No mother would let a tramp stay in her house, and allow her daughter to sleep with him. Drive around in toy car in the house though she does, she isn't dumb enough for that, and that's the one plot point that made me think the humour had crossed the drama line too far.
...But, yeah: it fitted with Sana's busybody, always-willing-to-help personality for her to drag a tramp into her house and make him her manager/'boyfriend'. (Her stalking method of saving Akito near the start amused me, very much. You gotta love her, if only for her inability to leave people alone.)
The subject matter Kodocha deals with is fitting for 10-year-old girls, in your opinion?... Extremes aren't required for stories to be genuinely touching and hit home, you know.
Not to be an arse, but methinks you're, as ever, looking to put down a series because of where it was serialized. There's no way to take what you said in anything other than a negative light. I've said a number of times that characters are aged to match-up with the majority of readers... when the characters are high school aged. In Kodocha's case, the characters are tweens yet act far more mature and intelligently than adults in other stories, and that's because no adult can create an accurate representation of a child. In the end, the mangaka's writing shone through, and Sana only comes across even remotely childish in a romantic sense.
(Akito's voice actor not sounding like a brat - instead sounding like the adult the voice actor is - makes it even harder to see the main two as tweens.)
When I mentioned Kodocha to an e-woman, one of the first things she did was praise it for its characterization; citing the difference in quality between its cast and the cast of most other shoujo with far older characters. Just sayin'...
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Blassreiter - 1-12
Following the gaudy full-on CG beginning at a racetrack, where a 'demoniac' (machine-thing) came to life from the corpse of a woman, without any explanation as to wtf was going on (back of DVD case >>> anime itself), I was ready to write it off. But I was pleasantly surprised by the episodes that followed the fairly awful start.
Blassreiter gives me exactly what I want: characterization taking complete priority over story, lots of flashy action, and no goody-goody ********.
The first arc covered the descent into despair of a once famous motorbike racer as he discovered his love had been a joke; soon earning the wrath of a fickle public as he was first declared a hero and then a monster. Then, with him out of the equation, the second arc dealt with a bullied kid as he suffered; his friend's betrayal and the tragedy that ensued pushing him over the edge as the clearly evil, recurring scientist lady (nice rack) handed him the ultimate happy pill.
In both arcs, there was a very human edge about proceedings. Yes, people do turn into machine-things, and there is some sort of special task force with skin-tight suits in a church-like building, but the drama that went on in the background allowed me to relate to the characters and care to the point of getting teary-eyed. In particular, the bullied kid being forced to handle everything alone due to his sister working 24/7, and the sister realizing too late she was losing him, pulled on my heart-strings.
I don't doubt that the story will turn out to be horrible, even though I'm only halfway through. I mean, there's a smiling villain riding around on a horse, allowing the hero to live after beating him down (in his human form, FYI) in typical, cliche I'll-let-live-but-you'll-kill-me-at-the-end fashion. But the characterization has been bang-on, the CG actually looks pretty darn sexy after the unpleasant beginning (yay for fast movement; yay for no speed-lines!) and nearly all of the starting cast have been wiped out, in Ga-rei EP1 style.
When there's no white knight to prevent suicides or save bullies from being slaughtered at the last second, Aion likes this.
Glad you're enjoying it Stu, more people need to watch this show! Can I guess your favorite characters so far from your post in the "Hot or Not" thread?
