Today is October 1, a date of great significance in human history. No, I’m not talking about the Battle of Gaugamela, the beginning of Shinkansen service from Tokyo to Osaka, or even the Thrilla in Manila. I’m talking about the fateful day when savage war engulfed the world and civilization was destroyed: 1997, October 1, The END DAY.
Crystalis told little kids in 1990 the exact date they’d die on in seven years. It was awesome. Most stories wouldn’t even give you a specific year, let alone a specific date, or they’d give you a date sufficiently far off in the past or future as to be non-threatening. I say children need to be threatened; otherwise they turn into huge pussies who can’t even handle being graded with red ink. This is one of many reasons why it’s imperative that I attend the March to Keep Fear Alive.
Now, to commemorate the the thirteenth anniversary of The END DAY, I’m launching an annual series in which I’ll be discussing END DAYs of my own. This kickoff post will cover my first END DAY as an anime fan: the day I dropped the second Fushigi Yuugi OVA.
Fushigi Yuugi was one of the first 20 anime series I ever watched, and it was one of the first 10 I watched outside the magical box called Cartoon Network. Since my enjoyment of anime hadn’t yet fallen prey to the hedonic treadmill, Fushigi Yuugi blew me away. Sure, it was full of girly-looking guys who had as many feelings as they had strands of hair in their eyes, but the show had more than enough plot and action to make up for it. At 52 episodes, it was the second longest series with a continuous plot I’d seen at the time, DBZ being first. I was hooked from start to finish, and when I found out there were OVAs, I scrounged through the bowels of IRC for weeks to get them.
The first OVA sucked. I was more confused than angry. I’d never seen anime suck. What the hell was going on? I did a little research and found out that the OVA was created to bridge the gap between the ending of the anime and timeline of the the manga, or something like that. What a great excuse. It only sucked because it had to. I totally bought it. It made a lot more sense than anime sucking of its own accord, that’s for sure. Now that the first OVA bridged the gap between the anime and the manga, the second OVA wouldn’t have to suck. Those surviving vowed not repeat their mistakes of the past and erected a great tower in the sky to oppress evil forever. What could possibly go wrong?
The second OVA has six episodes. I bailed after the fourth. It was horrendous. They came up with some new piss-poor excuse to extend the plot and do all kinds of worthless stupid bullshit with shitty new enemies and soporific character development. It was everything I’ve now come to hate about filler intensified by the fact that I actually expected it to be good. As much as I’d love to go into detail, I honestly don’t remember that much. I wanted to rewatch the OVA before writing this post, but my last post was so popular that I spent all my free time responding to comments instead of reliving the horror of The END DAY. My life clearly sucks. Time’s running out, so I’ll just leave you with this: I would rather rewatch Tenchi in Tokyo than rewatch the second Fushigi Yuugi OVA.