Tea Shop BeLoved

Pretending Nanaka doesn’t exist (hard ain’t it?), if you were Yoshiyuki, who would you devote your time to?

Yume or Otome? Otome or Yume? Other than a season or OVA devoted exclusively to Nanaka, and am glad it is all about Yume, Otome, and Sakura this season. From a purely reptilian brain perspective, you simply cannot go wrong with either Yume or Otome.

Otome
-motherly
-onee-san power
-ponytails turn me on
-big ribbon

Yume
-Horie Yui
-tsundere
-meganekko
-imouto

Really depending on what I ate for lunch or if the A’s won, I could go either way. Yume does have the advantage for the meganekko factor and the God Mode Horie Yui factor, I will admit, but her striking resemblance to N*mue can’t be ignored. There are times when I wish I could have my cake and eat it too.

Chiwasu~

Who am I kidding? Nanaka, like her predecessor, is pretty much flawless in every way. The almost complete lack of Nanaka through the first 4 episodes was disappointing. _|-|O… She did have more in episode 5, but it once it was done, it was done.

A Sakura is (DEFINITELY) fine too.

Da Capo II Second Season surprisingly has been a nice ease into the spring season, despite feeling a bit apprehensive about it last December. I’m not following anything currently airing (at least for now) outside of this and Macross Frontier and Toshokan Sensou, so the fact that DCIISS has been good thus far is a plus. Part of me is glad they got all the other stuff out of the way before tackling DCII’s main storyline. All the fluff that was Koko and Minatsu are out of the way, and although anything and everything Shirakawa is tantalizing and made of gold, leaving all that out has strengthened what has been done so far. Anzu got some attention early, but DCIISS’s focus has not deviated too much at all.

DCIISS also feels more like the original Da Capo seasons in a few ways. First, the emphasis on magic is back. Junichi’s daily adventures were important, but ultimately Da Capo was about magic and how it affected a few characters (namely, Sakura, N*mu, and Junichi). Magic was brought up with Yoshiyuki’s dreams, but was it really ever part of the the first season of DCII? Other than some random bread product covered in palm sweat appearing every 4 episodes, nothing magical really every happened. Nanaka could read thoughts, but it was never explored a la Kotori. This time around it’s there (with both Otome and Yume) and is being addressed.

The sound of my nose: drip… drip… drip…

Unlike the predecessor, DCIISS is more like the sequel that DCII is supposed to be because it is connected to the original story (i.e., Da Capo). So second, we are only now finding out what is really supposed to be going on. One of my biggest complaints about the last season was the complete dearth of Sakura screen time. Not only do we need more magical twintailed Tamura Yukari, but we needed the common thread between Da Capo and Da Capo II. That was something that sorely lacked last time. The uniforms were the same and the island was still moon-shaped, but it just wasn’t Da Capo enough. However, this time the names Asakura and Sakurai mean something again, as does the sakura tree on hGH.

And lastly, DCIISS comes across as darker, which was something that I really enjoyed from the original (and to a lesser extent DCSS). Whether it was Fushigi-san’s side stories, N*mu hacked up flowers, or nekomimi meido’s fear of people, the darker side of Da Capo always counterbalanced the cool and spicy. There were serious tones with Minatsu vs. Maya and Koko’s failed relationship, but they weren’t stories that dug deeper–there wasn’t an underlying dark side to any of that really

Requesting twincest of the Candy Boy variety.

Outside of the complete refocus of Da Capo, the other aspect of DCIISS that I am loving would be the new OP and ED songs. It’s still the same old yozuca* and CooRie, but I’ll throw myself out there and say these two songs are the best Da Capo songs I’ve heard in any of the anime series thus far. Both have the familiar yozuca* and CooRie sounds, respectively, but at the same time both songs grab you and both fit the animation sequences nicely. The ED in particular looks and sounds great paired with childhood shots of loli Yume and Otome and shota Yoshiyuki (and “younger” Sakura). It might be because it reminds me a lot of the original Macross’ ED sequence, but props to whoever put all that together.

Through 5 episode, all I can do is hope that things stay on track. The first season of DCII seemed like it was going through and through with Koko, but skewed off into Minatsu. I really don’t foresee DCIISS’ wheels falling off that badly again, but we shall see.

“When is an episode going to be devoted to me?”