Reina is always back-to-back with Death.

Queen's Blade is awesome. No, wait. It's horrible. Actually, it's awesome because it's horrible. Or is it horrible because it's awesome? You kinda have to see it for yourself. On the one hand, it is wall-to-wall fan service. And I don't mean soft core Hatsukoi Limited fan service, I mean hard service of the "Look at all the tits! There must be...57 tits!" variety. And also the snake-rape and acid-lactation variety. No, really. And it goes on like that.

I wonder if Tomoe even knows what kind of show she's in.

But it also has A-List seiyuu in nearly every role. Kawasumi Ayako plays the lead girl, an inept middle-child named Reina who manages to lose nearly every single fight. (Really, a victory for Reina is a loss during which she doesn't piss herself.) Ayako isn't in Lafiel mode by any means, but she's taking it a lot more seriously than her He Is My Master role, for example. And it has Noto Mamiko playing an absurd miko character, also dead seriously. I guess it's a chance to get away from her Shimako typecast.

Of course there's a maid character.

And it has Hirano Aya yammering at a thousand words per minute about all sorts of insane crap related to this "Queen's Blade" reality television show she's trying to promote, albeit with only dubious success. That's what Queen's Blade is technically about: a ridiculous contest, but none of the characters seem especially motivated. I can't really blame 'em. Nanael is crazy.

I still think Nanael is making it up as she goes along.

On a whole, Queen's Blade isn't a show you watch for its merits—you watch because it's a curiosity. Still, it's a freak show, not a train wreck. If it were a better show, Queen's Blade would be boring and pointless. If it were any worse it probably wouldn't be any fun. As it is, it's brilliant slack-jawed entertainment and I can't stop watching.

Ueda Kana's cat is pure evil.

Just so you know, Ueda Kana is a blogging fiend. She doesn't update as much as, say, Hirano Aya, but she definitely updates a lot more than I do.

So, Wakusei keeps breaking. As far as I can tell, something in the chain doesn't like the character set of one of the feeds. Most of the time I can fix it by deleting the cache.

What I ought to be doing instead of blogging about it is adding something to my crontab to delete the cache preemptively, or find out if I can disable it all together. In fact, I should probably be doing that right now....

But I'm not, so random posts will continue to break Planet until I get around to fixing it. For now, we can all just blame these problems on Hirano Aya (even though it's really Kadowaki Mai's fault nearly every time).

Damn you, Hirano Aya! Why must you torment us!

This is not a Danbooru breast-comparison chart.

I'm re-watching Azumanga Daioh again. This time I'm leaving my ADV DVDs on the shelf, and just watching the Triad fansubs—partially because of ADV's "MISS SAKAKI" faggotry, but also because I find it entirely too inconvenient at the moment to swap DVDs and cycle through pointless menus, etc.

Tomo, Yomi, and Chiyo.

E/N Warning: I originally watched Azumanga Daioh during an especially demanding time. I didn't really have time for, well, anything...but I sacrificed sleep to watch episodes of Azumanga Daioh because the show always made me laugh my ass off.

Sayaka from Oku-sama wa Mahou Shoujo.

As an aside, those of you who really enjoy the music in Azumanga Daioh are encouraged to give another J.C. Staff series a try: Oku-sama wa Mahou Shoujo. It's a vastly underrated series, which suffers because it didn't capture the attention of a better-known fansubbing group, and because its initial episodes are a little overt with the fan service levels. Oku-sama wa Mahou Shoujo is no Azumanga Daioh to be sure, but it is amusing enough, and the background music is very similar.

Osaka, Chiyo, and Sakaki.

Actually, I ended up marathoning Azumanga Daioh before I finished writing this entry. My original review still stands. I don't think I even have much to add, except perhaps this:

In light of this year's fervor over Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuuutsu, it is important to remember the tremendous fanbase devoted to Azumanga Daioh during its prime. That Bandai enjoyed great success with its The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya launch compared to ADV's Azumanga Daioh failure is at least partially attributable to the degree to which ADV fucked it up.

Haruhi.

Certainly the timing of the sales and the expansion in the market itself over the years contributed to the differences in the two North American releases, but it should be obvious to fans of both shows that ADV's stumbles marketing Azumanga Daioh coupled with the MISS SAKAKI-type curiosities seriously cost ADV a tremendous opportunity. I'm not going to break down the differences point by point, but a large one to consider is Bandai's (at least tacit) willingness to embrace (and market directly to) fans of the show who had already seen it via downloading fansubs or streaming YouTube—a sharp contrast to ADV's doctrines.

Yukari and Nyamo.

Think of it as the triumph of Web 2.0 mumbo jumbo versus the old and busted obstinate way of doing things. ADV, like everyone else, knows fansub-watchers buy DVDs. Think of it this way: Every series offered with a "collector's box" edition of the set's first DVD is obviously geared towards people who have already watched and enjoyed the show. Who else would buy the collector's box edition of a show they had never seen? Wouldn't it make more sense to offer the collector's box with the last DVD? And yet, although ADV will grudgingly acknowledge the inspired-by-fansubs market exists, it won't (or at least didn't) embrace it.

Tsuruya.

Osaka is actually a genius. I swear.

For neophyte anime fans who are only still reading this because I mentioned The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, you should also watch Azumanga Daioh because Tsuruya's seiyuu, the megas-talented Matsuoka Yuki, also voiced (the vastly different) Osaka.

So apparently Banana Mizuki and Yui Horie both revamped their blogs and in so doing eliminated their RSS/Atom feeds.

Eh, they'll be back. Besides, with Aya Hirano updating in the double digits each day, it's already hard enough to keep pace with Wakusei.

Planet doesn't seem to play nice all the time. Wakusei was down for a while due to an irregularity in one of the feeds. Deleting the cache fixed the problem, but I'd prefer this thing not require so much hand-holding.

I also re-added the blog of Chihara Minori (Nagato Yuki's voice actress) since her RSS 1.0 feed doesn't seem to have the same issue that her Atom 0.3 feed did. (Every single post kept reappeararing as new every day.)

In other news, it appears Hirano Aya is back to posting a lot. A lot a lot.

There are no corpulent Santas in Japan.

In other news, I have come to the conclusion that Banana Mizuki and Tanaka Rie cheat on their seiyuu blogs in that they have other people photographing them. Either that, or they use tripods and self-timers extensively (which seems unlikely). This is not to say that other voice actresses don't do this on their blogs, but these two are prolific updaters. Hirano Aya also updates frequently, but she seems to manage her self-portraits by holding a camera phone at arm's length.

So while trying to figure out why Planet was giving me so many errors every once in a while for no apparent reason, I ended up bifurcating the aggregator into the regular section, and one just for seiyuu blogs. For what it's worth, the errors seemed to have gone away for the time being.

This is a picture of Saeko Chiba for no reason.

Speaking of seiyuu blogs, it wasn't that long ago when Tanaka Rie was pretty much the only voice actress with an online diary. (It was notable for having tiny thumbnails that linked to grainy, marginally larger, cameraphone pictures, leading many readers to lament that she needed both a better camera and a better webmaster.)

Now, seiyuu blogs are almost commonplace. Mai Kadowaki was one of the first with an RSS feed, but even syndication is becoming more prevalent. Well, more prevalent, but still not common. Yui Horie's blog recently gained an Atom feed, but we're still waiting for Chiba Saeko to add syndication to her pleasant corner of the Internet.

In related news, Aya Hirano's blog has an RSS feed, and she likes to update that sucker like four times a day, mostly with distorted wide-angle closeups of her mugging shamelessly.