Anime in Focus: Rozen Maiden Episode 2

Because the talking doll was DEFINITELY referring to physics

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I dare say, my updates have become sporadic. I did, however notice that this copy of Rozen Maiden has been sitting on the desk in that pile of things I plan to watch. I WAS planning on watching Lord of The Rings to catch up with normal society a bit, but then I realized I already read the books...

Having already seen this episode at an anime convention, I sort of already knew what happened, vaguely. It starts by demonstrating a bit of Shinku's powers, by showing her repairing the damage caused in the previous episode. The real plot gets going when one of Jun's classmates shows up and attempts to drop off his homework. Unfortunately for Jun's master plan of avoiding contact with people entirely, they run into each other, demonstrating to her that Jun has been doing nothing but sitting in his room and ordering things online, if his sweatpants and posture are any indication. (hey, if he was older, he'd have stubble too. We can only assume he's reached the level cap in WoW by now) Shinku walks in on this, and notices this girl is wearing a ring.... signifying her as being a servant.

We get to see the relationship between this girl and her doll Hina, who seems rather possessive. So possessive, in fact that Hina winds up sucking the girl into a pocket dimension where doll-person relations get entirely reversed. Such a drastic action winds up drawing Shinku's attention, leading to Shinku hunting her down to investigate, leading to... PLOT REVALATIONS

In the confrontation between Hina and Shinku, we learn that the dolls compete in these things called “Alice Games” where they battle to the death in order to eat each other's souls, or something. This leads to a battle in what looks like a demonic toy box, making this show feel like a bizarre Highlander/Toy Story cross over.

Anyway, after a delightfully bizarre fight involving exploding piggy banks, we get to the conclusion, where rather than Shinku eating Hina's soul, she demands her servitude. While some questions are answered, even more are created. The important thing is that this show show promise, and I hope to see more innocent looking toys used as weapons of mass murder. They can't POSSIBLY screw that concept up.

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Anime in Focus: Rozen Maiden Episode 1

On my continuing journey to watch all of the unwatched anime sitting on my bookshelf, I decided to start watching this series, which grabs my attention with all of the pretty dresses.

Anyway, this anime takes us into the wonderful world of underground doll battling. This goes to show that if done correctly, anything can be made to be badass.

We start off by meeting our main character Jun, who lives in his room as a shut-in who doesn’t like doing things that involve leaving his room, such as ordering voodoo dolls online and answering chain letters. While normally staying in your room causes you to wither away and die, he has the help of his doormat sister to make sure he eats and that his weird packages get signed off, while taking his verbal abuse and not standing up for herself.

As luck would have it, one of Jun’s chain letters happens to actually work, and he winds up with a weird box containing an even weirder doll inside of it. After screwing around with it for a bit, he learns that the doll is in fact, alive, and believes herself to be the boss of the area.

Suddenly, Jun gets himself attacked by a killer clown doll. Normally, killer clown dolls are not very scary, since you can usually punt them out a window, but we have to realize that Jun has been sitting in his room making purchases off of websites instead of getting any form of exercise. This unfortunately means he has to make a pact with the creepy doll that was in the box in order to prevent himself from being stabbed to death by a killer clown doll.

The rest of the episode is dedicated to showing Jun’s relationship with his sister, and how he copes with owing his life to a weird doll that appeared in his room. Unfortunately, we don’t actually find out what being a servant to a creepy doll actually means, leaving stuff for the next episode.

This show doesn’t show many symptoms of first episode syndrome. It doesn’t spend much time on exposition, and instead gives the viewer an idea of what to expect in the rest of the series. I’m actually quite anticipating the next episode.

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