January 7 (5M^_^: Seven of Seven)

[Zeke]

Welcome back as Five-Minute Anime breaks into the new year! Today, filling in the fifth question mark on the front page, we have a more obscure target -- Nana: Seven of Seven. It's a light comedy anime from the creator of Sgt. Frog in which young Nana is accidentally split into seven copies of herself. (Fun fact: their voices are all different in the original, but Veronica Taylor does them all in the dub. You know her as Ash Ketchum.) Here's...

Five-Minute Seven of Seven

-- HEY! What the hell was THAT?

I don't get it. It wasn't supposed to be about Voyager. Where did this overlong dialogue piece a la The Disbanding come from, and what did it do with my anime fiver?

Something weird is going on here...

Well, anyway, I'm off to a math conference, but be here when I get back for the filling in of that final question mark!

[Side note: We're getting a lot of traffic right now from Chris's Invincible Super-Blog. Why? Because of my entry in Chris's fifth-anniversary contest (the second one of these I've entered). There'll be a proper update for it later.]

[Derek]

That was pretty cool, Zeke. I liked a lot of the lines in your fiver, but just to pick one:

Seven: None of them! I'm the outcast! The discard! The Pluto! I was left behind, and let me tell you, it was not rapturous!

I'm assuming the anime is more or less along the lines of the fiver.

[MaverickZer0]

Seven: Yes! And it was hell, I tell you! Sneaking food was difficult! Showering was impossible! And I had some pretty damn close calls! Did you know there are invisible flesh-eating monsters that live in all the shadows of the universe? No you didn't!

Ahaha, this line really caught my eye. Vashta Nerada anyone?

Nice one, man. Good to see the Underused Characters' Tavern is still open.

[Zeke]

Originally Posted by Derek

I'm assuming the anime is more or less along the lines of the fiver.

Pretty much. The two most important differences are that the Nanas had only one year to live unless they got reunited, and their transformation gave them super-powers. They sometimes used this as an excuse to disguise themselves as the "Nana Rangers" (characters from a Power Rangers-type show they used to watch) and thus be out in public as a group; they couldn't do this otherwise since Nana was trying to keep her duplication a secret.

Other elements of the show appear here only to get dismissed. Nana's copies really did have distinct personalities (except blue, who was the "real" one), they had nicknames to keep each other straight, and they all inherited Nana's crush on a boy in her class.

To be honest, I only got three episodes into Seven of Seven. It's the anime equivalent of a Saturday morning kids' show, so I felt a little old for it. Of course, since it's anime, Nana is a bit... bouncier than you would see in a western cartoon for the grade-school set. Okay, a lot bouncier. And it's based on a manga with even less age-appropriate visuals. So the whole thing makes me cringe a bit. It's part of a general phenomenon I discussed in the first half of this recent LJ post.

Oh, by the way, "nana" is Japanese for 7. That's the joke in the title, and it's the reason "Nana Rangers" isn't quite as ridiculous a coincidence as it sounds.

Anyway, glad you two liked it. (Now where's everybody else?)

[Nate the Great]

Not everybody is a fanatic about relatively obscure anime, Z. I'm certainly not. Probably the most obscure anime I'd consider myself a fan of is The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Otherwise it's mon shows, magical girls, Miyazaki, and Takahashi.

(And Lucky Star. How can a dance with such meaningless lyrics be so catchy?)

[Zeke]

I was afraid of this. Nate, click the link. As my "reaction" was supposed to indicate, this update is not remotely what I billed it as.

(On the plus side, this means somebody actually got my reference to the Lucky Star theme in the Sailor Moon fiver. I completely agree re: meaninglessness/catchiness.)

[Sa'ar Chasm]

Seven: Only a mild predilection for the colour indigo.

Janeway: Red, Seven. Your favourite colour is red.

Seven: But indigo...

Is not a real colour, just something made up by the numerologists when they were assigning the colours of the spectrum back in the dark ages.

Doc: Not... right away. Re-integrating seven people takes much more complicated calculations than just differentiating one. It could take weeks.

Janeway: Weeks?

Doc: Have you ever tried to do a septuple integral?

Pfft, theoreticians. Another pass through a prism will sort them out. Er. Unsort them in? (Well, OK, maybe not Black Lant^H^H^H Seven, but there's always dark current in any instrument. You just have to subtract her out with the baseline)

Chakotay: So what did you do? Vaporize them? Give 'em the airlock?

Bandpass filter.

/nerrrrrrrd!

Side note: We're getting a lot of traffic right now from Chris's Invincible Super-Blog. Why? Because of my entry in Chris's fifth-anniversary contest (the second one of these I've entered). There'll be a proper update for it later.

A comic? I didn't know you could dr--oh. Never mind.

(I keed, I keed. I can't dr-- either.)

Nice update, Zeke. How's it feel to be back in the saddle?

[Tate]

I enjoyed that, especially the math jokes.

Did you know there are invisible flesh-eating monsters that live in all the shadows of the universe? No you didn't!

Not every shadow, but any shadow... (cue creepy music).