Rosario Vampire Review

I really don't like to generalize, but between having no idea what is going on in the first five seconds of Kill La Kill and the aggravating nonsense of Rosario Vampire, I'm starting to think the good Anime died out 10 years ago. While Kill La Kill starts out telling you how crazy it is, Rosario Vampire I feel is worse as it tells you how much potential there is to characters and story telling, but it's just a literal cock tease through and through.

The plot...well, premise actually, is that a boring guy finds out about a school that will accept someone with such atrocious grades as his, so he applies. Without the school looking into his profile, he's accepted. The school it turns out, is a school for monsters...in the same sense that Twilight is about vampires. The scariest part about any of these is if a sexual harassment suit is filed or being sued for a hospital bill if any damage lasted more than five seconds.

The characters are insults to cardboard as cardboard doesn't make you feel uncomfortable watching it or hate how contrived what little personality it has. There's the boring guy who's attributes are being boring, indecisive, human, and the center of the most boring harem ever. There's a token loli who's a witch and her personality is... that's it actually. There's a succubus who has breasts, an ice girl who is nowhere near as awesome as Iceman, and the titular vampire. By titular, I mean she has tits. That's as subtle as the anime gets.

Every episode has someone attack the human, the vampire gets mad, yet can do nothing, her cross is removed, letting her change into a lighter-haired and slantier-eyed version of her self who kicks ass, she turns normal and bits him. The end. Anything else int eh story is filler or worse. Yes, worse.

Honestly, I don't have trouble with harem animes. They're a staple of anime and if it weren't for ones such as Love Hina or Tenchi, anime might not have gained the foothold it did in America, even if there were far better ones to see at the same time. But those are usually comedies with added drama. Rosario Vampire doesn't seem to know which is which, though. The drama is played off for laughs, such as the vampire's fear of water ala Bloodrayne, villains trying to kill the human, or how the human feels his personal space isn't respected when the vampire bites him without permission all the time (this lasts for five seconds, so don't think it's character development). The comedy, though, is played out as drama. Two dates at the same time, fighting over the human, and the comedic would-have-been-characterization-if-it-had-remained-consistent desire of the witch to grow up and earn the same attention as the older girls. Half of that, though, was flashing her panties, which was meant to be a dramatic moment, just like all the others.

Don't think the 'dramatic' pantyshots are few and far between. They're everywhere. If you took a shot for every pantyshot in an episode, you'd need your stomach pumped if you weren't dead. Every time the vampire kicks ass, there's a pantyshot. Every time the vampire threatens someone, there's a pantyshot. Every time someone threatens the vampire, there's a pantyshot. The catfights, the teachers, the non-name extras, learning to cook, late for school, but the human...all full of pantyshots. And if there's a female villain, somehow there's five times as many pantyshots, despite doubling the female ratio.

Exactly who is this anime for? There were far better pornographic animes back in the 90's than this. There was better sexual comedy. The decade was famous for good harem animes. The action lasts less than 2 minutes, sometimes less than 1.

I'm not giving up, though I'm close. If there is anything like Madoka Magica, I'll keep giving anime a chance.

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Review-Attack on Titan

Back when anime was first flooding America, I was a big fan. I collected VHSes and DVDs of everything I could get my hands on. I owned figurines and dolls and posters and pins.

I couldn't get enough...until I had enough. Like everyone else, I stopped accepting plotholes, flat characters, grating voice acting, and rampant mysogyny.

I expected quality just the same as from any literature, movie, graphic novel, or show from anywhere else.

This is why I almost never watch anime anymore. Companies don't need to grab the cheapest and hire actors who barely speak English anymore. Studios don't need to squish mangas the height of a dishwasher into three episodes anymore. There are now many different groups of audiences who like different kinds of anime to market to. Yet whatever I find always seems to be from 15 years ago, when real effort was too hard, only this time they're shinier.

One of the first new animes I watch in years was Attack on Titan. I want a refund on the time I spent on it. While not horrible, the anime doesn't really have anything going for the audience short of the theme song. The characters angst for long periods of time and don't change. Scenes are disjointed to the point that it is difficult to tell a flashback from the present. Anyone over thirty also seems to have given up already and tossed their IQ points out with their ability to give a damn.

The plot is simple: giant beings called titans attack people, so people built walls to protect themselves. Gianter titans smash through the wall and many titans terrorize everybody. There are three walls and there are three people who can turn into titans (because...magic?)

I said it was simple, not that it made sense.

So much time devoted to whining about bad things for five to twenty minutes could have been put to better use. Where did the titans come from? How were the walls built? The anime mentions knowledge and discussion of other places where people live is banned, but why? Wouldn't somewhere safer benefit everyone?

When did the main character figure out how to use his Spider-Man harness? Why are they using those harnesses when they have cannons and nets and tranches and giant batarangs? How do those harnesses no tangle all the time?

Why say titans can survive with their head cut off and then that titans have died because their heads were cut off?

Why do some people turn into titans? We are told the main character was abducted by his dad when everyone started fleeing the city at the first titan attack and was injected with whatever turns him into a titan, but why? Why was then the best timing? What exactly was in the injection? How did he make it? Why just his son and not a professional soldier?

Why do the other humans who can turn into titans help the titans? What do they gain? Why not move to somewhere the main character isn't if he keeps trying to defeat you? Why can human-titans pull powers out of their ass one time and not another? Why are they different powers to different human-titans?

How does this society feed itself when before the titan attack there couldn't possibly be enough farmland to support the population? Why is there so much metal and so few factories? Why don't the evil human-titans attack the factories and not the army?

If you turn into a titan (if you have the power) by bleeding, will you do it if you have a papercut or get stabbed by a cat or thornbush?

Over all, the whole anime is really boring. It leaves fights with titans to have red herrings, flashbacks, worrying and debating about irrelevant issues. People stop to explain things you don't want explained instead of what you do.

On top of that, the art is bad and inconsistent. Proportions are often wrong, Perspective is often wrong. Styles used to animate humans and titans don't match up (I kept expecting the foot from Monty Python's Flying Circus from one of them). Titans move inconsistently. They are sized inconsistently (was one a baby?).

On top of that, many times the whole show just seems to intentionally hit a nerve for no reason. There are huge gushes of blood not from battle (fighting was rather bloodless), but from when a character bit his tongue every time he talked. Why is the most blood in scenes during downtime from the actual fighting? Why is the only main female character the only person in the entire country who was nearly raped and almost sold into sexual slavery (to whom?)? And are the titans...mentally handicapped? Why? If not, why do they so closely resemble people with problems like that?