The Ruler of Nabari #26 — Sparklies!

September 30th, 2008

 

So much less embarassing than leaving a smelly corpse.

Still on vacation. I got distracted by the Steelers/Ravens game that would not end and Sylar eating brains. You didn’t even need that power, dude. Why are you eating someone’s brain just to let you use your mouth to do the same thing that you can do with your hands? Anyway, I’m back home late tomorrow night, but I’m going to see if I can get through KKN and Earl/Fairy before then. I need a break before tackling more fairies and/or KKN’s migraine-inducing nonsense though.

Impressions:

Man, whatever. Yet even more Miharu and Yoite manlove sandwiching Miharu going on a date with the one non-vampire heterosexual male in the show and knitting time with Yoite and Gau. Honestly, Yoite… knitting? This is how you choose to spend your remaining days before turning into magic sparklies? Could you possibly be any fruitier? Aren’t you supposed to be about 12? I’m pretty sure that I was still playing with Hot Wheels and thought that anything with ribbons and frills would give me cooties. If somebody had asked me to knit, I’d have called them a poopface and then gone off for some Four Square.

Other than Yoite and Miharu, there were some cursory attempts to wrap up the other loose ends, but not strongly enough to actually wrap them up. Kouichi’s immortality, the feral loli, and Super Cat are just sort of left out to dry, while Raimei lets Gau keep Raikou’s little keepsake because the flame of his mancrush for Pinky burned far hotter than her sisterly hatelove did. Fuuma’s still going to dick around with everything since he really learned nothing from this mess and Kumohira’s quest for second base will have to wait for the second season: Nabari no Ou 2: Miharu vs NAMBLA.

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

Nabari was at times fun, exciting, awful, yaotastic, boring, and frustrating. It started well, and aside from the last episode, which could have been condensed to a 90 second montage playing during the ED of the previous episode, had a pretty solid ending as well. Most of the middle… had some issues. The problem lies in the characters, and not because they were a pair of effeminate boys with crushes on each other. From the start, Miharu’s personality gimmick was that he was apathetic and didn’t care about anything. Then they matched that up with… somebody who didn’t care about anything. So you had two characters with fundamentally the same personality both standing around and… not caring about things together. Neither were motivated or had the drive to actually do anything except let things unfold around them which would supposedly lead them to their goals which, if you force fed them some Red Bull, they might be able to muster up some excitement to reach. So all those Miharu and Yoite episodes were pretty much just wasted time since they had all the drive and depth of a stagnant puddle.

Other characters were a little bit better, but the Ash Wolves had some issues in general because there were confused signals sent throughout the show. The head antagonists were clearly evil and out to rule the world, but most of the rest were presented as basically just doing this as their day jobs and their thoughts on the whole "world domination" or even "Evil Mr Frosty who kills children" were conveniently omitted, letting them skate by on a shade of grey by just omission of development more than anything else. In contrast, Kouichi, Raimei, and Kumohira were pretty much flawless shining knights, whose only ‘flaws’ were either ignorance or in Kumohira’s case, excessive preachiness. There was also a lot of wasted potential with some characters, namely Kouichi and Shijima.

Overall though, it wasn’t that bad a show. It would have been a really solid 13 episodes had they trimmed down all the Yoite and Miharu to manageable levels and got rid of a lot of the Kumohira angsting and/or Gau in general. I’d say that there are probably about 10 really enjoyable episodes in this series, which isn’t that bad of a ratio, but there are literally month long stretches that will force you to question what the series is really about. I certainly did like the unique visuals, especially the watercolored background art which has become JCStaff’s style in recent years, though could have used a little less of the blurred action sequences, but in the end, for all the mocking that I do of the yaoi vibes, weird direction, and even the occasional massive production error, I do consider it an above average show. 

As to what an average show is though… that one’s up to you.

Posted in Nabari no Ou | 1 Comment »

One Lonely Comment

  • issa-sa says:

    Oh, you just reminded me that I watched this about a day or two ago… And I have absolutely no recollection of what went on in it nor in the rest of the series. Guess that’s the kind of impression Nabari’s leaving me in the end – vanishing into pink sparklies…