There was an episode of Twilight Zone about a guy on death row who was stuck in a loop reliving his last day over and over again. Each loop ended with him dying in the gas chamber, and then he'd waken in his cell again, with it being the morning of that day.

There's one last appearance in a court room. And certain people are always present: a defense attorney, a judge, a bailiff, a prosecuting attorney, and some others. On every loop they all mix around and take new roles.

I just had a bit of that feeling. I originally watched about four episodes of Mai Otome, but gave up about the time Arika's underwear got stolen. That was a couple of years ago. A few months ago I downloaded Mai Otome Zwei and I like it a lot.

There's a related anime called Mai HiME. That one came first. Mai Otome is a "reimagining", I think they call it. It's set in the far future, out in space, on a planet colonized from Earth. Mai HiME on the contrary is set in the present in, I gather, a high school in Japan.

And that's where the creepiness comes in. Almost all the same characters are in both, and the characterizations and relationships are similar, even though the situations are entirely different. In HiME, Haruka and Yukino are friends. In Otome, Yukino is Haruka's master. In HiME, Yukino is part of the student government. In Otome, Yukino is president of one of the city-states.

In Otome, Mikoto is Nekogami-sama, and is Mai's master. In HiME they're friends. In both, Mikoto loves Mai's cooking.

Nagi is the villain in both.

There are differences, of course. Nina and Arika are new characters in Otome. Natsuki seems to be quite a lot different in the two series.

I haven't watched HiME; I was just visiting Wikipedia about it. And I think it would be really strange to watch it, seeing characters I know in such radically different roles.

I wonder if that's how it feels to watch Sasami: Magical Girl Club, with the added weirdness in that case that Sasami has a different seiyuu. (As do Washu and Mihoshi.)

UPDATE: There is something really a bit strange about one of the names that they chose for the Otome series. The school where Otome are trained is called "Garderobe". Probably to the director he keyed on "guard" and "robe".

Apparently he didn't know that a garderobe is a latrine, at least in medieval European architecture (e.g. castles).

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 08:54 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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1 Hmmm, I don't know - the production staff were hitting up a lot of German for the terminology for ZHiME, where Garderobe would be Wardrobe or Cloakroom or something to that effect.

The "reimagining" thing is a sticky wicket as far as ZHiME goes, as whilst I don't think it's ever made explicit, there's more than a few hints that it's technically a very far flung sequel. Certainly, it's suggested that Miyu and Mikoto are actually the same characters as in HiME.

Suppose it doesn't doesn't stop the whole re-casting thing from being a little peculiar, though, although that was a lot of the fun in watching ZHiME when it was new. I can imagine it being a lot stranger going back-over, though. It's also one of the many things Sunrise trolled the audience with in iMAS Xenoglossia, where a lot of the characters ended up having very little in common with their game counterparts, but then most of Xenoglossia was playing around with the expectations of the audience coming in from ZHiME.

Also, strictly speaking, Nina is in My-HiME, though only as a dialogue-free background character (Also, it was Arika's school uniform that was stolen in ZHiME, not her underwear ^^

Posted by: DiGiKerot at February 07, 2010 05:12 AM (AM9il)

2 I think you mean this Twilight Zone episode.

Posted by: Mark A. Flacy at February 07, 2010 07:47 PM (Lbkvv)

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