Daijoubu

I’ve been following the U.S. DVDs of Shana and Fate/Stay Night, which I haven’t seen before. Watching Shana vol. 4 followed by Fate/Stay Night vol. 3, I was thinking of how similar these shows are: they both have female fighters with magic powers and swords and the typical anime guy who’s really nice and worries about the girl and ends up being trained by her. I’m not sure who I’d rather be trained by: a tsundere like Shana would be a challenge, but then Saber would a perfectionist with a tough chivalric code. As for the shows themselves, I’m leaning towards preferring Shana, because the universe it sets up, with all its details about life and death and the balance of the universe, seems to be a lot more creative and the early episodes really get the audience emotionally invested in Yuji’s situation. F/SN seems more conventional, but since there’s a lot of background info that’s not revealed in the early episodes, its hard to tell where its going.

Watching shows as the DVDs come out is very different from watching an ep each week, or a whole series all at once. I sometimes forget what was going on in the last volume a few months ago. As a DVD release, the four episodes of Shana vol. 4 actually worked fairly well, because the first episode finished off the cliff hanger from the last volume, and then you get a complete story with the 3-eps flashback arc. But the flashback was inserted a bit crudely here. It’s usually a lot better to have these things relate to the plot at hand, like maybe the main character meets an enemy from the past or faces an emotional trauma at a crucial moment that relates back to something. Here ii’s just like they decided to stick a flashback into a lull between other arcs. And Yuji wondering why Shana likes Melonpan so much is a very weak way to enter into a lengthy flashback. But the flashback itself was pretty entertaining. I’m looking forward to the next volume.