Welcome to the NHK!

No I haven’t forgotten about my blog – believe it or not. With this little “relaunch” I’m – as probably already noticed – switching to English as my primary blogging language. With the first “Season” of blog entries I couldn’t really motivate me to write new articles for I had set the bar for the length of articles pretty high from the first post on. My new concept is to keep things shorter but more frequent – let’s see how I’ll get away with that. ;-)

I’ll begin with a little review of a really great Anime show I finished watching just yesterday. The series is titled by the pretty obscure name “Welcome to the N.H.K”. Despite this first naming-confusion the show digs deep into human psyches and deals with personal and societal problems like pathological fear from other humans, (online-) gaming addiction and even suicide. You may now think of “Welcome to the N.H.K!” as a really dark-toned melancolic and depressive series. But it manages to connect these pretty serious themes with a general comical attitude which is prevalent throughout the entire 24 episodes – a thing only possible in Animes as I believe. It’s more like a satire criticizing but also making fun of various social phenomenas.

The protagonist is a 22 year old college-dropout who suffers from being a “hikkomori” – a person, who cannot leave his flat due to his abnormal fears from bigger  human crowds. The story envolves into him running into his highschool-freind, with whom he starts writing computer-games (maybe that is also one of the reasons I liked the show so much^^) and believes they could become rulers of the world with their soon-to-be world-dominating game company.
As the story progresses the protagonist falls in love with a younger girl, who tries to help him getting over his “hikkomori”-lifestyle – as it naturally turns out even this girl has her own kinds of problems.

My conclusion: A really great show If you like more mature and serious Animes. Go watch it! ;-)