took this person up on her offer. I didn’t call her because she claimed to be married. She said she was in her early 20s and was bored while her husband was off working, so she wanted someone to keep her company.

Yeah. I got propositioned for an affair over a online game of Killer Instinct. I’m pretty sure I’m the only person in history that can make that claim.

You know what does that for me? The Dirty Pair.

Yeah. Let’s run with this.

Most of these shows revolve around a small cast of characters and the “daily life” shit the do. We see them go through their daily routines. These routines rarely change. There’s not much in the way of development. It’s all about maintaining the status quo and providing the audience with a reliable escapist “release.”

That’s exactly what happens in The Dirty Pair. Kei and Yuri, the titular duo, are very static characters. They start off as variations of the brash, Barbarella-like space chick, all about kicking ass and sexing it up. No matter how many times they get into bad relationships with dudes, run afoul of space bandits, or accidentally blow up planets, they turn right back around and do the same exact shit the next episode. Dirty Pair has the same repetitive, reliable narrative structure that’s inherent to the iyashikei genre. By seeing the characters interact in the same way week in and week out (or in some 20-something minute pattern over the course of several hours if you marathon the damn thing like I did awhile back), you get to “know” them.

The catch is that Dirty Pair and these other iyashikei series find “comfort” in different ways. Something like, say, Tamayura is all about the slow pace and gentle atmosphere and nostalgia and all that stuff that, quite frankly, bores me to death. I guess you could call it comforting in the same way that morphine is comforting, since it dulls your senses and lulls you into an artificial sense of dreaminess. Least that’s how it makes me feel. I ain’t gonna deny anyone their feelings if they genuinely love this stuff.

The comfort derived from Dirty Pair is the sort of visceral explosion-lust that I feel from 80′s action movie shit. It isn’t “exploring” the stylings of the action genre the way something like Black Lagoon or Kill Bill does, it simply is that genre the way people describe iyashikei anime as being pure emotion and atmosphere. In that sense, Dirty Pair is also pure emotion and atmosphere, with the catch being that said emotions and atmosphere all revolve around guns and punching.

That’s what I find comforting and familiar– pure over-the-top violence. And all of that is symbolized by one particular episode of the series.

I wrote about it during last year’s 12 Days thing. During one of the early episodes, the Dirty Pair’s antics results in an entire planet exploding, and this is played off as a gag. By having an entire world destroyed and having said “tragedy” be little more than a joke is as heartwarming to me as when people gushed over that little kid in Usagi Drop doing something especially cute and all of their paternal/maternal instincts kicked in.

So I get y’all when y’all get all mushy over this heartwarming stuff. I just have to see an entire civilization perish for those emotions to kick in.

So just call it what it is: unsubbed, untranslated, “pure and untouched by filthy American pig-dogs,” whatever. Yeah, I know, those words have more syllables and take longer to type. Not every word can be grunted out with the least amount of effort possible. Get over your fear of intermediate vocabulary skills.

Damn. I just wanted to post that rant. Now I have to actually talk about Milky Holmes.

Everything that I said in this post has stood the test of time, and all of that “turning moe tropes into the downfall of society” stuff has been amplified this season. For one thing, the girls have completely forgotten that they’re supposed to be detectives and shit. The first episode has them traipsing about some farming commune they created to fill the void in their hearts. They’re genuinely happy to be farming and raising animals and all that. But the other characters aren’t gonna put up with that.

See, the Milky Holmes girls have deviated from their intended destiny. The show’s supposed to be about detectives, but they’re not down with that anymore. It’s getting in the way of them being fanciful girls doing cute shit. That detective biz is hard and requires work and effort and doesn’t let them sit around and eat and sing songs and further the plot. It’s kinda like how these shows present some premise that brings all of the characters together then quickly pushes that premise to the side in favor of parfait porn or some cute bit that ends with everyone all moe-moe-kyun. That deviation from the premise is one of the universal traits of the trend– use it to gather the characters and then get down to what the audience really wants. K-On ain’t about a music club, it’s about cute girls doing cute shit. Moretsu Pirates, thus far, is more about cute girls doing cute shit than it is about space pirates and privateering. It’s what the audience wants, but it’s also a trend that’s easy to spoof. And that’s what Milky Holmes is doing. The other characters see the girls aggressively and intentionally drifting off-course and they’re doing their damnedest to lure them back to the show’s original intent. And they do so by burning down Milky Holmes’ farm and bulldozing the wreckage. It’s beautiful stuff.

But the show’s upped the ante as well. In what’ll likely be one of my 12 Moments this year, the first episode ends with their farm’s rooster catching fire. That could have been a simple sight gag. Anime peeps catch on fire all the time and are perfectly fine the next episode. But no. That cute little rooster, who I was hoping would be buddies with their pet cat (leading to some late-season episode where the two of them go on an adventure where their meowing and clucking is translated into subtitles), dies. The next episode opens with the girls crying over their farm while merrily devouring the barbequed corpse of their beloved pet. They ain’t subverting anything here. This is pure, malicious, mean-spirited, evil humor at its best. Even the beloved mascot character isn’t safe from Milky Homles’ anarchy.

There’s been plenty of other awesome bits thus far. The second episode has the girls using their “toys” without even realizing it, and the only one who does recognize the signs is the quiet, demure, polite one whose so-called positive traits are her downfall. If she was more assertive, and thus ruined her moe appeal, she could have solved all of their problems. The girls would realize that their drive and goal-oriented attitude in that episode allowed them to regain their powers, but by the time the chick’s able to voice her thoughts it’s too late. And the latest episode has another bit with their toys, where the Yellow Milky Ranger thinks she’s using her mechanical hacking skills to stop a conveyor belt when in fact all she’s done is hit the off button with her metal stick thingie.

And, well, there’s a hell of a lot more going on than all of this subversive, nasty, cynical shit that I love. But I gotta leave some stuff for you to see for yourself. Because you’re gonna go and start watching this shit right now if you aren’t already. Seriously. Watch Milky Holmes. It’s awesome. Best show of the season (with High School Dudes close behind).

And speaking of High School Dudes, “Nichibros” is also a lame name. I already made this joke over Twitter, but it’s worth repeating: The damn nickname sounds like a Taco Bell entrée. Do you really want an awesome anime such as High School Dudes being associated with a fucking Enchirito? If you’re gonna do that, at least call it something like Crunchy Boys Supreme. Go all out with the lameness.

And back to Milky Holmes. I’m not one to do all that “shipping” shit, but… Twenty X Cordelia. Yes.

Also Also Also: The Milky Holmes girls are so awesome that it only takes four of them to embody the Seven Deadly Sins. But that’s another post that I’ll never write.

So I watched Delinquent in Drag. It’s another one of these old school OVAs that I never got around to watching back in the day, except this is one that the “I’m still new to anime and think it’s all smart and unique and shit” me literally scoffed at. It wasn’t one of those hyperkinetic blood orgies like Ninja Scroll, and it wasn’t some pseudo-intellectual pontificating thing like Utena or whatever, so I ignored it. My tastes have hit their half-lives several times since then and have degraded well past their initial standards, so now that I’ve actually seen this thing I was kinda amused.

I have no idea how much the original manga (assuming there is one) predates or postdates Ranma 1/2, but that’s basically the vibe I got from this. I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole “crossdressing martial arts” connection between the two was one of the reasons why the damn thing got licensed in the first place. The premise behind the thing is that a dude gets mistaken for a girl when registering for a new school, so they give him a girls uniform. Being the sort of barely cognitive Neanderthal that most Go Nagai males tend to be (and I mean that as an endearing compliment), the dude just rolls with it and wears the uniform. It’s one of those “if he were actually a functioning human he’d never go through with this” decisions that almost every comedy is predicated upon, so you kinda gotta roll along with it just as much as the main dude. If he actually said something about it you’d just get five minutes of him going to the front office of his school, setting things straight, and that’d be that. Comedy sucks when you start trying to be all rational about it.

So this dude goes to school, making no attempt to actually look like a girl beyond his clothing, and he proceeds to get into a bunch of martial arts fights. It’s pretty much the same exact shit that goes down in every episode of Ramna 1/2– some misunderstanding comes about, or someone says the wrong thing to someone else, and everyone ends up trying to beat the shit out of each other over it. First the dude makes the mistake of sticking up to some poor sap of a nerd who’s being bullied by the school’s token girl gang. Once he makes short work of them the principal takes notice of him and realizes that the main dude has some pendant or some shit and wants it. So she does the same sort of thing that Principal Kuno would do in Ranma 1/2: she puts a bounty on the dude’s head and has all of the school’s clubs track him down in a sequence that ends up playing like that parody of The Warriors from that one episode of American Dad (Except, you know, made 20 years before said parody and at least 10 years before it was “cool” to parody The Warriors. And by “cool” I mean “when the internet started to churn out memes based on any vaguely interesting movie that’s vaguely nerdy.”).

And that’s about it. It ends even more abruptly than most OVAs from the era. The dude beats the judo club’s only member in an amusingly twisted and anticlimactic manner and its over. Other clubs still wanna beat the shit out of him. The principal (or whoever the hell this chick is, they never really say) still wants the dude’s pendant because, like, her cat has a matching one or something. The dude is still mistaken for a girl despite trying to molest the only girl that’ll give him the time of the day. Literally nothing is resolved at the end, but it ends anyway.

Yeah, the only real reason why I found this amusing is how it reminded me of Ranma 1/2. It begins with the sort of chase scene you’d expect from Ranma. The main dude and his dad are running away from something. You don’t know that it’s the main dude’s mom at first. All you see is some silhouette cracking a link of chain as if it were a whip. The resulting chase destroys half the neighborhood and nearly kills one dude when he merges with a trash can Katamari-style. It’s a shame that, like, Devil Man or Enma-kun or Cutie Honey didn’t pop up out of nowhere and joined the chase like one of those Ranma opening sequences where the entire cast ends up chasing after one another all because Happosai stole someone’s bra or whatever. That woulda been awesome.

There’s a few little outrageous touches that would be kinda fucked up if it weren’t for the fact that it’s a Go Nagai anime. The main dude’s mom is only 11 years older than him. And yeah, she’s his biological mother. She had a kid when she was 11. In a more recent anime that’d feel like some sort of lolicon fetish shit, but in something by Nagai it just feels like a part of his demented logic. He ain’t making the mother that young because “OMG I can have an 11-year-old bride too!” He’s doing it because he’s screwed up like that. He’s like the shock rocker of anime, doing it just to get a rise and/or a laugh out of you.

Can’t say Delinquent in Drag is all that, but it was amusing enough. People beat up other people, then people beat up more people. Then there was some more beating. Yeah.

Call Me Tonight is the only time adolescence/puberty/whatever has been portrayed with any degree of realism in anime. Screw FLCL and all that noise. None of them got down to the truth: all those hormones and shit turn you into some sort of monster that’s virtually unrecognizable from your previous self. There’s no fond memories of this shit, no matter how much you want to believe otherwise. That’s what Call Me Tonight is all about.

Some generic anime dude discovers that he blacks out when he masturbates. Being a horny teenage dude, instead of doing the sensible thing and not jack off, he keeps on doing it, only to awaken to a wrecked room and torn clothes. And again, like the stupid kid he is, instead of going to see a doctor or something like that, he calls what seems to be a teenager sex help line operated by cute teenage girls who are probably below the legal working age. The girl he talks to agrees to meet him in person so she can see this “monster” for herself.

Girl flirts with dude. Dude reveals to us that more than just his dick hulks out when he gets hot and bothered– the dude literally turns into a tentacled monster and remains that way until his urges calm down. And he does this in public. It’s just like one of those awkward adolescent moments where your pants get just a little too tight at just the wrong time and you can’t do anything to hide the fact, except I’m assuming you lost control of yourself and tried to eat your waitress. Maybe you lost your cool and chased her around the restaurant, but I doubt you actually had any intention of eating her.

And from there, things play out in the way you’d expect it. The girl doesn’t mind that the dude’s a monster. Some other peeps find out about this dude and alert the local gang boss, who happens to be your stereotypical long-skirted yanki type. She lures the couple to an abandoned building along with her crew to have their way with them. I know we can all relate with that bit, what with having a little public mishap in the pants that leads to being targeted by rapist thugs and their bad girl leader. The details may be different. Maybe it was the local rich girl and her entourage of football players in your case, but we know the situation. And you remember how you totally transformed when said girl forced herself upon you and couldn’t revert back? We may not have grown as many extra heads as this dude does in the final scene, and we may not have been shot by bazookas in order to try to calm us down, but we can never forget when we realized that all of our adolescent, hormonal problems were nothing more than the same sort of alien possession everyone has to deal with at that age.

It really helps to see an anime put everything in such a realistic perspective. Our youth isn’t about dealing with peer pressure, relationships, family problems and the like. It’s all about how we change from innocent children to mad, demented teenagers controlled by ancient forced beyond our comprehension, and our greatest formative moments revolve around accepting that fact and then conquering it with our indomitable human wills. Only then can we truly become young adults.

I guess it was going for the whole “weird situation” vibe, but it totally floundered. It’s your usual “outsider arrives in a small town and he notices that weird shit is up” scenario– the sort of horror that peeps who have ever been to an actual small town would write about because anything that isn’t urban chic is evil or whatever. Sometimes that can work. Twin Peaks rocks. Peeps love Shiki, even if it kinda bored me. One of my favorite Japanese movies is Goju, and it’s all about a yakuza dude tracking down his boss in some small Japanese town and it was totally whacked out.

But Another just doesn’t “get” how this shit is supposed to go down. The music is constantly buzzing in the background, trying to evoke some sort of unsettling mood, but it keeps playing even when it shouldn’t be there. Dude meets with all of the kids from his school? BRRRRRRRMMMMM! Dude’s grandmother calls him for breakfast? BRRRRRRRMMMMM! I think they’re trying to make this mood oppressive or something, as if there’s some heavy burden on the city and a secret hidden behind every corner, but by always being there it loses all of its meaning.

The dialogue is the same. Everyone talks as if anything they say will reveal some major mystery, and they don’t want this outsider to be in on their secret shame. But how do they do this? They have everyone pause when they want to say something. Everyone reacts in the same way. That’d be cool if this was some sort of Village of the Damned situation, where there’s some omniscient presence controlling the town or whatever, but we’ve already been let in on the town’s secret before the credits rolled.

The first episode opens with two kids telling some ghost story. A girl dies in a classroom. Someone acts as if she never died. Everyone starts to act the same way. They keep this up until that class graduates from school. It’s pretty obvious that this is the town’s secret, and they’re still dealing with the aftermath of this situation. And when the mysterious eye patch chick comes along and one of the characters claims not to see her, it’s also obvious that she’s some sort of ghost or whatever and that she’s probably tied into this secret. Maybe she’s the kid that died, or maybe she’s something else.

At the same time, all of this also feels like some generic high school drama. If it weren’t for the pervasive music and that opening scene, all we’d be left with is a sickly kid moving to a new town and meeting some new people. Even the “ghost” or whatever she is talks to him like your typical Rei/Yuki clone. It’s like someone took the latest cookie cutter JC Staff anime and replaced its generic anime BGM with the soundtrack to The Grudge 27 or whatever sequel it’s on this week.

Yeah. That’s not how you make a horror story, man.

But all of that is just shit I spouted out to rationalize why I didn’t give a damn about the first episode of Another. You know what bothered me when I was actually watching it? That eye patch. Not that it’s a weird fetish or anything. That isn’t what bothered me. What irked me was that it’s one of those medical eye patches you’d wear right after having surgery or getting injured or something. Assuming this is a constant part of this chick’s character design (and all the promo art seems to suggest this), does she change out eye patches every day? And if so, wouldn’t it be more cost-effective to buy a real patch? If she’s gonna be sporting this thing for a long time, maybe she should look into something that’s a little more fashionable? This is an anime, after all. I’m sure there’s someone in the animeverse that sells bedazzled eye patches or something like that. Or maybe her school has a strict dress code. Maybe someone can whip up a patch that fits the school’s rules. It could have the school’s logo or something. And if she isn’t changing out that eye patch every day, damn, it must be letting on a serious stench. Even ghosts need to think about shit like that.

Then I realized I superimposed Rinne no Lagrange’s set-up on top of Symphogear’s crazy fluorescent alien shit. Like, I seriously thought the main chick suplexed a DayGlo slime before making with that creepy shadowed smile.

I think my brain is trying to amass a good anime out of the pieces of all of these half-good first episodes I’ve been watching.

Everything that’s good about Symphogear comes from the action scenes. These aliens are pretty damn cool. You have your slime-spouting giant ones, that are like ooze artillery or something. Then you have the slimes those things spit out, which dart about and devour people. Or make them disintegrate. Or something. The way people die when those things get a hold of them is pretty gruesome, since it doesn’t really seem to hurt them so much as it makes them cease to exist piece by piece while they’re fully aware of their impending demise. And people are well aware of this fact, so they see it coming. It’s pretty scary shit. And then you have those bird-like ones that spiral down like those bat things from Metroid. If I had to die at the hands of these aliens, I’d rather have one of these things kill me. They just splatter you all over the place all quick-like when they impale you. Quick and easy. That’s my kind of monster-induced death. And then you have those foot-soldier dudes that hold their hands up in an awkward pose like some sort of Ultraman monster-of-the-week. I’d totally buy a vinyl toy of them.

And I’m really digging how the names of the characters’ special attacks get flashed across the screen, with each character seeming to get their own personalized font and whatnot. I hope they stick with that, regardless of how much some people might find it repetitive after awhile. Just so long as they bust out new moves every episode or so. We don’t want it to be the same attack every episode.

And really, that’s about it. It’s a lot of flash and style, but it was enough to keep my attention once things got rolling. The school scenes were as lame as you’d expect, but they were thankfully brief in this episode. I’m sure that’ll change as things go along, but who knows. I wasn’t expecting this to be a kinda gory monster invasion thing. Maybe they’ll spare us from the banality of school life.

On the other hand, Bodacious Space Pirates was neither Bodacious nor Piraty. Sure, the main character has been told that she’s the daughter of a former space pirate and a dead space pirate, and now some peeps want her to take over her dad’s space pirate ship, but that’s about it. Other than a couple of lines of exposition and a really crappy “action” scene that consisted of two pictures of guns and lots of flashing lights, the first episode was the same as every single other “peeps at a high school doing high school shit” anime ever made. New teacher arrives. New student arrives. New student is haughty or arrogant or knows something or whatever background detail is needed to explain why she isn’t instant friends with the main character. There’s maid cafes and drinking tea and… that’s about it.

That’s where  I was going with my initial comparison that fell flat. While Rinne no Lagrage’s first episode wasn’t particularly great, at least it got to the point and gave us some action. Space Pirates (mini)skirted around the whole space pirate issue and gave the larger audience what they really want: high school girls being high school girls. Never mind that some of us are actually interested in space pirates and shit like that.

I’m sure Space Pirates will get around to all that later on, but I gotta make the usual “does every anime have to take place in a high school” complaint. Do fans really need that kind of safe, comfortable “grounding” to buy into any sort of story? Can’t we, y’know, just have an anime about space pirates doing space pirate stuff? I wanna see pillaging and looting and boarding and boozing and space keelhauling. I don’t need all of that tempered with plaid skirts, tea cups, and school desks.

Really, I could have forgiven all of that if the last scene with all of those mobster dudes and the fake security guy trying to kidnap the main chick actually panned out. Instead, we got mysterious transfer girl partaking in a scene of parfait porn while the actual conflict was reduced to the aforementioned screen caps of guns and flashing lights. Couldn’t we have gotten some swashbuckling shit going here? Pirates are way better at swashbuckling than they are at being maids.

And… it’s still just OK.

 It’s the sort of novelty shit that I like. High school girl is also an assassin and has assassiny reactions to everyday stuff. It’s predictable and safe and all that, but it’s the sort of predictable and safe that tastes right. It’s assassins, man. That’s my lifeblood there.

Hell, when I was in school I wanted to be an assassin. Like, seriously. Ever see Grosse Point Blank? That’s how I wanted my ten-year high school reunion to play out. Never mind that I think the movie came out a year after I graduated from high school. It was like the writers of the movie were tapping into my every adolescent fantasy and bringing it to life. Except the love interest is so not my type, but whatever. Can’t be a perfect representation of my dreams.

So Kill Me Baby sounded like my kind of thing. Let’s laugh about a cold-blooded murderer doing cute anime girl shit. Problem is that the comedic timing is way off on this thing. A couple of gags work, but for the most part things linger too long or repeat the punchline or don’t build things up properly or whatever. That’s how things were in the manga, but this is the sort of shit that you can fix if you’re actually paying attention and not just copy/pasting manga art into Flash and coloring in-between the lines with the bucket function. You gotta use the real definition of adaptation, dudes. Don’t just slap what’s already there onto a computer screen. You need to think this shit out and ask questions like “Hey, I’m a smart guy, how can I make this mediocre source material better?”

But yeah, blahblahblah JCStaff blahblahblah money blahblahblah 4komas suck blahblahblah whatever. The makers of this thing don’t care. The fans don’t care because they’ll either eat it up because OMGPONYTAILSMAKEMEHARD or completely dismiss it because it isn’t some in-depth treatise on the human love condition of the post-post-modern high school freshman.

I don’t know, man, I just want my assassin comedies to actually be funny and shit. Being afraid of cockroaches ain’t comedy. That’s, like, an excuse to go buy some Raid. Investigating  rumors of ghosts in the school can be funny. Saying you’re not sure if you can put one in a headlock is funny. Having the punchline of that build-up be “oops, I tripped on a stick” is fucking unfunny.

I don’t want my assassin comedians tripping on fucking sticks. I do want them fulfilling the potential of that ghost/headlock joke. Don’t throw such an awesome set-up away just to give us a pratfall that wasn’t even funny when shit like Bosco and Betty Boop were cutting edge.

But I’ll likely keep watching Kill Me Baby. Such is the pain of being an assassin connoisseur.

This is likely the first and only time I’ll ever make this comment: the one about the middle-aged dudes in a restaurant was better than the one about the amoral badass assassins.

I’m not much for “slice of life” stuff. Y’all know that by now. No need to go off on that rant again. So when I realized Ristorante was playing up that angle, I wasn’t too enthused. Granted, the subjects of the series are a bunch of dudes in their 40′s and 50′s who work at a small, upscale restaurant in Rome, so it wasn’t like it was the usual “obnoxious gaggle of walking schoolgirl stereotypes,” but I was still worried that the dreaded cloud of banality was gonna rain down on me. The series has a few of those moments, where things fixate on a plate of food for just a little too long and little “heartwarming” details like that, but for the most part the series is more concerned with having relationships play out.

Ristorante is more about dealing with divorce, marrying late in life, dealing with being a widower, and dealing with irresponsible family members. Once I realized that, I was no longer afraid of the threat of banality. Instead, I was worried that the series would resort to something that can often be worse: melodrama. The main character is a young twentysomething girl who kinda wants to get back at her mother for ditching her when she was a little kid to marry some guy. Catch is that said guy wasn’t interested in a woman who already had kids, so the mother played it as if she was never married and never had kids. Were this your usual shoujo or josei anime, this would result in pitched screaming fits, dramatic scenes of running away while crying sparkly tears, and other trademark “This is tailor-made to make you sad, you easy to manipulate puppet! Dance and cry for me!” moments. Instead, Ristorante plays things out way more coolly. The daughter’s pissed at the way her mother behaves, but she’s far too stubborn and far too smart to resort to that shit. She plays it to her advantage and basically blackmails her way into a job at her mom’s restaurant– “Get me a job and I don’t tell your husband you’re used good” is her game plan, and she gets away with it. The mother and daughter have some tension between them, but it thankfully never erupts into a pity party or a shouting match. Save for the final episode, but even then it’s toned down far more than what I’m used to seeing in these sorts of dramas.

While all that’s going down, the main girl also starts to develop feelings for one of the waiters at the restaurant. The guy’s recently divorced but still has lingering feelings for his ex. What’s cool about the interaction between the girl and the waiter is that age isn’t really a factor. None of the supporting cast gives them dour looks or speaks behind their back about how uncouth it is for two people who are at least thirty years apart to have a thing for one another. The nature of their attraction is never a source of unneeded drama. Hell, one of the other guys working at the restaurant is married to a girl more than half his age. They address the age issue, but it’s never about that difference. Once the other characters catch on to their obvious feelings for one another, it’s more a matter of them encouraging the two to either fess up or move on– no need to lead anyone on or anything else that can hurt their feelings. And the girl even makes a move early on, clumsily trying to seduce the guy to no avail. They don’t end up as an out-and-out couple at the end of the series, but they actually act on their feelings and deal with their issues. It’s basically the exact opposite of how romances usually play out in anime.

In the end, Ristorante isn’t about trying to be heartwarming or healing, and it isn’t about amping up the drama factor. It’s about what these sorts of slice of life/romance anime should focus upon: people interacting with other people in interesting ways. It’s the exact same shit that makes for a good sitcom. I love Working because the characters play off of each other in an entertaining and amusing way. Their little relationships and conflicts make it worthwhile. The same goes for Ristorante. It’s hardly thrilling, and it isn’t exactly a comedy, but the way the characters deal with one another’s issues and such was genuinely compelling.

So, in its own way, Ristorante helps support my little theory. Every other series David Production has done has been some sort of action-adventure story with its own distinguishing quirks that made them stand out, but Ristorante bucks trends by handling slice of life situations in ways you rarely see in anime.

Also: I went ahead and read the first chapter of the Inu x Boku, the new series that David Production is doing. First appearances make it look like yet another “girl protected by a bishounen” sort of thing, but it has its own quirks to it. The first chapter dealt with dudes robbing tenants of the girl’s apartment complex and a shy girl turning into a giant skeleton. Haven’t read past that first chapter, but it looks like Inu x Boku might have its own tinge of weirdness to it.

Also Also: Yeah, all the dudes in Ristorante Paradiso wear glasses. That little bit is dismissed pretty quickly, since the first episode outright says that it’s due to the mother’s fetish for older men in glasses. And yet her current husband has perfect vision. Goes to show that your fetishes are just that.

Turns out I’d already seen part of one of their first efforts: Dogs: Stray Dogs Howling in the Dark.

When I first realized this, I remembered kinda hating Dogs. I couldn’t remember why, so I decided to give it another shot. Maybe I was just in a bad mood that day or something. At the first episode of this OVA made me think that was exactly the case.

Dogs is split up into four 15 minute stories, each one dealing with a different criminal and their personal problems and shit like that. The first one was pretty cool. An old school assassin returns to his hometown and has to deal with his former protegé. Turns out said protegé murdered the assassin’s girlfriend several years prior and has it out for the assassin as well. Flashbacks show us that these three were something of a makeshift family unit, but the protegé was jealous of how the girlfriend occupied a lot of the assassin’s attention. The kid never had a proper father figure, and the assassin was the closest he had to that and didn’t wanna see him get pulled away by some woman. So he kills her, because that’s how assassins-in-training deal with little issues like that. They don’t run away from home or threaten to never speak to you again, they just put a pillow over your face and shoot you. I guess that solves your issues, but it also kinda makes other people mad and stuff. So the assassin and protegé finally realize how the other one feels, but it’s only after a third-party successfully assassinates the protegé. Again, the only way assassins can fully express their feelings is if someone’s life is lost, so it’s fitting that it takes the protegé’s proverbial death-bed to finally confess his jealousy. It doesn’t make his actions right or anything by your usual moral standards, but in the world of professional killing this is the sort of shit that gets your sanctified.

So that first episode was really good crime drama stuff. Real good Luc Besson shit. So I was thinking I was wrong about Dogs. Even if there’s a drop in quality in the next episode, it couldn’t be enough to ruin all this cool stuff from the first one.

I was wrong.

The second episode is godawful for two reasons. The first is the fact that the assassin from the previous episode is shown to have lived. See, at the end of that first episode, the older assassin gets knifed by a street urchin type. It was a sort of karmic balance– he was paying for his own sins with his life much in the same way that his protegé died in the previous scene. It was a fitting end to his character arc. But in this second episode we find him alive and well. All of that drama and shit from the first episode was rendered null and void.

But what makes this second episode worse is the character it focuses upon. He has a mildly amusing bit where he photographs a mob boss having a little bondage fun with a young boy and has to run for his life afterwards, but it’s the resulting climax that ruins everything. This guy normally avoids violence at all costs, but he snaps if you take his cigarettes away. His nicotine withdrawal turns him into an Uzi-wielding maniac, and he sprays everything in sight if he can’t get his fix. So the other characters use this to their advantage, take his cigs away, and then sic him on the mob boss and his cronies. And on top of that, when he does his spray and pray tactics, he never kills anyone. He unloads clip after clip, but he hits everyone in the shoulder or arm or knee or leg or whatever. ALL of his shots are perfectly placed to wound and not kill. He’s like some sort of druggie Vash the Stampede, and he manages to suck even more than Vash.

That’s what pissed me off about this OVA back when I first watched it. The second episode managed to render the first one meaningless and topped it off with one of the worst characters ever seen in an anime. And I still think this episode is among the worst I’ve ever seen. But unlike last time, I pressed forward and watched the second one. Hell, it’s only 30 more minutes. Even if it sucks as much as the last one, the suffering will be short.

Turns out the second two episodes are considerably better. The third one is probably the best of the bunch. It deals with another assassin and protegé scenario, this time with a swordsman who takes in a girl whose parents he murdered. The assassin trains her, never allowing her thirst for vengeance to die and using it as motivation to improve her skills. But there’s a few catches to this scenario. First, she’s robbed of her vengeance by the swordsman’s partner in crime. This guy turns on the primary assassin so he can finally be freed of his influence. This leads the girl to take him on and kill him in a pretty damn good sword fight. But once he realizes he’s dying, the usurper busts out the truth: it was someone else that murdered her parents, and the initial guy allowed her to believe it was him to give her a reason to keep living. He did this because it was his former student that performed the murder, and you gotta assume that he was hoping he’d be able to train this young girl so that she could take on his former pupil in his stead. Kill a rogue student and get a new one at the same time. That’s some clever assassining there.

The fourth one starts to get into genetic manipulation with some dude that looks like a Devil May Cry reject and some mute chick with angel wings. They toss in the asshole that ruined the second episode, repeating his shtick yet again. The parts without said asshole are decent, but it’s not really worth talking about. The best stuff is in the first and third episodes.

All in all, the thing’s a mixed bag. Two genuinely awesome stories, one mediocre one, and one that makes me hate every living thing on Earth for being of the same carbon-based life as the Uzi asshole. When it’s playing things right, Dogs is great stuff in the vein of more recent assassin-themed movies like The Professional. It takes itself seriously without being completely dour and whatnot while playing off all sorts of crime elements that I dig. But when it sucks, it fucking sucks.

Still, it’s offbeat compared to most anime we see nowadays. The closest thing that comes to it is Black Lagoon. Maybe CANAAN, although its primary sucktastic character was completely different from Dogs’. So far my theory about David Production stands. For whatever reason, they seem to be targeting stuff that isn’t completely beholden to the proverbial new hotness. That doesn’t necessarily mean that said anime is good, but at least it isn’t the same old shit placed in a different school uniform.