What I Watched in March: Digest Version

o Dojin Work:  Well, that's over.  Really, I was just watching for the extras.  I felt bad, so I forced myself to sit through the show.  Thankfully, my memory is hazy.

b Glass Mask (1-13):  You know, this is cheesy (no moreso than most shonen), and I would really like more, please.  Don't make me watch it legally online; I beg of you.  I want to lay on my cough doing exercises while they do acting training sequences or slugging out on my couch while the drama gets high.  I'm low tech, so the computer doesn't even know the TV exists.  The TV's too old for it, anyway . . .

b Hayate the Combat Butler 8:  If I hadn't just watched Dojin Work, I would not have noticed all of the characters making a guest appearance in a corner of the screen for 5 seconds.  :)

b Kiba: I was not a huge fan of this dub, but I needed to be able to be doing work while it was playing, so I had to leave the English track on.  Some performances were really good.  Some folks just didn't have characters who made sense to work with, but they did their best.  Others were pretty terrible to begin with.  Some of them got better.  I think it would have been a better experience if I'd actually been watching instead of just listening because a lot of this show was fighting action with shiny animation and many tragic deaths.  It's harder to care with only auditory and no visual.  Not impossible, just difficult.

b Nana: I'm a fan. 

b Toradora: Wow.  Goofy screwball romantic comedy full of various love triangles, energy, shouting, and mortifying romantic missteps.  Some of the characters are types, but they really do transcend, and you have to love the main male lead who is a natural born nurturer everyone is afraid of because of the scary eyes he inherited from his absent father.  He's the soul of the show for me, but I find most everyone sympathetic eventually.

b Tsubasa 1: I like the premise.  Something weird happens, and a girl's memories turn into feathers and scatter across the multiverse.  The boy who loves her asks the dimensional witch for help recovering the memories, and she agrees.  She has to take an equivalent price, but the boy has nothing, so the price is that the girl he loves will never recover her memories of the time they had together before the journey began.  Super heartbreaking!  I must say that the pacing is bad.  I mean, any time you have to watch a still scene for, like, two minutes or spend 30 seconds panning at snail speed because they don't really want to move on to the next actual plot point because it's only a couple minutes away from the end is sort of inexcusable (and excruciating).  And unfortunately, appallingly frequent from episode one.  Sigh.  If you can handle the poor pacing and you like slow-build series that are episodic with threads of greater conspiracies looming, you might like this one.