My Secret Santa Stocking Stuffer Shows

So, Secret Santa! I sorta saw these shows some several months ago, but surely I’ve still got something to say about them.

I’m interested in knowing who my santa was, because it’s possible that they chose these shows out of reading my site and having a pretty good idea of who I am and what I like (a yuri fan who just started working full-time), or they may have just picked their two favorite Noitamina shows that I hadn’t seen yet.

Note that I was also recommended Perfect Blue, which I’d already seen, but apparently forgot to add to my MAL page. I sent a message to Reverse Thieves to tell my santa about this, but I never heard back from them, so I don’t know if the message got through, or if the santa just never came up with another recommendation.

Hataraki Man ++

An excellent show that I’d recommend to anyone who works, Hataraki Man was given to me at the perfect moment to appreciate it. I’d been deliberately holding off on watching this show until I had a job, and sure enough I watched it when I’d just gotten through my hardest weeks of work to date.

It’s altogether a pretty simple show—the key is in how well it’s done. The comedy parts are hilarious, the characters are likable and relatable, and every time things get melancholy, it strikes a deep chord within the tired part of my soul.

When I completed the show, I got drunk and recorded a podcast about it, mostly talking about how I related to Shinji’s comments about his job, but it was horrible and I deleted it, and you should all be happy about that.

Aoi Hana +

Aoi Hana reminded me a lot of what I was like in early high school. Very shy, hoping for love and someone to care about me, and questioning whether or not I might be gay. It’s kind of a fun memory I guess.

Other than that, I found the show utterly boring. The characters were well-rounded and interesting, but nothing that they did was interesting. It’s a low-key romantic melodrama, and that just doesn’t appeal to me in the slightest. Had it not been so well-made, I probably wouldn’t have finished it, and indeed I nearly didn’t.

In the end, Aoi Hana left almost no impression on me. I remember intending to say a lot more about it after watching it just to have a fuller review, but I don’t even remember what I was going to say now, and I don’t care. I’ve heard that a lot more happens in the manga and that it picks up later, but I don’t care enough about the story to begin with to be itching to read the manga.

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So, yeah, that’s those shows. I probably should’ve written about them back when I first watched them instead of holding off until I’d largely forgotten what I had to say about them. Ah well.