Haha, how awesome! Just when I thought that this show had already passed its best point, it just keeps the surprises coming. Seriously, with this series I was expecting the final episodes to be all over the place, like what it did in the middle part of the story, which had so many different plot twists about so many different characters.

Instead, the past few episodes have been the most solid and focused episodes of the entire series. Because of that, it lost the erratic pacing that I liked so much in the rest of the series. Usually when a series pulls this, it gets rather boring, but this episode really was surprisingly good. In fact, it was awesome, and well for the fact that this series has much more than just that pacing: it still has its great sense of characters, plot twists, visuals, music, et cetera. And the slow pacing leading up to the ending actually improved on them: we now can really focus on the central themes of the series. And hey, this series has completely shifted its style of storytelling before, so for once it doesn’t feel like the creators lack inspiration for the finale.

I really liked the reason why Sayoko was freed by one of Ryoko’s henchmen: he discovered that Sayoko was his older sister he had never known, so he decided to be a good brother for once and let her go. While it seems like a rather flimsy reason at first, the more I think about it the more it fits within this series: it ties in very much with this series’ themes of family bonds: families being torn apart, growing away from each other. You see it everywhere in this series: Sayoko lost her daughter, Takehito having lost his little sister, Kuniko taking her grandmother for granted and getting into a fight with her, Karin and the distance from her parents, and there is of course also my theory of Ryouko, being the mother of Kuniko, Mikuni and Kunihito, which is getting more and more likely, which I’ll get into below.

Most of this episode was spent on Mikuni, trying to decide whether it was worth destroying the world for the sake of revenge. The thing is however, that she’s just a little kid: very easily influenced by the scary Ryouko. Ryouko on the meantime really proved to be an excellent villain here, if you can accept that she’s so screwed in her mind that she’s willing to destroy the world, and it was her who hacked into Medusa earlier.

So in the end she did turn into another villain who’s planning to destroy the world, but in my opinion she stands much higher above the usual villains of this type. In a villain, I’m not looking for someone who necessarily has to be morally ambiguous, like these misunderstood good guys. Those people also have their sets of problems. What I’m looking for in a villain is a personality: a well fleshed out character who isn’t a cheap excuse for a bit of conflicts. Well backed-up reasons are a plus, but not necessarily required: I mean, how many evil overlords in the real world are screwed in the head? The reason why I dislike most villains in anime is because they’re too often just paper bags who are there for the sake of having a villain.

And yeah, I’m getting more and more convinced that Ryouko is the mother of Mikuni, Kuniko and Kunihito. The final twist this episode really was an awesome one: I love it when these character who infiltrate the enemy tell nobody of what they’re doing, not even the viewers themselves. I already found that it was strange that he’d suddenly get so close to Kuniko, I already found it weird for the creators to suddenly start establishing a strange romance between him and Kuniko. Now everything makes sense!

And really, Ryouko looked so much like an angry mother who’s urging her child along when she took Mikuni along with her. She really had that feeling of parental authority when she dealt with her. And besides that, I can’t think of any reason why she would want to obey the successor of Atlas, other than some sort of strange and deranged case of family bonds, in a series which is full of broken up and dysfunctional families.

Out of all the shows that are going to end in the coming month, the ones that are promising some outstanding endings to look out for for me are the new Mazinger, Shangri-La, Tokyo Magnitude and Phantom. These are the shows which were excellently planned across their total airtime, and are promising to close off with a finale in which everything comes together. There are only a few shows of this caliber every season, and I’m glad to see that this season again has a fine selection of them.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

I’m still amazed at how much the creators are able to cram into just one episode for this series, and still continue to be fresh, original, varied, interesting, charming, and quite a few more adjectives that I’m too lazy to think of.

The episode starts at the beginning of classes on a particular day of bad weather, so everyone arrives with a bad hair day. We also see the members of the Art Club battling the weather in this way, in which Awara is having a bit too much fun and hits Uozumi when he tries to calm her down, and Tomokane’s brother becomes a bit too exhausted from the weather, so he moves to the infirmary to rest.

The next sketch is about a bunch of bottles of very good paint that Yamaguchi has kept with her ever since elementary school (or whatever it’s called in English). Typical of her, she’s never used it because she figured that it’s just be a waste. Next up are a bunch of short sketches about the bad weather, including Yamaguchi getting blown away and a role play in which Awara and a new character are trying to imagine what the sun and the clouds must be thinking when they cause weather like this.

Next up we see the characters sharpening their pencils the old-fashioned way: I never realized it, but it is indeed ideal if you want to determine the shape of your pencils, and what kind of stroke they’ll leave. Tomokane however, takes this way too serious and nearly cuts off her entire pencil.

We then learn that Noda also has a sibling, who apparently works part-time as a model, and sometimes appears on the cover of some fashion magazines. She’s in the same class as Uozumi, and for some reason we never get to see her face. A running gag of this episode is also that Oomichi seems to have just about everything along with her that people might need, including some sort of dye colour (yeah, the focus is all over the place in this episode: you’ll never know what the next scene is going to focus on) and a cold drink, which turns out is something that she just bought with Nozaki.

Yamaguchi then collapses and gets brought to the infirmary. Interestingly enough, Tomokane is so busy with other things that she doesn’t even recognize her own brother, and they leave. As it turns out, Yamaguchi didn’t eat enough and therefore collapsed, but she turns out to be fine after a bunch of cookies. She then comments on how sturdy the box of the cookies turns out to be.

The next sketch is just… crazy. While taking out the trash with Yamaguchi, Tomokane hears Uomichi and Yasumura complain about how bothersome taking care of the chickens is. What follows is an epic battle between the super sentai version of the five leads, versus a giant GAR chicken in what I presume to be Tomokane’s head. It made no sense at all, but it was absolutely hilarious.

Next up: rain, and a quiet couple of scenes involving characters who forgot their umbrella. As usual with this show when it comes back to topics it used to talk about, it doesn’t just milk these topics, but instead it builds further upon them, including a surprisingly charming scene between Awara and Uomichi.

They then talk about rainbows, and confuse Newton to be its discoverer (”Why is this apple red? Yes, because of its spectrum!”).

If I had to give this series a criticism, then it’s that they overplay Oomichi’s weirdness a bit too often, especially in this episode. Her quirks are often too stereotypical, as opposed to the other four characters who still remain characters when they make jokes about their quirks.

In any case, what this episode was really good at is bringing the school alive: it focused on many different characters spending this day at school at which the weather happened to be rather bad and there was always something going on. I’m really not much of a fan of most moe comedies, but I’m glad that exceptions as this one exist.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Now that it’s September again, I’d like to return to a yearly tradition for this blog in the form of a little contest I hold every year. It basically consists out of a poll of the series that are going to be airing in the upcoming fall season, and me blogging whatever series that received the most votes. In the past, this lead me to blog Claymore, Gundam 00 and Tytania.

Anyway, here are some concrete rules:
- To make a valid vote, drop a comment leaving your selection. You can select up to two series from the upcoming Autumn season.
- The anime with the most amount of votes in the end will be blogged for at least 12 or 13 episodes (in the very unlikely event that the series in question becomes way too much of a chore to cover).
- Here is a list with the shows that are scheduled to air. (At least, that’s what I assume. Notify me if it isn’t complete).
- No direct sequels; that’s just boring and predictable.
- Apart from that, I accept any series with an airdate between September 20th and November 11th.
- Please refrain from spoiling synopsises or staff lists. I’m still trying to enter the Autumn Season with as little information as possible about the upcoming shows, and I’d like to keep it that way.
- The poll will end at September 30, 23:59 GMT. All votes that arrive after that will be ignored.

Here are the current scores:
Kimi ni Todoke - 44
Romance of the Three Kingdoms - 36
Kobato - 34
Kuuchuu Buranko - 31
Winter Sonata - 25
Letter Bee - 23
Armed Librarians: Book of Bantora - 18
A Certain Scientific Railgun - 14
Seiken no Blacksmith - 11
Fairy Tail - 11
Jungle Emperor Leo - 8
Darker than Black - 8
Sasameki Koto - 7
Blue Literature - 7
Nyankoi - 6
Kampfer - 3
Seitokai no Ichizon - 2
Ai no Kusabi - 2
Yumeiro Patissiere - 1
Sora no Otoshimono - 1
Note that with comments that selected three series, I just picked the first two. The people who voted for Darker than Black II and ignored the “No Sequels”-rule can of course always change their votes.

A Second Note: it just turns out that Jungle Emperor Leo isn’t going to be a TV-series at all, but instead just a TV-Special. Those who voted for it can of course change their votes.