Chaos;Head and Chaos;Child both have good Anime adaptations actually.

I can't claim to have no understanding of why people think at least Chaos;Head's Anime is bad when I myself had originally given up after a few episodes and mentioned that on this blog before.  However what I speculated on in that prior reference was that my issue with Chaos;Head was probably the story itself not the Anime as an adaptation.  And I never said it was horrible or anything, just that I was having trouble getting into it.

In the years since that first attempt I've gotten more used to VN based Anime of it's type, while still not actually playing VNs themselves.  I started the show over from the beginning and wound up giving it a 9 out of 10, then I gave Chaos;Child a bull blown 10.

I give Child a higher score partly because Head is more difficult to get into, the early episodes are a bit disorienting but ultimately that served a purpose and things will get clarified.

What gets me about how hostile to these Anime their VN fanboys who've made YouTube videos on them are, is they keep saying these "horrible" Anime give people bad impressions of these brilliant ingenious Visual Novel masterpieces.  But the truth is the only people who think these Anime are horrible abomination are VN fanboys overreacting to even the slightest creative adaptation choices they don't like.  Non VN fans who just watched it like they did any other Anime at worst simply went "meh" and moved on.

Their average MAL rating is between a 6 and 7, that's between Fine and Good.  Given all the 1s and 2s being hurled at these shows from those haters, clearly there are many who also gave it higher ratings then the average.  I haven't written any reviews for these shows on MAL, among those who have are people giving them 8s, 9s and even 10s.

Most 5s, 6s and 7s given on an out of 10 rating system generally mean one of two things.  Either that person respected the execution but just couldn't get into the premise or the characters, or they see the potential value in the premise, characters and story but had issues with the execution.  The latter group are probably fully prepared to assume it's something great in it's source material.  And the former were not going to get into that VN even if VNs are a medium they're into.

To RedBard specifically, the problem with these Anime seems to begin with them being single cour, unlike Steins;Gate and Robotics;Notes which had 2 cour Anime.  Everything more specific is really the same stuff VN fanboys whine about in the VN based Anime widely considered to be great, even Steins;Gate isn't immune to these complaints.  Every YT video about recommending these VNs with little comment on the Anime doesn't mention any vital story element or themes the Anime hadn't already conveyed to me.  Information about how they're played however does tell me I wouldn't enjoy playing them as much as I do watching the Anime, even compared to other VNs.

I do prefer 2 cour shows in general, but these I felt worked as 1 cour just as well as Madoka did, which means I don't think dragging them out longer would have resulted in anything good. I did not feel like anything was missing, no criticism I might have would be fixed by adding more context.  It's only people comparing to the source material and know what's missing that can't stop themselves from thinking about it's absence.  But their perspective is the wrong one, most Visual Novels are longer then they need to be, that lack of restraint is largely what's holding the medium back, and I'm saying this as someone who defends three hour cuts of Superhero movies.  I recently tried to play YU-NO and I'll probably try again, but I was not prepared for it to take half an hour to get through the first 5 seconds of the Anime, I gave up before even reaching a save point.

I spend a lot of time watching Adaptations of things I have no source material familiarity for.  And often I can tell when something is missing, when an issue I'm having is probably because of something that was cut, that is where criticism of something as an adaptation and criticism of it as it's own stand alone piece of Art overlap.  

However any criticism that does not exist without comparison to the source material is irrelevant to judging the adaptation on it's own terms.  So you're not gonna convince me an Anime I enjoyed watching, and maybe even made my cry (as Chaos;Child and Umineko both did), is actually very bad because it left out some memorable internal monologue you really liked.

I am a defender of voice over narration and internal monologues in Anime and movies, I HATE the popular YT reviewer use of "show don't tell".  But Visual Novels aren't like the way these tropes pop up in Light Novel based Anime or Hard Boiled Detective novels. VNs are incredibly over indulgent with massive amounts of text of the protagonist pondering things that I'm sure build on the themes and characterization but really are not nearly as intrisincly necessary as their fanatics think they are.

The reason Steins;Gate's Anime was much more successful then any other SciADV Anime was because it simply had better luck getting seen by the non VN fans who would be into it's premise.  Part of that is how the Chaos;Head Anime kind of wears it's VN roots on it's sleeve a lot more.  Part of it might be Steins;Gate being more actively promoted in general (Chaos;Child was the only spring 2017 show I never even knew about while it was airing).  But it mostly comes down to something I'm going to say that might shock some people.  Steins;Gate is the most Normie friendly of the SciADV franchises, while both Chaos; shows are the least.

Trixie The Golden Witch likes citing Steins;Gate as one of the top Otaku Pride shows because it's set in Akihabara.  Yes Steins;Gate has lots of Otaku references, but it's really not actually about any of that.  Being set in Akihabara is perhaps itself a cause of this, like how people who live in New York have never visited the Statue of Liberty.  The status of Akihabara as an Otaku center is most relevant to Ferris's subplot.  Akihabara's older significance as a tech hub is probably more relevant to the main plot, since that's why it's a place one would look for an IBN 5100.

I know exactly how to recommend Steins;Gate to Normies, I tell them it's the best SciFi Anime and in my opinion best Time Travel story in any medium.  If they like the Denzel Washington film Deja Vu, you can tell them Steins;Gate has a premise like that but much more elaborated on due to it's serialized format.  Even the Hououin Kyōma persona seems more like an American B Movie Mad Scientist then anything specifically Anime.

Steins;Gate became the only one of these that most non VN players have even heard of not because it's Anime is sooo much better at being an Anime, frankly I think it's Animation style and Art design is much blander then Chaos;Head.  It simply is a far more accessible story with inherently wider appeal then the rest.

Robotics;Notes is a giant love letter to the Mecha Genre, but more specifically a Sub Genre of Mecha the American fanbase never got into (Glass Reflection saying the in-universe Mecha show is basically Gundam really annoys me, it's clearly a Shounen Super Robot show like Mazinger Z).  I do consider it and even Occultic;Nine potentially Normie accessible, but still a tougher sell then Steins;Gate, one tactic I use is to describe Robotics;Notes as the msot Speilbergian Anime.  But with Robotics;Notes it's precisely what's more Otaku about it that makes me personally like it more.

Chaos;Head and Chaos;Child however are the embodiment of almost everything Anti-Otaku Anime fans hate, they will never respect them in any medium.  Going back to the discussion of MAL scores, if any non VN players have given these Anime truly low scores on MAL, it's probably those Anti-Otaku types being disgusted by their very premise.

Chaos;Head is about an antisocial shut-in literally named Taku who'd rather talk to his hallucination of his favorite Anime Girl then real people becoming the only person who can save this town that he hates.  That's a true Otaku Hero's Journey.

Then Chaos;Child..... well I'm gonna have to spoil it's central twists here.

Overdue update

If my blog has regular followers, you've probably deduced I've given up on consistently posting updates on my Seasonal Anime viewing.

I've dedicated to start more often waiting to binge.  I've finished the simuldubs I was following and all of them were good shows.  I'm now only still following Yuki Yuna is A Hero and once that ends I'll probably be following nothing for awhile.

The shows I do want to still follow weekly are ones that are more episodic with minimal overarching plot.  But it's difficult to know what shows are going to be like that up front, your seasonal round up videos on AniTube are usually going off just pilots.  I do know I'll at least start the new PreCure.  

LN adaptations I would be interested in binging by Novel or Arc, if I can know for certain when a given arc ends.

In the meantime I've bouncing around between semi-binges.  Re-watching YU-NO as I already mentioned and I may have even more to say primarily about that show, I've also obtained the Switch version of the VN which I'll give a try after finishing the re-watch.  I'm also 7 episodes into EdensZero and 20 into Legend of The Legendary Heroes.

I also watched D-Frag which I think is the most underrated comedy Anime of the 20tens.  I watched the movie Aura: Koga Maryuin's Last War which was good, what distinguished it from Love, Chunibyo and Other Delusions can't be communicated by a plot description, it has a very different tone which makes it a good a companion piece.  I also enjoy what I've seen of Sabagebu and would like to see it get dubbed.  Also the show Shattered Angels is fantastic Shoujo Melodrama with cool action thrown in.

On November 19th (today as I'm typing this and hoping still when it will be posted) I watched the first three episodes of Wheel of Time on Amazon and all 10 episodes of Netflix's Cowboy bebop.

WoT is one of those classic Fantasy franchises I have bene aware of for a long time.  These opening episodes are interesting,  I don't think it'll feel worthy of it's source material's legacy till we actually visit a setting that makes me go "wow, that could have been in a movie".

Cowboy Bebop I decided needed the perspective of someone not simply comparing it to the original all the time, a role I've given myself before.  It's a fun Space Western with likeable characters, that is perhaps goofier then some old school fans would prefer, but it does get serious when it needs to.

Cowboy Bebop was originally a homage to certain American genres like Western and Film Noirs and other pulpy stuff.  This show having more "Whedonesque" dialogue then the original fits how those genres have changed.  We're now in the era of Guardians of The Galaxy rather then The Fifth Element.

YU-NO again

I'm currently doing my third watch of the 2019 Anime adaptation of YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love At The Bound of This World.  My first time was following the Simuldub one episode a week for half of the year, my second was in early or mid 2020 doing a standard binge watch of all the episodes in a day or too.  This time I'm doing it at a more fluid pace.

I'm also re-watching it in the context of how much more Anime I've seen since, dedicating a good chunk of 2021 to watching more Anime adapted from Visual Novels, both highly revered and poorly regarded.  With an emphasis on some of the earliest stuff, and seeking to learn more about VNs and their history in general.

YU-NO didn't get the attention it deserved because the Western Fandom never got the memo on how old and influential the source material was.  It's like the frustrations many western media Nerds had at seeing people who didn't hear of Dune till this year calling it an attempted next Star Wars.  But YU-NO's simultamious influence and obscurity runs deeper then that even, perhaps more comparable to John Carter of Mars, or for a comparison to how it's tied to the English speaking world being deprived of it till we'd gotten used to it's imitators, Paul Feval's The Blackcoats or Ponson Du Terril's Rocambole.

YU-NO is probably the most important Visual Novel left out of Bowl of Lentils The Origins of Visual Novels video.  The culmination of that history lesson is chiefly Leaf's Visual Novel Trilogy which originally coined the term.  YU-NO was first released in January of 1996 between the second and third instalments of that trilogy.  The Leaf VN trilogy however becomes less focused on it's fantastical and genre elements as it goes on with To Heart being the first primarily High School Harem VN, the foundation on which's Key's Seasons Trilogy built.  YU-NO's importance however partly lies in how the sheer ambition of it's story dwarfs anything else that can be called a Visual Novel or Sound Novel that came before it or it seems for awhile after.

YU-NO is pretty much the genesis of at least two sub-genres of Otaku media, the time looping to thwart a bad end scenario exemplified by Higurashi and Steins;Gate.  And Isekai in the form it's most commonly associated with today.  But like Sailor Moon's relationship to the fully developed form of the Genre it started, it lacks a certain core conviction I would be less forgiving of if it weren't the innovator.  The fact that Takuya is forced to accept that Mitsuki can't be saved, the later Otaku media spawned from it are about defeating Fate, and later in the story that applies to more then just her.  [Turns out an epilogue OVA I didn't know about resolves this issue somewhat.]

One of the few pieces of discussion about this Anime as an adaption that was floating around when it started airing was a statement from the people making it about Mio being "even more Tsundere" and some parallel statements about other characters, which was taken as a bad sign for the adaptation and I understand why as someone who's reacted similarly to quotes related to Batman projects.  But trust me Mio in the 2019 Anime has not been flanderized into a standard modern Tsundere caricature.  In fact when I compare her to the characters usually propped up by even the most cynical AniTubers as the good "well written" Tsunderes, I consider her more balanced and stable then any of them.

I had observed on this blog before I knew about YU-NO how in the early and mid 90s the Anime characters who were doing the Tsundere bit were mainly the protagonists of Shoujo Anime.  The term Tsundere was coined probably on 2channel in the early or mid 2000s mainly in reference to Visual Novel characters who at the time mostly hadn't been animated yet.  Mio is the model on whom that VN archetype was based, and as such is perhaps the missing link to verify my observation, I really think she was written to be like a 90s Shoujo protagonist.

Anime's Original Big Three

In our modern world post Anime being Revolutionized in the 2000s, the phrase "big three" in relation to Anime tends to mean Naruto, One Piece and Bleach, I'm probably the only Anime fan my age who has never seen a single episode of any of those three shows.

Instead I remember when the top three mainstream Anime franchises were Sailor Moon, Dragonball Z and Pokémon.  All three I have fond childhood memories of watching, but only two I am still an active fan of, DBZ and the genre it represents I can respect but they have no appeal to me personally anymore, which is probably why the 00s Big Three never interested me.

What I want to talk about today however is how for us Western fans those three all represent the same era, we got our first taste of Sailor Moon a bit sooner, but it was the late 90s and the year 2000 ruled by all three in daily syndication.

In Japan they are more or less three completely different eras.  Pokémon debuted on the 1st of April 1997 a couple weeks after Sailor Moon's finale.  Sailor Moon started in March of 1992.... so technically Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon's Japanese broadcasts overlap, but after checking various Japanese airdates for DBZ I am very willing to say it's best days were behind it when Sailor Moon started.

Ya know how we often divide Decades into thirds?  Early, Mid and Late?  Well it's almsot like for Children's Anime in Japan the Early 90s is DBZ, the Mid 90s was Sailor Moon and the Late 90s was Pokémon.

Of course people who care more about adult late night Anime would prefer to define the Late 90s as being "post Evangelion".  Well the thing you should remember is Animated shows are in production for a long time before they start airing, on average around 2 years.  Even a show the premiered exactly a full year after Eva's premier like Martian Hunter Nadesico would have had to have already been in production already before Eva became a runaway hit.  So I would be willing to say the first real "post Eva" Anime was a show the premiered the day after Pokémon did, Revolutionary Girl Utena.

What's kind of sad is how the 2010s couldn't produce it's own Big Three, not really.  Toonami and Adult Swim were merged together by Cartoon network so now on western TV Shounen shows air as part of a block their actual target audience is not supposed to be watching, and nothing else airs on TV anymore but on the same streaming apps as the Ecchi shows too raunchy even for Adult Swim to handle.  So Fairy Tail, My Hero Academia and Pretty Cure have been talking points of the established Anime community, but no actual kids are watching them in the West.

I fear this is bad news for the future of the Western Anime community, we need to get the stuff made for kids where kids can actually find them in order to keep reproducing.

Zelda Theory: Ocarina of Time's Forest Temple is a Martyrium

Afraid I won't be doing much for Zelda Month this year, just this idea I'd had floating around in my head for awhile.

The Forest Temple of all the OoT Temples is the most mysterious in terms of what kind of Temple it could be.  The others were built by some group in the region to serve some purpose. But the Kokiri certainly didn't build this Temple.

One thing I notice about the Forest Temple is that it has some thematic Death associations shared only with the Shadow Temple, like Stalfos showing up.

Let's look at a map of the Forest Temple, focusing on the First Floor since that gives us the best look at the overall outline.  I had to screenshot this myself since no fansites just use the official Maps anymore.

Here some Screenshots of the main Room.

Notice how the celling looks like the inside of a Dome?  I wonder how no one ever observed that before?  Also, the main room's octagonal shape. That last one without the black sidebars isn't mine but one I found before deciding to resort to making my own.

That basic lay out reminds me of a Byzantine Martyrium.  

Here is the layout of a Cathedral from Bosra Syria.

Here is the Sergius, Bacchus and Leontius Cathedral in Istanbul.

Here are the Ruins of the St Philip Church of ancient Heirapolis in Turkey.

Similar kind of Octagonal structure with a Dome.  

But in this comparison where the actual Ciborium designating the resting place under the Dome would be is the 4 Torches and the Elevator going down to the lowest level.  Perhaps the Boss room was once a Tomb?

Whose Tomb would this be?  The Royal Family were buried in Kakariko.  Maybe it was the Tomb of the First Hero?  And that's somehow connected to how his garb became the basis for how the Kokiri dress?

The 2000s were Anime's most Revolutionary Decade

I don't think Anime has changed more in any single decade then it did in the 2000s.

At the start it looks a lot like the late 90s and by the end it looks almost like what 2010s Anime has been.  That's normal of course.  My point lies more in how radically different the 90s are from the 2010s.  In a lot of ways the early 90s only looks a couple upgrades different from the late 70s.  However comparing what was airing in December of 1999 to January of 2010, it can be hard to believe that took only 1 decade.  

The 2010s meanwhile as much as I've loved the Volume of Anime they've given me (about half of everything I've watched), do feel like they've mostly been defined by a handful of trends.

The 2000s were the most experimental decade, a decade where seeds planted in the 90s were nurtured and cultivated to eventually fully blossom into what we see now.

How did the Magical Girl genre go from Sailor Moon and Card Captor Sakura to Madoka Magica and Yuki Yuna?  Well stuff like Magical Girl Lyricla Nanoha fills in the gaps.  But in the world of Magical Girl shows that stayed strictly kids' shows, the first 6 years of Pretty Cure laid the foundations of everything that franchise has been doing since.

When it comes to the really out there trippy stuff, yeah everything in the 2000s may be standing on the shoulders of Eva, Utena and Lain, but that just helps them reach greater heights.

Is Mecha dead?  That's a question that's been haunting Anime discourse for awhile now, and I'm not interested in answering what most people mean by that question.  What I miss about the late 90s and 2000s was how Mecha just sorta popped up in shows that weren't mainly Mecha shows.  Like oh you're gonna do Futuristic Space Opera Anime Count of Monte-Cristo, of course the duel is gonna be with giant robots instead of swords or guns.  And even among stuff that Mecha could be considered the main genre classification, today they are usually one of three things, trying to be Eva, trying to be Gundam, or very rarely trying to be Mazinger Z.  It's only in the 2000s that we had a lot of Mecha shows that don't easily fit into any of those.

The nature of these transitions were complicated.  Partly in how often Anime is behind it's source material.  A lot of the trends that have defined mid to late 2010s Anime were already flourishing in these more niche mediums in the late 90s and early 2000s.  Remember when the Sword Art Online Anime debuted it's source material's original publication was already a full decade old, older then some well known franchises that got animated a lot sooner.

Light Novels have existed and been an occasional source material for Anime longer then Visual Novels have.  But in the 90s and very early 2000s the kinds of stories an Anime fan would associate with the term "Light Novel" were completely different.

You could conceivably take any year from the 2000s and argue it to be a key transitional year.  But for the rest of this post I shall focus on arguing for 2006, simply because some shows from that year have been on my mind.

Prior to 2006 no Visual Novels got any 2 cour Anime adaptations, AniDB may list some but I'm pretty sure those are based on games that don't properly count as VNs under the strictest definition.  But in 1 year 2006 saw the debuts of three 2 cour Visual Novel Anime, Higurashi, Fate/Stay Night and KyoAni's Kanon.  Two were instant hits that were in some way followed up immediately.  The one that didn't quite take off as immediately eventually dwarfed the rest to become one of the most all consuming brands in all of Anime.

And in the world of Anime adapted from Light Novels, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya single handedly changed everything.  Though The Familiar of Zero also got it's Anime that year.

In addition to shows that were seemingly giving birth to the 2010s in that year, there were also shows that were in some ways send offs to trends of prior eras.  Nerima Daikun Brothers isn't technically the last Nabeshin Anime, but I feel it was mostly the last gasp of the style of Anime comedy popularized by Excel Saga.  Meanwhile Strawberry Panic felt like the Magnum Opus of everything the Yuri Genre had been for the prior half century.

And Pokémon quite literally transitioned from Advance Generation to Diamond and Pearl.  At the same time it's English localizers made some production transitions.

There was also plenty of stuff that feels just as related to what came before as to what came since, but still while being innovative.  Code Geass, Death Note, La Chevlair D'Eon, Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl.  And then there was a show that wound up making a good case study in Anime obscurity.

Update: On my Twitter thread promoting this post I wound up talking about an interesting 2007 show.

https://twitter.com/KuudereKun888/status/1459123983417229338

Mark Millar's Moonie denial

In JLA issue 27 cover date March 1999 written by Mark Millar, the Martian Manhunter disguises himself as a Japanese Woman and uses the name Rei Hino.  Bruce Wayne immediately knew that was J'onn because he recognized that name as having something to do with Mars.

Sailor Moon fans immediately deduced that J'onn was naming himself after Sailor Mars, and apparently Batman was also familiar with Sailor Moon.

Thing is Mark Millar has denied that this was an intentional Sailor Moon reference, saying...

"I was told it translated loosely as POET OF MARS, which is what J'onn's occupation was back on his homeworld. It had zero to do with Sailor Moon."

But that explanation doesn't make sense.  Rei Hino does NOT mean "poet of mars".

Hino means "of Fire", the Kanji for Fire in that name is also part of the Japanese name for the Planet Marts, Kasei which means "Fire Star" but is spoken differently in that word.  So in context Hino is a fitting surname to give someone you're associating with Mars, but it's not on it's own inherently a reference to Mars.

Nor does Rei mean Poet, according to Wordhippo the Japanese words for Poet all have "jin" in them.  The Wikipedia page for the name Rei lists many different Kanji and meanings for Rei, but none is Poet.

So either Mark Millar is lying, or someone lied to Mark Millar.  Who told him this name translated that way, and why were they offering a translation of this name specifically?

Millar wrote this individual Issue, but it's actually still during the Run of Grant Morrison.  There are things about Grant Morrison that make me suspect he would like a lot of Anime, including Sailor Moon.  So is it possible the real culprit here is Grant Morrison?

If I described the premise of the Black Moon saga (the Manga version not the 90s Anime) to a bunch of DC Nerds but avoided like names and stuff, they'd probably say "that sounds like a Grant Morrison comic".  But Naoko Takeuchi did that before it became Grant Morrison's thing.

Morrison's key theme for his JLA run was equating each JLA member with an Olympian deity.  So it's easy to imagine he was researching lots of ways those deities were used in modern pop culture, especially stuff that can be considered Superhero stories.

Clannad season 1 is underrated

It doesn't surprise me that most discussion of Clannad is always going to involve the actual ending of the story.  But every Video Essay on Clannad is never bringing up any season 1 specific content at all, or even the early part of season 2 really, since what "After Story" strictly means in the VN doesn't start till the High School stuff is over, I think, I haven't actually played it.

I feel that unintentionally gives newcomers the impression that you could practically just skip season 1.  Though I also think some of these snobbier Essayists very intentionally do wish they could just skip the High School Harem anime and get right to the adult life tearjerker.

Thing about season 1 of Clannad is it only feels incomplete if you know there is more story because you played the source material, saw the Dezaki film, or read a wiki.  As a two cour Romance Anime it's as satisfying as Toradora, it ends with the main couple having not only gotten together but done something as a couple.  And what the final episodes focus on is the wrapping up of what was nominally the show's main plotline from the start.

And in the meantime all of the secondary Waifus got their time to shine.  The ones the OVAs focus on are said to have not had their Arcs properly covered by the main Anime.  But the Twins never needed an Arc, they just are fundamentally entertaining whenever they're on screen, they work best as side characters to everyone else's stories, the R2-D2 and C-3PO of Clannad.  And Tomoyo does become President, her longer term end goal isn't achieved on screen but who expected that to happen in High School anyway?  Well by Anime standards I guess everyone.

But while Season 1 can be a satisfying stand alone Anime without the After Story, After Story doesn't work without season 1.  It admits in it's very name that it is merely the Coda to the Love Story told in season 1.  The goofy Harem Anime antics are what gets us invested in the characters enough to care what happens After.  Everything in season 1 that seems irrelevant to the core of After Story plot wise is a compliment thematically.  After Story is a sequel, a very good one, but still a sequel.

I'd been wanting to make this rant for awhile, and I wish I had done so before watching Kanon in September, because now I can't praise Clannad without adding that I like Kanon more.  Objectively Clannad is Key's Magnum Opus due in large part to the ambition of After Story.  But the characters of Kanon are simply more appealing to me personally, specifically how they are in the English Dub.

I would recommend new fans watch the KyoAni Key Seasonal Trilogy in the order they were animated.  I haven't watched Air yet (I'm annoyed it's NOT on any of the legal streaming sites), but as a single cour show it's bound to be the least satisfying to me.  But being shorter may also be what would make it a better entry point to this style of Anime for some newbies.  So Air then Kanon then Clannad then After Story.

Update: I've started Air and the one cour limitations are showing and maybe it wasn't a good idea to guess it'd be the best entry point.  I'm enjoying it because it is still essentially more of what I liked in Kanon and Clannad and since I've seen them I can imagine what the more fleshed out versions of these arcs would be like.  But as someone's first exposure to Key's style it might not be a great first impression.

It turns out it was mainly just the arcs covered by episodes 3-6 that felt very trimmed down, the rest of it was solid.  But I would still now say to start with Kanon.