When I go through a series looking for frame grabs, I don't use the sound. But sometimes if I get intrigued by a scene I'll turn the subtitles on.

Usually I end up spending more and more time with the subtitles on as I get further into the show, and that's what happened with Sekirei.

It wasn't as awful as I had thought it would be. More, including spoilers, below the fold.

It's still a half-rate exercise in pandering. There's no getting away from that. It's got as much ecchi, and as big of boobs, as Divergence Eve but without the engaging characters or amazing story.

But it isn't a total loss, either. One thing that it took me a while to really realize was that all the sekirei are kids. Tsukiumi may look like a mature woman, but mentally she's like a first grader. They're all like Kusano, pretty much.

Well, not quite. Musubi and Tsukiumi are first graders and Kusano is more like a preschooler. Kusano's prep wasn't completed, as I understand it, which is why she's the only sekirei who doesn't have an adult body.

Matsu is more like a fifth grader. She's #02, the second eldest of them all, and she's been out on her own for a while. But she isn't an adult, mentally or emotionally. None of the sekirei are. (Really, not even #01.)

Once I realized that, it was a lot easier for me to understand what was going on.

Shows like this which are based on the very early part of an ongoing series of books or manga have a real problem: how to do you end them, when the story isn't really over? You have to come up with something that feels satisfactory without really completing anything.

The usual solution is to find some major event in the part of the overall story which is included and to make that the closing arc. That's what they did for Fruits Basket. The anime covers about the first 35 chapters of a series that eventually ran more than 200. They took the arc where Tohru sees Kyo in his true Cat form and made it longer and more dramatic by including a lot of characters who didn't participate in it in the manga, and then they created an entire event out of whole cloth for the last half of the last episode. And it worked pretty well.

They seem to have done the same thing here. The final arc was about helping another ashikabi and his sekirei escape from the city, and it was pretty dramatic. I think the coolest thing was Matsu riding around the city on a motorcycle with Ku and her tree-bazooka on the back. It makes clear that Kusano may be the highest numbered sekirei, but she's far from being the weakest of them. In her own way, she's plenty formidable.

Having said all that, this is still mainly a vehicle for huge boobs and the Most Common Special Attack. The story is just there to make excuses for all the fan service. If I didn't know better, I'd have thought it was from Gonzo.

I can't imagine myself having any interest in really watching it, with sound on and all.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 10:25 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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