Sunday, January 2, 2011

Anime Reviews: Bakuman Episode 13 - Early Results and The Real Deal

Apologies for the lack of a title card.  For some reason there wasn't on for this episode.

Miyoshi finally manages to convince Mashiro to send an email to Azuki.  He spends an entire night obsessing over getting the wording just right.  When he sends the email Azuki replies almost immediately with a much smaller email.  The scene is pretty funny, and kind of cute.  Especially as a nostalgic kind of feeling, looking back on worrying excessively over saying something stupid to the one that you like.  Trust me, I know all about saying stupid things.


During school Mashiro and Takagi, with the help of Miyoshi, think of a pseudonym to keep people at school from finding out that they are creating manga.  I kind of like this because it makes their intentions seem more “pure” I guess, since they’re not doing it because they want to be popular, well they are, but they don’t want shallow school popularity.  The two of them are more focused on their love for manga, which makes them more appealing characters.


They submit their manga Money and Intelligence, and while it gets first place in the early results, they fall down to third place once the actual results come out.  Mashiro throws away the name they were working on for a serialized version of Money and Intelligence, and the two of them decide that if they want to convince Hattori to let them get serialized before they graduate high school then they will have to go with a mainstream manga.


Like I've mentioned before, Bakuman is not the kind of series that works well on an episode by episode basis.  The individual episodes really do not stand well alone, and as the story moves forward it becomes infuriating to wait a week for the next episode.  Which is part of why I have several weeks worth of episodes waiting for me to review.


There really isn't much to say about this episode, other than that things are happening.  It's not a bad episode, but it's kind of hard to say that something incredibly super awesome happened, because it isn't that kind of series.  It's very real life, rather than the more fantasy series that I like to read or watch.


The main thing that I noticed was their reaction to getting third place rather than first.  While I confess that the scenes where they wait for the results are well written and tense, in this case I don't think it worked as well.  Mostly because I can't help but think, "Hey, third place in such a high profile magazine is pretty good!  Chill out kids!"  They overreact to their results, so I find it hard taking their failure as seriously as they do.  Heck, I don't even see it as failure.


Not much to say about the episode, other than it's a part of a good series overall.

0 comments:

Post a Comment