...was "Oh, time to turn in a quest!"
That's Sawako from Kimi ni Todoke, but they don't always draw her like that.
Here she is the way they normally draw her, but wearing her hair in ponytails for soccer practice:
They do draw her like the first picture a lot, for comedic effect, but never that way for the serious or heartwarming moments. Despite her status as "creepy-chan" she's actually supposed to be cute.
...have I mentioned that I really like this series?
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While trying to find out who pointed me at it, I found this post by Wonderduck about the Haruhi story arc "Endless Eight".
SPOILERS HERE! Haruhi spoilers, I mean.
That one linked Steven Den Beste's rant about it, with this quote coming from his reply to a comment: "Doing it in two episodes, or even in three, might well have worked with the fans. Using six episodes is extremely poor judgment."
Steven's post has this link from Mahou Meido Meganekko which asks incredulously, "Are You Out of Your Alledged Mind?
So let me get this straight… There’s going to be a total of SIX iterations of the time loop in the Endless Eight arc?"
No, eight.
...at the time, everyone was shocked and dismayed that KyoAni was repeating the same episode over and over, but what would they have thought if they'd known it would be eight episodes? Out of a 14-ep series?
END SPOILERS.
Incidentally it looks as if Wonderduck was not the person who pointed me at that series. I know it wasn't Steven Den Beste, either, as he'd run screaming from this kind of anime. There are precious few anime bloggers I actually read habitually, and I don't think they all read me as a matter of course, so a bleg ("Was it you?") will probably be ineffective.
(Considering how much he liked Kanon I think the Duck would like Kimi no Todoke but that's neither here nor there.)
B Gata H Kei has really surprised me by being entertaining, a lot more than I thought it would be.
Basic premise: a girl named Yamada (no first name given) wants 100 sex friends (male) but wants to lose her virginity to a guy who's also a virgin. The series (as of ep 3) is all about her attempts and failures at seducing the guy.
The story is actually good because we can see how things are going in Yamada's brain even if she herself doesn't understand what's happening to her feelings for the guy, whose name is Kosuda. She keeps telling herself that all she wants is to have sex with him (once) so she can get on with her plans for having 100 casual sex partners.
All the characters are likable, even Yamada, who is doing her damnedest to be a slut (Ep 2--buying condoms--LOL) because we can see that what she wants and what she is likely to end up with are two different things, and that at her core the latter is what she really wants anyway: should things turn out as I expect, she'll be shocked and surprised to realize that's what she wanted all along.
Minus points for being censored, of course. Some of it I understand, but censoring an image which is already censored? Really?
I'll have to see the DVD release, I guess.
* * *
...and just now I discovered that BakaBT has the OST for Kimi ni Todoke as well as the anime. I have no idea where I got the anime from--not BakaBT--but I really like the music, so there we are. (Naturally it's in FLAC format rather than MP3, so I have to convert it before I can dump it to the MP3 player. Argh etc.)
* * *
My ebook reader ships in one week. Not that I'm counting.