More of my opinions you don't really care about

Really, I could make that the title of any post here, or of the blog itself if the title wasn't better than everything, but I digress...

So thinly veiled, legally sanctioned child pornography anime all but fell off the radar. Mainly because, it had to. After getting the house and the car, there was no way that I could sustain, well, anything. Forget two summers ago where it was fucking insane and I was buying toys and DVDs left and right. No, I had to pretty much cut myself off from everything once The Ultimate Driving Machine showed up (a tradeoff, as you know, that I was happy to make). I simply stay away from all of the toy sites that I used to frequent. I don't do periodic eBay searches or look on Amazon Japan. I stopped checking the site I was getting Japanese schoolgirl magazines from, although after awhile I discovered that they had stopped selling the ones I was into, so that temptation would have gone away one way or the other. The Girls only recently got a new sister after more than a year (the last time was after ACEN last May), and I wasn't the one who bought that new figure. Hell, I haven't bought any toys (not counting cars and coffee robots, of course) in over a year. Well, almost -- there was the X Files Cancerm'n (not a typo) figure, but I ordered that last spring and it didn't ship until like fucking November or something. But that's it.

In further keeping myself from any temptation (or from being cranky because I can't buy something), I haven't been watching too many current series in the form of fansubs. Well, it was partly because I was trying to help in the spending department, but also because I didn't care. I kinda burned myself out on Japanese cartoons. Like I said, the pace for awhile there was off the fucking hook, even for me and my legendary spending capabilities. As I said at the outset of this post, things have all but fallen off the radar. There are some series that I still want to finish on DVD, so I get a new disc occasionally. And there are a few series I've been watching the fansubs of:

Mahou Sensei Negima: This is the latest series from Ken Akamatsu, the creator of Love Hina. You all know about my history with Love Hina, and I'll watch or read whatever Akamatsu tells me to. Negima isn't Love Hina, but it's still very, very good -- both the manga and the anime. Its roots in Love Hina are evident, but it's not like it's the exact same show as Love Hina only on the moon.

Keroro Gunso AKA Sergeant Frog: I nearly forgot about this one since it started quite a long time ago and there are a ton of episodes, yet only about six of them have been subbed in over a year. Supposedly it's a hard series to deal with, but that of course could just mean "lazy fansubbers." This show is pretty fucking funny, and the same goes for the manga. I wish it would just get licensed so that I could finally be able to see more of it since the fansubbers clearly aren't going to get their shit together on it.

Ichigo 100%: This is a show that I started watching just because I really liked some of the character designs. If you have some cute female characters, I'm in. I'll poke around for an episode or two. As are many of the shows I watch, it's TBMF. Total loser guy suddenly has a bunch of hot chicks who want his man chowder. Or something like that. Anyway, the conflict is kind of interesting because for awhile you really aren't sure which girl he'll choose, even though (in typical fashion) there's the one we know he's supposed to choose. The thing is, the set up for the conflict just wasn't done well. All these girls want the main character guy, but you really never get a sense for why they're so into him. The plot demanded it, and so it was. It was exactly like the "love" story in Episode II -- if it were real people you'd never imagine how it happened since there was no real development, but in the end it happened just because it had to. Maybe they could have done better if it was more than a 12-episode run; with more time they could have developed things so that it felt a little more real (even though it's still all bullshit). I ended up watching the entire series, though, since it got to a point where I was like, well, I'm already invested in this, so may as well finish it up. I know, I know. The bottle of poison is half drunk, so may as well finish it off -- we wouldn't want to waste good poison. I mean, the show isn't that bad -- it is somewhat amusing. A lot of the situations are really contrived, though, so they could have tried harder overall. There are also four OVAs, two of which have been subbed, and as far as those are concerned, same shit, different day. But the female characters are still totally fuckable. The manga was apparently long-running and just finished in Japan, so I'd be interested to check that out at some point. Oh, and I nearly forgot: the closing theme to the TV series -- "Ike Ike"; don't pronounce it like Eisenhower -- is fucking harsh. It's like some shitty early-90s dance track, and I just can't stop listening to it. I liken it to Girls Aloud meets 2Unlimited and learns Japanese. Available for download at this site (Go to Anime->Anime OSTs on the sidebar... And unfortunately, you have to do a bullshit registration with their site, and navigating around that site is retarded... Yeah, let's have a meaningless little key icon for logging in as opposed to something that just says "login"... I'll e-mail it to you if you really give a shit but not enough of one to register, although that site does have a bunch of other shit that may or may not interest you.).

Okay, so the one show I'm watching that wasn't that good is the one I ended up talking the most about. Which brings us to...

Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid: Full Metal Panic is the best show that's not Evangelion or Love Hina. Hey, you know how The Legend of Zelda was really cool? Then Zelda II came out and we were all like, "Whoa, they switched it up! All of the action is side-scrolling!"? Then Link to the Past came out, and we were like "Dude! It's old-school overhead-view like the original!"? That's what FMP has been like. The original was what it was -- it was BA (bad ass, for the Dane Cook uninitiated). Then Fumoffu pretty much ignored the whole robot thing and went strictly for the high school romance comedy. Now, TSR is doing it like the original, with a lot of drama and robots mixed in with the romance comedy. Only this time, it's a little more fucked up in terms of the drama. More blood, more violence (from what I remember), good stuff. Then there's the main bad guy, who's fucked up. I mean, the bad guy in the first series was fucked up; he was the kind of guy who would beat nine people to death with a steel dildo. The new bad guy, though, would beat nine people to death with a steel dildo -- but he'd do it while wearing a Bugs Bunny costume. So yeah, Zelda and Carlin are the best things I can come up with to describe the new series. Will it live up to the glory that they've built up so far? I wouldn't be surprised if they can pull it off, although through six episodes it's been almost entirely drama. I know we were spoiled with all the funny shit in Fumoffu, but I'm liking it quite a bit so far even if it's mostly the robot shit. We'll see how it goes, but I have faith in these people (always a good sign since I'm real big on faith).

Alright, so that's enough of that.