It’s astounding how well Evangelion stood the test of time. It came out in 1995, 24 years ago! Yet I watched it for the 12th or maybe 13th time, now on netflix, and it’s still perfect. To be honest, there’s a difference comparing to the first couple of times — some moments that would leave me without sleep before (it’s a bad habit to watch anime in the evening, you know) now just feel endlessly sad. After all, NGE is an incredibly depressing show. And what makes everything even worse that for a while all other shows I’ll watch will make an impression of something shallow and meaningless.
The second season of からかい上手の高木さん is almost perfect. (I’m sorry but I’m not excited about the English variant of the name, even though it seems to be correct; and Russian name sounds even worse). I mean, the first show was good, I genuinely liked it and we even bought something with Takagi-san when we’re in Japan, but it wasn’t good enough to get obsessed with it, to listen to its soundtrack and wait patiently for every new episode.
This anime, on the other hand… it’s adorable. You want pure, innocent romance? There you go, what can be more innocent than the relationships between Takagi and Nishikata? The show still contains a lot of comedy moments but this time Takagi finally took the bull by the horns and her teasing is aimed to move all Nishikata’s thoughts in one direction. The direction of becoming a couple, of course =) Whether it’s a school trip, playing hide-and-seek or eating instant ramen in a tiny store — even such a dense guy as Nishikata begins to realize that they spend a lot of time together and other people think that they’re going out. What’s more important is that he understands that he misses Takagi. I must add that the second season has soo sweet moments that even cold-heart bastards like me will say “aww” watching them. All this pinnacles in the scene when Nishikata invites Takagi to the festival. Yep, the festival episode is great but the moment when Takagi can’t hide her happiness in the 11th episode is the best one of the anime.
Will Nishikata and Takagi end up together? (Un)surprisingly, we won’t learn that in this anime. But! Lucky for us, there’s a spin-off manga called からかい上手の(元)高木さん, with the same main characters, who are adults… and got married. Maybe this story is not just almost perfect, maybe it’s simply — perfect.
P.S. I wouldn’t say that I adore Rie Takahashi but as Takagi-san she’s certainly charming.
The last couple of months have been quite hectic, so I had neither time nor, to be honest, desire to check the internet regularly — my internet usage was pretty much down to “I get home and turn on crunchyroll” or “I get home and watch an NHL game”. So, just for posterity — we moved to another apartment (packing-packing-packing, insurance, movers, internet, the moving itself, cleaning up the previous place, unpacking-unpacking-unpacking), visited Russia and I reunited with my good ol’ Warwick. And the last but not least — I’ve become a permanent resident of Canada (Nastia should do the same next week). Hopefully, our life should become tedious and uneventful soon and I’ll be able to catch up with everything that’s been happening… well, everywhere =)
Randomly generated stuff 