|
Lucky Strike – Why I Like Lucky Star By: PoisonRamune, the Apathetic Lizardman While I do actually like anime, there’s really not a lot of series I’ll actively watch. In fact, there’s only a handful of series that I’ve gone out of my way to see. Lucky Star is the most recent anime that falls into this category. I had known about Lucky Star since the time it came out a couple years ago, but at the time it was only available to watch through torrents and just never figured out how to use them. It wasn’t until early 2009 when one of my online friends had sent me a youtube playlist with all the episodes that I finally decided to watch the series.
One major thing a lot of people who watch Lucky Star for the 1st time complain about is the pacing. However, in order to fully enjoy Lucky Star one must understand that the anime is a slice of life story, depicting the lives of 4 high school girls. Most of the episodes plots are very minimal and/or have very slow pacing. So a lot of the humor and charm from the anime is the fact that you’ll often say to yourself “I know someone like that…” or “that reminds me of something that happened not too long ago.” A big reason why I like this show is because I can see a bit of my friends and girls I’ve dated in the main cast of Lucky Star.
Aside from the cute story about the friendship between 4 girls, there’s also some incredibly hilarious anime, video game and cultural reference jokes in the form of parody and word play. My two favorite instances of such are when Konata Izumi’s cousin starts a drift race in the same style as the anime Initial-D (along with a Eurobeat sounding song to boot) while driving to the beach on vacation; and when Konata’s recollection of saving Tsukasa from a strange foreigner is staged like a battle between Ryu and Guile from the Street Fighter series. Even though the story is a bit slow, there’s always a funny joke or clever reference to keep the show entertaining.
The 4 main girls in Lucky Star are all well thought out as well as written. While each girl brings something unique and adds a special dynamic to the clique, they’re also very similar to each other in various ways. The main character of the show would probably Konata Izumi. She’s the biggest otaku in her group, often obsessing about the latest games, manga and anime. Her character design satisfies the lolicon (lolita complex) facet of male fan service as she’s drawn to look way younger and smaller than a most 17 year olds. Next in the group are the Hiragi twins, Kagami and Tsukasa. The 2 girls are fraternal twins with very contrasting personalities. Hiragi is very practical, logical and hard working; while Tsukasa is a procrastinating dreamer that is often referred to as an “airhead.” Both girls are drawn in somewhat similar ways, except Kagami shows more tsundere (hot-cold/bi-polar) emotions in her animations and Tsukasa is drawn with a more sad and/or confused design. Finally, Miyuki Takara rounds out the group as the naïve brain. Though she’s shown to be very book smart, she’s seemingly very unaware when it comes to issues such as relationships and innuendo. Miyuki is one of the few girls in the show drawn with glasses so she’s seemingly designed with meganekko (eyeglass fetish) fan service in mind.
I’m sure you guys can see the real reason why I like this anime; the girls are drawn so damn cute. It’s not like I some sort of star crush on a cartoon character, more like 4 cartoon characters. Just kidding.
|
