For some very odd reason, I can't stop watching an anime about bread.
I picked this one up while looking for blog themes, I found one based on this anime and thought "Alright. It's about food... sure". After one episode I told Brit that it seemed too over the top and shonen like for me, but that he'd probably get a kick out of it's satire and comedy. He watched the first episode and didn't really like it. Yet now for some reason I keep watching it...
The central storyline is about a boy with magical "Solar Hands" who has a dream of creating the perfect japanese bread. The title is a pun, and puns are everywhere in the show. Pan means bread in Japanese. So calling his dream bread Ja-pan ... well, you get it.
It pokes fun at the over the top, action oriented shonen genre but does it in such a way that I'm pretty sure that somewhere there's a group of ten year old boys who take the show very seriously. If I didn't realize that it was a satire I'd likely have thought it very, very stupid. But as someone who admitedly loved Naruto but rolled her eyes as it's fights that lasted half a dozen episodes and entire episodes where nothing really happened other than to up the stress level of whatever seven part fight was happening at the moment, I can get that Yakitate!! Japan makes fun of itself while succeding pretty well at being a shonen anime itself. It includes overly frequent references to the lead characters warmer the normal magical Solar Hands, campy cut scenes of the wonderlands that good bread apparently gives you when eaten, a character who's sword doubles a rolling pin etc.
The only question that remains is ... why am I still watching it?! I don't know. Maybe I have a soft spot for Japanese insanity or maybe I'm just nuts enough about food to actually enjoy the educational rambles about bread making. Scratch both those maybes. It's like ... Iron Chef meets anime.
Silly bread-anime aside, I'm gearing up for PAX starting tomorrow. I'm excited and feel really spoiled that such a big gaming con takes place ten minutes away from me. Friday is opening day which means waiting in line since we didn't get to pre-pay. That should be fun. Turbine, the developers of the MMO we currently play, is throwing a party at Gameworks after the exhibit hall closes which I am hella looking forward to. Free food, free drinks, games and lovely lovely swaaaaag. I'm also looking forward to meeting Critters from NC Soft/Tabula Rasa who I worked with back when I ran a roleplaying fansite for that game after beta. Pictures will follow, if I can find the usb cord for my poor old camera.
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