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curestardust · 6 years

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if you want: slice-of-life / realistic portrayal of wlw relationships with no fanservice

We obviously know why I’m here. If something contains wlw, expect me to appear there sooner or later.

Aoi Hana is a pretty special series. Among all the shoujo ai series whose main draw is the fanservice and the fetishization of girl on girl action, Aoi Hana contains none of that. It’s a quite realistic take on the “genre”.

The way I’d describe this anime would be to say that it’s about “Fumi’s first love”. Our main cast consists of Fumi, a very timid and gentle girl who moves back to her hometown where she meets Akira (Aa-chan) with whom she used to be friends with as kids. Despite the expected premise, Aoi Hana isn’t a love story between these two. Fumi meets a girl called Sugimoto on her first day in her new school. They eventually start dating. The series is basically about Fumi’s personal growth throughout this relationship with multiple characters and their interjecting love interests keeping things even more interesting. I’d also like to mention that while wlw relationships are the focal point of the anime, Fumi is the only lesbian in the bunch. Two other main characters are bisexuals and we aren’t really given anything to figure out Aa-chan’s.

With the complicated relationship “drama” you’d expect Aoi Hana to be pretty spicy but it’s a slice-of-life through and through. The story advances at a very slow pace and focuses quite a bit on side-characters’ relationships, friendships and just general school life.

The technical side perfectly mirrors the anime’s pacing and general atmoshpere. The OST contains a lot of piano and various musical instruments and the OP/ED are both slow and soothing. The animation is very smooth and the art direction is quite interesting with the backgrounds only being drawn as if they were just sketched. The character designs are simple but distinct.

However, there’s a reason I said that this is about “Fumi’s FIRST love” as this is just a small piece of the actual story. The manga was unfinished at the time of this production and thus they decided to leave the ending SOMEWHAT open-ended. Not in a bad way as most of the story threads have been wrapped up but they left room for a potential sequel which I’d love to see so bad!”

Sidenote: compared to my review my score may seem low and that is because I may have appreciated how the series was handled, I’m really not a sucker for SOL and the pacing was way too slow for me personally. [7/10] (x)

Recommend: HELL Yeah! | Yes | Eh??? | Nope | This anime killed my parents

if you want: boobs and asses tbh / okay-ish beach volleyball matches

Harukana Recieve is a sports anime mixed with some slice-of-life. Which sport? Beach volleyball. And as I found out from watching this, that is apparently very different from normal volleyball.

The story starts out with Haruka, who moves in with her cousin Kanata. Now living near the ocean, Haruka obviously takes a trip down to check it out where she meets 2 girls playing beach volleyball. Later it turns out that Kanata has certain connections to the pair. This is the start of how Haruka gets her first taste of the sport which later leads to her pairing up with Kanata. A bit later we meet another pair, the Thomas twins, who get the other 2 to join the beach volleyball club at school.

Honestly, Harukana Recieve was quite boring to me. The slice-of-life between the matches felt really slow. They did give some character bulding moments to our characters, however this being a sports anime I think the same could’ve been achieved during or after some exciting matches. And while the anime tries to give some depth to our cast, for quite some time I could only think of them as the tropes they represent...cause of the fanservice.

I looked at a few pages of the manga and was surprised to see that the characters don’t look like they came out of a hentai which means that making their boobs 3 times the size of what they were in the manga was a conscious choice. The creators most likely thought that the story couldn’t carry the anime and instead they filled the empty spots with a lot of eyecandy. Boob jiggles, close up shots of their asses and of course weirdly small swimsuits, everything a salivating virgin would want and more!

Shortly about beach volleyball from what the anime told me: a team consists of 2 people. A pair can only touch the ball 3 times while it’s in their court before needing to send it over the net. This part was initially what I thought made the matches quite boring to watch as it really doesn’t offer much variety. The tactics were the exact same for a long while. Recieve the ball, second person goes up to the net and passes up the ball to be hit over, first person jumps up and hits ball over. Repeat. However, I took a look at some actual real life beach volleyball matches and I realized the problem. The camera work. In real life, the passing of the ball is incredibly fast paced. You barely have time to think, the ball is just flying all over the place. In the anime however, they often pan on the ball while it’s in the air or even slow down the camera after a hit, making the matches feel much more sluggish than they actually would be. This is made worse by the fact that they barely use any wider shots, mostly just close ups from a lot of weird angles, making it hard to discern how big the court actually is and following the ball’s trajectory is almost impossible, as sometimes the ball looks like it got launched into the stratosphere and then we pan to literally a few meters from the person who hit it.

Obviously, the lack of tactics used in the matches could be attributed to the fact that Haruka is new and she is slowly progressing. Which is realistic, but doesn’t make it any less boring.

The final 3 episodes more or less consist of one match, which is the most exciting part of the whole thing. It still has the problems I pointed out above but as the 2 pairs are both more or less experienced, the fooling around is finally over and replaced by some actual tactical playing. It helps that the match also carries much more emotional weight than the ones before.

Well this ended up being hella long...if you just wanna look at boobs and asses go ahead tbh. If you want the beach volleyball part just watch the last 3 episodes. If you’re not interestested in either, then... [5/10] (x)

Recommend: HELL Yeah! | Yes | Eh??? | Nope | This anime killed my parents

if you want: beautiful presentation and nature scenes / some insight into diving / iyashikei (healing slice-of-life anime) / peculiar charm

Amanchu! is a special case for me. I see it mentioned a lot that one of the most exciting points of the anime is that it’s made by the creator of Aria, which I’ve obviously heard of but haven’t seen yet. And while this would work great towards me not comparing it to a prior work of the mangaka, I still made a mistake by having preconceptions about what this anime would be like.

My vague memory of the plot was that it was going to be about a diving club. Great! Basically another sports anime, which I’m fine with. However that wasn’t quite the case.

In the beginning, we’re introduced to Futaba (Teko) who moves into a new town, away from her dear friends. She is very shy and timid. Then at her new school she happens to meet a peculiar girl named Hikari (Pikari) who quickly befirends her and makes her join the diving club with her. The overarching plot of the anime is Teko’s change from a shy little girl into a much more mature young woman thtough Pikari, the diving club and the sport itself.

That is, in the first half of the anime and then the last episode. However, there’s a pretty big chunk of Amanchu! where the diving barely gets mentioned in favour of some slice-of-life and character building episodes, some of which focus on the side characters; the other 2 members of the diving club, a twin sister and brother and the club manager who’s their teacher. Unfortunately, most of these episodes fell flat for me as they really aren’t...very interesting characters!

While my lack of enjoyment in most of Amanchu! could be chalked up to me being a bit sick of slice-of-life stuff thus making it hard to get invested in what was happening, there’s something else that can be a huge turn off for people which is the “comedy”. Whenever something that demands a reaction happens the characters’ heads turn into a circle and their faces kinda turn into an emoji (for examples look up ‘Amanchu faces’). All of them have a specific “emoji face”. This looks cute of course but the anime uses it SO OFTEN you sometimes feel like you see their normal faces less than their emoji faces. Characters also have certain “ticks” like Pikari constantly saying “upyo!”, Teko making this high pitched “eeeeeehhh??” and the twin sister kicking her brother in the back at basically every occasion. The “funny sibling abuse” trope I hate anyway but your opinion of these things I just listed could make or break the series. It could either annoy you to hell and back making it basically unbearable to watch or you can find it incredibly charming and entertaining.

If you’re on of those many people who find it charming then Amanchu! will be a great iyashikei (healing anime) for you. The presentation is absolutely gorgeous with soft linework and a vivid but inintrusive colour palette. The background music consists of some very nice instrumental tracks. Of course, the anme shines especially during the diving and underwater moments while the slice-of-life episodes bring up some less serious but everyday questions. The enjoyment of small moments is a big part of Amanchu!.

This anime wasn’t really for me but I’m still giving it a quite weak 7 as I don’t think it deserves to be listed with some of my 6 rated anime that are objectively much worse. [7/10] (x)

Recommend: HELL Yeah! | Yes | Eh??? | Nope | This anime killed my parents

#dusty reviews #Sweet Blue Flowers #Aoi Hana #Harukana Receive #Amanchu!#Amanchu #pls dont kill me amanchu fans #also glad that i could get this out before my hospital stay

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