I finished this anime pretty much as fast as I could, and not because I hated it, but because I loved it.

Well, I don't know, maybe just liked, because it isn't my top favorite anime (actually, I don't even know what my favorite is anymore). Still, I really did enjoy it; it has action, comedy, and romance, as well as characters that I like (except for two of the villains, but it's unusual for the antagonists to be more charming than the protagonists anyways). Not to mention that I do have a bit of a penchant for tsunderes, and at certain points, the main character, Zakuro, displays some very tsundere-like behavior.

The anime starts out with Zakuro and her fellow half-spirit girls finding out that they are going to have to work together with soldiers to take care of the trouble that spirits have been causing. I won't reveal anything else, so if you want to find out, give it the 3 episode test - basically, watch 3 episodes of the anime, and decide where you want to finish it. Actually, for me, sometimes I only watch the 1st episode. That was enough to make me decide I didn't want to watch Akikan or Omamori Himari (urgh, too much ecchi, no thank you). So, whatever # of episodes floats your boat.

Anyways, Otome Youkai Zakuro seriously has a lot of characters that look like characters from other series.

Takatoshi "Omodaka" Hanadate (Otome Youkai Zakuro)


Matsuyuki "Yukiatsu" Atsumu (Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae wo Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai)


Both of them pretend to be something that they're not. Hanadate poses as a lieutenant but turns out to be after Zakuro for his own sinister reasons. As for Yukiatsu, he can't get over Meiko Honma (or Menma, as she is called in Anohana) and dresses up as her. Also note that both Hanadate and Yukiatsu are interested in the main female character of their respective animes, but in both cases the girls like someone else. And at one point Hanadate says he's stuck in the past because of his mother's death and her supposed rejection of him. That reminded me a lot of Yukiatsu, who was unable to move on after Menma's death.

Aya Orikata (Otome Youkai Zakuro)


Yuuko Ichihara (xxxHolic)


Both of them are the owners of unusual shops, have mythical beings as their assistants (Mugi is Aya's helper, and Maru and Moro help out Yuuko), and of course, the signature pipes they're smoking.

Tsukuhane (Otome Youkai Zakuro)


Kohane Tsuyuri (xxxHolic)


Besides the similarities in their names and appearances, I can't think of much, except...Both of them lived lonely and secluded lives. Tsukuhane's husband had her live in the mountains, alone except for the fox spirit Kushimatsu, and later on, when her daughter Zakuro was born, Tsukuhane fled with Zakuro to keep her safe. As for Kohane, her mother becomes distant from her.

Actually, now that I think of it, xxxHolic and Otome Youkai Zakuro do have some profound similarities. Spirits are a big part of both animes, both of the main characters' parents are dead, and both are sometimes funny, sometimes slightly disturbing. It does make me wonder if the author of the Otome Youkai Zakuro manga ever read or watched xxxHolic.

Labels: 3 episode test, anime, ano hi mita hana no namae wo bokutachi wa mada shiranai, anohana, characters, comparison, manga, otome youkai zakuro, similar, similarities, xxxholic

These past few days I've been watching the anime Angel Beats. It's already been a while since the anime came out - that was back around April to June 2010 - which is typical for me. I tend to watch older anime first and then gradually work my way up to more recent animes, so I guess I've been making pretty good progress if I'm able to watch some 2010 animes from time to time. (I think there still might be a couple of 2007 animes that I haven't watched yet, like Shattered Angels. Funny that its name is also about angels. :p)

Well, as is the case with me and most animes I've watched, I wasn't particularly intrigued by the beginning, but it got better as it went on (I felt that way about Durarara!! too). I'll try not to spoil it for those of you who have not seen it and might want to see it in the future.

I've heard it mentioned before that Yuri Nakamura, one of the protagonists of Angel Beats!, resembles Haruhi Suzumiya from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (otherwise called Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuuutsu).
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Labels: angel beats, anime, art, characters, chronological order, comparison, existence, haruhi suzumiya, life, meaning, my soul your beats, nico nico douga, pattern, proof, similar, song, time, yuri nakamura

That's a phrase that I saw in the book The Heights, the Depths, and Everything in Between by Sally Nemeth. And I thought it was really very true.

Life can give a person a lot of happiness, but also a lot of pain. If we didn't have the good times to keep us up, the sorrow in our lives would take over. There are still things that I've done in the past that continue to haunt me. If I didn't have good memories that I could recall, I don't know how I could keep from being swallowed.

My mom says that she likes to watch funny dramas so she can have something to laugh about. I find her interest in watching dramas rather amusing. She checked out this book from the library about a guy named Jerry in Australia. (There was a picture of him visiting the Twelve Apostles, which are these rocks in the ocean - unfortunately there are no longer twelve of them - which I had visited myself last summer)

My parents also seem to know about Super Junior. And then my mom said she knew about one of the guys from SS501 and how he was in Boys over Flowers or something like that. My dad, on the other hand, for a short time, kept mentioning someone called Angela Baby.

There really aren't that many differences between teenagers and middle-aged people. Both of them like...
- Asian dramas
- Social networking sites (Facebook, Kaixin, etc.)
- Being selfish

In fact, I wonder if that means that adults are immature or if that teenagers are actually middle-aged in their mindset.

Well, my mom had said that the older you get, the more you recede and become more childlike...Like slot machines, for instance. They have bright, cute pictures (cherries, bananas, diamonds, etc.) and make amusing noises. In a way they are like toys. No, I take that back - they ARE toys. Toys that take your money. XD

I've been watching an anime called Special A the past few days, and it's been pretty good. But it has a lot of similarities to Skip Beat, which I have also watched (and am currently reading the manga of).
Both...
- are in the Hana to Yume magazine
- have clueless heroines
- have heroines who are out to beat someone (Kyoko wants to top Sho, while Hikari wants to defeat Kei)
- have scenes where a character has a very evil aura
And so on. It's always possible to pick out similarities between stories. I guess it's because of the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" idea. After Harry Potter came the Lightning Thief. I haven't read the Olympians but I've heard that both involve half-bloods and such things. So it seems to very common for people to borrow one another's ideas.

Labels: age, cry, drama, happiness, ideas, k-pop, laugh, life, memories, pain, similar, skip beat, special a, teenagers, the heights the depths and everything in between, twelve apostles

The title of this post may confuse you. What I'm trying to do here is play on the phrase, "Like father, like son" or "Like mother, like daughter".

On Saturday, I had two piano recitals to attend. My piano teacher has a lot of students, so she has two recitals. Most students only perform in one recital, except for a few exceptions. In the afternoon, I was number 18 in the lineup and played the song Nocturne in F Minor, Op 55 No 1. I left for home after my performance so I could relax a bit and eat dinner before returning for the second recital. When I arrived back at the church (we always have our recitals at a certain church, I suppose you can rent it for performances, seeing as it has a piano), I saw some people coming out of the church and standing in the parking lot.

I saw two girls, and I think they were probably sisters. They were both wearing a jacket sort of thing and dresses. Also, both of them seemed to like swinging their legs around. One girl swung one of her legs back and forth, while the other girl did some movements that looked like kicks. o_o;; I suppose sisters behave alike. I think my mom and aunt are similar in ways too.

Sometimes I wonder what my sibling(s) would be like if I had any. Would my sibling, like me, favor my father's genes, or my mother's? Would my sibling be a mix of my parents? Or would he/she look like neither? What kind of interests and personality would he/she have? Would we get along? Would we fight all the time? Would we barely talk to each other?

As an only child, I think of how things could have different if I hadn't been an only child. People who do have siblings oftentimes think that it must be nice to be an only child. You don't have to share your toys, or if you're a younger child, you won't have to deal with getting hand-me-downs (well, unless they're from other relatives or something). And your parents' attention is focused on you, you, you. You are, however, your parents' only posterity, and their expectations rest on you solely (though I hear sometimes oldest siblings still feel the burden of being expected to do great things, at least in the case of someone I know). I'm just fortunate that my parents are not as driven as some parents. One of my classmates said her father threatened to disown her if she didn't get an A in math.

But sometimes, even if you're an only child, you might still feel like you're being compared to someone. And in that case it's even harder than being compared to a sibling. If you're compared to your siblings, at least you know what you're up against, but if you're being compared to an imaginary, perfect child, or to all other successful people in general, it's a lot harder.

I used to feel like I was being forced to be someone, to be "smart" and earn a lot of money, but after a while I began to realize the pressure mostly didn't come from my parents. Some of the pressure came from seeing other students and their ambitions, but in fact, I believe I have created some of the stress upon myself, too. I often seem to have an angel and demon on my shoulders - the angel says that I must stop getting distracted, and focus very seriously on my work - while the demon says, "Oh, just a few more minutes won't hurt. You have to have some fun." And then I end up in anguish for having cheated myself by not listening to the angel and not achieving my potential. When I am upset over a test score, it's not exactly the grade that really bothers me, but the feeling of having failed, and not done as much as I could have and should have.

Well, back to the topic of being an only child...This may vary from person to person, depending on personality and a person's experiences, but I think only children are probably more likely to get lonely. I personally feel like I might be closer to or more reliant on my parents, as they are the only real family I have (I do have grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, but I don't see them much), and so I feel the absence of their presence more deeply. (Sometimes I even thought I wanted to die at the same time as my parents or before them so that I wouldn't need to feel the pain from their deaths.) I wonder if this is just one of life's many hurdles. After all, no one ever said life was easy (or did someone?).

Labels: absence, ambition, comparison, failure, family, life, like father like son, only child, perfection, piano, pressure, problem, recital, relatives, siblings, similar, sister, stress, theory

Lately my father has been watching baseball instead of golf. He usually watches golf, but since it's almost winter, the golf season is over (I mean, you can't really play in the snow, and besides it's harder to get a cold golf ball to go far than it is to get a warm golf ball, if those Comcast Sports Science videos were worth anything) and the only places they could play would be, like, Hawaii or something. So now, since it's currently still baseball season, my father has turned his attention to that sport.

This means that there are even more similarities between my father and my history teacher than ever before! D: Now both of them are baseball fans who are/were teachers (after all, my dad used to teach, and he might be better at that than being an engineer, seeing as he likes to talk =_=;; ) and both of them often get distracted by their computers. (When my dad is on the computer, if I try to talk to him, he probably won't hear me...) In fact, just the other day I saw my dad going on this website he likes. He was doing some virtual gardening, pulling up weeds with his mouse cursor and stuff. And then he put some food in this place where he keeps his animals. He has weird animals like peacocks. Looks like my dad is a zookeeper now.

The other day, in science class, we watched an interesting video from the History Channel. It was about great engineering disasters, and we got to watch planes blow up and dams break. What I thought was the funniest (I know, it's not funny if people get injured or whatever, but in this one no one died, except there was a car on the bridge) was this bridge in Washington. When it was windy, the bridge would roll about. Search for the Tacoma Narrows Bridge on Youtube if you want to see what it's like. Anyhow, the bridge collapsed in a wind storm, unfortunately.

My mom and I like a kind of bread sold at some Chinese bakeries called a "polo bun" (it's pronounced differently than that, though). It's sweet tasting and sort of bumpy. It looks kind of like a melon bun, which is something I saw in the anime Shakugan no Shana. I've always wondered if they are the same thing or not. I've been wondering a long time, so if anyone's eating a melon bun, let me know. D:

Weather is something I mention occasionally in this blog, and so I'm talking about it today, too. Not long ago, it was really hot outside, but now it's cold and my hands are freezing while I type this. I really hate it when the weather keeps changing. I heard that it was hot right now in Shanghai from my grandparents. Is this one of the natural weather cycles of the Earth, or is this caused by global warming, I wonder? There are still people who say that global warming doesn't exist, or that it's being offset by the natural ice ages of the Earth anyway. (But then again, we haven't had an Ice Age for a while...It's suspicious.)

Sigh...I had to switch cell phones. We're changing from Sprint to AT&T because my mom's friend was laid off. Because of him, we were able to get a discount on the phone service, but since he's not working there anymore, we won't have the discount any longer. My mom decided to swap to AT&T since it is cheaper and she says that people who used AT&T say it works fine. Still, I do miss my old cell phone. This would be my third one now and I hardly know how to use it... Plus, I feel like it's bad for the environment, getting new cell phones. I mean, it takes energy and resources to make a cell phone, after all.

Labels: animals, baseball, bun, cell phone, gardening, golf, season, similar, sports, tacoma narrows, teacher, virtual, weather

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