Violent? Yeah. Gory? Uh huh. Stupid? Check.
I'll have to see how things go over the course of the rest of the series. But the violence and gore is so over-the-top I can't help but laugh at it; it's utterly ridiculous.
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Potemayo is almost unbearably cute. Moetan is hilarious. And Umisho has plenty of excellent fan service and the story looks like it'll be good, too.
...and so I'm going to be watching more of all four of these.
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How the hell does Guchuko manage to be cuter than Potemayo?
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...I was thinking about Steven Den Beste's identification of Kikuko Inoue as "the queen of tears". I was watching more of Mamotte Shugogetten--episode 16, the one set on Valentine's Day. (Whenever you have a series about high school kids, with coed classes, a Valentine's Day episode is inevitiable as the tides.)
Steven never saw Marmalade Boy; he's not into angst, and MB ain't nothin' but--and I have a feeling that if he had seen MB, he would take Inoue's title from her and award it to Mariko Kouda.
I forgot about how much Miki Koishikawa--the main character of MB, voiced by Mariko Kouda--cries in that series until I heard Mariko Kouda wind up the tear cannons in ep 16 of Shugogetten.
She sniffles and says "Tasuke-sama!" and I hear her sniffle and say, "Yuu!" because 9 out of 10 episodes of MB features Miki sobbing over something or other. I'm serious; if you had a cry-off between Mariko Kouda and Kikuko Inoue, Inoue would lose.
In Shugogetten, Shaorin doesn't cry nearly as much as Miki did. (She doesn't even cry as much as OVA Belldandy did, which is what led Steven to crown Inoue the "queen of tears".) I'm just as happy about that. The series is shounen (not shoujo as MB is) so the target audience will have limited patience for weepy females.
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The best line of the night came from a character in I"s, though: "Seto-kun! Tell Teratani to die, from me!" Yuka-chan's confession is rejected by Teratani on Christmas Eve, and she tells Ichitaka to tell his best friend what she now thinks of him.
I'm down to only one episode of that series left--episode 6--and it's a struggle not to fire up Movie Player Classic and watch it....