I don’t know what took me such a long time to finally get round to watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. I think, not being a fan of supernatural elements in my plot and even less so of aliens, time-travellers or ESPers, I took one look at the summary of Haruhi and dismissed it immediately out of hand as something completely bizarre that I wouldn’t be interested in.

Lately, starved of good anime to watch and completely addicted to “God Knows…”, I decided to give Haruhi a whirl. And it is absolute genius! The meta-ness of it all, the surprising complexity of story given the slightly ridiculous-sounding subject matter, the rare likeability of practically every single character including main characters Haruhi and Kyon (I don’t usually like main characters at all so this is a big plus!), and most of all, most unexpectedly, the real emotional depth underlying the series – I honestly can’t praise it enough.

Most of the time, Haruhi doesn’t take itself very seriously. In spite of, and probably because of, its frequent frivolity, when it does get serious, it is really, really powerful. I genuinely thought this was going to be absolute crack, and The Adventures of Asahina Mikuru didn’t do anything to allay this preconception (much as I did enjoy it and nearly died laughing), but it turned out to be so much more by the end. Perhaps it’s just as well that I came to it late, as I had the benefit of having all the episodes on hand and not having to wait weeks for the chronological order to string together, as they were originally aired completely jumbled up.

Much love and obsession – and now I need something new to watch! I hate this feeling of empty “what-comes-next?” after you reach the end of a truly fantastic series and no longer have a next episode to look forward to.

World Cosplay Summit Australia preliminaries: finalists
L-R: Misa-Misa and Rem from Death Note, Touya and Yukito from Tsubasa, Al (grownup human form) from FMA, Ryuk from Death Note, and the One Piece ship!

*

My siblings and I dragged ourselves out of the house at 9 am today to attend Animania ‘08, Australia’s biggest and bestest anime and manga convention, and upon arriving we were presented with a little guidebook that had something called the Animania Passport Tour at the back. It involved checking in with six different info desks, doing tasks at each of them to collect stamps, and then collecting a special limited edition freebie! (with exclamation mark!) after all six stamps had been acquired.

So feeling unusually gung-ho (and egged on by having spied a table labelled “PRIZES” with rows of very lovely and expensive dolls on them), we embarked on a quest for stamps that grew, over the next couple of hours, progressively more horrifying; we started from deceptively tame tasks like drawing pictures and striking anime poses to walking round and round the ginormous hall twice over to count the number of sunglasses hanging about, to singing Naruto and Doraemon theme songs in front of a crowd, and finally to the pinnacle of humiliating super-special last tasks, wearing chocobo suits on the dance floor (I kid you not; no, there are no pictures, thank goodness).

The karaoke bit was particularly annoying – there was a list of 10 songs and they’d randomly assign you one, and among them, coincidence of coincidences, was “Ikenai Taiyou”! Which my sister and I were really hoping to get (my brother had been assigned Naruto’s GO!! earlier), but we got a song from Suzumiya Haruhi which we both didn’t know… and in the end, thanks to time constraints, we were chucked in together with a group doing, of all songs, Doraemon. After we’d practised the Suzumiya Haruhi song to perfection too. Pffft.

So after all that effort, we received… a limited edition yellow Animania 2008 wristband, of which there are only 100! In the world!

et voila – I apologise for crappy webcam quality

(Apparently the dolls were for the other competitions. Go figure.)

“And now,” said the guy who gave us our wristbands, obviously dying of laughter at our dumbfounded horrorstruck faces, “you have to ask yourself: was it worth it? Say yes! Say yes!”

It was a massive facepalm moment. Yet thinking back, I have to say, this harebrained Passport game was what turned your everyday run-of-the-mill convention – where I’d normally just stroll round, watch the Karaoke (but not sing), watch the dancing (but not dance) and watch the art desk (but not draw) – into something really special for my brother, my sister and me… and we’re probably never going to let each other forget it. (“Remember when we all wore chocobo suits? Most embarrassing moment of our lives!”)

I’m still wearing this lousy yellow wristband as I type. It’s not even very nice, but it has been one hell of a memorable day.

[xspf]_start(FALSE, ‘order=3′)[/xspf]

So I don’t normally embed media in my posts… but this, this piano remix of a song from Gravitation, is amazing. Perhaps my reaction to it was so much greater because I’ve just wasted a good 6.5 hours of dissertating time over the past two days marathoning the entire Gravitation series (♥) – maybe because I really like piano – maybe because I love the original song, and the contrast between the two is awesome. Have a listen and then have a listen to the piano version again:

[xspf]_start(FALSE, ‘order=4′)[/xspf]

Just… so much love.