It’s been a long wait, but finally my beloved Kaiba is back. And what an episode does it return with! For once, Kaiba doesn’t appear in it at all, and instead it’s all about Popo, and how the bastards killed off his own mother to keep up his appearances. As it turns out, she once changed his body, which is against the rules of the organization Popo works for. That does make me wonder why Neiro was just allowed to change into Ger and all…

In any case, we indeed learn that there is another Warp besides Kaiba. This guy probably was the one who shot Neiro. If I understood things correctly, then Neiro’s body was shot, and she ended up in Hyohyo. It seems that her memory got split in two: one part works for Popo, and the other one went along with Kaiba.

That still leaves the question to: which Warp is the real one? What we know is that the body that Kaiba was in in episode one was the genuine indestructible body of Warp. I believe that the Warp we see in this episode is the real Warp who killed off those hundreds of people. Then at one point, he ran into this “Kaiba”, which stole his body. Kaiba then met Neiro and the two fell in love. Warp then tracked down Kaiba and destroyed Neiro’s body, though what I suspect is Popo’s meddling, Kaiba escaped him, somehow causing Kaiba to lose his body and get that hole through his body, after which episode 1 started.

What interests me the most is the real link between the plant Kaiba and the human Kaiba. We know that that plant has a lot of an appetite and that it eats memory, but what I want to know is how such a plant ended up being turned into actual memory. What I also want to know: who are on Kaiba’s side in this story, and most importantly: why? Why would the ostrich be working for such a plant? What’s the connection to the memory-guy to all of this?

I must say, that this series knows EXACTLY what makes a good mystery-series. I totally forgot about this, since 2007 was a bad year for mystery-series, but a good mystery-series doesn’t just ask questions, but it forces its viewer to form his own theories about what happened. This is what sets the genre apart from series that have to rely on some obscure side-story that you can only understand if it’s spelled out in front of you.

And indeed, even though I originally thought that Crystal Blaze would be a mystery-series, its mystery turned out to be just a simple back-story and the story focused on storytelling and characters instead. Instead, Shion no Ou’s mystery-plot was simple, yet it knew how to make its viewer guessing about the identity of the murderer, and most viewers already knew exactly what happened when facts were finally revealed. Nijuu Mensou no Musume is about to do the same: the simple question is: what happened to Nijuu Mensou, and there are several theories possible, and enough clues to keep you guessing.

Another great approach to mystery is the one used in Himitsu: it offers you the pieces of the puzzle for each episode, and they only really fall into place when you connect these pieces. Ergo Proxy and Boogiepop Phantom are yet another story: they just provide a few clues here and there and apart from that they make no attempt to help the viewer figure out what happened.

I now see that the series that just feature a huge setting, but withold some of this information at the start aren’t necessarily good mystery-series, and rather use the appeal of the unknown to create tension. I personally loved Dennou Coil, but it was excellent because of its plot, characters and the amount of imagination that was put into the setting. Not because of its mystery, and I’m surprised it took me so long to realize this.

At the moment, I’m wondering whether Real Drive will be able to pull off good mystery. Right now, it relies a lot on the appeal of the unknown, and it’s definitely got my attention about its concept, but interestingly enough, it hasn’t started asking focused questions yet. When this’ll happen, I wonder whether it’ll allow the viewer to speculate about the setting, or whether it’ll just carry the viewer along with its revelations.

For the past few years, I’ve been using AniDB to keep track of the anime I’ve watched. It’s got a clean look with a lot of options for statistics, and I especially like how you can assign priorities to the entries in your wishlist, which helps to give a clear overview over my huge to-watch list. Unfortunately, there are enough reasons to dislike AniDB, and recently another one of them got introduced: the tag-system.

The tag-system basically enables visitors to add their own tags to different anime. I’m not complaining about the ones as “action”, “lost technology” or “randomness” (although I do wonder what makes these so different from AniDB’s category-system). My problem is mainly with the more subjective categories as “Boring”, “Utter Crap” and “Emo Fag”.

So yes, I’m indeed mentioning this in this particular post because Amatsuki has been labelled as “Utter Crap” by god knows who. Other entries I majorly disagree with are Wellber no Monogatari, Mai Hime and Crystal Blaze (under that same tag), and Ergo Proxy, Flag, Higurashi, Jigoku Shoujo, Voices of a Distant Star, Seirei no Moribito, Evangelion, Trinity Blood and Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, which have been labelled as “Boring”. I also wonder what the category “Emo Fag” really contributes…

My problem with these categories, other than that some of my own favourites are amongst them, is that they do absolutely the opposite of promoting anime. If someone was looking for a show to watch, stumbled upon Crystal blaze, only to find it amongst the utter-crap tag, there’d obviously be a small percentage of him, actually checking it out. I’m perfectly fine if you want to say bad things about a series; heck, that’s what stating your opinion is for, but the tag-system is such a ridiculous 4chan-way to do it. It never allows you to state the reasons for having that opinion. Besides, AniDB also has comments, tags and reviews for stating opinions. Heck, I’m still not sure about the difference between all these.

I’m really feeling that AniDB is about to drown into its own features. What’s the purpose of the mylist and why isn’t it integrated with the vote-system? And there are more of these details that gradually make you unable to see the forest because of all the trees that are in the way. So yeah, if any of you knows a better site to keep track of the anime you watch (besides the obvious myanimelist.net), would you care to share it?

Okay, I’ve gone off-topic for a bit too long now… Back to this week’s episode of Amatsuki. This finally sheds a bit of light on Heihachi’s fate. AS it turns out, Tsuyukusa never abandoned him, but instead he saved the guy from being killed by the fox demon. In exchange, he became some sort of servant (?) to the fox-demon. The thing that Bonten did to him in the previous episode was just to read his mind to find out what happened.

I also now finally know the mission that Toki and Kuchiha were going to do: they were going to check up on the guy who cut down the tree that housed the spirit that the fox demon grew up with. It now all makes sense: she was trying to get it back, and because of that rumours of Ayakashi probably started floating around. Now all that’s left is to figure out where the heck Tsuruune and Benitobi have gone to.

And oh my god, Toki and Kuchiha are really cute together as a couple. I’m surprised to see that even the romance in this series went well: it’s there, but it knows exactly when to appear and disappear.

In any case, yet another great episode. Let’s hope that it won’t be over in just two episodes.