This is probably going to break me.

But first, some backstory.

I went through a period of a few years where I kind of fell away from being an anime fan, for various reasons.  Lack of money, lack of time, lack of interest in the shows I saw on retailer shelves, disgust with fandom, and of course playing MMOs every waking moment of every day.

Still, there was enough residual fanboy in me to make me fly to Japan for a vacation in late 2005 after getting a deal on plane tickets that staggered belief.

That trip was really a sort of rebirth.  MMOs started seeming a lot less important afterwards, I started getting in better shape, and I started trying to pick through the last several years of anime to find the gems.  It was a good experience.

Anyway, we spent probably too much of our trip in Akihabara, and we just happened to be there in the month when Leaf launched two big titles: the PC version of ToHeart2 and the PSP version of Comic Party.

The result was that you saw Leaf characters pretty much anywhere you looked.

Not, mind you, that I really knew what I was looking at.  I’d seen the Comic Party anime but didn’t realize that it was based on a game (to be honest, I’m not sure I knew what a visual novel WAS at that point) and though I’d heard of ToHeart, it was in the context of “hey, it’s that anime that they kept talking about in the Comic Party anime” and I certainly didn’t know anything about the original game or its sequel.

Thing is, though, I kept running in to ToHeart2 in various media, and one thing lead to another and I eventually wound up buying a copy of the PC game just so I could get around to seeing what all the fuss was about.

Now, I had learned what a visual novel WAS by then, and I knew that, while it did have a fair bit of the “visual” in it, it also had an awful lot of the “novel” and that playing a visual novel consisted of doing a heckuva lot of reading and occasionally pressing the enter key to continue and not much else.  In addition, at the time (August 2007), spending $70 on a Japanese visual novel was basically spending $70 on a pretty box.  I’d taken a term and a half of college Japanese 8 years prior, but that was about it.

Four years later, I have my bachelor’s degree in Japanese under my belt, I have enough dictionaries to choke a horse, I have a vague understanding of grammar, and I am terrified that I am going to forget the Japanese that I spent four years and $40,000 learning, so I have finally started to play ToHeart2.

As I started off this post by saying, it might just break me.  I played it for about two hours tonight and all I’ve managed to do is wake up, realize that I’m alone in the house because my parents are away on a business trip, and had my house almost immediately invaded by the neighbor girl who my mother has given a key to so she can take care of me while they’re away.

It strikes me that guys in Japan must be seen as fairly helpless for quite a while.

Anyway, the thing that really slowed me down was the crazy idea that, whenever I hit a word I didn’t know, I’d write it down in a book.

I’ve revised that idea somewhat.  Now I’m only going to write down words if I have to look them up at least 3 times.

It’s STILL slow going.

I’ll see how long I last.

Before the recent boom in supernatural fiction, I never really thought much about the undead.  Sure, I’d hacked my way through my share of animated skeletons and zombies in many an RPG, but they were just sort of incidental monsters, the sorts of things you get thrown at you in the early levels of a game.

Since Zombies became The New Big Thing, however, it’s been hard to avoid them.

In the last few years, I’ve watched “28 Days Later” and “Shaun of the Dead”.  I read and quite enjoyed Mira Grant’s “Feed“, was somewhat less enthusiastic about Marvel Zombies, and I own a copy of the Zombie Survival Guide.  I’ve played games that took the whole zombie thing very seriously, games that take a bit of a lighter look at the living dead, and games that use the whole zombie apocalypse thing as an excuse to have half-naked girls running around with Big Damn Swords.

And yet I’ve barely scratched the surface of the whole Zombie genre of fiction, because I’m honestly not seeking it out – if I WAS seeking it out, I could probably spent every hour of free time on zombie-related activities.

Speaking of zombies as an excuse to have girls running around without many clothes on, I spent a few hours recently watching last year’s “Highschool of the Dead”, an anime which at first glance seemed designed to cater to the fetishes of, respectively, zombie porn, gun porn, and plain old porn porn.

Actually, it seemed that way at the second, third, and fourth glances too.  It centers around the struggle for survival, post-zombie-apocalypse, of a group of five high school students and their school nurse, with a male:improbably proportioned female ratio of 2:4, who manage to live through the infection of their high school and escape to find that the entire world is full of  groaning hordes of flesh-hungry zombies.

Through one contrivance and another, they stumble into a massive cache of military weaponry and a humvee – I’m not spoiling anything that isn’t in the opening credits, here – and spend the dozen episodes getting chased by zombies, killing zombies, dealing with the living who have used the whole zombie apocalypse thing as an excuse to shed the veneer of civilization and get with the murdering, finding the occasional refuge that is inevitably overrun…

You know, normal stuff for the genre.  There are a few tropes of the genre that seem mandatory in any treatment of the subject, and HotD does its best to hit them all.

I was also ready, four or five episodes in, to point out that it reused animation an awful lot – one episode runs through a 8-9 minute recap of What Has Come So Far before you get to any new animation, and in a show that’s only 24 minutes long and has to include an OP, and ED and a preview of next week’s episode, 8-9 minutes is almost half the episode.

Fortunately, the excessive reuse more-or-less stopped after that episode.

Toward the end, it gets quite a bit better.  With 12 episodes, it’s able to cover the main tropes, get the flounce and bounce out of the way and then get on to some actual character exploration and thinking about what it is that allows us to stay “human” in the face of extreme adversity.

Of course, that’s about when it ends.  Now, while the ending is actually a decent ending, rather than the “wow, you guys better hope we get to make a sequel” ending that has been rather prominent in recent years, it still somewhat grates that the producers could spend 12 episodes not really answering any of the questions that the story raised.

We do find out in the next-to-last episode why one of the main characters had to repeat a grade of school.  That’s something, I guess.

It’s a bit odd to be talking about “Sanctuary” now.  I mean, it’s not exactly a new release, it came out during the mid 1990s and is long out of print in this country as far as I can tell.

My wife bought all the volumes back when they were coming out and has occasionally mentioned to me that I should check it out, but I’ve always resisted.  To be honest, it was kind of intimidating – I mean, it’s a 12-volume series (bundled into 9 volumes for this country) all about Japanese politics and the mafia.  Sure, it’s got Ryoichi Ikegami art and the main pair of characters are Truly Magnificent Bastards, but I didn’t think I’d be able to follow it.

The other day, though, we were having a conversation that actually turned to Japanese politics and she said that she thought I could handle it by now and that I should give it a try.

So I read the first volume to humor her and then I read the next 8 volumes in about a day.

It’s really quite good, is the point I’m trying to get across with that last sentence.  It’s got the aforementioned pair of Magnificent Bastards, and a few more Magnificent Bastards to go with them and a couple more Magnificent Bastards just to liven things up.  There’s lots of heroic posing and Blazing Gunfights and elaborate schemes that inevitably lead to dramatic double crosses and so on and so forth.  It’s truly Manga For Men, though it has enough Improbably Attractive And Well Dressed Men to make it Something For The Ladies as well.

But, yeah, it’s also really dense and I’m glad I waited until I had some basic understanding of Japanese politics and post-war history and (to a great extent) basic geography and, well, I’m kind of startled that this actually got published outside of Japan.  Glad it did, though.

My cat: Internet Celebrity.

That reminds me, I took a bunch of food photos while I was in Japan over the summer and inasmuch as most of my traffic comes from people looking for same (or looking for pictures of Pokémon characters in compromising positions, but this isn’t that sort of blog), I should probably get to posting those.

But I digress.

Anyway, I noticed a new source on the referrer page, and following it led me to some deliciously-snarky writing about old videogames that nobody remembers.  I blew through a couple of hours reading almost everything there; it’s not a huge site but the content is of the “just one more article and I’ll get back to productive work” variety.

Then I went through the links on the bottom of the page and lost nearly a week’s free time to reading the entirety of the back archive of this guy’s site.

As a rule, I don’t follow the infighting and drama that surrounds anime fandom.  This poor bastard has made it his career – he can’t escape – but he’s spent an awful lot of time in chronicling the most horrific parts of the “scene” in terribly entertaining fashion, and I felt the better for having read through all of it.

Also he nearly got me to buy a Gamera pachislot machine just by mentioning that companies import them, but that didn’t pass the “wife test”, for which – a week later, and saner – I’m actually grateful.

That being said, there do seem to be an awful lot of shows about otaku lately.  I mean, sure, in the early 90s we had Otaku no Video, and then there was Otaku Planet a few years later – the latter of those two being something I know about only through seeing ads for the LDs in Animage; it seems to have vanished into the mists of history – but the last, oh, five years have given us Genshiken, Lucky Star, Welcome to the NHK, Densha Otoko, OreImo… and a couple of shows I’m going to talk about now.

I’ve watched an awful lot of shows recently that revolve around nice-but-relatively-personality-free young men that wind up in the center of a hurricane of cute girls.  Most of them, to be honest, involve aliens or anthropomorphic versions of Japanese myths, so it’s actually a bit refreshing to watch Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu, which is just high-school-slice-of-life.

Of course, even a pure slice-of-life show needs a “hook”, which in this case takes the form of a beautiful, cultured, fabulously rich – yet still going to a public school – girl who just happens to be a massive closeted otaku.  Of course, the main male character finds out her secret but – as the Nice Guy – swears to keep it private between the two of them, and you get twelve episodes of so-when-are-they-going-to-kiss, mixed in with the usual assortment of maids, rival girls, curiously precocious younger sisters, quirky childhood friends and so on and so forth.

Oh and it’s got a Comic Market Episode that actually comes close to the Comic Market experience; that is to say waiting in long lines in hot weather to buy comic books you probably wouldn’t show your parents.

It’s very much the paint-by-numbers approach to anime production, with the only unusual thing being that the main character is even more of an enigma than you usually get in these shows.  After watching twelve episodes, I couldn’t tell you a single one of his likes or dislikes, not even a favorite food.  To carry on with the paint-by-numbers metaphor, just because I like it, he’s the white space that isn’t numbered so you don’t paint it in.

The series – or more likely, the series of light novels it’s based on – was popular enough to get a second 12-episode run, anyway, which I will probably watch at some point just because I’m morbidly curious to see if they’ll ever give the guy a personality.

Kuragehime, on the other hand, is NOT aimed at young men desperately trying to imprint themselves on an onscreen avatar, and I liked it rather a lot.  It’s about five otaku women living in a run-down Taisho-era apartment house and having their peaceful routines disrupted horribly when a fashion-obsessed Shibuya-type joins the group.

Note that “otaku”, in this case, isn’t used in its typical sense of “obsessed with manga and anime”, but rather in the sense of being really just a little too much into a hobby.  The group includes a railfan, a Three Kingdoms geek, a woman obsessed with older men, a traditional-dress-and-doll nut, and, well, the main character, whose specialty is jellyfish.

I learned SO MANY THINGS about jellyfish from watching this show, it’s not even funny.

To be honest, it does drag a bit near the end and it never even comes close to hinting at resolutions for most of the story threads that it opens, but it’s only eleven episodes and based on a currently running manga – it’s designed to introduce you to the characters, set up an initial conflict, and resolve that initial conflict while still remaining open-ended, and it does that all quite well.

Oh, and most of the characters are in their thirties or older, which is pretty unusual but quite nice, it means that the show avoids the obligatory beach-trip and culture festival episodes that a high-school based show always seems to throw in.

Nothing against culture festival episodes, of course.  One of my favorite anime movies of all time is Beautiful Dreamer, which is an entire movie revolving around a culture festival.  For some reason, however, the culture festival episodes in Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu were giving me flashbacks to the culture festival episodes in School Days, and those are not flashbacks anyone wants to have.

But I digress.

The first two tapes I rented were the Dirty Pair movie and the first Bubblegum Crisis OVA, by the way.  I didn’t have a VCR of my own at home, so I watched them at work in the breakroom.  Yeah, I had no idea what a “career limiting move” was and I’m probably lucky that the only person who came in and boggled at the screen was a friend of mine.

Anyway, I watched what the comics store had to offer, and then a couple of other video stores in town started carrying anime tapes, and things were getting off to a pretty good start as far as I was concerned.

I also wasn’t spending TOO much money, because, well, the options I had to spend it on were pretty limited.  The comics shop had some translated manga to buy, but that was about it.

I did find out that one of the local records store could order CDs from Japan if I had a catalog number, so I asked them to order me the first Bubblegum Crisis Vocal Collection CD.  Several months after I placed the order, it actually arrived and I practically danced my way over to give them my thirty bucks for it.

Oh, and I bought my first VCR.  It was a Samsung 4-head job that didn’t do stereo and that wouldn’t play certain brands of tape and that cost me $240 (basically a week’s pay) … but it was MINE.

Then I saw a reference online to someplace called “Nikaku Animart“, which seems to still be open today, that sold stuff relevant to my interests and that would cheerfully send me a catalog from which I could make selections.

That catalog is reproduced below, mostly for my nostalgia.

Page 1: CDs.  Note that the CD I REALLY wanted to get, the Gunbuster soundtrack, is marked off in blue ’cause they were low on stock.  By the time I called, they were out of stock.  18 years later, I still don’t own this CD.

Page 2: Video.  This is mostly imported laserdiscs.  If you thought spending $20 on a four-episode DVD was expensive, imagine dropping 70 or 80 bucks on a single half-hour of animation.

For your elucidation, here’s a larger version of the important bit.  This represents the sum total of all the subtitled anime available as of February of 1992:

These prices were obviously bargains compared to importing the laserdiscs, and you even got a translation.

Page 3, 4, and 5: Models, books, magazines, manga.  English-translated manga is on page 5.  These were prices for single “issues”, which were usually two chapters from a given manga and about 32 pages long.  VERY expensive compared to the Japanese originals, but you could actually read them.

Page 6: Miscellany, posters, pencilboards, etc.  Looking at this now, I really wish I’d gotten some of the 10 Little Gall Force trinkets on offer, or those Ranma door curtains.

Pages 7 and 8: Obviously, you couldn’t be expected to buy a poster or pencilboard solely because it was from a particular show, so they thoughtfully provided these visual guides, if you can call them that.  Try to imagine making buying decisions from these sub-postage-stamp sized black-and-white examples, if you will.

On the other hand, looking back at these pages now, they must have represented a CRAZY amount of work.  Desktop publishing barely existed back in 1992, so someone must have been photographing these, then reducing the photographs, doing the paste-ups… Whoever it was was quite dedicated to making a sale, I’ll say that. 

Anyway, once this catalog hit my hands, it was pretty much over for me financially.  After Nikaku, I discovered Kimono My House and the Right Stuf, and, well, things happened.

No, I didn’t ACTUALLY declare bankruptcy at any point, that was just there for hyperbole.

The first time I went to an anime convention was 1993.  I didn’t even know such a thing existed before 1992, and I certainly couldn’t afford to get from the middle of Oregon to the San Francisco bay area, where the nearest cons were held.

On the other hand, a friend of mine came up with a cunning plan that would get us to Anime America 1993.  A friend of HIS was also an anime fan AND wanted to take his family to Great America in San Jose, which was basically across the street from the hotel where the con was being held, and my friend asked him if he wouldn’t mind a couple of extra passengers.

So me, my roommate, my friend, HIS friend, his friend’s wife and their two young boys all piled into a minivan and drove all night.

In 1993, north American anime cons were still something of a novelty and they attracted a rather high class selection of special guests.  This con had Haruka Takachiho (Dirty Pair creator), Megumi Hayashibara, Monkey Punch, Kenichi Sonoda and Johji Manabe in attendance.

It was also before anyone in North America knew what the heck “Sailor Moon” was, so when we snuck into the dealer’s room before it was officially open, I managed to score these two cels for 5 and 20 bucks, respectively.

It was shortly after that that we were discovered and thrown out so the dealers could keep setting up without people trying to buy things from them.  Of course we went back after the dealer’s room officially opened and spent as much more of our money as we could, but those were the first and most memorable. 

Let’s see… we also went to the Troma screening of “My Neighbor Totoro”, I went to a couple of panels, watched some anime on the in-room channel… In general, I had an awfully good first day just being surrounded by other fans.

Oh, and I discovered that pizza places will deliver to hotel lobbies, which was a major coup considering that the hotel’s restaurant was woefully inadequate to the task of feeding the number of people on hand and the hotel itself had been built in a part of San Jose that was still pretty undeveloped and there no other restaurants anywhere nearby.

Then I found out that my friend’s friend, the one who’d driven us, expected that he, his wife, and their children were going to be sleeping in the room with my roommate and I, which was a small room with two twin beds in it and no room for six people.  One shouting match later, we were stuck in San Jose with no way home.

It worked out all right in the end.  My roommate and I  made our way home thanks to a helpful cab driver who clued us in to the existence of a VERY budget airline, and I get to say to this day that I’ve eaten breakfast only a couple of tables away from Megumi Hayashibara, but it kind of cemented in my mind how bloody cheap some fans can be and how very important it is to ask questions like “So, do you guys have a hotel room yet?” in advance.

From 1995 to 2001, I went to San Diego Comic Con.  Those were generally fun trips; the con had a massive dealer room and enough anime/manga content that I didn’t feel like I was missing out by not going to a specifically anime-oriented convention, and the con staff has plenty of experience in running conventions and keeping crowds under control.  Fond memories include getting a sketch of Cutey Honey from Go Nagai in 1995 and having Naoko Takeuchi sign some manga for me in 1998.

I didn’t go to another anime con for five years after Anime America, until I was living in Los Angeles and some friends talked me into going to Anime Expo ’98, which was, mmm, less than professionally run.  We had to stand in line for a couple of hours just to get name tags, there were cosplayers with ridiculously oversized swords wandering the hallways whacking people behind them whenever they turned around, and the legitimate dealers in the dealer’s room were having to compete with tables hawking bootleg Taiwanese CDs and similar junk.

Then I went to Winter Comiket in 2005, and that pretty much cured me of ever going back to a con in this country, but that’s a long enough story that I’ll cut this off here.

Still, “wakasa yue no ayamachi” is one of those Famous Quotes and I’m going to steal it.

Anyway.

I got sucked into reading a blog recently where the author was doing an awful lot of navel gazing about his days as a young anime fan, when everything was Exciting and New, and I wound up doing a bit of reminiscing myself, and the collection of memories that bubbled to the top THIS time were some really cringe-worthy ones, so of course I decided I’d share them.

I used to run an anime club.  Hell, I thought it was my Solemn Duty to run an anime club.

See, back in the Wayback When, the halcyon years after I first got hooked on watching cartoons produced in a language I couldn’t understand, people didn’t have ready access to the internet, so getting new anime and talking to other people about anime involved making actual human face-to-face contact with other freaks who were also crazy about foreign cartoons.

So, for a few years, and with the help of a good friend who was bad about saying “No, you’re crazy, I’m not doing that”, I ran an anime club.

We even made a newsletter.  Ranma 1/2 was big at the time, so we called it “Panda Tracks”, and we put out three whole issues.  I was only able to find two to scan for your amusement, here they are:

Beyond newsletters, we had periodic meetings where we showed mostly-subtitled anime (although I did subject people to raw-Japanese, unsubtitled episodes of Sailor Moon and Miracle Girls back when those were airing in Japan).  It was those early meetings that sowed the seeds of what would later become my current rather jaded attitude towards fans.

Our first two meetings were held in local pizza restaurants, because neither I nor my easily-influenced friend were college students and we were used to fan clubs that met in pizza restaurants.  It made sense to us.  Pizza places had nice large private rooms that they were happy to set aside for a few hours based on the idea that the people in the rooms would be eating pizza and drinking appropriate beverages, and we needed a large private room.  It seemed win-win.

For our first meeting, we reserved a room, borrowed a largeish TV with built-in VCR from my friend’s workplace, and did as much advertising as we could to get people to show up.  If I recall right, we actually had a fairly good turnout, probably 20 people or so.

The first problem was that I didn’t realize just how cheap anime fans were until I saw that some of them had brought bag lunches into the restaurant, which didn’t exactly endear us to the management.  We also had a little drama at the end of the night because some people had agreed to split the cost of pizzas and then people had trickled out during the showings, so when it actually came time to settle up the bill, some of the people who’d agreed to split costs on the pizzas had quietly left some time before, so we wound up covering the rest and then tipping rather heavily by way of apology.

We had a second meeting at a different pizza place, and, while the people-skipping-on-the-bill thing didn’t reoccur, the bag lunches thing DID, so it was obvious that we needed to change our tactics before we ran out of pizza places willing to host large groups.

Our savior came to us in the form of the Golden Arches.  It turned out that a local McDonalds had a private room they used for groups to watch sporting events in, it had a big-screen TV built in and was shielded from the rest of the restaurant by blinds that could be closed.  Also, the food was cheap enough that people actually bought it as opposed to packing in their own.

I actually have mostly good memories from that time.  We’d get fifteen or twenty people at any given meeting, we’d watch anime together and eat McDonalds, we set aside a bit of every meeting for Show-And-Tell, where people could show off their latest purchases, and the management loved us because we ate lots of food and didn’t make a problem of ourselves.

We did have one time when, well, see, there was this show called Video Girl Ai, and we got the first three episodes of it and watched them and loved it, and then we got the last three episodes of it and decided that we’d make a meeting out of watching the whole thing together as a group, and then the last episode had an awful lot of blood in it and an employee happened to walk in right during the middle of the gory bit… I don’t think the restaurant actually SAID anything to us but we did adopt a “watch everything BEFORE showing it at the club” policy after that point.

Also, there were some issues with, let’s say, “social graces”. We did have to turn down an awful lot of requests from people to show various sorts of porn (Urotsukidoji had just come out and was All The Rage), and The First Time We Had a Girl Show Up was, well, a little embarrassing.

Still, we were Fighting The Good Fight at getting anime out to the masses, and I was young enough that that actually motivated me.

After about three years of this, I moved out of town and handed the reins over to my friend, and he took the helm for a little while longer – how’s that for mixing metaphors – and then handed them off again, and the whole thing lasted for well over a decade before it finally disbanded.

So on one hand I feel pretty good about having started something that lasted that long, and on the other hand it makes me cringe to think about how naive I was.

I’ve been watching “Rosario+Vampire” lately, even though I have a lot of other stuff I really should prioritize in front of it. After all, it’s a show about goofy hijinks and panty shots, and I have Serious Dramas and Significant Movies lurking in my collection crying out to be watched.

On the other hand, I read an article recently that claims that it’s just human nature to put off doing things one Ought To Do in favor of What Seems Fun Right Now, and although the intent of the author was probably to make the reader reflect on his or her behavior and then change it, what I took home was that it was all right to stop feeling guilty about putting off watching, say, my DVD copy of Shawshank Redemption that has been lurking on a shelf since 2000.

Anyway, so.  Rosario+Vampire isn’t too different from Omamori Himari or To-Love-Ru or any of a thousand similar Shows For Guys going back to Tenchi Muyo and before.

By the way, there’s some spoilers coming up related to the end of the first series, so if you care about that sort of thing you might want to stop reading.

To continue: You’ve got your Perfectly Ordinary Japanese High School Student is who suddenly confronted with proof of a supernatural world (or, you know, aliens work too) and then winds up drawn into the machinations of said supernatural world as an active participant.  Generally, they’re surrounded by impossibly powerful (and occasionally immortal) friends who are also, you know, physically perfect and – for some reason – fighting for the main character’s affections even though there’s no real reason they should be looking at the main character as anything other than, say, lunch.

Anyway, there’s not a whole lot of Angst and Drama in Rosario+Vampire, but there’s a bit at the end of the first series where the Generically Nice Main Character is seriously wounded and his vampire love interest has to save his life with a transfusion and there’s all sorts of OMG WILL HE TURN INTO A VAMPIRE NOW tension, and that’s where I had a flashback to sitting in a theater with my wife watching Twilight where there’s a bit where the Generically Angsty Main Character is seriously wounded and HER vampire love interest is contemplating saving her life by turning HER into a vampire.

And then I realized that, if you swap gender roles and ideals of physical attractiveness (and let’s face it, ideals of fan-service) around, there’s not a whole lot of difference between the stuff I’ve been watching of late and the recent trends in Books For Young Ladies Featuring Love Affairs With Werewolves And So On and that I probably shouldn’t make too much fun of the next person I see reading a House Of Night novel on the bus.

Firstly, my Japanese history class took two periods to watch Harakiri, a rather dark period film about poor Edo-era samurai, ritual suicide, bloody revenge and so on and so forth, and secondly I decided to watch an anime called “Kampfer” as a follow-up to Omamori Himari.

The chain of events that led to this was roughly as follows; I’ve enjoyed a lot of shows that can be collectively described as “spiritual successors” to Urusei Yatsura, so I decided to see if any other Takahashi shows had similar descendants.

Now, I’ve heard “Love Hina” described as a Maison Ikkoku knock off, and I may check that out some day, but what I wound up doing first was seeing if there were any shows in the mold of Ranma 1/2, everyone’s favorite gender-swapping high school martial arts tsundere love comedy.

A minimal amount of research suggested the previously mentioned “Kampfer”, so I tracked it down.

And it’s, well, it’s got a boy who turns into a girl and there’s some fighting in it, and it’s in high school and there’s even a girl named Akane.

Apart from that, though, not much in common. The whole thing seems to have been kind of an excuse to animate yuri fan service scenes and cash in on some easy boy-in-girl’s-body jokes, like having to buy bras and figure out how to use the toilet when you’re wearing a skirt.

Oh, and it has weird mascots. I mean, really weird mascots. One of the characters is obsessed with collecting stuffed animals made to appear as though they’ve been brutally killed in some way or another, generally with their intestines hanging out.

Hence “anime with guts”, see.

Also, the stuffed animals talk.

Anyway, it’s a pretty short series, clocking in at 11 story episodes and a very weird Christmas episode, so it doesn’t really have time to develop a story past “boy turns into a girl and the girl of his dreams falls for his girl side but can’t stand his boy side”, and it’s full of little moments that made even me roll my eyes, but it wasn’t actually BAD, just kind of… well, just kind of THERE. It is a thing that exists.