So on the advice of a friend I watched "Welcome to the NHK".

This is the er, heartwarming story of a rather paranoid 22 year old hikikomori (a recluse/ agorophobic...currently considered a disturbing trend in Japan) who having given up on life sits in his apartment...consuming O², ramen and pr0n.

Tatsuhiro Satō is agorophobic, poorly socialized and increasingly seeking to blame his emotional problems and poor choices on a vast conspiracy.  He finally makes a determination to get his crap together and do something with himself....OK he has to take baby steps...to the door...and he'll get around to opening it...eventually....Honest!

 The issue is forced when there is a knock on the door and he is visited by a couple of missionaries an old lady and a cute girl ( in a..gasp...dungrrreeeskirrrrt) who are talking about...well they are there to talk about the crisis of people descending into the hell of Hickikomoriism. Sato rather too angrily protests that he's not 'one of those freaks' and slams the door.

However, this, a need for food, the loud music of the 'idiot otaku next door' and a realization that his finances are coming to an end convince our mentally unbalanced hero to venture into the world and try to get a job...his first attempt is stymied...but he catches the eye of the young lass who was at his door...she decides that he is going to be her project...SHE'S GONNA SAVE HIM....



One of the worst qualities that a show can possess is a lack of respect for its audience. Welcome to the NHK takes this affliction and turns it into a plus...or something...by embracing their lack of respect and becoming one with it. Not even the Evangelion movie displayed such utter contempt for their target audience.

The first four episodes follow our hero through the narrowing corridors of his sanity as he ables through Otaku culture. Filled with examples and even thoughtful analysis of the sorts of pathologies that has been blogged about here and here, this show is brutal and painful to watch at times...but I LOL'd

Hard...

It hasn't gotten actually vulgar yet (aside from some implied ick), but it is absolutely merciless to the fans who will likely be thanking God that they haven't slipped quite that far...no really....never...have...
WTF ARE YOU LOOKING AT!!??11!?

I laughed out loud...
I cried silently in shame...

I'm going to have to get volume 2.

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Chobits is a series that didn't really speak to me when it first came out. The magical girlfriend genre has little appeal to me as a concept. Combined with the the look which seems equal parts shuojo and moe' and I was pretty sure this show was not aimed at me.

Recently however, the series has intrigued me.   The reactions of certain female anime fans to a male classmate who expressed an appreciation for the series was interesting ...being best described as a "Body Snatcher Point and Screech^tm".

What little I'd seen of the show had been very high quality, and the show seemed to actually be dealing with some interesting concepts.  Finally the show was one of Geneon's properties and the recent collapse of that excellent import studio made buying the series a sort of now or never proposition. I'd gotten volume 1 as a promo some time back and after watching it I was hooked. I put the remaining 6 on hold at Worlds Best Comics and purchased them piecemeal before and after my injury.This show is well drawn, with very high production values. I'm  not often their target audience but CLAMP tends to produce thoughtful, interesting stories and this is no exception.

The Premise:

Humanoid androids "perso-coms" are filling the same niche as personal computers are in our world. Of course, possessing opposable thumbs, being ambulatory and sometimes anatomically correct, they are filling other niches as well. They are sophisticated machines and while some of the newer and more lifelike models seem to mimick sentience quite well they are just that...machines. They are also becoming necessary to day to day life, or at least daily life has progressed to the point that not having one can be a serious handicap. Which brings us to...

Hideki Montasuwa who has lived all his life on a western style farm in Hokkaido has decided to pursue a college education. To that end he has just moved to Tokyo to attend a cram school...which has taken most of his savings. He looks at purchasing a persocom but they are far out of his price range. Hideki is introduced as a decent ethical fellow trying to overcome considerable obstacles. He is a fairly well realized, likable character. He is a fish out of water in the big city and utterly out of his depth regards computers, especially persocoms. The show really begins when he discovers...

CHI!! who...which...is lying on a trash heap as Hideki walks by and is brought home by him in the hopes of gaining internet access to better facilitate, studying, job-hunting and thoughtful analysis of internet pr0n sites. The main issue with this cunning plan is that Chi is pretty much incapable of anything except saying "CHII!!"hence her/its name. As Hideki has no idea how to program the thing he tries to teach it to get around as he might a child. This has better results it really ought to. As to why an appliance should be on the character list....it is revealed early on that Chi is operating...without an operating system installed. Our protagonist seems to have something quite special on his hands...perhaps someone...and the ethical quandaries that implies. This astonishing discovery is thanks in part to....

Shinbo Hiromu who is a classmate of Hideki's and fairly adapt at personcom maintenance. This likable chipper and helpful fellow lives a few doors down from Hideki in the same 'Maison'.  Utterly stumped by Chi, he enlists the aid of .....

Minoru Kokobunji "M" a 12 year old prodigy who is one of the worlds formost experts on persocoms. He met Shinbo via a chatroom and is willing to help Shinbo and Hideki find out about Chi. Though in some ways wise beyond his years, his youth and insecurity (as well as his technical prowess)show in the fact that he has scratch built a persocom replica of his dead sister....

Yuzuki who is, of course, just an appliance...that is our story and we are sticking to it.

She has been programmed with all the knowledge of Minoru's dead sister. It is unclear if this involves anything akin to a brain tape but her knowledge of his sisters habits is stated to be uncanny. She is far more advanced than the average persocom. However, it turns out she is less advanced than Chi...she cannot access Chi except to determine that she is operating without an OS...independently. She seems to be quite capable of some types of initiative that occasionally mystify her creator. She is a far more advanced persocom than say....

Summomo, who is Shinbo's personcom, only around 100mm high, she has limited processing capacity, but is basically equivalent to a tiny ambulatory laptop programmed to be exceedingly cute. This would likely still not endear her to...

Yumi Omura , a teenage barely-legal young lass who works at her fathers pub where Hideki eventually gets a job. She is bouncy, optimistic and seems to like Hideki. She also has a deep and abiding distrust of persocoms. She is cute as a button and has all sorts of fashion sense but this still cannot make her nearly as hot as...

Takako Shimizu, Hideki and Shinbo's Teacher at the cram school. Outgoing, witty and sharp as a tack, Takako is a superb teacher and a very cool person. By a strange twist of fate, it turns out that she lives very near the Maison run by...

Chitose Hibiya, Hideki and Shinbo's landlady, obviously modeled after the hottest anime babe of all time, Ms. Hibiya is exceedingly helpful in helping Hideki with Chi particularly providing clothing for the persocom.

This show is really interesting in a lot of ways. Superb production values, great characterizations and some interesting ethical issues.It has a low key often subtle plot and the humor is generally cute.  It kept me engaged almost to the end. However, the last two episodes wrapped it up rather clumsily, the ethical issues raised earlier were largely discarded by people....going against character and the main romance story is a bit creepy. I didn't mind the fellow sort of adopting the "Chobit" after realizing he might have an emergent AI and trying to help "her" along he was ethical to do so...that was cute and sweet..and her childlike nature made it poignant.
I didn't mind the idea that the android that was self aware  might "want" companionship or even that there might be a romance of sorts between "her" and someone.......
The fact that it is the same guy who is essentially her father figure and she is STILL waiflike and...almost...developmentally challenged at the end makes my skin crawl.

 Much of the problem stems from the abbreviated ending. This is the opposite of their problem a lot of manga adaptations have as they must drag to avoid overtaking the manga and produce filler if they do. In this case, it seems the show was truncated to fit the 26 episode format. (A bit more development might have answered several questions and even made the "romance more palatable")

For all that it is an interesting series, and touches on but doesn't explore some intruiging issues.

* Chi gets a job. (no spoiler, it is the title of an episode) How does this work? SHE gets paid and it is implied that persocom owners doing this is not uncommon. It is also implied that this is recommended for people who must leave their PerComs at home...to keep them from getting bored. (aieee!) The implications for low end entry level work are not good. (That Hideki allows her to keep her earnings, indeed insists that she does speaks well of him)

* The end of civilization. No need to deal with those annoying Mars/Venus compatibility problems. You can  have your very own Jennifer Connelly or Johnny Weissmueller and they won't talk back or take half your income in a divorce....no kids of course...In the show people & their persocoms are shown holding hands more as the series progresses.(Mark Stein has presumably  moved into his bunker at this point) as a thoroughly geriatric society collapses in 30 or so years. this is what happened to Takkako her husband became enamored of their persocom and eventually locked the "imperfect " woman out . This revelation comes as a gut punch, especially give how cool a person the character is.

* What is the threshold of sentience? While the focus of "intelligence watch" is on Chi, Minoru's ersatz sister has a delightfully unnerving off the cuff remark. While talking to Chi she says that she knows everything about Minoru's sister and can act as she would...but she is not Minoru's sister...and it bothers her.

It is a creepy series and the rewatchability is rather low as a result of the abbreviated ending. Not stressed in the series is the actual victor of the piece. Shinbo got the smart sexy reasonably well adjusted woman...everybody else got a robot or a weirdo..SHINBO WINS!!

Still, all in all it was worth a watch and I found it interesting.

(Thus my misogyny is confirmed I suppose).

3 Bricks

UPDATE: I should point out that one of the saving graces of this series is that the writers UNDERSTAND the wrongness of the main "romance". I felt that the ending rather ignored some of the charachter bits and glossed over a LOT, but Jonnathan Tappan (who points out my omission in the comments) says that the manga offers, if anything, less resolution.

UPDATE2: Author has thoughts on the high production values here, and heartilly disagrees with my squeamishness here.

 Thinking about one of the "weirdos"and his falling for an android: One of the plot points involves a charachter who "married" a persocom. He felt she was really alive and "she" apparently did emulate human behavior well...interestingly, she sturned out to be defective with a hard drive problem that caused her to loose data. This "fuzzyness" may have served to emulate human behavior better than a fully functional program...until of course it became debilitating. This is another of the subtle bits I like. A LOT of thought went into this show.

Regards the well founded criticism of my getting too far into the weeds on this, there are 2 things to remember. 1: The series does inspire some thought. 2: I am a geek.

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1

Except for their recent decent into recursiveness and self-referential series, CLAMP has always had some of the most thought-provoking stories out there.

Their masterpiece, of course, is Card Captor Sakura.  In some ways, that's unfortunate, since it's one of the best anime series ever.  They had nowhere to go but down.  For the seven or eight episodes of Chobits that I've seen, I was constantly wondering just where they were going with the story... which is a good thing.

I have nothing else to say that is either relevant or true.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Thu Dec 13 00:41:46 2007 (JQe3J)

2 I don't think you make it sufficiently clear that the threat to civilization is not an oversight on the part of the writers--it's the main point of the story.

Also the ending is not "abbreviated" compared to the manga. The endings are very similar, though they differ on some crucial details. It's probably fairer to say that the endings are deliberately ambiguous with regards to the central question, though I think the anime ending is more hopeful.

Posted by: Jonathan Tappan at Fri Dec 14 11:30:46 2007 (Zimal)

3 Rereading the post I see you are correct.  I did not make it clear that the creepy issues are not overlooked by the writers.

Indeed the fact that the writers understand they are being creepy (as opposed to your average harem show) is one of the saving graces of the series and why I liked it until the end.

I disagree that the ending isn't abrupt. There is a sudden shift in certain peoples attitudes to facilitate it and it really seems abrupt. The exact effect of the "Chigasm wave" on the other persocoms is unclear, though it seems positive...for the persocoms [ /spoiler].

It was a good series, and kept me to the end but the end was unsatifying on several levels.

OTOH it was certainly no Bee-Bop in that regard.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Fri Dec 14 12:16:58 2007 (B54lO)

4

Olha eu amo a chobits ....

sou loquinha com suas coisas....

ja vi todos os espesodios e li todos os mangás...

Posted by: bianca at Tue Jul 7 17:56:32 2009 (Fj742)

5

Loool essa rapariga nao entende que esse site e ingles -_-'''

Sorry 8DThat girl is silly don't worry -.-

I believe she's from portugal so am I

Portugal or brazil o-o

CYa (wonder when XD)

Posted by: loooll at Thu Sep 10 17:37:22 2009 (8jHGf)

6 Chobits is a good anime, but I though it was going to end like peter pan, but it didn't, which is sad that she didn't turn into a real person, so they could never be with each other really. 

Posted by: Halish at Wed Feb 24 06:55:06 2010 (axHrn)

7 I believe you are thinking of Pinocchio.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wed Feb 24 15:27:23 2010 (+rSRq)

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Oh the humanity!

Via: Across The Board

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This is the most awesomest thing ever!

OK...
...perhaps that is hyperbole...

...but I suspect that the Dali Lama is unlikely to want anybody killed because of it.

HT: Don
(Where does he FIND these things?)

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I'm insanely busy right now, but there is a very lengthy post on internet piracy going on over at Colleen Doran's blog,  The discussion has reached 85 posts in the comments and is well worth a read.

The post mainly concerns comic piracy but the subject matter is likely of at least academic interest to many anime fans.

Full Disclosure: I've watched fansubs and bought several DVD series because of them. Every few months I go to a bit torrent party to see the first few episodes of what's new in Anime.

The fansubbers, however, don't stop with the first few episodes, nor do they, as Stephen Den Beste suggested, reduce their video quality to you tube levels.

I have little sympathy  for the video companies who saddled us with region coding specifically to screw Japanese consumers and the new "solutions" to the piracy problem that tend towards things like this.

However, the technology has advanced to the point that I fear we're going to see a "tragedy of the commons" in several artistic industries in a few years.

Well, I'm off to work. Be back in a day or two.

Update:
Suddenly...related posts...lots of them, some quite....special.
It's like Colleen is the hundredth monkey or something.
Actually this flurry of interest is strictly anime related and seems to stem from this editorial at ANN . (HT: Stephen who has further thoughtful screedage here).
Avatar has industry insider perspective here, and points out the unlikelihood of RIAA style crackdowns on fansubbers here. While some may be very happy to hear this, the jist of his argument is that the Anime companies,  because they don't have the financial resources...these are small operations frequently run by people who were fans of this stuff and they don't have the spare change to deal with the lawsuits.  This is unsurprising, in my experience, particularly on campus recently,  "standing up to the man" generally means taking pot shots at those who can't hit back.

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The art and science of writing romance novels....explained.

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Prodigies.....it's always the prodigies...

(Back to work.....)

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Ubu is suffering from antisocial urges regards the current season of anime.

Don't do it Ubu!!

  I'm not currently watching much of anything as I've got a capstone seminar paper, a PowerPoint presentation, 2 tests, a Coast Guard drill weekend, doctors appointments, and a lab to make up this week.

  However, before I got swamped I saw a few things at a Lain Party friends house that few have discussed much but looked enjoyable.

  One of the more pleasant was Code E

I saw the first 2 eps of this and enjoyed it thoroughly.

Premise: 20 minutes into the future, one Chinami Ebihara a perfectly normal girl, has moved from school to school for years forever at the whim of the careers of her ambitious parents.

She is shy and awkward. She tries to make friends.

That is my story, and I am sticking to it.

 Like the cake..it's all a lie.

Her parents have moved multiple times at considerable expense to conceal their daughters disability, and culpability in various calamities. They are determined to allow their daughter to be well socialized but this is not entirely successful as she is deeply self conscious and worried.

Her disability?

   When agitated she generates powerful and destructive electro-magetic pulses that cause modern consumer electronics to short out or explode. Her family makes do with a combination of very old style appliances ( tube/valve electronics and old Bakelite phones are about as sophisticated as can deal with their daughter) or in the case of the father shielding his basement office with scads of aluminum foil and his electronics with homemade Faraday cages..and keeping the daughter..out. The father, a sci-fi author, uses a Google Earth analog and footwork to draw his daughter a map of the circuitous "safe" route to school. (no electronics stores).

   Unfortunately, while at school she is taken to meet the head of the science club, Kotaro Kannagi, who has spent all year turning a classroom into an electronic hobbyist/computer nerds dream.

   A moment of anxiety occurs in our heroine, precipitating a visually specacular moment of despair for the young hobbyist who quickly figures out who happened if not exactly what to his months of hard work.

   Our strapping Alpha nerd wants to study the young lady and is willing to keep her secret. She is despondent about having to cause her folks to move again after her FIRST DAY at the new school and must decide if she can trust him or not.

   The fact that the parents are genuinely caring and nice people who will back their child to the hilt is a refreshing thing in an era when so many series have (As Pulpjunkie put it) the parents seemingly competing for worst parents ever       ( non Evangelion division).

OK the spoiler is just the premise but I went into this show utterly cold and enjoyed it even more for that.

The characters introduced thus far are quite likable and the series looks upbeat and generally enjoyable. It is very low key thus far but there is potential for much plot and intrigue as is hinted at by the credits.

At Episode 2:

5 Bricks

Hopefully enough to bring Ubu from the brink.

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( I thought Danny Choo was too short to be a storm trooper)

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Yes kids, Batman Jones.

All is explained here.

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IT'S A LIE!!!!

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art by RYU

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 Don looks at Ghost Hound....

  Given the creators of Ghost Hound, I was afraid that the show might be pretentious, incoherent or incomprehensible. The first episode suggests a worse possiblity: it might be dull.

Oh dear....

Astro, on the other hand, seems to like it thus far and has other recomendations as well.

It certainly looks cool. I'll most likely give it a try.

Both Astro and Wonderduck seem to agree that Sketchbook is a worthy bit of quirkieness.

Ubu claims to have discovered the result of combining "win" and "awesome".

Tangentially related, Jason has mathematically reduced the series of the Fall 2007 season to their constituent components .  (There seems to be fair ammount of "lose" and "fail" in this list. )

No idea when/ if I'll see any of these. Right now, to the extent I'm watching anything, I'm watching.....Chobits....for the first time.

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Still cramming....

...but took a break, saw this on iichan, and LOL'd.

Here have fun with it kids. 

Back in a few days.

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While it matters not one iota to me...

...others might find the implications distressing.

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   Mostly I'm studying for Exams. So I've watched precious little anything other than the inside of my textbooks and ODU's  Blackboard site.

Fortunately Ubu has been watching crap so we don't have to.

It's not ALL crap of course but this season really has little to interest me.

Ubu does provide some important historical perspective to the new shows.

If WWII had been like this, Roosevelt would have looked like Professor X and have been crippled years ago by his quasi-enemy, Super Seiyjin Stalin; Hitler would have been the lunatic madman out to conquer/end/dominate/destroy the world, Mussolini would have been the jilted bishie lover of both Roosevelt and Stalin, Churchill would have been an angsty teenager, and Hirohito would have been a cute female high-schooler in a sailor outfit trying to end world militarism in time for this semester’s finals.

Which gives an idea of why Bridgebunnies.com should be checked out periodically

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.... I really like about Oh! Edo Rocket is the music.

Don has two extended pieces up on his blog.

Go swing baby!

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Lost Tyree....
Lost Hutch....

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