Shugo Chara! – Fairytale Gone Bad

I guess most you have at least heard about Peach-Pit’s anime adaptation of their manga serialisation “Shugo Chara!”, production of Satelight and all. A mahou shoujo series, with the classic tsundere type main protagonist Hinamori Amu, newly transfer student at Seiyo Academy, suddenly finding herself involved in weird situations due to the birth of her three “Guardian Characters”, cute chibi “would-be” selves claiming that they were born from Amu’s dreams.

That’s also the reason of her to be recruited by Seiyo Academy’s Guardians as the “Joker”, who seem to be just a mere student council at first sight, but actually prove to be kids with “Guardian Characters” like Amu’s, trying to prevent the eggs of other children’s hearts to be stolen by a company named “Easter”, who corrupt their dreams’ eggs in order to obtain the “Embryo”, which is believed to grant any wish to the one who possesses it. Of course, lots of shoujo here and there, friendships with Fujisaki Nadeshiko and Yayoi Yaya, the “Queen” and the “Ace” of the Guardians respectively and Nobuko Seaki, a spiritual fortune teller, love troubles with Hotori Tadase, the “King” Of the Guardians and Tsukiyomi Ikuto, puppet of “Easter” and old friend of Tadase, rivalry situations with Hoshina Utau, Ikuto’s sister with HUGE brother complex and the unforgettable and surely irritating classmate Yamabuki Saaya, and so on (hope it was understandable, what I wrote above!)…

… Anyways, I’m not here to just give you a summary of the series, but to express my feelings about it (or to mostly complain about the outcome of this production, I guess you can say that)! ‘Cause it seems that things got a little out of order along the way and… well, nobody seems to like it, just like me! Or is there anybody who has no complaints about how “Shugo Chara!” ended up to be a bunch of endless fillers, getting seriously hard to stomach stand anymore?!!!

Things started really good! A new anime, adaptation of a popular manga, cute drawing style… all in all, a good recipe for a production aiming for success! And it WAS a success, creating a fuss and getting spread around in a very short amount of time by the manga fans. There was enthusiasm all over the net, the abbreviation “SC!” here and there, pictures of the main characters and cute soundtracks available at the torrent pages, discussions over the so-called “Amuto” (relationship between Amu and Ikuto) from the one side and “Tadamu” (relationship between Amu and Tadase) from the other, or the gender-bender character of Nadeshiko/Nagihiko Fugisaki (Nadeshiko turned out to be a boy without the others knowing),  blah, blah, blah… Only in my external hard disk you can find almost all the music soundtracks, OPs-EDs and insert songs played throught the airing of the series (but, wait, I’ve always done that for ALL the series I’ve watched so far!).

Of course the anouncement of the second year of airing came along eventually. All fans having 2 thumps up (with me included), hoping for it…But that didn’t work out exactly this way…

In all adaptations we can see that the anime is not completely and entirely faithful to the manga plotline… and it’s logical and understandable. Using filler characters once in a while is acceptable for the series to continue airing, things always happen and throws us out of our program, so it’s ok, because there is no way they can stop airing the series for one or two weeks or maybe a month. It costs time and money. All that stuff is inevitable. So all goes well.

Things  started feeling a little awkward when at the very first episode of  ”Shugo Chara! Doki” we had.. a filler! Well, I guess we could accept a recap after all this time, it was the introduction for the second year. So we waited for the second episode… And to our disappointment, it’s a filler… AGAIN! Wait a little, when does the “Doki” actually start airing? At least it wasn’t a COMPLETE filler, but we had a very nice fighting between Ikuto and Tadase., and in all the commotion of the fighting, when Amu can’t take it anymore, light bursts from the Humpty Lock (don’t ask for explanations, those who don’t know) and… WHAT?!!! Something like a power-up is announced?… Well, personally I wasn’t too enthusiastic about it. It was so-so, it did just nothing to me actually. Letting it go was the reaction of the fans, it was just a little, whatever, just a snap.

There we have Fujisaki Nagihiko to save the day (for a while, at least). The dearly beloved Nadeshiko is really a BOY and everything gets clear from when we saw him leaving at the first year. Only boys get to learn the truth, because Nagihiko is not ready to let Amu know about it (being a trap, that is), so he lets her believe he’s is Nadeshiko’s brother etc. We also have really beautiful scenes of Nagihiko being teased by Kukai and in revenge getting the boys dressed into girls’ uniforms!!! So one hole got closed nice and tight. But it didn’t go that smoothly when Lulu with her ?-eggs popped up…

The introduction of the character named “Lulu”… well, Lulu de Morcerf Yamamoto (her full name) was pretty much a failure. From my point of view, she was a silly character, or maybe not a character at all, and her ability creating ?-eggs (like X-eggs, but even more irritating) made me despise her even more! Irritating with no reason, a total screwball who got on our nerves for far too long a time… Okay, I don’t like even thinking about her, that’s all! I guess many others are along the same wavelength with me at this topic. I’d like to leave it now as it is and go to the next complaint (yeah, of course there is more complaints here!)

We followers of  ”SC!” finally took a breath when it came to Ikuto’s escape from “Easter”, too bad for Amu for having things settled up with Tadase (or maybe not?)… Well, for those being to the Amuto side (like me), it was just like heaven! For those who are not, it was at least a refreshing move to the actual plot, which was even better. Finally, we got forward with the plot and all were happy about it, getting a break from the endless parade of crappy Lulu fillers (at least for a while)… Too bad Ikuto had to go in the most tragic way, hurting both his love (Amu) and his old-time friend (Tadase), to not let Amu’s family get involved into his own problems (I almost cried when I read it in the manga AND when I watched it… silly kitty!)…

After that happy break for us, back to the industry reality… As Lulu gets the role of the most-sucker-not-even-a-worthy-villain-of-the-entire-season, fillers are a weekly routine… and an overextented eyesore as filler characters get sillier in each and every one of the episodes, with not even the slightest character development and even more hideous fashion style non-existent fashion sense (oh, god, my eyes still hurt!)…

Or what about Platinum Heart? Well, I couldn’t care less… but it’s better to have this over the other problems that occured. It was neither good nor bad, just like the power-up, eating time but nothing really exciting or even useful. Ruined it again… It’s all about filling the timeboard, I guess…

But we were now watching a good fairytale getting bad, reeeeally bad along the way… The worst of all was Amu’s character getting ruined by the script writters in order to get more episodes after Ikuto’s abduction by “Easter”… I don’t really wanna remember that. It was utterly hideous well, crappy to the bone, ANYWAY,  SO unforgivable! Suddenly Amu became a bitch, well, a grouchy scumbag, whining here and there, in reverse to the “Hot And Spicy” character of the manga, who decided to clear everything between her and Tadase, simple and clean, just like that! The anime character forgot about how she trying to protect Ikuto and refused to even talk about him when he got abducted by “Easter” and separated from Yoru (his Guardian Character), whereas the manga character was worried almost from the very beginning, despite being hurt by him… and so many other problems and plotholes that, if I have to name them all it’ll take a whole day, okay, maybe two days and too much space in the blog (seriously, I’m thinking about it for two days and I’m tired of finding problems almost everywhere!)…

And then, a bunch of fillers again, all boring and not worthy of the pain of watching SC!… The only acceptable filler character was Sakurai Yua (and that fact is accepted worldwide), a cute character, very well developed and NOT IRRITATING (finally, a filler worth our time!), getting two nice episodes, filler again, but at least not an eyesore…

Someday, it’s decided that Lulu’s fulfilled her purpose (thank god!!!). I think that the audience was tired of her blabbering anyway and were totally relieved when Lulu left for France not so long ago (at last!). “Filler season – THE END”… was what I thought (and many others with me)… But who would have guessed…

Okay, I know that post is too much, but forgive me, it’s my first, but I can’t help it with this topic. Anyway, too bad it’s fillers again, even when Lulu’s gone… “Oh, god, WHY AGAIN???” the reaction suits perfectly…

And where does that lead us to? “Shugo Chara!” got from the top to a bunch of overextended fillers. It’s really tiresome to watch it now, fans hoping to get forward with the plot once again to keep following it (if they haven’t given up yet) every week, only to get disappointed by the fact “Just a filler… ONCE AGAIN! What a surprise…”.  Here we have it, a fairytale gone bad! Really, how much will the fans put up with it???