Haha. I'm late watching another series again. This one is a fantasy story about the life of a cute red haired girl with burning eyes who polices some extradimensional space and replaces "eaten humans" with torches, Shakugan no Shana. When I first saw it, I was pretty impressed with the opening scenes and the usual half-complete cryptic explanation of whats going on to build up suspense, it then started ceremoniously with drum beats into the opening. It was pretty good, even my flatmate said so.
Alright, so the opening was pretty nice, with flash-bys of what were in store in the anime. The song was pretty upbeat too, and there was lots of cool poses with fire and spirits, and most importantly, good drawing. I had the feeling that something looked familiar to me in this opening, but I wasn't able to put my finger on it. It might just be my imagination, though since I am prone to imagining things that don't really exist but my head just makes them up anyway, and then I encounter the rare (though not extremely rare) occurence of deja vu, which is pretty disturbing... Anyway, on to the story.
The story starts with this boy here, Sakai Yuji who was an ordinary student living an ordinary life and taking an ordinary stroll to live out an ordinary day. But while crossing an ordinary street, he suddenly encountered a not-so-ordinary phenomenon. Basically time stopped around him and lots of things happened including him almost getting eaten by a giant Ju-on type baby and getting saved by a cute red haired girl with burning eyes and finding out that he is actually dead.
So basically what started off as a normal first day in high school in a normal class full of cute girls who are willing to help you when you go into a daydream spell and the teacher asks you to read the next paragraph just to mock you for not listening in class, became an encounter with the extraordinary. The day never gave any clues though, since he simply wanted to check out CDs at the store which I really really want to do too except the CDs they sell here are crap and too expensive for me to afford.
Okay, back to the cute red haired girl with burning eyes. Well, like I said, just when Sakai was about to be "itadakimasu"ed by some horrible looking straight-out-of-Ju-on thing, he was saved by some cute red haired girl with burning eyes wielding a sword that sliced up his predator's arm. However, after the cute red haired girl with burning eyes managed to remove some "being" from some "shell", which was apparently Sakai's assailant, and about to kill him, Sakai managed to do something extremely stupid. He shielded her from being cut.
The cute red haired girl with burning eyes, not one to hesitate, instead cut him up with the assailant while the assailant backstabbed her saviour by putting her hand into his body to "take" something (it looked like it jumped straight out of Nanoha A's to me). Well, then after that, it seemed that the real bad guy behind all this was some weird children's doll that suddenly appeared out of the smoke, possibly hiding before this in one of the things the cute red haired girl with burning eyes was having fun cutting up.
Anyway, after that it was revealed that Sakai is already dead and he is some sort of a "replacement" to avoid the collapse of the universe or something like that. It turns out that outside that strange plane where time stops, the cute red haired girl with burning eyes is actually a cute black haired girl with brown eyes. Damn that was sad. Now it seems she can dye her hair in like seconds. Or maybe its just me. Overall, I think this is gonna be great and I'm gonna start following it one by one till I run out and enjoy the second season and the movie when it comes out. Oh yeah. YES the movie is coming out on dvds soon. お楽しみに。
... and it seems like I'm developing a red-hair fetish, and starting to watch stuff like Kaze no Stigma and ToHeart just because of the intense chroma generated by those series' main character's hair colour. Oh well.