12 Days of Xmas: Day 12 – Lucky Star’s Breadth of Conversations
Posted on December 26th, 2007 by calaggie in Specials
Bet you never thought of this way of giving presents?
Yes, I am aware that today is Boxing Day but I won’t consider this twelfth and final entry in this year’s “12 Days of Christmas” retrospective (sponsored by the Anime Blogging Collective) to be very late since I got some of my presents, including a new wristwatch, today, For this last highlight, I will return to Lucky Star and not focus on any particular moment (e.g. the Inital D parody, Comiket, the cosplay cafe) but rather something that spanned the series and carried it through its twenty-four episodes – the variety of topics that were discussed between Konata, Tsukasa, Kagami, Miyuki, and others.
When was the last time you sat down with your friends and just chatted?
The first episode turned off a bunch of people initially because of the long conversation about food that included which is the proper way to eat a chocolate cornet and when one should eat the strawberry on top of a strawberry cake as well as later conversations about the difference between a cold and the flu. I didn’t seem to mind that much but it’s interesting how many people didn’t like the first episodes, but began to enjoy it when the director changed in episode five and now it is likely among many people’s top five or ten anime of the year.
The overall humor through its run was derivative of its origins as a seinen 4-koma, with Konata making references to older anime and visual novels and at times making comments that one would expect to hear from a lecherous salaryman. Many dialogues begin with something like “hey, don’t you hate it how X happens?” or “why is Y like that?” and that is what qualifies it to be classified as slice-of-life. However, it plays to its core audience so much through its various references and Konata’s otaku behavior that it is also kind of a parody series although not as explicitly as Excel Saga, a more hyper anime.
Kagami seemed to be the only significant critic of beach house food.
Anyway, back to talking about talking. Topics that Lucky Star has covered imagining what kind of animal certain persons would be based on their personalities, wondering what you and your friends would look like in ponytails, static electricity, blood types and personalities, sleeping on trains, looking at someone else’s photo album, tidying up instead on studying, strategies for finishing extra food at a restaurant so you don’t get charged for leftovers, the quality of food at beach house diners, making wishes and drawing fortunes for the New Year…I better stop there ’cause that’s approximately half of the non-otaku-based conversations.
Looking back on these past two weeks and this project, I started out in earnest and had about eight topics that included real-life events like going to Ubisoft to play Rise of a Ninja but then as the days went on, I began having ideas about particular aspects of certain shows that I didn’t realize when I first watched them. If I were to do something similar to this in the future, I’d certainly try to compose a semi-solid list and write part of them a day in advance since many of the posts I made were written near midnight. Now I can go spend more time writing editorials or reviews (aka more compelling content IMO).
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The food discussion didn’t really do much for me the first time through, but when I returned to that halfway through the series I suddenly found it to be rather interesting. Go figure.