“You’ll always haunt me so, won’t you?”
“That’s the way I show my love.”
A lot has already been written on The Tatami Galaxy. 2DT entertains the notion that we’re looking at a reality unfolding in a multitude of ways. Although this is an interesting angle, I want to examine another aspect of the anime and why things always go wrong for our unnamed hero. I propose that Ozu and the unnamed hero are actually one and the same.
There are anime I enjoy. There are anime that aren’t great but watchable. Finally, there are anime so bad that I can’t even last through an entire episode. There’s only a few weeks left of spring so we’re going to pull out the weeds today.
In the West, we have a strange phenomenon: the magical pixie girl.
Who is she? What makes her so magical and… pixie-like?
I pondered this question during Misaki’s mini-speech to Usui on the rooftop of the school in the first episode of Kaichou wa Maid-sama. Here’s how it goes:
You were always running ahead of me with ease, even though I’m frantically running with all my breath. And then run facing backwards while calling out to me. I really hate losing, and it was so vexing losing to you that it pisses me off. But this time you were running forward and helped me out. Just you wait. I’ll definitely overtake you and it’ll be my turn to worry about you.
She’s in second place apparently. In fact, she relegates herself to the lower position when nothing in the first episode at all suggested that Usui was superior to her other than looking indifferently cool (probably because he avoids wearing the nasty combination of a lime-green blazer and yellow pants/skirt). But why? First, a little context.
Look at that. It’s the director’s cut. Yeah, that’s right. We’re getting the director’s definitive vision.
Someone, somewhere, is psyched to see the above scene on their 60-inch big screen TV. This isn’t a post about censorship. I don’t like censorship. This is a post about director’s cuts.
