It seems like such a shame. Allison was a wonderfully dynamic character, and Will a suitable foil. Too bad they had to be dropped into such dreadful plots.

I picked up the first few novels. One of these days I’ll tackle them. I fear that Keiichi Sigsawa may really only be up to the fablistic short-story form (of Kino’s Journey), since, surely, the anime doesn’t depart too far from the novels? My one ray of hope was an early blog-commenter on some blog who said, after the first story-arc finished, that the anime had butchered the novel.

@Hanners: I’ll see you there!

@Issa-san: the warm fuzziness and homely adventure is probably the real reason why I saw it through to the end, to be honest. Fingers crossed for a novel translation, eh?

I didn’t find the entire series that bad, but honestly speaking I never expected anything above B-grade cheesiness the entire time anyways. That and watching most of the second half raw meant I just sat there listening to the seiyuu that I liked and letting the blatant plot holes and speech fly over my head.

Yet I still managed to feel short spurts of warm fuzziness watching the characters and the somehow ‘homely’ feel of adventure throughout the entire run. Of course while watching the show my brain’s lulled into that sense of not needing to expect much hence losing the need to criticize, but afterwards a blog post like this will jog me out of that state unfortunately. Perhaps as you say, all the missed potential can be salvaged from the written work.

The ending to the series really did take the cake though, it was almost as though they realised that they’d made a complete mess of everything up to this point and figured that if they topped it off with something even more ridiculous then people might forget about episodes involving crashing a plane full of orphans into the sea for political gain. For a brief moment I actually thought they’d gone for a brave ending in killing off a major character… How gullible was I? I must have forgotten what I was watching.
Hannerss last blog post..Ga-Rei -Zero- - Episode 7

I’m reminded of Peter Schickele’s introducing the fictional composer, P.D.Q. Bach. “Every once and awhile we turn up a new PDQ Bach manuscript in a monastery or attic, and every time we do we get a feeling of anticipation, a feeling of exultation, a feeling that this new piece can’t possibly be as bad as the last one.

But so far …”