Tag: romantic comedy

Maison Ikkoku is, like a fair number of Rumiko Takahashi’s manga from this period (including Urusei Yatsura and Ranma 1/2) – very sitcom esque. It finds a status quo, will venture away from it at the start of an arc, and will generally will return to whence it came at the end, with some forward movement, but not necessarily a lot. Such is the case with the second and third volumes of the manga, where after introducing the cast in the first volume, it’s starting to find its rhythm.

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I’ve reviewed most of the anime adaptations of Hayate: The Combat Butler, and reviewed much of the manga that’s been officially released in English to date (in spite of the official US release being several years behind the Japanese release – which has since ended). When I learned that author Kenjiro Hata’s latest manga, Tonikawa, was getting an anime adaptation, that show quickly ended up on the list of shows on my watchlist for that season, and I was not disappointed.

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In what feels like decades since the last release of Maison Ikkoku, Viz is re-releasing the manga, using the 10-volume format that the series received in Japan, instead of the 15-volume release they used for the previous version, and with a new translation. Since I didn’t get particularly far in the manga with the previous release, I figured now is a pretty good time to start over from scratch.

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I’ve talked a bunch on this blog about my having Autism, and how my Autism informs media I consume. Well, one of the things that my Autism does when it comes to shaping what I do with my personal time is it makes me something of a homebody. I generally need to get a push to go out to do some activities. It doesn’t have to be a hard push, but that push has to be there. This lead to me resonating a lot with Uzaki-Chan Wants To Hang Out, one of the slice of life rom-com anime from the Fall 2020 season.

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This past season of anime started with me having about 6-7 different series I was planning to watch… and then COVID-19 hit and with postponements, that number dropped down to two. One of those was Fruits Basket Season 2, which is still ongoing, but the other was a new Isekai series based on a Light Novel, and one with a premise that really caught my interest – My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! (or HameFura for short).

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Oreimo is a manga which starts well – high school boy Kyousuke discovers his fashionable (as in fashion model) and popular younger sister Kirino is secretly an otaku who is really into games with moe little sisters and decides to bond with her through her fandom while also covering for her with their parents – and then hits an ending where the brother ends up in an incestuous relationship where he ends up marrying that sister. One of the supporting characters in that work is Kuroneko – one of Kirino’s friends in otakudom, who also has a romantic interest in Kyousuke. Now, Oreimo Kuroneko dares to ask the question – what if instead of boning his sister, Kyousuke decides to court his sister’s classmate who is also into him instead.

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After this past year’s horrific fire at Kyoto Animation, I found myself looking at all the animated series that Kyoto Animation had done in the past, and found that I had seen so very few of them, and that they were also all on my to-watch list well before the fire. The body of work of the studio was at a level that I’d compare to GAINAX at their prime. So, having read the first volume of Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid a couple jobs ago, while I was working in Downtown Portland, I decided to bump that show up on the list. Also, as a part of the weekly anime viewing nights I’d started with my parents after I got my Dad into anime, I decided to add that show to the rotation, sight unseen. The results were favorable, with an asterisk.

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Cover of Genshiken Second Season vol. 1

When a creator revisits an old creation, it can be interesting from a reader’s perspective, as we see how changes with time influence that work, whether it’s the Eva Rebuild movies, or Chris Clairmont returning to the X-Men, Timothy Zahn returning to Star Wars, or what have you. With the revival of Genshiken – Genshiken Second Season – the manga elects not to pick up right where the old manga did, and instead skips forward, to a new generation of otaku and a look at how fandom has changed with time, with some interesting results.

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