Air TV - 02

Well, it looks like everyone but me is absolutely head-over-heels for this show. If I was a review writer, of course, I'd be talking about keeping myself "pure," forming my own opinions, and so on, but this is a blog and one of the advantages of blogs is I get to make up the rules. So my response is what it normally is when my opinion is downstream of everyone else's, and that's to wonder what I'm missing, and watch more carefully.

On the plus side, the constant flight imagery is starting to show a little depth. I'm very interested in the interplay between that and the loneliness theme, especially in Misuzu's character. She's so incredibly needy, both explicitly ("Let's play hide-and-seek!") and passive-aggressively (fishing for a "Happy Birthday.") I think she has abandonment issues, and yet she has a flight fantasy, which is traditionally about freedom, or escape. The contradiction looks intentional, too - Misuzu falling on her face when she's running with her arms out is a pretty clear hat tip.

At the same time, there's a duality being set up between Misuzu and Kano. Kano's own flight fantasy, which she admits on the school rooftop, is the giveaway, but the two girls also have the same family structure - especially with Yukito being insinuated into both households at roughly the same time. We've got what almost amounts to a scientifically controlled experiment here: Kano is Misuzu, only something, and that something is what has Kano glowing and wandering around temples in the dead of night.

I only wish I could say what something was. I want to say "less needy," which would fit in very well and set up a confidence-in-oneself story, but she sure tried hard to impress Yukito back in the first episode. I wish we'd seen more of her, so I could figure out if that was something more than the friendliness implicit in dating-sim girls.

But on the other hand, I still think the opening is comically overblown, and Ryoka Yuzuki is way out of her depth as Minagi. (I'm not sure if the staff doesn't know why Minagi speaks slowly, or it's just Ryoka that doesn't know, but it sounds completely stiff and unmotivated to me, and unmotivated speech idiosyncrasies as a substitute for character development drive me crazy.) The voice acting in general's picked up a little, though, and the animation doesn't strike me as nearly as ostentatious as it did at first.

If they start talking about the Hedgehog's Dilemma, though, I'm gone.

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