true tears – Melting My Icy Splinter of a Heart [Eps. 1 – 8]
Thursday, March 27th, 2008
Romance anime and I aren’t friends. Short of KareKano (and Honey & Clover, I suppose), the genre has me in constant despair. It seems most guilty of the mass-produced, formulaic crap that makes me hesitate with shame whenever someone asks if I like anime. In the past I would splutter, ‘yeah but not that big eyed Manga shit’ and hastily throw my FLCL DVDs at them until they relented or left to make a cup of tea. These days, with us living in the post-Miyazaki era that has cleansed British consciousness of all the stereotypical nightmares of yore, I shrug nonchalantly and say, ‘yeah, I could lend you a few if you want’. No crippling sense of shame to speak of. Yet romance anime embodies everything that embarrasses me about this hobby. Shrill squealing schoolgirls who fawn over the same characterless everyman character. Character designs so saccharine and malformed they make you gag with horror. Constant fucking panty shots. The whole affair makes me want to hulk-out and rampage through KyoAni/Key’s studios and leave no person alive.