Cinnamon Ass

OP - Dream*Wing (Minami Kuribayashi) - oh, the cheese of this song is incredible, but I like it anyway. The OP animation isn’t overly exciting, however.
ED - Otome wa DO MY BEST Desho? (Mika Kikuchi/Ami Koishimizu) - run, Arika! Run into space to escape the cheese of the ending theme!

Arika, an orphaned girl with a mysterious pendant, heads towards the Kingdom of Windbloom to try and become an Otome at Garderobe Academy, an elite fighter in the service of the palace. Along the way, she bumps into Nina Wong, a stoic young lady who has a bit of a thing for her father, Sergei, and Mashiro Windbloom, the brattish princess of the Kingdom. An Evil Dude summons some king of giant mechanical beastie to attack the Academy, and Nina springs into action as an Otome-in-training, but she can’t deal with things by herself and the girls attempt to hide - however, Arika’s pendant seems to have other ideas, and eventually it also transforms Arika into an Otome (with wings and stuff, it’s quite nifty really). While Shizuru, the chief instructor of the academy, and Akane, one of the higher ranking students, take care of things with the monster and the girls, Arika decides that she will definitely become an Otome.

My-HiME was a good series, but with the incredible amount of hype and excitement that it gathered it’s only natural that a lot of people will be overly-critical of this sequel/side-story/whatever series. While I did like HiME, I think that people have really blown it out of proportion and sometimes consider it with rose-tinted spectacles - it still had its fair share of flaws, but overall was definitely great fun to watch.

The beginning of Otome has a lot of baggage to bear, therefore. The tone of the episode is very similar to that of the first episode of HiME, except replace bad fanservice jokes with bad clutziness jokes - at this (incredibly early) stage, I don’t find the central trio of Arika, Nina and Mashiro to be as strong as Mai, Mikoto and Natsuki (mainly because I only disliked Mikoto from HiME, whereas neither Arika nor Mashiro have done much for me yet). THe frivolity and comedy is only really to be expected, as this is very similar to how HiME began also.

The biggest problem is, of course, that everything about Otome has to be compared to its predecessor, and in some ways this is deliberate on the part of Sunrise, re-using characters and stylistic features as they have done. Thankfully, while this does of course mean that it’s a bonus for fans of the first series, My-Otome isn’t totally inaccesible, and it’s very much a show that most people can still enjoy - the animation is great (I wish Cluster Edge had animation like this), and the first episode is exciting and interesting despite the weak leads and occasional stupidity.

As long as Otome doesn’t wallow too much in pandering to fans of the original series with pointless cameos and endless smug references, and manages to craft an interesting story in its own right, I think it will be just as successful as its predecessor. My biggest personal worry is that I’ll get so wound up over the endless hyping and dissecting of the series that I’ll get put off watching it again, much like I was with HiME about half-way through - I shall have to make a conscious effort to avoid the Internet when new episodes are coming out…

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 9th, 2005 at 7:48 pm and is filed under My-Otome. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.