(no subject)
Remember when I mentioned thinking about starting Naruto again when I discovered myself downloading emo SasuNaru fanmixes? Well, just last night I finally caught up as far as volume 27, which fans will know is the timeskip and non-fans won't care about the rest of this topic anyway.
I knew it was coming, but I was still sad to see Sasuke leave in a grand gesture to prove to Gaara that nobody out-emos him to become stronger. However, I spent the whole fight hoping that Sasuke would at some point admit he actually liked Naruto, and I was not disappointed. ^-^ I did crack up when he went Super-Saiyan, though, down to the light-colored big eighties hair. Considering how big of a DBZ fan the author is, I'm guessing that wasn't accidental.
The fights leading up to the big fight, on the other hand, I found tremendously boring. No real suspense, since a) while the author is quite happy to make sure the lives of all his characters suck, he's probably not going to kill off a bunch of the popular ones and b) I really don't give a damn about Negi, Shikamaru, what'shisname with the dog, or Chouji. In fact, weren't all these guys supposed to be enemies just a little while ago? (Yes, I know, in manga you always make friends with your enemies as long as they're attractive enough and not dead and/or insane, but still.)
Oh, and Naruto continues to be annoyingly sexist. Sakura is on her way to becoming a medic, since girls suck at fighting, and just when it looks like Shikamaru's actually going to have to hurt a girl, another girl shows up and does it for him. Not even via a direct, personal attack, but via an indirect leveling of the forest. ::sigh:: I'll give Neji credit: I may dislike him, but at least he was willing to beat up his cousin. (Except I somewhat liked his cousin, causing me to not like him. We need more unlikable girls, or redshirts, or something, for some equal-opportunity violence.)
Awfully convenient how the sand ninjas just happened to each take on the sound ninjas they were most suited to attack, wasn't it? And speaking of sound ninjas: that guy with the bones was disgusting. I, just... ewwwwww. Especially the part with the rib cage.
As I haven't watched the anime, I'm very curious: how did they handle the infamous year of filler? I had this notion it took place during the timeskip, but if that's true, than Sasuke wouldn't be in it. That seems unlikely to make the filler popular. (Not that it was anyway, but you know what I mean.) But I don't see another good place for it, since so much of the plot leads directly up to all of these fight scenes taking place sequentially. So how did that handle it?
So, xxxHolic Kei. They're doing several things differently from the manga, largely because they're trying to avoid any and all mentions of Tsubasa, which seems a little odd. I guess they're aiming for a different audience? Anyway, I mostly like it, though it drives me a little crazy when I'm like, wait, did they just wrap up the Kohane arc? When we haven't even finished with Himawari? And because they can't mention Tsubasa, of course both arcs wrap up a bit differently. I wonder if this will cause problems later, considering just how deep it turns out the crossover goes? Ah, well, it's still very good. (Which I would probably say regardless as long as Doumeki continues to get screentime, but I really do like the plot of these episodes.)
I do think they're hammering the Himawari arc a little hard, though. In the manga, it was foreshadowed but not overdone. In the anime, the question "And what did you do with that finger?" is repeated so often they might as well hang a blinking sign on it with arrows a la the first episode of Ouran. Why Watanuki is surprised by the question and even has to struggle to remember each time is beyond me.
I knew it was coming, but I was still sad to see Sasuke leave in a grand gesture to prove to Gaara that nobody out-emos him to become stronger. However, I spent the whole fight hoping that Sasuke would at some point admit he actually liked Naruto, and I was not disappointed. ^-^ I did crack up when he went Super-Saiyan, though, down to the light-colored big eighties hair. Considering how big of a DBZ fan the author is, I'm guessing that wasn't accidental.
The fights leading up to the big fight, on the other hand, I found tremendously boring. No real suspense, since a) while the author is quite happy to make sure the lives of all his characters suck, he's probably not going to kill off a bunch of the popular ones and b) I really don't give a damn about Negi, Shikamaru, what'shisname with the dog, or Chouji. In fact, weren't all these guys supposed to be enemies just a little while ago? (Yes, I know, in manga you always make friends with your enemies as long as they're attractive enough and not dead and/or insane, but still.)
Oh, and Naruto continues to be annoyingly sexist. Sakura is on her way to becoming a medic, since girls suck at fighting, and just when it looks like Shikamaru's actually going to have to hurt a girl, another girl shows up and does it for him. Not even via a direct, personal attack, but via an indirect leveling of the forest. ::sigh:: I'll give Neji credit: I may dislike him, but at least he was willing to beat up his cousin. (Except I somewhat liked his cousin, causing me to not like him. We need more unlikable girls, or redshirts, or something, for some equal-opportunity violence.)
Awfully convenient how the sand ninjas just happened to each take on the sound ninjas they were most suited to attack, wasn't it? And speaking of sound ninjas: that guy with the bones was disgusting. I, just... ewwwwww. Especially the part with the rib cage.
As I haven't watched the anime, I'm very curious: how did they handle the infamous year of filler? I had this notion it took place during the timeskip, but if that's true, than Sasuke wouldn't be in it. That seems unlikely to make the filler popular. (Not that it was anyway, but you know what I mean.) But I don't see another good place for it, since so much of the plot leads directly up to all of these fight scenes taking place sequentially. So how did that handle it?
So, xxxHolic Kei. They're doing several things differently from the manga, largely because they're trying to avoid any and all mentions of Tsubasa, which seems a little odd. I guess they're aiming for a different audience? Anyway, I mostly like it, though it drives me a little crazy when I'm like, wait, did they just wrap up the Kohane arc? When we haven't even finished with Himawari? And because they can't mention Tsubasa, of course both arcs wrap up a bit differently. I wonder if this will cause problems later, considering just how deep it turns out the crossover goes? Ah, well, it's still very good. (Which I would probably say regardless as long as Doumeki continues to get screentime, but I really do like the plot of these episodes.)
I do think they're hammering the Himawari arc a little hard, though. In the manga, it was foreshadowed but not overdone. In the anime, the question "And what did you do with that finger?" is repeated so often they might as well hang a blinking sign on it with arrows a la the first episode of Ouran. Why Watanuki is surprised by the question and even has to struggle to remember each time is beyond me.