pudgetronHappy 10th article-iversary! I’ve sent you all sparklers in the mail! If you haven’t received your sparkler, Death’s Door Prods is not liable if it gets lost in the mail. And we could only afford one sparkler per reader, so there won’t be any more sent out, sorry! Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to the stuff you all come here for: an anonymous stranger foisting his opinions about anime and manga on you! Hurray!
This morning could not be going better for Tsuzuri Enji, a high school student who puts a lot of stock in fortune telling and horoscopes. All of the horoscopes that he reads are saying that it will be the perfect day for him; his luck is perfect, his love fortune couldn’t be better, the universe is telling him that, for today, he is an untouchable god. In a rush to take advantage of his good fortunes, he runs out his door hoping to possibly run into the perfect girlfriend. I can tell you that he doesn’t quite achieve that objective. What he does find instead is the grill of a truck as he rounds a corner. Which causes him to die. Violently. Via splattering. Then, all of a sudden, he isn’t dead. He doesn’t recognize his surroundings, but at least he’s alive, right? Sort of. As it turns out, he did die as he thought, but his brain was undamaged in the accident and it was transferred into an experimental quasi-human superbody by a mysterious girl. So begins his new (un?)life with a witch.
Boku to Majo no Jikan follows in the vein of comedy that turns the protagonist into the main butt monkey(the one who is the main brunt of the beatings, physical or otherwise). The main basis of the story is one of getting used to sudden change, and Tsuzuri is a little slow in that respect. Admittedly, he goes from a somewhat normal high school life to living with a mad scientist and going to capture monsters in the span of, from what I can tell, a couple days without having a psychotic break, so I think he’s doing all right.
Ryosuke is famous at his high school. Maybe famous isn’t the right word, infamous fits much better. No, he isn’t some crazy powerful delinquent, nor is he an aloof genius. As a matter of fact, he really isn’t significant at all other than his libido. Yes, you read that right, I said libido. He is so well known for this that he has earned the nickname Erosuke; aren’t Japanese students so wonderfully creative? One rainy night on his way home from the store, he finds a redheaded beauty standing outside his house staring at it. After a brief exchange in pleasantries, Ryosuke invites the girl into his home so she might dry her clothing and warm up inside. She accepts, to everyone’s surprise(everyone, in this case, being Ryosuke and the reader), and they enter his home together. I’m going to skip over the amusing interim sequence to leave it unspoiled for when you see watch the show, as there are some genuinely unexpected bits of innuendo used. Long story short, however, she is Lisara Restall, a noble among shinigami who is searching for a “special specimen”, a human with a ludicrous amount of energy. Unfortunately, shinigami cannot survive in the human world for long without an energy source, and so Lisara forms a provisional contract with our protagonist to use him as a sort of battery until she can find this “special specimen”.
Dakara Boku wa H ga Dekinai is likely a very polarizing series. I say likely because I haven’t had much (read: any) discussion about it with anyone besides myself. The show has the unfortunate quality of trying to appeal to both the shounen and seinen age groups at the same time, something that rarely works out for the best. It’s simply too difficult to balance the desires of the two age groups, at least with a show like this. While Dakara Boku H has some good bits, brilliant bits even, the overall feeling can get very sporadic, flipping in between action scenes and inexplicably precise clothing damage at the drop of a proverbial hat. I will likely end up in a rant here so feel free to jump to the next series with my recommendation to check this out, but take it with a grain of salt.
If you’re looking for a tutorial on how/how not to do fanservice in your show, this is one of the better shows to use as a reference. As stated before, the show doesn’t seem to have a grasp on who it wants its audience to be and swings wildly between some very clever innuendo and the “You want boobs? We’ve got boobs coming out our ears!” kind of pandering. I have never felt that there was anything inherently wrong with nudity in a show, provided that it is justified by the scene. The same goes for any other kind of “fanservice”. If a show requires the use of fanservice to make it interesting, I am of the opinion that it was never interesting in the first place. Dakara Boku H is plenty interesting without the blatant, not to mention pointless, nudity, and it’s a shame that somebody important, somewhere along the line, had to say ” ‘Ey, fellas! We don’ got enough boobs in ‘ere!”(yes, whoever it was was from New York). I’ll rein it in here, lest this become a triple length article/ Rant over. Moving on.
Kitsune no Akuma to Kuroi Madousho tells the story of Kyuuki, a powerful fox spirit who has just woken up and needs a host , and Kamishiro Shin, a high school student who, through a series of unfortunate events, ends up in the possession of the grimoire that controls Kyuuki’s existence. Unfortunately for everyone involved, especially Shin, the book is bound to him for as long as he’s alive, which is bad news because the grimoire’s massive power is starting to attract other demons and spirits who want it for themselves, and who aren’t afraid to be proactive about bringing Shin’s life to a premature end so they can get it.
I chose this one due to the fact that it mirrors so many of the themes in Dakara Boku H, and it seems to be heading down the path toward a romantic sub-plot without the blatant pandering. This is a relatively young series, so it’s a little difficult to say which direction it will go from here, but I have high hopes for this one. There’s little more I can tell you other than find it and read it.
Congratulations on the 10th article-iversary the sparkler was fun and the cupcake was delicious so Pudgetorn what anime do you think would be better in English dub.
That’s a bit of a complicated question. The only shows that I consider “better” in English are older(Dragonball, Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, etc.), likely due to the lack of the current pool of talent in Japan. Nowadays, the English dubs of shows are, at best, just as good, but that’s not to say they’re uncommon. FLCL, Gurren Lagann, Full Metal Panic!, FMA, and a slew of others have brilliant English voice work, but it doesn’t surpass the original Japanese version. The only (relatively) recent series that I would consider better in the English dub is The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya(along with subsequent titles of the same story).
If you’re talking about potentially better, I can’t really say, as it depends so much on the actors involved. Some actors that are usually a good sign of quality are Travis Willingham(Roy Mustang[FMA/FMA:B]), Monica Rial(Tsubaki[Soul Eater]), Vic Mignogna (Ed Elric[FMA/FMA:B]), and Crispin Freeman(Alucard[Hellsing], Kyon[Haruhi]). If they’re there, it’s probably good.