Hope you had a nice Christmas. The Spare Parts archive once again shows news properly, so if you missed news you can go back and read it. Under some conditions, it'll show you two weeks of comics on weekly view. Just consider it bonus material. I'll fix it in the nearish future.Unrelatedly, we also watched an anime called Azusa Will Help. We live about three blocks from a city called Azusa, so that's why. That's the nice thing about California; I mean, back when we were in Florida, the cities all around us were named things like Margate, Tamarac, and Plantation. There will never be an anime called Lauderhill Will Help. Anyhow, it was about a baseball team who can't win, so they go out to get a baseball robot. It's in the future and baseball robots are, apparently, commonplace because baseball isn't popular - no, that doesn't make sense to me either. If you can't find eight other friends to form a team, you have a baseball robot complete the ranks.
Anyhow, they buy a maid robot. They go to baseball training. One montage sequence later, the maid turns out to be better at baseball than the professional baseball robots are. Thing is, she didn't need to be a maid. It just seemed more like they took the "Maid robot plays baseball" concept and forced it. They didn't let it progress naturally like a good robot baseball maid series should.
Azusa, the maid, didn't have much personality. The team members did. There was an amazing set of twins - they weren't comically mistaken for one another (Mint na Bokura). Neither of them was evil (Shaman King, and thousands of others). Nobody said that they wished one twin could be more like the other (Touch - which is a lot better as far as baseball/romance goes). They weren't exact opposites of each other (dozens of nameless shoujo manga). That made them cool. The rest of the team was pretty cool too. They got characterization for the first 15 minutes. Then Azusa showed up and every single one of them was relegated to supporting cast, which is too bad. If they didn't have Azusa there, I would've liked it a lot more, but, you know. Could've developed the team's personality, and not had to spend five minutes explaining why baseball robots exist. "Robot in big puffy maid uniform = big sales money". Or something like that. Funny, though, apart from Azusa and the baseball robots, there weren't any other robots around.
And yes, within a few minutes of me posting this, I expect somebody to name a dozen better examples of manga/anime with twins.
