Saw the end of Mai Hime the other night. Two words: "Reset motherfuckers". Bah. Comedy and high-drama tragedy/melodrama can co-exist - look at Buffy the Vampire Slayer in its salad days - but the writers have to be damned careful with the reset button. Mai Hime was a rather lack-luster fighting-girls comedy which developed a hard, harsh, nasty second half - and did well with it. Sadly, the last episode blew through that treasury of merit like a cardinal with an unlimited spiritual line of credit and an out-of-control faro habit. I'm not generally a tragedy kind of guy - I'm all for happy endings; I'm an American, after all. But certain story-lines demand bitter tragedy as a purgative, and Mai-Hime's emotional middle-late themes really ought to have been left be as-is. Fuck the reset button.

Oh, I thought this was amusing. It's apparently from the website for the new Victorian maid anime, Emma. I can't imagine what water could be drawn from that blasted heath of a premise, but it's getting good buzz, and the character-designs and backgrounds in the screenshots I've seen rather remind me of Witch Hunter Robin, which I'm fond of.

Bleach continues to rock sedimentarily, metamorphically, and igeneously, to steal a phrase. Volume 6 wasn't the pitch-perfect fighting-shounen-schoolkids brilliance that was volume 5, but it was still the sort of gemlike wonderful which leaves you buzzing and giddy afterwards. I've been warned that it gang aft agly after this volume, but I'll have to take that as it comes. For now - wooohooohohoo!