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:

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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.

The new series “Is it wrong to try to pick up girls in a dungeon?” has the look of a very predictable harem comedy. Indeed, it probably is a very predictable harem comedy. Our Hero is a typical hapless loser, who’s not only in over his head, but who almost loses it on the first level of the local dungeon until he’s rescued by the girl of his dreams, a sexy swordswoman. Over the course of the first episode, we’re also introduced to his big-sisterly advisor, his cute waitress, and his (platonic) live-in busty goddess.

After watching the first one on Crunchyroll, my quick judgement is “competent but uninspired”. For amusement, hapless loser-boy is the voice of Kirito, but Haruka Tomatsu is not voicing the sexy blonde swordswoman; she’s handling the big-sister role.

It was a pleasant enough diversion while I was on the elliptical, so I’ll likely watch the second one.

I vaguely remember hearing something about this “coming soon”, but I happened to be browsing torrents and they’ve released an extended cut of the last episode of Gatchaman Crowds, which ties up all the loose ends.

The episode title is “Embrace”. The rest of the series is still on Crunchyroll, but it doesn’t look like they’ve licensed this, and of course the US box set was released a long time ago, so there’s no alternative to torrenting it.

Not to be confused with siscon, lolicon, or any of the other fetish-con constructs in Japanese (in which case it would be “tiger complex”, which could get messy fast). No, I was suddenly curious to see if the original Dirty Pair novels used a kanji compound for the “Trouble Consultant” job title used by Our Heroines. Nope, it’s トラブル・コンサルタント, or トラコン for short.

Update: scrolling through the vocabulary list generated by my scripts, I was amused to discover that the words ホットパンツ and ジェノサイド appear exactly the same number of times. In fact, you could pretty much subtitle any discussion of the Lovely Angels with the phrase “hotpants and genocide”.

Perhaps someone will want this to help make 2015 brighter…

Y’know, I was just thinking that there isn’t enough terrible anime on the shelves any more…

(direct link for those whose ad-blockers won’t show Amazon iframes)