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Anime First Impressions

Zettai Karen Children – Anime First Impressions

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For some reason I thought Zettai Karen Children was some kind of sequel to Zettai Shounen, but apparently it’s its own series. The second mistake was that I thought Karen was a character in this show, but “可憐” can mean both pitiful and lovely, which actually describes these kids pretty well.

zettai-karen-children-02.jpg

For some reason I thought Zettai Karen Children was some kind of sequel to Zettai Shounen, but apparently it’s its own series. The second mistake was that I thought Karen was a character in this show, but “可憐” can mean both pitiful and lovely, which actually describes these kids pretty well.

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Kaoru, Aoi and Shiho are a team of esper fighting esper children! That’s right, in the future, there are espers, and the way to fight espers is with espers! I think I’ve written the word “esper” down entirely too much.

They’re kind of reckless at fighting, seeing as how they demolished a few buildings trying to catch a Muscle Okama dude. Above, you can see the chief getting mad at them.

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But because they’re cute…

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The chief kind of spoils them. Expect this to be a running “gag” for the rest of the series.

I forgive them since they’re cute, too. For everything but the cringingly bad OP. Seriously, it sucks. A lot. Speaking of sucking a lot:

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Whenever I mention CG, I use the word “bad” in front of it. But I think maybe in the future, I’ll just mention CG and it’ll be assumed I’m talking about bad CG. Because CG in anime is almost always never good.

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This screencap wins for best unintentional (or maybe intentional) double entendre of the season. I say it might be intentional because Kaoru’s character acts like an old perverted man. Which is okay, I guess.

Anyway, for the rest of the episode, the girls chase down this muscle okama guy and meet up with a weak dude from their organization. The girls are sort of treated as weapons, first and foremost. Their collars limit their psychic activities until they can be unlocked. My question always is: if they can develop technology to limit psychic power, can’t they create technology to enhance psychic power as well? So everyone has psychic powers?

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Snakes in a subway. I know, they needed snakes so they could do some borderline hentai tentacle stuff with the kids. But isn’t that taking the easy way out? Why not steal large flightless birds from the zoo and have them fight the protagonists or something?

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Anyway, I don’t have much to say about this anime because it didn’t really hold my attention too much. It kind of feels like if they made the Powerpuff Girls into an anime but changed the characters to be annoying. What’s that? They DID make an anime version of the Powerpuff Girls!?

The characters are all a bit too annoying for me to handle. I mean, Aoi is cute, but Kaoru is really annoying and I am having problems with the weak dude father figure. Inevitably the series will touch upon issues like the Zettai Children being used for their powers to fight their own kind, the feelings of the members toward their new manager, and other stuff that probably happened on X-Men at some point.

But since I’m pretty sure I can accurately predict the future of this anime, I might as well just not watch it and know what happens. Where’s my Potemayo/Minami-ke of this season!?

8 replies on “Zettai Karen Children – Anime First Impressions”

Tastes differ. I’m not that interested in the show, but I like the OP. The song may not be much, but the singing is as good as I have ever heard from a seiyuu group. Kudos for that, at least, to Hirano Aya, Shiraishi Ryouko, and Tomatsu Haruka.

By the way, I agree about the CG here, but if you really want to OD on CG (not that you would), take a look at the almost all-CG “Amuri in Star Ocean” OVA, which comes out late next month.

I guess I must’ve blocked all those petrifying penis beams out of my memory. Or I just thought I’d focus less on the okama guy and more on the zettai kids. The beams just weren’t that amusing to me, I guess. Hasn’t it already been done to death? Or am I from the future!?

And @hashihime: I dunno, at first I thought it was sung by a bunch of actual little girls. To which I wondered why they didn’t get the seiyuu to do it. Then I realized it WAS the seiyuu singing it!

Pen0r Beam….ftw??? Funny as hell. Now if one of the girls had used Mikuru beam against that, then…ROFLMAO,

Actually I sort of liked this…

Surprised no one mentioned that the character designs make the girls and the “normal” dude look like they’re from Pokemon.

The sad thing is that I actually enjoyed the manga version, since it is considerably more serious and fast-paced. So when I looked at the anime I was devastated, seeing how they turned it into another magical girl series. Since the original had a rather small number of characters and chapters so since the anime is to be 52 episodes long a lot of it had to be filler, which sucks because it’s not the kind of story that can bear that. What made spending time on these brats bearable was the focus of their emotinal progress (which is also why you could root the Minamoto guy since it was clear that he was gonna be the Good babysitter a la “Sound of Music”). There were a few esper criminals in the manga, but you actually got the sense that they were dangerous; because they were somewhat realistic. Take that Muscle Okama guy instead; basically just another PPG type criminal. He does not appear to have any kind of plan, or pose any real threat; he’s only there for the heroes to have someone to defeat. One wonders why they even needed the ultra-powerful Children to take him down. The manga was nice becuase it played the “will they be angels or devils?” question straight (which is basically the dilemma that every parent goes through) with the kids who are too immature for their powers. But take away that serious tone and what do you have? Three annoying brats with superpowers, same as a thousand times before.

Actually, when i found the manga, i quite enjoyed reading it. In all honesty, i don’t find it annoying in the least. Of course, there’s always an annoying character or two in ANY series you find… and there’s always a few spots you wish never came up. But, because of my personality, i focus on the depressing parts of all anime i find… and it just so happens that this show has a lot of depressing features to it… or the manga does, i should say. And of course, no show will EVER be as good as the story it was based off of, Japanese or not. Really, if someone says this Anime is terrible, or that it’s based off the Powerpuff Girls show, you obviously haven’t read the Manga and are just being Predjudiced because you’re too lazy to actually look into it just a little bit more, or find the manga and read into that. And about the Muscle Okama thing… his Big Magnum isn’t really funny, rather, it’s disturbing on so many levels, i just pretend it’s not coming out of there… -.-” Alright, i think i’ve covered my point here… though even i’m confused at what the point really was for saying all this. Anyways, really, it’s not a bad show once you get the jist of it, just give it a chance and it might grow on you (or scar you for life with how much Hentai is in there when it’s obviously NOT a hentai and the girl is 10 years old even though she’s acting like an old perverted geezer). Have fun! … hehe…

If you let yourself get shocked by Muscle Okama’s “laser” you deserved to miss such a good serie. Humour may be borderline but nerver became bad taste.
The story main theme is also deeper than it can appear at a first glance:
If you’re given so much power how would you relate to the others, expecially if you’re a kid and everybody has even kept distance from you cause you’r a frightening esper monster? The 3 kids are treated like wild beasts and forced to work against their similar kind. I bet they’d be at least annoying, spoiled and evil too.
Miamoto is the cathalyst to let them change behaviour and life.
Later in the serie the theme changed to how is it possible to change a dreadful future given that gret power the kids have.
I’d rather suggest you blogger to give it another try. You’ll not regret it.

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