I beg you, no more amnesia!

People often say there are more bad trends than there are people in the world, and looking at fiction in particular, I couldn’t agree more. I had the dubious honor of watching Saint October a while back, and knew halfway through the first episode, that this was another one of these series lots of people are going to baww about, for no good reason except the three females looking cute and playing the “I’m so innocent -teeheehee” routine. Well, the same can be said for Britney, and look where she is now. Don’t worry though, the fans will take care of this even faster than Britney accepting to strip for some boring rock-magazine.

But before I completely drift off track, there are three really shitty trends which catapult this series out of orbit into the sun:

1) Don’t use amnesia for a plot device. Amnesia is the worst invention right after “honor”-revenge. It has to stop now. Amnesia plots always follow the same predictable storyline: Kid is warped into a world without memory, found, lives a normal life with some foster family, yadda yadda yadda, then some bad guys come pillaging and plundering, a lightning bolt or similar flash strikes the kid and he gets superpowers, the kid yells “Kamehameha”, which then leads to the bad guys looking stupid and flying into the sky, just like Team Rocket in every known episode of Pokemon.  Then the kid sits next to the dying village leader and gets the quest to go rescue some princess and/or defeat an evil warlord/dragon/drug dealer.

Just stop. Seriously.

2) No unexplainable superpowers. Already addressed in 1, but I still feel the need to point it out again. If you must use superpowers, make them a believable part of the world, not just reserved for one or two special characters. And holy hell, stop using white orbs shot out of the caster’s palms. The only exception to this rule is tentacles, and only in very special kinds of anime.

3) NO AMNESIA. Did I already mention I really despise amnesia plotlines?

Minami-ke Okawari – Simply horrible

There are some anime out there, which are simply amazing by their own right: Minami-ke is one of these special flares, lighting my cold dead heart on fire, and making me feel young again with my twenty odd years. Granted, the start of the first series was a bit slow, some might go so far as to say boring, but after a short while the pace gets immensely faster, culminating in an epic ending consisting of equating pasta with bad melodrama concerning an expensive, badly designed boat (and of course lesbian antics, and lesbians rule, right?).

Seeing how the team of Minami-Ke Okawari managed to turn Minami-ke into a story only 12 year old emos could enjoy, really pisses me off to no end. They have nothing new to show, except fanservice all across the board, bad fanservice too. Instead of making this an age 18 and up exclusive and jumping right to the pulse pounding action, noooo, they pinch out an anime for young boys trying to get off to a painting of the french revolution. Oh look! One of the Minami-ke sisters unwillingly exposed her body to a boy, *roaring laughter of the 12-year-olds*. The staff even used the bible black style – the whole time I was expecting tentacles sprouting from somewhere and the anime finally growing some balls, but alas I was rendered impotent by steam clouds and badly designed objects. No, just no, it didn’t work in Love Hina Again*, and it sure as hell isn’t going to work here.

And the staff knew about their lack early on, else they wouldn’t have felt the need of introducing some emo-kid-character all these kiddies can relate to, only for the purpose of justifying all the fan-service; They did this in Love Hina Again too, only that time it was a slut instead of a dork.

The people defending this poor excuse for an anime remind me of particular friends forcing me to watch crappy reality shows on MTV, on which badly dressed strangers find something objectionable in some or the other drawer, and then expect me to laugh, like there’s a state of the art “revelation” going on, and finally accusing me of having no humor, because of me not laughing at this boring, trite shit.

Yes, I know it was done by a different studio intended to be released right after the first season, but does that change anything? Not a goddamn thing as far as I can see.

*And guess where they go in the first episode: That’s right, to a hot spring. Is this supposed to be some cruel perverted inside joke or something?