Animedragon

I've just finished True Tears. An interesting little series with lots of mixed up relationships between the main characters, but everyone seems to have got their lives sorted out in the end. I feel like a change of pace for my next series, so I'm going to start on Starship Operators.

If we're talking non-anime series, one of my top favourites is "The Prisoner". I've visited Portmeirion, the village in North Wales where the series was filmed, a couple of times.

I found school depressing most of the time. As Douglas Adams put it "the hours were good, but the individual minutes were pretty bad". I never liked maths either, actually, it wasn't so much as case of not liking maths it was more a case of just not being able to get my head round numbers and understand how they worked. Thankfully I had a job where maths didn't really matter.

I think that technically Please Twins is spin-off or side story not a second season of Please Teacher, but who's worrying about such details. (did you guess correctly which was the twin before it was revealed?) The EF series, ef: A Tale of Memories and ef: A tale of Melodies is one of my favourites and has some great characters and character interactions, but be warned, that Melodies has some slightly disturbing plot lines and is quite tear-jerkingly sad in places. Both series have a rather avant-garde presentation style, which works rather well.

Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions: Take On Me.

Alice 19th is an interesting story by Yu Watase. It's a curious story with romance, action and mysticism all rolled into one. Alice, the main character, is a shy girl who learns that words have power, and that there's a special set of words that are very powerful indeed and she has the ability to learn how to use them. But Alice learns, the hard way, that power comes with a price and that that price can be very high. I found this to be a good story, I've read this twice now and would happily read it again.

Crying at the end, or even in the middle, of an anime series isn't all that unusual some anime have a habit of sneaking a tear-jerker scene in when you least expect it. The Chobits manga is a good read and not too different to the anime. Having finished Fushigi Yugi I thought something a little less serious was needed, so I've started watching Please Twins.

I've now finished watching Fushigi Yugi. This time round I'm not going to bother watching the OAV's. They're not bad, but not as good as the TV series.

A variation on the theme: Have you ever bought a new series and after the first few episodes thought "why did I buy this" and then changed your mind about it by the time you've watched all of it? Well I have. Here's a couple of examples from my recent(ish) acquisitions: First up: Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions. I purchased this series having seen a couple of clips from it on YouTube and it looked interesting, but by episode 5 I was beginning to think I'd made a mistake buying it because the episodes appeared crazy and made no sense. But I stayed with it and by the end of the series I liked it enough to buy the second series and the final movie. I rewatched the series a couple of month's later and found that because I now knew the whole story those crazy first few episodes were important to introduce the characters and their personalities. Next up: Golden Time. When I first watched this I thought it was a series of unrelated one-off story episodes with no overall storyline but as I continued with the series I realised that there was an overall storyline, but it seemed to stumble along and take a long time to get going. I enjoyed the series much more the second time round because I knew the backgrounds of the characters so their actions and reactions made a lot more sense. Does anyone else want to share similar examples?

The last place I worked in still had a piece of kit that used a dial-up connection and every time it decided it need to contact the outside world I'd hear those familiar dialling and data negotiation tones. As this was in 2017 everything else in the room that needed external data access was connected to our broadband line I never found out why that one device was still on old tech.

I saw a couple of episodes of 3X3 Eyes on TV back in 1996, then about a week later found the whole series on VHS in the local record shop. I followed 3x3 Eyes with Gal Force New Era, and that was it..... I've been buying and watching anime ever since.

Cardcaptor Sakura has some great characters. But I think, after much thought, the vote has to go to Sakura herself. Who's your favourite?

I agree about Madoka Magica. It's so very different to the usual magical girl series and it's not until you watch it a second time that you start to understand the relationships, situations and motivations of the various characters.

Do you find that an anime is better the second time you watch it? What I find is that first time round I'm following the plot carefully, but the second time I know what happens so I notice the little details and usually enjoy the series more. Does anyone else find this?

Years ago it seemed like every high street had a video rental shop, I don't know of any round my way now. I've never used one anyway because I prefer to own rather then rent. I did have a look in my local one once, just to see what they had, and I was amused to see that everything in the shop had a sticker on it saying "please rewind before returning" even the DVDs had this sticker which suggested to me that the shop staff didn't understand how DVDs worked.

Forums back then were often busier, but most of what we posted was, quite honestly, complete rubbish.

I've just started re-watching Fushigi Yugi.

Was like. It died out due to lack of contributors many years ago.

Some of those deserve to be forgotten because they were pretty bad, other's should still be remembered as they are quite good. I leave it up people to make their own minds up about which is which.

This place can't be more insane than alt.fan.animation.anime

Both versions are good.

I spent my Christmas gift money on the Blu-ray box set of K-On and watched it at the beginning of January. It's an enjoyable series with a good cast of characters and is definitely on my 'rewatch' list.

I've just finished watching Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions, both series and the final movie, it's got a great cast of characters and is good fun to watch with a nice Ballance of serious and crazy scenes. I like Rikka's imaginative descriptions of things and events.

It has to be Tomoya Okazaki and Nagisa Furukawa from Clannad.

For me it has to be Miyuki Kobayakawa and Natsumi Tsujimoto, from You're Under Arrest, they're Tokyo's very own Dynamic Duo