"There’s one way to make everyone happy. Each person has to make the person dear to them happy with their own strenght. If you make your one special person happy like that, then everyone can become happy. Definately." - Alice

And so we come to the ending of Mahou Shoujotai. I kindof feared something like this would happen. It looks too much like the "and they lived happily ever after"-ending, which I sortof despise. Although, this was to be predicted… everything lined a bit to much up for an ending like this. It’s such a shame that the weak point of one of the best series ever has such an ending.

Anyway, tomorrow, I’ll probably have the review up.

Fruits Basket, the concept of a family in which the members turn into an animal of the chinese zodiac when they hug a member of the opposite sex. There isn’t really a story holding this together. Just the main person living her live alongside the family, and meeting different family members. Still this works out pretty well.

The power of Fruits Basket lies in the fact that it’s excellent in creating and developing characters. Each one of the huge cast has something unique and even an extremely well developed story of his/her own. This goes along with the incredible writing talents of the writers, which give birth to some of the most impressive speeches seen in anime.

This show also has a healthy dose of comedy stuffed in it. It works pretty well, mostly in the first thirteen episodes. At the second half the jokes become a bit more forced and repetitive, unfortunately.

One thing that turned me off a bit is that in the second half, some characters are introduced just for the heck of it and to fill up some episodes. It just felt like they had nothing to do with the main characters. I would’ve liked to have seen a bit more of the other ones.

Why you should watch this: if you like heavy drama with lots of very interesting characters, then you should watch this.

This episode was so cool. It starts out as a regular jigoku-shoujo story. A girl with a talent for acting gets surpressed by her famous adoptive mother. We see her acces the website and call Emna Ai. The same ritual, blah blah. But somehow the pacing is a bit too fast, and a few questions are left unanswered. Then, however, we get to see that the girl is actually an enormous SOB, and the mother is the one with the good intentions. When she gets her role taken away from her by an unknown girl, she decides to take revenge upon her, calls a couple of guys and they do something horrible to the girl that took her part. After that, it really gets awesome. I won’t tell what happens, but I was extremely amused by the sudden plot twist. The creators carried it out perfectly.

I also think I’ve figured out the power of Jigoku Shoujo: the element of surprise. The creators build a certain premisse and overall repetiveness up, maintain it, and suddenly break it at just the right time. This has an awesome effect.

Like I said before: it’s been a long time since I saw the last episode of this. I believed that I’d seen up to number twenty-three. Just now I realize that I made a slight error in my calculations, making me miss the twenty-third one. It would probably have featured the downfall of the boys of the black rose. (note to self: track that episode down)

Anyway, this episode featured the start of a new season. If you’d ask me to describe it in just one word, I’d reply with "refreshing". The boys from the black rose were good in order to show some in-depth character development of some of the major an minor characters. It really felt like I got to know the personages more and more. However, it also felt a bit empty. The black rose had nothing to do with the main story and I also felt like some important characters were neglected a bit.

Therefore it was nice to see that this season will revolve around the members of the student counsel again. Sayonji and Touga are back, in all of their bishounen-ness. We also get some very obvious hints that Akio is some sort of bad guy. In what ways and how, when, why which and where are still a mystery. The recycled cells are replaced with old ones, Utena gets a new sword, the music gets even more awesome, and the shadow-play-girls are back against the walls where they were in the first season.

The story certainly takes a twist in the good direction this time. I liked the overall plot twists. I’m really curious now who End-of-the-world might be. It also seems that Anthy finally acts beyond her role of the rose bride, the student counsel meetings are just as awesome as ever (this time with baseball!) and the shadow-play-girls are as weird as ever. The stairs also seemed to have made way for a modern elevator (don’t you love the modern-day sciende?). All the desks and body outlines shown on the battlefield also got their modernization, as they were repaced by red sport cars, sticking out of the arena, literally (do NOT ask me why). My only complaint is that I almost couldn’t take yaoi-scented scenes.