Entry tags:
My-Gateway Drug
Has it really been 20 years since the My-HiME anime first came out?
On my side of the pond, the original series was first released in 2006, and it was more or less my first dive into buying anime to watch/rewatch for myself on a daily basis. I first learned about it in 2007, in my early days as a TV Tropes visitor/editor, and would search the anime shelves at places like Best Buy for new volumes (back when 3-4 episodes to a DVD was the standard distribution method) to get my "fix. Great animation, great characters, an interesting premise (although the last few episodes get kinda screwy)...what more could a budding anime nerd ask for?
I'd bought every episode of the My-HiME anime and its kinda-sorta spiritual successor/spiritual sequel, My-Otome (but not the sequel or prequel OVAs to the latter), and I also read the alternate continuity My-HiME manga and a fan translation of the My-Otome manga of questionable quality since it never got released in the U.S. due either to the HiME manga not selling well enough over here or publisher Tokyopop's financial troubles (if you ask me, you're better off sticking with the anime continuities; most fans do, anyway, because the manga aren't very good).
Believe it or not, that's the series that steered me toward writing fanfiction. Until I started writing The Ghost of Ochs, my silly little 30_kisses challenge snippet collection, One Wonderful April, was my most-read story on Fanfiction.net. To this day, I'm still impressed that I got away with writing a story where I pried Mai and Natsuki (two of the original series' three main characters) away from their canon love interests (Yuuichi for Mai, and Shizuru for Natsuki, and the latter of the two pairings seemingly make up more than half of the My-HiME fanfics I've seen on FF.net) and shipped them with each other. What can I say? I liked their character dynamic a lot and thought they'd be cute together. (Somewhat related: in an episode of My-Otome, Shizuru teases Natsuki about a time when she caught Natsuki and Mai fooling around while out camping in the wilderness when they were all in school together. I don't know what the original writers had to say about this, but my headcanon maintains that either Mai was Natsuki's first schoolgirl crush, or she was crushing on Mai and Shizuru-senpai at the same time but decided to stick with just Shizuru after Mai disappeared for reasons unknown.)
One of these days, I'll need to search through Crunchyroll's website to see if they're streaming any of the anime series (as Crunchyroll swallowed up Funimation, who bought the license to the series from Bandai [Namco] Entertainment in the mid-2010s). Some of its aspects definitely haven't aged well, but I'd still like to remind myself what it was about the series that drew me to it to begin with.
On my side of the pond, the original series was first released in 2006, and it was more or less my first dive into buying anime to watch/rewatch for myself on a daily basis. I first learned about it in 2007, in my early days as a TV Tropes visitor/editor, and would search the anime shelves at places like Best Buy for new volumes (back when 3-4 episodes to a DVD was the standard distribution method) to get my "fix. Great animation, great characters, an interesting premise (although the last few episodes get kinda screwy)...what more could a budding anime nerd ask for?
I'd bought every episode of the My-HiME anime and its kinda-sorta spiritual successor/spiritual sequel, My-Otome (but not the sequel or prequel OVAs to the latter), and I also read the alternate continuity My-HiME manga and a fan translation of the My-Otome manga of questionable quality since it never got released in the U.S. due either to the HiME manga not selling well enough over here or publisher Tokyopop's financial troubles (if you ask me, you're better off sticking with the anime continuities; most fans do, anyway, because the manga aren't very good).
Believe it or not, that's the series that steered me toward writing fanfiction. Until I started writing The Ghost of Ochs, my silly little 30_kisses challenge snippet collection, One Wonderful April, was my most-read story on Fanfiction.net. To this day, I'm still impressed that I got away with writing a story where I pried Mai and Natsuki (two of the original series' three main characters) away from their canon love interests (Yuuichi for Mai, and Shizuru for Natsuki, and the latter of the two pairings seemingly make up more than half of the My-HiME fanfics I've seen on FF.net) and shipped them with each other. What can I say? I liked their character dynamic a lot and thought they'd be cute together. (Somewhat related: in an episode of My-Otome, Shizuru teases Natsuki about a time when she caught Natsuki and Mai fooling around while out camping in the wilderness when they were all in school together. I don't know what the original writers had to say about this, but my headcanon maintains that either Mai was Natsuki's first schoolgirl crush, or she was crushing on Mai and Shizuru-senpai at the same time but decided to stick with just Shizuru after Mai disappeared for reasons unknown.)
One of these days, I'll need to search through Crunchyroll's website to see if they're streaming any of the anime series (as Crunchyroll swallowed up Funimation, who bought the license to the series from Bandai [Namco] Entertainment in the mid-2010s). Some of its aspects definitely haven't aged well, but I'd still like to remind myself what it was about the series that drew me to it to begin with.
