A miracle of the universe.
Impression
I have had a very tough week. And I have been sleep-deprived this whole weekend due to being buried in work. The last thing I properly watched was AntiMagic on Wednesday. I was up at 8.30am on Sunday morning, and it’s now 6am on Monday. In a bout of questionable judgement, I decided to watch Gochiusa instead of sleeping – it’d be about time to leave again by the time I finished writing it up, anyway.
I am happy to report that Gochiusa has magical healing properties. I mean… I’m still tired, but this has worked wonders on my mental state. I don’t even want to watch the episodes weekly. I want to save them for whenever I’m feeling horrible, then watch them on purpose in the hopes that it’ll make me feel better. I was hoping to watch this after I finished up work, by the way – so I used this picture of Chino-chan to rest my brain a bit about once every hour during the all-nighter. I think it’s from the first season, but anyway – I swear to god, this girl can cure cancer. There’s fluffy, and then there’s Chino. There’s adorable loli, and then there’s Chino.
Chino is perfection. And so is the new ED by Chimame-tai. I mean, nothing can ever beat ~KOKORO PYON PYON~ but this came pretty damn close. I think the OP was the moment I realized just how much I missed Gochiusa and its iyashikei fluff. It’s a different type of iyashikei to Non Non Biyori and Kiniro Mosaic, but it’s just as good as they are – if not better. A bit less comedy than the latter maybe, and it replaces that with… I don’t know what it is, it’s just overbearingly sweet. It’s so sweet that you don’t even get diabetes, you just skip that stage and die from overdose. Is it wrong that I wanted the entire episode to be various scenes of Chino getting embarrassed as Cocoa tried to take photos of her? It’s the one thing I fully agree with Cocoa on – that Chino is the most adorable thing ever. If only she did the ‘Nico~!’ smile that Rize did, then my life would be complete.
I think this episode had a bit of everyone, just so they’d remind us of who was in the cast before we started – even Aoyama Blue Mountain made an appearance! But it does feel like the first half of the episode was very much Chino’s, which is discouraging as it means we’d get fewer segments focused on her and Chimame-tai in the future. I want to adopt them! It’s insane how many times I’ve already listened to this ED. And the second half was about magazine segments for each of the cafes – it was like they were giving us a short crash course into the setting before continuing, which was quite nice of them. Rabbit House has, of course, the best girls, although Fleur de Lapin has the best uniforms. I still haven’t forgotten that time when Rize started working there and had to practice her greetings!
In all honesty though, I don’t think I can blog this. I want to try, as I always do with iyashikei anime at the start of every season, but a combination of a lack of time (Saturdays are very full this season) and it being something very hard to write about to begin with is going to make it too much of a challenge. It’s enough for me to be able to bask in this… glorious thing blessed by the heavens on an average of once per week, and internally squeal like a little girl whenever Chino does something cute. Which is essentially all the time.
Possibility of Watching: Guaranteed
Possibility of Blogging: Unknown
:0
Do what you can. It would be good to have a blog to react to it on (honestly, I just really like seeing what other people have to say about things that I watched: the more the better), but don’t abuse yourself trying to do it. As numerous bloggers have discovered, it can be very hard to “cover” this kind of series, because almost nothing happens. You often end up reduced to just commenting on how adorable it is, and there are only so many ways to say that before folks realize that’s all there really is to say.
Not that that’s bad! These shows are, as you said, a miracle of the universe. They heal the soul, soothing away accumulated stress and mental fatigue. I love all the time spent with these girls and everything they do. I just want to cuddle them all, like the adorable bunnies they seem to be sometimes.
The thing is, I place shows like Gochiusa on a very high pedestal, because I truly believe it’s just that wonderful an experience. So it makes me want to cover it despite the difficulty, because I simply don’t know when we’ll get the chance to see another good entry in the genre again – especially now that Gochiusa, Non Non Biyori and Kinmoza have all had their second seasons. All I’m certain of is Amanchu! in Summer 2016, and while that’s approaching god-tier, it’s a terribly long way away…
But yes, I definitely get what you mean. When I first started this episode’s write-up, all I had previously written down were one-liner reactions like ‘SHE’S STILL CUTE WHEN SHE’S BLURRY’ or ‘COCOA MADE THOSE MARKS ON THE TABLE!’