1430: Step Into My...

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been watching the US incarnation of The Office recently. And I have to say, I'm a big fan — even more so than I liked the UK original, in fact. And I liked the original a lot — the three DVDs that made up the complete UK series in its entirety joined Spaced and Black Books as titles that were in my regular "rotation" for a while — things I'd watch over and over again when I just wanted to zone out and not really do anything.

I watched the first episode of the American The Office mostly out of curiosity. And the first episode disappointed me a lot, as it was little more than a word-for-word recreation of an episode of the original series.

However, clearly the team behind the new American version understood that this wasn't good enough, because by the second episode, there was enough new stuff to distinguish it significantly from the original. And by partway through the first series, it's a completely different show that never looks back.

For my money, it's a better show, too. It still has the same kind of uncomfortable humour as its UK counterpart does, but it carries off better and more consistently. It makes better use of the "docudrama" format, with a lot more in the way of sidelong glances to the camera and otherwise acknowledging that the characters are being filmed going about their business, rather than gradually drifting into a relatively straightforward "comedy drama" format.

Michael Scott, the David Brent equivalent, is a much more sympathetic character, too. At least part of this may be due to the fact that he's not played by Ricky Gervais. I personally have no issue with Ricky Gervais, but it's sometimes difficult not to see him as just Ricky Gervais rather than David Brent. Perhaps it's just because I'm not particularly familiar with Steve Carrell and there's none of the associated baggage that comes with Ricky Gervais — whatever the case, I think Michael Scott works much better as a character than David Brent does, since although he's obnoxious, stupid and utterly, utterly tone-deaf, there are numerous occasions when you will find yourself feeling genuinely bad for him.

The Tim-Dawn equivalent will-they-won't-they romance between Jim and Pam is explored in much greater depth, too. The fact that nothing was ever really quite resolved in the UK version was one of its hallmarks, and indeed so far in the US version, nothing has become particularly "conclusive" as yet, but it's already gone further than it did in the UK version. Their relationship is interesting, depicted — and rather familiar, too.

A real highlight is the supporting characters, though. In the UK Office, I'd be hard-pressed to name many of the supporting characters other than the fantastic Keith, of Scotch egg-eating fame. In the US version, meanwhile, each of the other characters is fleshed out rather nicely; we perhaps only see each of them for a few minutes in most episodes, but we start to get a sense of who they are and what they're all about over time — and each of them has their own little story arc, too, which is nice. The focus is still very much on Michael Scott's troubles as a boss and the relationship between Jim and Pam, but this bit of extra detail just helps to flesh everything out that little bit more.

I'm about into the third season or so now, I think, and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes next. There's certainly plenty of it to enjoy!

1421: APPLAUSE

One of the things I find quite interesting when watching my favourite comedy shows from over the years — something I like to do over dinner, or when I just want to switch off my brain and zone out for a bit — is how the role of the "audience" has evolved. Specifically, how we've gone from prominent canned laughter, applause and other reactions to, in many cases, the complete opposite — the total absence of audience noise.

I say this because it took me nearly eight seasons of How I Met Your Mother to notice that that show has a laugh track in the background, albeit a very quiet one. It's nowhere near as pronounced as in, say, Friends, which, in turn, was less pronounced than shows that were very proud of the fact that they were filmed in front of a live studio audience such as The Cosby Show. (I'm probably dating myself somewhat there, but eh. Whatever. The Cosby Show gave us the word "zurbit" to describe the act of blowing a raspberry on someone's stomach, so it clearly had an important impact on culture at large.)

I remember back when I still lived at home and we started to get the first wave of new comedy shows that didn't have laugh tracks in the background. They were often described as "comedy dramas" rather than sitcoms, and initially they made somewhat uncomfortable viewing because it was never quite obvious whether or not you were "supposed" to be laughing. I remember the first time I saw Spaced on TV, for example; it may be one of my favourite shows of all time now, but when it was first on TV and there was no easily recognisable prompt that you should laugh here, here and here, it was a little confusing.

This may sound strange to those of you reading this who have never known anything but shows without an audience track in the background, but it's true. Nowadays, I've adjusted to the norm of there not being a laugh track — so much so that it's jarring when you do notice it in shows like How I Met Your Mother.

That said, while the absence of a "live" audience has worked well for sitcoms and "comedy dramas," it doesn't work universally well. Game shows that unfold without a live studio audience are a curiously lifeless experience, for example, as anyone who has ever watched Eggheads or Only Connect will tell you. There's nothing inherently wrong with the format of either of these shows (though the combination of smarmy presenter and the titular "eggheads" on Eggheads infuriates me beyond belief) — they just feel a bit "wrong" without, say, applause at the end of a round, or people laughing when someone cracks a joke.

I remember for a while some video games experimented with having a laugh track. The strangest one I remember was the N64 version of Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, which was extremely Japanese and rather poorly translated, which meant the moments when the canned laughter kicked in were often… bizarre, to say the least. (Still, it was a great game; I recall enjoying it more than Zelda at the time.) It's not something that ever really took off, though, and now that laugh tracks are the exception rather than the rule in other forms of media, it's something I don't really see games going back to any time soon — unless they're specifically trying to capture the feeling of '80s or early '90s sitcoms.

Anyway. I didn't really have a point to make with all this. I just thought it was mildly interesting.

1378: Oh, Ambassador

Given Dave on Demand's apparent inability to stream anything to my computer at present — we wanted to watch the last episode of Dave Gorman's Modern Life is Goodish — I decided to check out Mitchell and Webb's new show Ambassadors earlier, and was pleasantly surprised by what I discovered.

Mitchell and Webb are an excellent comedy duo, and have proven themselves to be pretty adaptable and flexible through stuff like Peep Show and their sketch show. Of course, David Mitchell usually plays characters that are reasonably close to his real-life persona — or perhaps he adapts his real-life persona to be closer to the characters he plays? — and Robert Webb usually plays slightly supercilious, smug arseholes, but the pair of them actually have a surprising amount of range outside their most well-known roles as Mark and Jeremy from Peep Show.

Ambassadors is a good example of this. The show wasn't at all what I was expecting, but then, I went into it reasonably blind, so this perhaps isn't altogether surprising. I was expecting something along the lines of a modern-day Yes, Minister type thing, with bumbling, incompetent British officials having to deal with comic shenanigans in some far-off country, but what I actually got was something a little more serious. Oh, there was still plenty of ridiculousness along the way, for sure, but the ridiculousness wasn't the main point of the show; in other words, it was more of a "comedy drama" than a straight-up comedy.

Mitchell plays the British ambassador to the fictional country Tazbekistan, while Webb plays his second-in-command — who is actually a little more assertive and confident than his "superior", but who is also being blackmailed for some reason or another that hasn't yet become altogether clear. They're supported by a strong cast of other actors playing officials from both Britain and Tazbekistan, and the first episode revolves around Mitchell having to juggle the seemingly conflicting questions of whether to negotiate the release of a human rights activist or a lucrative arms deal with Tazbekistan for helicopters that can "pick off a rabbit from 70 miles away."

I can't say I'm massively switched on politically and thus can't really comment as to how "biting" the satire inherent in the show really was, but leaving that aside, the show itself was entertaining enough. Mitchell and Webb are always very watchable, and seeing them play characters other than Mark and Jeremy (or variations thereof) is rather pleasing. If nothing else, Ambassadors certainly shows that the duo have the capacity to be serious when it counts — and when strange things do happen, their particular brand of deadpan humour contrasts well with the sillier things going on.

I'll be interested to see how the show develops. With hour-long episodes and the addition of drama to their usual comedy, it's a lot slower-paced than Mitchell and Webb's previous work and thus it will be a good test of their abilities, and whether they can carry an interesting story as well as a series of amusing happenings. The first episode was certainly a reasonably strong start — I'm looking forward to seeing if it continues.

1366: Modern Life

I'm in a bit of a hurry tonight, so apologies if there's any typos or bits that don't quite make sense.

I'm in a bit of a hurry because in approximately 15 minutes' time I'm going to be watching the one TV show on at present that I will actually watch when it's broadcast — Dave Gorman's Modern Life is Goodish.

I'm a fan of Dave Gorman's comedy, and have been ever since I saw his show from a few years back where he travelled around trying to find all the other people called Dave Gorman in the world. He followed this up with Googlewhack Adventure which, besides teaching me what "Googlewhack" meant, was a similarly entertaining experience. And so far Modern Life is Goodish has been just as enjoyable.

Gorman's comedy is fairly distinctive in that his shows are almost structured like a lecture, complete with Powerpoint presentations, visual aids and all manner of other things. He picks a topic and explains it in detail, taking great pains to provide evidence and proof for the things he's saying, usually in the form of photographs or diagrams. He often lampoons himself, though, by launching into a detailed quasi-scientific explanation of something utterly ridiculous and pointless, yet treating it as seriously as if it were a lecture on, say, global warming, or Shakespeare's influence on modern theatre or something.

Modern Life is Goodish has been particularly enjoyable to me as a lot of his observations are in line with things I think about the modern world. It's always nice to have your own opinions (and irrational prejudices!) validated by someone else, and while I haven't always found myself agreeing with everything Gorman says — particularly outside the context of his shows, such as on Twitter — I've found enough common ground in my limited experience of him to know that he's someone that I like, and that I enjoy listening to.

The absolute highlight of Modern Life is Goodish, though, is his weekly "found poem" feature, in which he trawls comment sections of news stories from a topic he's discussed throughout the rest of the show, then arranges them into, well, a found poem. Not only is this an enjoyable feature in its own right, it brings back incredibly fond memories of an English lesson back in secondary school where we were challenged to create our own found poem using only things we could see around the classroom. Our particular effort was an increasingly urgent exhortation to "Graham Coop" (actually someone we knew from a couple of years above us whose work happened to be displayed on the wall) to put out a fire in the classroom. (Pull out pin, Graham Coop!)

I'm not entirely sure why I remember that particular experience from school, but it's one of those things that's stuck with me for no apparent reason. Graham Coop wasn't even a particularly good friend (though I did borrow Terminal Velocity from him at one point) and I haven't spoken to a lot of those other people from school for a while; regardless, that particular experience has stuck with me, and I'm reminded of it every week when I watch Modern Life is Goodish.

I'll leave you with a teaser from one of the early episodes. If you're in the UK, you can find the most recent episodes on Dave's website.

1358: The Bits You Fast-Forward Through

I'm struggling to remember the last time an advert actually had its intended effect on me — that is to say, I can't really remember the last time I actually bought something or made use of a service based on an advert.

The reason for this is that advertising appears to be getting increasingly infuriating and lazy as time goes on. TV ads these days are actively irritating rather than positive in promoting things, Internet ads are seemingly designed to be as obtrusive and distracting as possible, and print ads barely exist any more.

Consider TV ads, if you will. There seems to be an increasing number of people writing TV ads who seem to think that doing the whole thing as a rhyme is a good idea. No. This is never a good idea, because poetry sounds pretentious and arty-farty even when it's good; get someone without a literary bone in their body to write some sort of rhyme about yogurt or nappies or haemorrhoid cream or something and the result is just embarrassing, like the sort of shit children come out with for the usually short-lived "poetry" project they inevitably do as part of "literacy" lessons in primary school.

Then there's the ads that take a well-known song and "hilariously" change the lyrics to something to do with insurance or plasters or credit cards. Inevitably, the songs chosen are the most horrendously overplayed, clichéd shit that everyone is already sick of, and similarly, the ad itself is inevitably edited by someone who has no clue about musical structure or indeed how the original song actually went, leaving the whole thing feeling like a band of year 9 music students who think they're really good but actually keep forgetting the lines.

Worst of all, I think, are the ones that actively try to "go viral" or become a meme. This is always painful to watch, because it's something you can't force. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that anything that has tried to deliberately "go viral" since the dawn of the Internet has spectacularly failed (is anyone following O2's advice to "be more dog"? Didn't think so.) while anything which did successfully permeate popular culture ("you've been Tango'd", say) did so largely through word of mouth rather than a group of marketing executives specifically trying to make people say things.

I think my least favourite ads in the world are "interactive" Web ads, though. They'll start as a postage stamp-sized version of a TV ad, and then those infuriating words "Get ready to interact!" will appear on the screen. Rather arrogantly, the people behind the ad then expect you to indulge in all the fun of, say, hoovering a carpet or wiping a dirty toilet seat, with your reward being the helpful information that you can buy the product you've just been "using" at all good supermarkets.

I should probably just use an adblocker if all this infuriates me so much, but unfortunately I'm all too painfully aware how much of the Internet is reliant on these stupid ads, and there's relatively little I can do about TV ads aside from not watch TV, which I don't really do that much anyway.

Anyhow. Bollocks, piss and fart. I am grumpy so I am going to bed.

1353: Criminology

I watched my first ever episode of CSI today. Or CSI: Miami, to be exact, since the original CSI isn't on Netflix as far as I can make out.

I enjoyed it! It reminds me how much I do enjoy police procedurals and crime thrillers — yes, even the cheesy, stupid, unrealistic ones — when I watch them, yet it's pretty rare I'll actually seek them out. It's one of those things that I forget I like, if that makes sense, and I'll just occasionally stumble across the, and remember all over again.

As with many forms of non-interactive media, I find myself thinking that there should be more procedural games. Trauma Team on Wii was a great example — particularly from the crime scene investigation angle — plus the Ace Attorney series has always provided a neat combination of private detective-style investigation and courtroom drama. I'd like to see more of that kind of thing.

There's the Police Quest series, of course, which I'm still yet to try, though those have the dubious distinction of being Sierra adventures (i.e. already brutally difficult, and not necessarily in a fair way) that are notoriously finicky about you actually following police procedure to the letter. There's nothing wrong with this, of course — how many other "police sims" are there out there? — but it doesn't necessarily push exactly the same buttons as a police procedural drama on TV.

I'm surprised that over the years we haven't seen more games branching out into popular TV genres. We've done sci-fi and fantasy to death, obviously, because both of those are eminently compatible with the most common means through which we interact with a game world: attacking it. We've also seen crime drama through the eyes of the criminals a lot thanks to titles like Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row. But what we haven't seen a lot of is a game about being a doctor, or a policeman, or a lawyer, or a journalist. I remember having a conversation with fellow Squadron of Shame members a while back about how cool it would be to play a war-themed game in which you weren't one of the American soldiers on the scene, but instead an embedded war reporter tasked with covering the conflict from the front lines. Plenty of scope for interesting storytelling there, plus gameplay that doesn't involve shooting people with a different skin colour to your character.

We could even expand that, though. Sci-fi and fantasy games don't have to be about killing, either; how about a sci-fi "future police" game? Or a "future medicine" game? (I guess that's Trauma Center, but still.) Or a game where you play a member of the Watch in a typical fantasy city? Plenty of scope for interesting things, and yet — at least in the mainstream — we still rely on the same old stuff.

Ah well. The times are a-changin', and we are starting to get more and more interesting thematic content in our games that isn't just about stabbing and shooting. I just wish there was a bit more.

1338: Educating Everywhere

I watched an episode of Channel 4's docusoap/fly on the wall show Educating Yorkshire earlier and, as I could have predicted, I found it most enjoyable.

You see, despite my unpleasant experiences at the chalkface a few years back, I still find myself interested in the world of education. I find schools to be fascinating places, with their collection of hundreds or even thousands of diverse people thrown together and expected to survive without killing each other. They're a great source of stories, both from the perspective of the teachers and the pupils, and I am constantly fascinated by fiction set in schools. (This explains my love of the following things: Buffy the Vampire Slayer; appalling high school drama movies; slice of life anime; visual novels)

Educating Yorkshire is set up well to tell some of these supposedly real stories, and it tells them well. Over the course of the single episode I watched today, we learned about the school's headteacher and his ideals; the students' attitudes towards him; the "back stories" of two persistent troublemakers; and a few other things besides. Although everything that happened was mundane to the max, these stories were presented in a compelling manner that made them interesting.

One image I absolutely could not get out of my head, though, was how much typical disciplinary proceedings at a school resemble a police interrogation — or at least one as depicted in the media. Before long, I was picturing Cole Phelps from L.A. Noire yelling at a kid ("[DOUBT] You did it, didn't you, you sick son of a bitch!") and pondering if there might be a market for a video game in which you play a teacher and have to investigate these incredibly mundane transgressions.

Well, I'd play it, even if no-one else would. Though given some of the creative interactive experiences we're starting to get today, now, I can't help but feel I might not be alone!

1316: Get Hype

I've written about this on at least one occasion before, but the fact that Breaking Bad is on television again has reminded me of the curiously inverted effect that hyperbole has on me. In other words, the more people waffle on about how amazing something is, the less I want to pay any attention to it whatsoever. I've long since muted everything to do with Breaking Bad for this reason, as it's completely dulled any enthusiasm I might have once had for something that is — by most accounts — very good.

Breaking Bad is a curiously extreme example of what I'm talking about. It's doubly infuriating because everyone posting about it on social media is also being incredibly conscious of spoilers — Breaking Bad fans hate spoilers — and thus what we end up with at the time a Breaking Bad episode is broadcast is a string of tweets that say absolutely nothing. To be more precise, they tend to be nothing but a string of tweets of people going things like "OH MY GOD" and "WOW" which has absolutely no meaning whatsoever to those who aren't watching the show.

Now, I'll grant that Twitter provides a reasonably practical means for Breaking Bad fans to get together and discuss the show — or, more accurately, "react" to it in real-time — but it really doesn't inspire anything like in-depth discussion, and thus I have to question the value of doing this, particularly as it has several knock-on effects: 1) people who don't like Breaking Bad get pissed off 2) people who might have wanted to watch Breaking Bad at some point get fed up and decide they don't really want to watch it until everyone shuts the fuck up about it and 3) the people who are actually watching Breaking Bad are only giving the show half their attention because they're flip-flopping back and forth between the TV screen and their phone.

I tried the "livetweeting" experience a couple of years back when I got vaguely into The Apprentice. I picked up a few followers in the process and found some entertaining people, too, but it really wasn't worth it; the number of people who got irritated at it didn't really make up for the people I "met" in the process, and the interactions I was having with others who were "reacting" to the show in real time were superficial at best. I didn't find it particularly valuable, in other words; certainly no more so than sitting around watching a show with friends in the same room, which is something I don't tend to do — TV, for me, tends to be an accompaniment to something else (like eating dinner) rather than an activity in itself.

More than the fact I didn't find it particularly valuable socially, though, I just found it frustrating to do — if I was tweeting while watching, I found myself unable to concentrate on what was going on on the screen, so eventually I gave up, much to the relief of my Twitter followers.

Ultimately, it's your Internet; if you want to "ooh" and "aah" at Breaking Bad while it's on, feel free — I simply reserve the right to mute your ass if you do it too much!

Grump over. Time to go to a pre-wedding celebration.

1176: Absolute Destiny Apocalypse

Utena-1-_(2) At the insistence of my good friend Lynette (well, all right, she mentioned it a couple of times and I was intrigued) I have been watching an anime series called Revolutionary Girl Utena, also known in various places as Shoujo Kakumei Utena and La fillette révolutionnaire Utena.

Utena, as I shall refer to it from hereon, is clearly from a very different period to the anime I have watched to date. It has a very distinctive "'90s anime" appearance to it, particularly with regard to character proportions and design — everyone has chins that could cut glass, and all the girls have inhumanly long legs, a fact usually accentuated by their clothing — but it still makes use of a lot of common non-realistic "stylized" features that we see in modern anime, particularly with regard to facial expressions and the way people move.

Thematically, it's also of a genre I haven't really explored before — technically, it could be described as a "magical girl" anime since Utena regularly gains special powers accompanied by special effects and recognisable catchphrases, but it's a lot more than just Pretty Girl Fights Crime. No; so far I'm only relatively few episodes into the whole thing but it's very clear that there are a lot of things going on.

A friend of mine described Utena as being "like a fever dream" and that's absolutely true. There's a curious sense of surrealism about most of the episodes, with fairly mundane activities juxtaposed with obviously fantastic happenings that only certain characters are aware of. The whole thing is also absolutely riddled with imagery and visual metaphor, some of which are more obvious than others and most of which only contribute to the strange, surreal feelings of things not quite being what they seem.

But you probably want to know what it's all about, right? Well… as I say, I've only seen a few episodes so far so I can't comment with full authority on everything that has happened, but here goes.

00003sp0 Utena is a statuesque high school girl who habitually dresses as a boy. The reason for this is that when she was younger, she was helped by a kind "prince", who gives her a ring with a rose signet and tells the young Utena that it will "lead her to him". It transpires that there are other people out there who wear the rose signet on their rings, and they're at Utena's school. Specifically, they're the student council, who appear to have some sort of special relationship with an unknown entity, person or organisation known as "End of the World" and are keen to "smash the world's shell to bring about revolution" as dictated by their creed. ("If it cannot break out of its shell, a chick will die without being born. We are the chick. The world is our egg.")

Key to the plans of the Student Council is the "Rose Bride" Anthy Himemiya, who also happens to be a student at Utena's school — and who appears to share some characteristics with the "prince" from Utena's past. Anthy, for the most part, appears to be a normal girl, but whoever is "engaged" to her "possesses" her and can make her do anything they want. Through a series of unfortunate happenings, Utena becomes engaged to Anthy and then proceeds to protect her from the other members of the Student Council, who all have their own reasons for wanting to possess the "power of Dios" that Anthy contains.

The interesting thing about the series so far is that no-one is really outright "evil" — there are plenty of obnoxious characters who are unpleasant or dislikable, but they all appear to have their reasons for doing the things they do. In fact, there are several characters who, despite being on the Student Council and thus at various points taking the role of "antagonist", are actually rather sympathetic and/or likable. It's really cool, and I'm looking forward to finding out the truth behind some of them.

Anyway, given that I'm only partway through the series' first story arc, that's really all I can say for now, but I will say that I'm enjoying it, even if it's currently very confusing and bewildering. I get the impression that's entirely deliberate, though — I wonder how many answers I'll have by the end of it all?

1118: My 1,118th Blog Post Can't Be This Cute

Anime is full of surprises and frequently subverts your expectations, prejudices and preconceptions. In few places is this more apparent than in the recent show Oreimo, also known as Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai or, literally in English, My Little Sister Can't Be This Cute.

Now, with a title like that, you'd be forgiven for thinking that this show is one of two things — or perhaps both. One: moe moe happy funtimes featuring a wacky little sister running around being cute. Two: incestuous "sister complex" story in which male protagonist ends up falling for his little sister through various shenanigans they get up to together. While I can't speak for number two in the show as a whole — I've only watched four episodes so far, so I'm still half-expecting them to pull the frequently-used "but they're not blood relations!" trope out of the bag (please don't spoil it even if that is the case!) — number one couldn't be further from the truth. Far from being a wacky show about nothing in particular as I expected it would be, Oreimo is, it turns out, an oddly personal show about being true to oneself and accepting each others' idiosyncrasies.

The concept is fairly straightforward. The main character Kyosuke is a 17-year old high school student who has had a somewhat strained relationship with his 14-year old sister Kirino for some time now. The reasons why they have been struggling aren't explained, at least at the start of the show, but it's clear that there's a certain degree of tension between them, whether that be the usual case of siblings resenting one another or something more. Kirino is a model student — she's pretty, she's popular, she gets good grades and she's a top athlete — and she also makes a lot of money doing modelling work for various catalogues and magazines.

But she has a secret.

Early in the first episode, Kirino makes a bold move. She comes to Kyosuke's room in the middle of the night, wakes him up and confesses something that she's been hiding for a long time: she's a secret otaku with a hidden closet full of anime, manga, doujinshi and eroge — all paid for with her modelling earnings — with a particular focus on one particular (fictional) magical girl show, and also on anything related to little sisters. Kyosuke initially isn't sure how to react, but it becomes clear that Kirino wants his help, even though her own pride and somewhat tsundere nature prevents her from stating this outright. He agrees to help her work out how to handle her secret "addiction" and figure out what to do with her life, because the stress of leading a "double existence" is starting to take its toll on her, as she feels uncomfortable showing the world who she really is.

As the series progresses, Kirino learns to make friends who are into her secret hobby, and comes to trust them. Kyosuke watches with some degree of pride as he sees his little sister starting to open up and be herself, but it isn't an easy ride — particularly when her two worlds start to collide as the siblings' parents and Kirino's non-otaku friends start to find out what has been going on. Kirino faces constant judgement and scorn from people who look down upon her hobby, and has a habit of becoming defensive and lying as her first reaction, often leaving Kyosuke to take the fall — something which he usually resigns himself to without complaining, even when it involves (as it frequently does) him being kicked in the testicles.

When it comes down to it, though, Kirino will often (eventually) stand up for herself and say what she believes in; she's passionate about her hobby, and over time begins to accept the fact that there will always be people out there who will judge her for it — often without knowing anything about it. Kyosuke, meanwhile, comes to understand his little sister a bit better, and also becomes something of a focal point for all her friends and acquaintances when various problems arise.

The nice thing about Oreimo that I've seen so far is that, a little like the excellent series Welcome to the NHK, it deals with subject matter that divides opinion but does so without being judgemental or preachy about it. You don't get the impression from watching the show that it specifically wants you to think that being an otaku is either okay or that it is vile and shameful; it simply presents things the way they are, places a strong focus on the concepts of people's "public" and "private" faces, and others' reactions to those faces. Far from being wacky, silly fun times, it's actually proven so far to be an interesting, very human story that doesn't hide behind moe shenanigans despite having, as the title suggests, a super-cute female lead. (It could probably do without some of the occasional curiously-angled shots of said super-cute female lead's bum, admittedly, but… well, there's not much you can do about that, really.)

Anyway. Thus far I've been enjoying it a lot, and am looking forward to seeing how it continues. Further reports will undoubtedly follow.