23 April 2007

Sola 2: Look up at the blue (ミアゲルアオ)


From this year's spring anime lineup that I have seen, Sola, Hayate no Gotoku and Lucky Star are the series I am looking forward to see the most.




Continuing the fight from the first episode, the cornered Matsuri is saved when Yorito makes his appearance. Taking advantage of the distraction, she jumps out from the window to escape the hunter. After another brief fight, Matsuri is hit by the hunter and fell into a forest.
The hunter then warns Yorito not to be involved, as he said Matsuri is not a human, but a "yoru no wazawai"/夜の災い (Calamity of the night), whatever that is.
Despite the warning, Yorito still try to find the injured Matsuri in the forest.

His effort paid off when he found Matsuri fell unconscious on the street among the trees. Thankfully for them, before the hunter can start the pursuit, his loli friend appears. The hunter decides to halt the pursuit for now, because it seems he does not want the girl to know what he is up to.

At Yorito's home, Matsuri is to be able to recover quickly to engage Yorito in some cloud talk. She also thanks Yorito for his help and ask what he wants as a reward. Yorito seems to be dumbfounded and unable to answer. Matsuri concludes that he must thinks something dirty :b



The next day, Yorito does not come to school so that he can accompany Matsuri. It does not take long for Matsuri to wreak havoc in his house, starting with her cooking.
When the microwave oven does not do what Matsuri wants, she tries to kick it like the vending machine. Yorito must be glad he didn't went to school so that he can stop this calamity :)
Afterwards, Matsuri demonstrates that she is weak to the sun and confesses that she is not human. Despite knowing something is different with Matsuri after last night's event, Yorito seems confused how to respond to all this.



Because of her different nature, Matsuri wanted to leave as soon as the sun sets as she can't leave before that. However, Yorito tried to persuade her to stay as he reckons it is not safe for Matsuri to go out when someone is trying to eliminate her. Matsuri thinks it is not Yorito's business, and it will all work out anyway.

In the middle of this argument, Yorito received a phone call from Mana telling him that Aono wanted to go home if Yorito does not come. Before Yorito leaves, he asked Matsuri to promise not to leave before he comes back. At the hospital, as soon as Yorito sees Aono, she wants to eat, and all problems seems to be solved for now.

In the mean time, the hunter is having a conversation with the loli about the event the day before. Despite her suspicion, he hides the fact that he saw a yaka/yoru no wazawai.

When Yorito went home, he panics when he sees all the lights are off. Thinking that Matsuri has left, he is about to look for her when he found out that Matsuri is actually in the 'sky room', looking up at the blue ceiling. She felt it's unfair that in the several hundred years she has been alive, she has never stood under the blue sky...


Impression:
Aside from finding out about Matsuri's identity, it is also confirmed that she is weak against the sun in this episode. I have also seen episode 3, and I think the story is building up quite nicely. There are also a lot of questions that will hopefully be resolved at the end of the series.
Because the anime is only planned for 12 episodes, I wonder what the writers had in mind for the ending. There is also a PS2 game planned and an ongoing manga for Sola, so I hope the anime is not just used for advertising those other merchandise.

Speculation:
The little girl that hangs out with the hunter is the same kind as Matsuri, which is probably why he does not come clean with her about his fight with Matsuri.
Next episode: Quiet day

4 comments:

Droniac said...

Nice episode review. Sola is certainly proving to be an enjoyable anime so far. I suppose you'll keep on blogging it now eh?


Oh and if you don't mind my asking: how did you manage to set your blog up to still be recognized by AnimeBlogger Antenna's tracker properly? All the other blogger blogs I've seen (including my own) keep getting 1969 dates and whatnot else :o

Musouka said...

Thanks for the comment, droniac! I do plan to keep blogging the series, hopefully I can always find time to do that.

Regarding the rss in animeblogger, if you were like me, you probably used an atom like:
http://yoursitename.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Re-submit the feed, but change it like this:
http://yoursitename.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

I didn't even realize the 1969 dates until recently and thought my feed were not displayed at all!

Droniac said...

Haha yeah - I know blogging can take up quite some time, but it'd be great to see you pull through. The previous entries were all good reads too - so I'm looking forward to whatever you conjure up next :p

And thanks for the explanation about animeblogger, I'll get right to it!

Musouka said...

Thanks for the encouragement :)

It seems my post above is a bit cut off at the end, the fixed feed should say:
....default?alt=rss