H.C.Staff

Three episodes in, Okamisan is just as awesome as when it began.

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Welcome to the fairy-tale world of the latest J.C.Staff Tsundere Heroine and the boy with the stealth skills who loves her.

Placeholder image, somehow appropriate

I regret being away from home because I can’t properly upload screenshots of the first episode of Okamisan and Seven Companions.

I regret my reputation as a J.C.Staff fanboy that makes nobody take my recommendations of Okamisan seriously. But think of it: this has all the requirements for being a great J.C.Staff show (namely, cuteness and comedy), and it’s in the hands of a director whose experience with tsundere shows goes all the way back to Love Hina and continues through The Familiar of Zero and Hayate the Combat Butler. Ryoko earns points for beating up (mostly) those who deserve it, and Ryoshi earns points for showing signs of courage beneath the cowering surface.

So far, the show that I guessed would be the best show of summer has been the best show of summer. From the first cat-gauntleted punch to the recruitment starefest to the Cinderella parody at the end, I too, fell in love with Okamisan.

Someone asked:

Ookamisan to Shichinin no Nakamatachi — Does anyone really need this?

I thought you were a J.C.Staff fanboy? Why, yes, we really need this. Do you not like DFC? Do you not like tsundere?

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This is like the third thing I’m most looking forward to this summer, after HAVING NO SCHOOL and Fairy Ring.

So I was prodded into doing this by Author, and I would like Hinano to see this too, because this is TOTALLY HER KIND OF SHOW, just like Toradora.

What is the light novel, Okami-san to Shichinin no Nakama-tachi (The Wolf and her Seven Friends), all about? Seen on MyAnimeList:

Synopsis: A love comedy parodying fairy tales such as “Little Red Cap”, “The Ant and the Grasshopper” etc. Okami Ryoko (Okami-san) is a spunky high school girl. She is a member of a “fixer” club so called Otogi High School Bank. She runs about to fix the problems of the school with her partner Akai Ringo (Akazukin-chan).

So it seems like the cast consists of characters representing various fairy tales. Ryoko and Ringo are the Big Bad Wolf and the Little Red Riding Hood, although Ringo seems to be more like B.B.Hood from Darkstalkers than the canonical Red Riding Hood.

Other characters seem to be modeled after Taro Urashima and Otohime (actually where the names of some Love Hina characters came from), and the school they go to, Otogi High School, is named after Otogi-zoshi, a book containing Japanese folktales. And there’s an Alice in Wonderland Ant and Grasshopper, a Morgan le Fay, and so on.

The novel is published by Dengeki Bunko, and the manga runs in Dengeki Daioh, much like Railgun, Toradora, and Shana did before it. Why do I bring this up? Because Ryoko, the titular Big Bad Wolf, is yet another face in the long line of Dengeki tsundere heroines.

And finally we have our male lead, Ryoshi. No idea what fairy tale he comes from. Kimikiss maybe? Edit: I should have seen this, but he’s the hunter from Little Red Riding Hood.

Trailers always look good, and this one is the tsunderiffic, lolitastic stuff that people didn’t find in Maid-sama and Uraboku this season.

Director: Yoshiaki Iwasaki, known for Hayate the Combat Butler, The Familiar of Zero, Skygirls, Bottle Fairy, and, didn’t we mention Urashima and Otohime? Love Hina.

Studio:

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Why don’t you take a wild guess?

Scheduled for August, this will be the show of the summer!

If you were J.C.Staff, and you wanted to adapt a shojo manga into a show, why not pick one where the female lead is a tsundere maid? Sounds like a good idea to me.

“I spent most of yesterday thinking of why I hate you.”

Yes, this may be a shojo show, but it has the authentic J.C.Staff tsundere flavor.

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I think I’ll focus on sparkly bishonen characters now.

I mean, J.C.Staff is doing it, so why not me?

So, unless you’ve been living under a rock or are really new to this blog, you know that I am a J.C.Staff fanboy whose love for J.C.Staff exceeds his love for Toho and Magic the Gathering put together, and that the reason my art skills are the way they are today is because I sold my soul to J.C.Staff in 2005.

Then you may be wondering, why on earth has there been no J.C.Staff-related post since that Railgun post five months ago?

A Certain Scientific Railgun started off awesome but I kind of lost interest halfway through. Of the upcoming J.C.Staff shows, Maid-Sama looks like it has the potential to be a hit, and I might try a volume of the manga to see what it’s like, and I will definitely check out the anime in April, but it doesn’t have me excited the way Potemayo, Toradora, or even Index/Railgun did.

Sadly, not every shojo manga can look like I Am Here! (at least that’s what Del Rey calls it)

And as for Uraboku (Betrayal Knows My Name)… well, I tried Loveless because it was J.C.Staff, and I will try this for the same reason, but it’s going to have to be really special to get me to watch it. I mean, cool sparkly bishonen are something any aspiring comic artist should draw every now and then, but an entire show of them?

So really, the only J.C.Staff-related news I felt like writing about is that the tsundere anime that surpasses everything is going to get its US release in July.

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I didn’t realize how badly I wanted to watch this episode until I was done watching it. And then I watched it again. Remember how I said before that the author had taken Railgun as an opportunity to fix Index and Touma was the most significant fix? There was nothing I wanted to see more in Railgun than the rewritten Touma, and the changes in the anime adaptation made his debut even better than I had hoped.

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In episode 1 of the new J.C.Staff series A Certain Scientific Railgun, the term “Dengeki Hime” (Electric Princess) is used to describe the main character, Mikoto Misaka. Is this a reference to the magazine published by the same corporation that also publishes Dengeki Daioh, the anthology Railgun appears in?

If you are avoiding Railgun because of bad memories of Index and the general trend of spinoffs and sequels not being as good as the original, you should shake that off and watch anyway. Here’s why:

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At this time, fan favorite anime studio Kyoto Animation has stirred up controversy by animating the “Endless Eight” episode of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (2nd season) differently six weeks in a row and counting. What are they trying to tell the fans?

Well, I have the answer.

Yes, the show actually does have Sweet Blue Flowers.

What Kyoto Animation is saying, is “Watch more J.C.Staff shows”.

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