Upon further reflection, I think it was the visual element more than anything else that was throwing me so, so far off kilter. That, and the anime fascination with portraying kids in goddamn war. Which in the case of Strike Witches is a particularly un-subtle one-two punch, because the art is... look, I'm sure it was done to deliberately strike dissonance, at least I hope it was, because the alternative is that it's someone's actual fetish and gah.

Let's just not go there.

Anyway! Point is, when I first tried reading OWaW, I had just been introduced to the source anime and so the images (ye gods!) were still fresh in my mind. And this was before I came up with my new mental rule for attempting to enjoy anime, which is that I smile and nod at what the creators say the characters age is and mentally add at least four years.

But without the canon material being so fresh in my mind, I actually found myself enjoying OWaW -- at least until I started looking at the character pages which features some screencaps from the source and decided to nope on out of there :)

But as of now, I'm all caught up and find myself hoping for more, and considering the low esteem I held the source in, I think you did a damn fine job of running this Home for Wayward Characters.

I guess what I'm saying is, whether or not we agree on the source, if I treat this as, y'know, just a story rather than being inextricably linked to its source material, the EPU magic comes through and I really enjoyed it.

I hope that makes sense?

--sofaspud
--i don't word so good sometimes