Inspired by a comment in a previous post, Lucky Star still seems to be a show that baffles the anime community for some obscure reason, causing flame wars and thread de-railings at the mere mention of it’s name.

And why? To this day I still don’t get why it causes such controversy. Was it a bad show? Not at all. Was it the greatest anime of our time? Not by a long shot.

The main argument I hear from people bashing the show is ‘All they do is talk about food!’ Tip: Get past the first 10 minutes of the show, and it’ll change. I’ll agree with this though, those first few minutes were like something out of Napoleon Dynamite; you keep waiting and waiting for the punchline, and theres plenty of opportunities for one, yet it never comes.

Beyond that, the insults evolve to things like ‘The show relied on outside references to make jokes’ and ‘It’s Azumanga Daioh. with less funny and more moé!’ Yes, the show used a metric shitton of outside references, specifically to Haruhi, since it was easy to use something made by the same studio. However, I’m still unsure why exactly references are a bad thing, and saying the show ‘relied’ on them to be funny is a bit of a stretch. The humor was much more of a ‘Hey, that’s funny because it’s true!’ or ‘Hey, that’s happened to me before!’ Example being the Comiket episode. That was all funny and good in itself when I first saw it. But after going to my first anime convention recently, watching it over made me able to appreciate the humor a bit more. It’d probably be even more true if you’re someone who’s gone to comiket specifically.

The next comment, ‘It’s Azumanga Daioh, with less comedy and more moé!’, is more or less true, yet it’s acting like a show being cute is also a bad thing. I mean cute? In anime? Wow, totally new concept, huh? It was an enjoyably cute series, it didn’t go overboard with cuteness, it balanced it out with comedy and slice-of-life in general. Theres plenty of cute shows out there, still don’t see why exactly that’s a specific directed at Lucky Star. Aiming that at the whole ’slice of life’ genre in general is fine I guess; you either like the genre or you don’t, there’s no right or wrong. It just seems like a spewed out insult with no actual backing.

Now saying all that makes me look like I’m praising the show, where I’m really not(putting my bias towords Kagamin’s awesomeness aside at least). Did I enjoy the show? Absolutely. I caught it around episode 16ish, looked forward to the next episode each week, and was sad when it was over. My main problem was with the characters. You really didn’t get to know a huge deal about them emotionally, or hear anything about their past, save the last 2-3 episodes, and even then, it was light. Sure, you’d know a bit about the characters habits, hobbies, spending of their free time, etc. But life isn’t *that* good all the time, and they really didn’t focus on much of character-development type problems, once again save the last 2-3 episodes. I guess it can be attributed to the slice-of-life genre generally being more episode-based then having a continuing story, but it still could have done a little more with it.

So why all the shitstorming? Honestly it’s probably going to rage on as long as all that never-ending ‘Pirates vs. Ninjas’ crap, which is older than the internet itself (Seriously, it is, I took a one-hour class on it. I shit you not), and never reach a valid conclusion. I just don’t think theres much to ‘get’ about it per say; it’s a cute show about a bunch of high school girls going through everyday life, just with a bit of outside references thrown in. Which, now that I think about it, means this entire post really went nowhere, and accomplished nothing other then burning up a bit of my free time. So thanks to you siegetank55, for keeping me occupied for a bit :P