Not bad at all. They went out with a bang, and to my immense surprise, none of the spoiler-happy wiki entries spoiled anything. A marathon rewatch is in order, because the big reveal makes the early episodes more interesting. Yes, that’s the word.

What I know about the next few light novels says it will be a while before they have enough material to make a second season. Maybe they’ll just do a few OVAs.

Elf:

Half-Elf:

If you can’t be an adventurer, be an adventure supporter! Won’t you think of the puppies?

(src)

What do you you get when you buy a supporting membership to Worldcon so you can be one of the ridiculously small group of fans that votes on the Hugos? A backpack full of loot:

(src)

[this message brought to you by Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, which is better than many of this year’s Hugo nominees. Which says more about how broken the Hugos are than it does about random harem anime.]

On a whim, I picked up a set of translated light novels a while back, the first five of the 130-volume Guin Saga, a popular fantasy series in Japan that I’d never heard of, notable primarily for its length and the fact that it was written by a very talented and prolific woman, Kaoru Kurimoto (who apparently had a hand in creating the yaoi genre in addition to her other accomplishments).

They’re a light, quick read, which is fortunate, because they follow a pretty basic formula, one that’s been done many times before and since. It’s noteworthy that the 2009 anime adaptation ripped through all five of these books in only 10 episodes without losing much that mattered. Although they did feel it necessary to make the one-on-one fights rather overpowered, and replace relatively realistic mass combat with plate-wearing soldiers jumping around like ninjas on crack.

I haven’t finished watching it yet, largely because it gets tiring to hear every character in the story constantly repeat Guin’s name while pausing the story for a closeup. Also, the closeups are pretty much the only decent art, the animation is tolerable-to-bad, and the music is intrusive and repetitive. I’d have given up already if I didn’t like the performances by the voice actors for Guin, Istavan, and Rinda (who was naggingly familiar until I had to look her up, at which point I wasn’t surprised to discover she played Maia in Daphne in the Brilliant Blue).

Not recommended, but if you’ve run out of other things to watch, it’s on Crunchyroll.

Episodes 1-3 covered book 1, 4-6 book 2, and 7-8 book 3. Episode 9 is starting book 4. Book 7 was released just over a month ago, and book 8 comes out in a few weeks, so it’s a race between the animators and the author.

If it’s a single-cour series, they’ll finish book 5 at the current pace, and won’t have enough material to adapt again until at least the Fall season. If they try for 26 episodes now, they’ll have to pull in the spinoff series about Aiz and company, which has 5 books as of last week.Or go with original stories, in which case it was a mistake to rush through the books; 2 episodes for a light novel leaves out a lot of material. Three episodes was already pretty tight, and risks turning an anime into a highlight reel (like DaiMaou), but it’s been working pretty well so far.

I see special editions of book 8 on Amazon, which suggests the anime is helping sales, and the pre-order for the first disc is at #68 in anime Blurays, so my guess is that they’ll do a second series in the Fall or Winter season.

It continues to be entertaining, but I’m hoping that Bell’s new skill doesn’t turn into an all-purpose “I Win” button, which is unfortunately implied in Hestia’s description of it.

While skimming through previous episodes of DanMachi, I happened to notice an amusing bit of animation in episode 3. At 11:34, Our Hero’s Dream Girl finishes dispatching a monster that’s escaped into the city, and as the crowd cheers, she performs a crisp, precise chiburi-nōtō to put away her sword. Her slim, double-edged rapier.

It’s an overhead crowd shot, and you only see her at a distance, but after flicking the blade clean, she very clearly grasps the mouth of the scabbard with her left hand and slides the full length of the blade along it before guiding it in.

It’s the classic technique for safely sheathing a katana, gliding the thick spine along the web of your thumb until the tip drops neatly into the mouth, so that you know without looking that the blade will go into the scabbard and not, say, your thigh.

This does not work for double-edged blades (or for that other famous anime blade, Rurouni Kenshin’s “reverse katana”). Attempting a standard nōtō will simply slice open your hand.

Amusingly, all of the close-up scenes I found of Aiz sheathing her blade show her just poking the tip into the scabbard; it’s only in this one very public slaying that the animators added the extra dramatic motion.

…and of course the usual ridiculous metallic noises that accompany waving a blade in the air and sliding it into a leather scabbard. After a while you sort of stop noticing that nonsense, unless it’s something as over-the-top absurd as the magical kitchen knife in the pilot episode of Gotham.

Race: prum (halfling).
Height: 100cm.
Age: 15.
Ethics: situational.
Occupation: lifts and separates.
Kemonomimi: at-will.

Episode 6 of DanMachi finishes off the second light novel’s worth of story, focusing on the tiny, cheerful, mendacious Lili, who hides not only her motives, but a smoking-hot body. Sadly, every potential screenshot showing her without her snug-yet-concealing robe involves her being beaten up by large ugly male adventurers (seriously; you get lingering cheesecake shots of her as she’s smacked around, which is Not My Thing). This has somewhat soured her outlook on life, leading to the point of episodes 4-6: what happens when a genuinely nice person pets a whipped puppy.

Since Bell is Our Hero, and this is a harem comedy, it’s no great spoiler to say that things work out in the end, or that the next arc focuses on Bell’s primary fixation, the flat-affect blonde sword princess (who, by the way, apparently has her own spinoff novels now).

A better-than-expected translation of the first two light novels is available on Amazon (1, 2). That is, you can still see the Japanese grammar peeking through, but it’s not filled with the clumsy constructs common to fan translations on Baka-tsuki, etc. It succeeds in telling the story, and fills in a lot of details that make for some puzzling moments in the anime.

One thing of note is that the novels are very light on description, apart from breast size and hairstyles, so Hestia’s famous ribbon was definitely the work of the cover artist. Lili’s figure goes entirely unmentioned, largely because her dog-ear disguise convinced Bell that she was a beastman child rather than a halfling teen. I’m sure this attitude will survive the truth for a while, leading to a future Compromising Position that makes her an official haremette.

Or maybe if she wants him to notice, she’ll have to upgrade her wardrobe to one of the classics:

more...

Goddess of the Hearth
If you had to hang out with a Greek deity, I’d go with Hestia. She never married, just cooked food, lit fireplaces, took care of travelers, and basically just chilled out at home. All-around cool lady.
    -- The Greek God Family Tree

While the show is apparently ripping through the source material, it’s managing to do so in an entertaining and amusing way, and this Hestia is clearly the patron goddess of Tumblr, Pixiv, Yandere, and anywhere else that cheesecake fan-art is accepted.