Okay, here’s the problem. You’re a teenager, a girl, with some serious powers, a magical beast companion and, you learn, a destiny. But, the person telling you what your destiny is, is the smarmiest roach of a guy you’ve ever met. And the destiny he’s telling you that you have is to fight a malevolent force – but only after you’ve defeated all the people you think of as your friends first.

You see the problem, right?

The answer is, “Nagi. You’re a tick and none of us trust you. It might be true what you say, and the person who reigns supreme after we fight will have the power of all twelve HiME…but we *already* have that power as 12 HiME. So instead of fighting one another, we’re gonna kick *your* ass, and then take on the evil whatmacallit.”

Of course, that would end the plot now and we wouldn’t get two and a half more volumes of pure, unadulterated angst in which to wallow. So that’s no good.

So here we are at My HiME, Volume 5. Our menu for today includes beating Mai to death with the angst stick and for dessert, making Mikoto cry. But it’s all IMPORTANT, so that’s okay. Without all this angst, our characters would have no impetus to make bad decisions and do the thing Nagi said they would do.

The DVD extras on this volume include a servicey Midori looking at her own choices in life, a Yuri-service Mashiro/Fumi vignette, Akira’s feelings about Takumi and Takumi talking to Mai.

More importantly, this volume includes the much-screencapped scene where Shizuru gives away her feelings for Natsuki briefly, as she plays with a sleeping Natsuki’s hair. Aside from the implied emotions, it’s a very pretty scene.

Also, while not Yuri, the gender-bendy Akira and Takumi have a genuinely sweet scene, which IMHO is probably the best scene of the volume.

Some attempt is made to give Tate a personality, but it’s wasted effort, really.

So, allowing for the obvious flaw in reasoning (and who would expect a bunch of 16 and 17-year olds to reason things through, anyway?) and the incessant beating of Mai and by extension Mikoto, which is the main driver of the plot, Volume 5 is quite good.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Character – 6
Story – 7
Yuri – 3
Service – 7
Angst – 9 and still rising

Overall – 7

Woops! I forgot to thank Ted for his sponsorship of today’s review. Sorry ted – I promise I’ll try to not slack off next time.

Visit my Yuri Wish List and pick something for me to review! Your contribution will be received with thanks…(even if it’s a teeny bit belated) and you can join the ranks of people who, by sponsoring a review have been imbued with magic lesbian powers. Yes, even the guys. ^_^

Where the heck was Volume 4 of My HiME when I was watching Volume 3? I wanted other people’s misery and all I got from Volume 3 was goofy evil creatures that ate cake. And here I was ready for some more goofy and Volume 4 had to go and be self-important and serious. How vexing.

After all the happy-go-luckiness of Volume 3, Volume 4 wallows deep in Mai’s various emotional conflicts, seasoned with a little light portentous (and pretentious) apocalyptic plot for flavor. But we’re just past halfway on the series, so even when the entire world blows up, we’re just not as tense about it as we should be, I think.

So, the story picks up on the night of the Tamayura festival which, among many other things, comes along with a traditional love tradition, in which lovers traditionally tie ribbons to traditionally express their desire for an eternal love. More importantly – and probably even more traditionally – lovers sneak into the woods for a quick snog. Mai *almost* gets a good first kiss, but then the schlub has to go and ruin it. Then the world blows up.

After the world blows up, we learn of the Searrs Foundation’s unreasonable plan to bring world peace by something something the something, until we all fall in line like the cattle we are. ‘Cause that’s worked before.

Lots of fights, and Mai nobly sacrifices herself for the first time in the series. Don’t worry – she’ll get to do it again later. And Miyu and Alyssa (who I still like better as a bird) get to have a melodramatic end. Don’t worry…they’ll get to do it again later, too.

Let’s see…for Yuri, we have Yukino’s hidden desire for eternal togetherness with Haruka, Chie and Aoi are eternally together, despite their occasional vageuish mention of wanting a guy and lots of Miyu x Alyssa snuggles. And Shizuru’s continued leering after Natsuki, which in this volume is pretty laid back. Almost as if they didn’t want us to know…oh, wait, that’d be a spoiler. ;-)

The “Character Featurettes” (seriously, that’s what it says on the DVD!) are the usual powerpoint slides accompanied by insightful monologue. This time we get to hear the deep feelings of Tate – whose deep feelings seem to be “Mai has large breasts” – Miyu and Alyssa – who ruins it all by mentioning her father, what a jerk – and a “funny” discussion of Orphans by Nagi and Natsuki. The actually funny thing about these was that I had completely forgotten them all until I went to write this review, so I had to throw the DVD in to see what they were. I forgot to change the language track to Japanese. Honestly, I jumped when Tate began to talk in English! It was so stupid.

Ratings:

Art – 6
Character – 7
Story – 6
Yuri – 3
Service – 6

Overall – 7

The volume ends with Nagi pretentiously (and portentously) telling the HiME that the “fun” is just beginning and now they have to fight one another. In my reality, I’d have nodded, and suggested to my fellow HiME that, before we fight one another, we should kick the snarky little bastard’s ass. But hey, that’s just me.

Thanks awfully to Ted for his sponsorship of today’s review! As always, it is greatly appreciated!

So there I was, all ready to wallow in what I felt was a well-deserved bout of Schadenfreude, so I popped Mai HiME, Volume 3 into the player. Well, pfft on me, because this volume was primarily fluff with an emphasis on comedy. Oh, sure, there was a little bit of plot and character development…and the kernel of what will later become a bigger crisis of conscience for Mikoto. But mostly it’s just stupid. ^_^;

The first episode is a a suspect “everyone is at the beach” episode. Mai is lifeguarding as one of her many jobs, when every single other character in the series just happens to drop by. This episode is notable for Shizuru’s harem who compete to put lotion on “Shizuru-oneesama.” Natsuki becomes the butt (pun intended) of yet another joke for basically no reason except that no one slaps writers when they add stuff like that in. We really need to retrain them a bit.

This was followed by an Iron Chef parody with more than its fair share of “girl trips and knocks cake over” gags. In fact, I think the episode used up every anime ever’s share of that particular joke. For ever. The only genuinely funny thing about the episode were the cakes at the end. They were just…funny. The “funny” Orphen eating the cakes…not so much. The punchline is that it is Mai’s birthday. The surprise party waiting for her at the end of the day keeps the episode from having to end wallowly and maudlin.

The last two episodes revolve around several things: there appears to be a vampire attacking girls on campus, (or perhaps a pervert – in any case, the girls are found stripped, with holes in their neck) and Miyu’s relationship with Alyssa (is it bad of my to like her better as a bird?) Haruka mobilizes the student council to try to catch the vampire and the HiMe mobilize themselves to fight the Orphen it clearly is. Natuski helpfully gives us incomplete information about the “1st District” which is also involved, and the “1st District” folks helpfully ramble on about a new Golden Age that will, of course, require a massive downsizing effort in the number of people on the planet. This never makes any sense to me anyway, but when Miyu tells us that the Searss Foundation already runs the planet, my thought was, “well what the hell do they want then – they’ve already got the world.” I’m sure the Golden Age will be ever so much better/different than what we have now. @_@

The volume climaxes with a big throwdown between Miyu, whose name is really a silly acronym that rivals HiME for “huh?” points and Mikoto, Natsuki and Mai. This is what, episode 12? And there’s 26 in the series. So…you can guess that it’s a draw.

Notable in this last episode is Yukino’s discussion of “like” with a fairly clueless Mikoto. Yukino realizes that her “like” of Haruka is in fact the kind *we* like, while Mikoto will now begin to obsess about her own understanding of “like” for the rest of the series.

Oh, and we get another HiME. She might have been more of a surprise, except that she was getting an awful lot of screentime all of a sudden.

The DVD extras were marginally interesting. They are basically, as Serge describes most ero-games, “Powerpoint” presentations. And the voiceovers frequently have nothing to do with the underwear or bathing suit shots on the screen. But Youko-sensei’s verbalization of our opinions of Midori (she’s cracked, but kind of fun) and Yukino’s discussion of what Haruka means to her were very decent.

Ratings:

Art – 5
Character – 7
Story – 6
Yuri – 3
Service – 6

Overall – 7

I know it’s not fair, but the more I watch of Mai HiME, the more I really like Mai Otome. Yukariko is so much better as a teacher than a nun.

This review has been brought to you by the generosity of Okau Hero Brent A, I believe – there was no name on the shipping label.  In any case, my sincere thanks for his generosity and kindness. This is another of the items off my Amazon Wish List, which I am exceedingly glad to review for you all, as promised. :-) If you would like to sponsor a review, just go ahead and choose something off my wish list – I’ll be sure to acknowledge you with genuine thanks and warm, fuzzy feelings.

So, in Volume 2 of My HiME, we continue filling in the ranks of HiME, get some backstory on a few of the characters and commit the first of what will be a series of heinous crimes against the viewers. The things that were good about this volume were also the things that were bad, so it was an interesting watch from my perspective.

Let’s talk technicals first. The subtitle issue was not resolved for Volume 2, so unless you have state of the art DVD players or computers, you will not be able to see the subtitles. Luckily, since I reviewed Volume 1 I did indeed get both a new DVD drive and new software. Not, you understand, so that I can watch this disk, but because my previous DVD burner began to melt. So, I was able to see the subtitles. And boy oh boy, I understand why they want them to be hard to see! Bandai…appears to be using the teeniest, most pixelated yellow subtitles they can find. I’m not asking for fancy text effects (Ogma knows they’re wasted on me) but I’d like to be able to *see* the subtitles. My laptop screen is 15″. I’m old. They were small and hard to read. And pixelated! That’s all I’m saying.

Once again., let me stress that the animation for My HiME, despite your faulty recollection, is *significantly* worse than that for Mai Otome. Really. If you think I’m lying, you just don’t remember. Because the animation for this volume is *awful*.

Volume 2 deals primarily with two things – the addition of two HiME who function for a *very* short time as foils for one another, and Mai’s personal backstory. The backdrop to all this is rain, so you know it’s dramatic. In fact, the first episode is called “Rain and Tears” in case you miss the point of just how dramatic it is.

But as fast as we gain HiME, we lose at least one in this volume and, in the process, we learn the true risk of being a HiME…that the person (not yourself) that is most important to you will disappear if you’re defeated. On the one hand, we gain a HiME who thinks of her role as a superheroine – and revels in it, much as she revels in her obvious lies about herself and, on the other hand, we lose a HiME who probably wouldn’t have hurt a fly otherwise.

The Monsters of the Day turn up the conflict a notch, Nagi continues to be irritating and wow – is it freakish watching this volume after having been so thoroughly brainwashed by Otome. The level of angst is SOOOOOOO high, that it was hard to take seriously, since I know that all the pain and suffering will…well, I won’t rant about it again. It just seems more like *this* is the fanfic now, where someone took all these happy-go-lucky Garderobe characters, made ’em kids, stuck ’em in a school and upped the angst.

Let me digress a bit and talk about angst. In my Fanfic Writing Workshop, which you can find on “Worldshaking” Fanfic (or at a con near you that is also near me), I discuss the concept of “hand of god” writing. Many people – especially young people, like very angst-heavy stories. There’s a lot of reasons for that that I won’t get into, but I will say this – from the author’s side angst is MUCH MUCH MUCH easier to write. You know the saying, “Dying is Easy, Comedy is Hard”? This comes from the stand-up comic circuit and it is absolutely true for writing, as well. That’s why so much fanfic sounds like this “Person X is forced to react when Person Y is killed doing something or other.” That’s hand of god writing. To me, the very best writing of all is the kind that plays out in small details. So a lot of anime fails in terms of writing, for me, but some are better than others. I was all for My HiME’s hand of god until the end, where the entire series was invalidated. (Dammit, I promised not to rant again… oh well.)

I had completely forgotten that Nao was Mikoto’s age in HiME, that was really weird. LOL In any case, I found it a tad depressing to watch this volume this time, but if I treat it like a fanfic of Otome, it’s not so bad. ^_^

No Yuri, really, even if you squint and turn up the Yuri goggles, unless you’re counting Mikoto and Mai. Which I’m not.

Last up, the DVD extras. They were universally disgusting. Oh, wait, no, the last one wasn’t disgusting, just pathetic. I know that they are just service for the fanboys, but gawd…how do you guys stand it? I was gagging trying to get through them. (Just another good example of how what lesbians think is sexy and what guys think is sexy is nothing like the same thing…)

Ratings:

Art – 5
Character – 6
Story – 6
Yuri – 2
Service – 9
Angst – 8 and going up quickly from here on in.

Overall – 6