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MENAGE_EXISTENCE


                                             March 6, 2018

A trio of anime series from the current,
Winter 2018 season:

   https://animedao.com/anime/a-place-further-than-the-universe/
   https://animedao.com/anime/laid-back-camp/
   https://animedao.com/anime/love-is-like-after-the-rain/


I rarely keep up with the latest in anime--         An influence on this
or anything else-- but this season I find           has been the animedao site:
I'm following multiple series, grabbing the
next episodes every week...                         BUFFER_YOURSELF

One of my first finds was "Sora
yori mo Tooi Basho" or "A Place
Further Than the Universe".

   https://animedao.com/anime/a-place-further-than-the-universe/

The character design shows a pretty gross
moe blob girl, and indeed she turns out to                BEWARE_OF_THE_BLOB
be the viewpoint character, and it's
astounding that the show survives her             A peculiarity of this show
squeaky shrieky enthusiastic genki-from-hell      is that it seems to have a
ravings-- but it does.                            redundant character that's
                                                  not needed for any reason--
The thing that attracted me to it was the
capsule description:                                    I theorize they were
                                                        following the K-On!
  "This is the story of four girls who                  formula, and figured
  travel to the Antarctic ... "                         they should have four.
                        
And that's indeed what it's about: some
high school girls are determined to get to
Antarctica, and they eventually pull it off
through luck, determination and good old
shoujo Superior Niceness.  There's nothing
about who's going to date who, there's no
how will I pass the test, or who's going to                 (Mar 22, 2018)
win the sports match, there's not even an         Oh, and all of you tough,
"oh no, they want to shut down our school         unsentimental moderns out
club".                                            there might like to try
                                                  this one.  Good luck
   They've got no time for that crap,             making it through without
   they're fucking going to Antarctica.           bursting into tears.


Glancing around on the net one day, I noted
someone compared this show to "Yuru Camp" aka
"Laid-back Camp", and I've started following
that one as well...

   https://animedao.com/anime/laid-back-camp/

Once again, moe blob girl character design, but
also once again this is nothing like the usual
high-school drama-- this is about young women
who're interested in camping out in different
scenic locales in rural Japan.  And while they may
be "laid-back" about it-- it's mostly off-road
camping without much hiking involved-- they're also
doing it off-season, during the winter: that's
hard-core enough.

   One of the main characters-- the quiet,
   competent girl-- spends the first few      She pulls up on her bike, sets
   episodes going off by herself doing        up her tent on a deserted lake
   weekend bike tours and winter camping.     shore, then sits down reading a
                                              book watching the sun set on Mt
   You want to talk feminist? That's          Fuji.
   way more edgey and ground-breaking
   than any female bad-ass ninja
   fantasy...


As you may have noted, I'm not exactly
enamored of the present-day trend for
moe-out-the-ears (and out the bulging eyeballs),
and one of my search strategies is to look
for small eyes and small tits (and over
twelve, and if it's not asking too much--
usually it is-- out of high school).
This led me to

"Koi wa Amaagari no You ni" aka
"Love is Like after the Rain":

  https://animedao.com/anime/love-is-like-after-the-rain/

And as it happens this rounds out the trio
very well...

Unlike the others this is a story of teen love--
a young woman chasing after an older man-- or at      One immediately gets a
least that's the framework the story is built         feel for the main
around.  Really it's all about the texture of         character as a quiet,
existance... we gradually piece together the          subdubed young woman,
main character's circumstances and obsessions         and yet she makes an
and start to wonder about her true motivations        occasional quick, agile
and where the story is going... it has a              step that seems almost
slow-moving universe-in-minature character to         out-of-character--
it much like the other two picks here.                we learn that she's
                                                      a former track-star
                                                      forced into retirement
                                                      by injury, and the way
                                                      she moves makes more
                                                      sense.

                                                      Every little detail like
                                                      that has been thought
                                                      through...

                                                         (And she's not a
                                                         clumsy kawaii
                                                         moe blob!)

     SECONDS_EXIST


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