I just finished another anime. Sadly, it ended like I expected... IT WAS STILL GOOD NONE THE LESS! As to how I found this, it was AA again.
There is this star, that only a few girls can see. These girls, called HIME, are capable of materializing weapons and commanding beast called "Children" (actually they call them "Child" but they are often talking about one of them. Some of Japanese grammar doesn't work to well with English.) They go around killing these other beast called "oufan" or "orphans" (the translators didn't do a good job with that part of the show.) After they had killed a few they are told that was a mere test and that they were to start killing each other. Well, not each other but each others Child. Killing the person controlling the Child works as well. When they had made a contract with the Child they ended up putting what they held most dear to them on the line. In other words, the person they loved the most. In the end of this royale, the strongest is left with the task of preventing the world from ending. In "compensation", they are bestowed immense power. They never explained how much, but I have the feeling it would be that of a god.
To sum it up, a fun little game where the life of the one you love is on the line, while you have to kill that of others just to save the world. There are some twisted people out there. I kind of like them.
While you may have never seen these anime, they are similar to this one in some respect: Rozen Maiden, Fate/Stay Night, and Konan. I thought about School Days, but this series isn't as depressing.
Like Konan, the anime starts off with a happy go lucky feel as the main character transfers to another school and then turns for the worse. I felt like mentioning that because it is how the anime starts of, more on these similarities later.
Both Rozen Maiden and Fate/Stay Night are battle royales where everyone is fighting to achieve something. They also have a human that forms a contract with a supernatural being in order to be in the royale. Felt like throwing that out there first. What makes these three anime different (Rozen Maiden, Fate/Stay Night, and Mai HIME) is what the prize is, who gets the prize, the criteria to be in the royale, and the genders. Yes, genders.
Rozen Maiden: The prize is solely for the Rozen Maiden that wins. The servant (in this case the human) doesn't really get anything. The series feels incomplete so there may be more to it. The prize is for the Rozen Maiden to become Alice, a girl without any imperfections. The Rozen Maidens' also feel an desire to make their father happy, and by becoming Alice they may do so. As for performing in the royale, it isn't really necessary to form a contract between the servant and the master, but it sure as fucking hell a good idea. For a contract to be formed, the servant must agree to something (another one of those things that was never really clear) for one of the Rozen Maidens to appear to them. He/she must than agree to be the servant to the Rozen Maiden and allow them to draw energy from them to fight in the royale. All of the Rozen Maiden are female, and the servants can be both male or female.
Fate/Stay Night: Unlike Rozen Maiden and Mai HIME, both the servant, the one mostly fighting, and the master, the one that summons the servant, benefit from winning the royale. Upon defeating all of the other servants (or both the master and the servant. they can do both if they wanted to) The Holy Grail (yes, the one that Jesus bled into) appears to grant the final master and servant a wish each. What they wish for can be anything from becoming a god to just having a cup of coffee (I'd rather have tea.) The point is it can be anything. The servants do seem to have other things that they wish for. Something like getting another chance to be king and maybe ruling better than before. I don't know, that's just a thought. In order to be in the royale, a master must first be a magi, summon a servant, and make a contract with them in which they both agree to be apart of the royale. I pretty sure that's how it goes. Now then, the master and the servants can be both male or female. From what I've seen, what ever the masters' gender is, it is the opposite for the servant. There was one or two that this didn't happen to, and I'm not sure as to why. How about this, I'm not going to dwell on it.
Mai Hime: Now then, I've given you what the prize is (saving the earth and shit load of power), the person who receives is (last person standing, that being the HIME and not the Child), and the gender of the HIME (which is always going to be female). There are two reasons that the HIME are female: they marry some dude at the end (part of the prize, I didn't bother to include it though) and the simple fact that "hime" means princess, or is one way of calling someone that. For some reason I feel as though there is another reason but I can't think of it. That explains the gender for the master, as for the Child, the servant in this anime, they can be either or. It doesn't really matter that much since most of them seem to have gender neutral names. As for the criteria for the royale: must be female, must see a red star of certain doom next to the moon, have a weird looking birth mark somewhere on her body (most are on their backs or arms), pointy ears seem to be needed as well (I kind of noticed that they had them, could just be the artist way of making ears tough), must make a contract with a Child, and most of the girls had someone that they loved deeply. Yes, that is needed as well.
I'm also going to note that the servants and the masters vary when it come to actually fighting. Rozen Maiden's, the masters, do all the fighting while the servants, the humans, are just there as a power well. In Fate/Stay Night both the servant, the one summoned, and the master, the summoner or magi, can fight but it is typical for only the servant to fight. Mai HIME, as far as I'm concerned, has the best balance between the master, HIME, and the servant, the Child, fighting. I think the reason for that is the simple fact that while the Child is fighting the other Child, the Hime is fighting the other Hime. There are other battles where it is the HIME against the Child, but I think that did a good job at varying it between HIME and Child.
Let's see, that covers two of the three anime that I listed up there. I only covered some of Konan though. Konan isn't a battle royale anime. Instead it's a love story, and there are quite a few similarities between Mai HIME and Konan. They both start off with the main character transferring to another school and as their life goes on it keeps getting worse and worse. As noted above, the HIME have to defeat each others' Child. By doing this they end up killing the person that was most dear to the HIME. Let me put it this way; HIME really loves guy, HIME losses Child, guy goes away, too. That should clarify things. Konan doesn't exactly have people dying as much as Mai HIME does, they both follow a downward pattern. As the series progresses it keeps getting sadder as someone (in Mai HIME they die) gets injured and one person does die. But of course in the very last episode everyone is back to life or well again. Sarcastic yay! The same pattern can be applied to Rozen Maiden Traumend (the second season) but since it is an incomplete series I feel as though it doesn't fit too well. There has yet to be an Alice! That is more or less why.
This is only a side note, as nothing to do with the current rant: There is some irony when I think about Konan. They made a mention of Pachelbel's Conan which contradicts the anime Konan. They sound exactly the same, Konan and Conan. More on that in another rant.
This is an ungodly long rant and I don't think I'm halfway done. There is the music, psychology, and a few more similarities with all four of them.
I'll start with the psychology. The battle royale in Fate/Stay Night contained some problems with attacking people but that was mainly the main character. He didn't want to fight against people that he knew, even though all he had to do was defeat their servant. They didn't have the issue of losing someone when the servant was defeated. In both Mia HIME and Rozen Maiden, the loser was going to either die themselves (was for guaranteed in Rozen Maiden, could happen in Mai HIME) or it was someone else that was going to die (which was always the case in Mai HIME.) The other combatants in Fate/Stay Night didn't have much of a problem with fighting, like the main character did. This wasn't the case for Rozen Maiden and Mai HIME. Almost all of the combatants were reluctant to fight another one of them. In Rozen Maiden the reason they didn't fight was because they are all sisters. In Mai HIME the girls couldn't bring themselves to fight for different reasons. I think the main reason was because they had formed some close bonds with each other. Another reason could have simply been that they couldn't bear to ruin someone's life. They did have fun with the possibilities of who would die when one of them was defeated, though. I have to admit they did a good job with it. They even surprised me a little. I've brought this up because it seems to me that Japan thinks girls are incapable of killing or something. Aside from that, it is another one of the similarities I noticed while watching Mai HIME.
Random similarity that I noticed, and didn't notice until I started this. The main character in Konan is named Yuuichi. The main character in Mai HIME is name Mia (HOLY SHIT! Really?) and she falls in love with a guy name Yuuichi Tate. I had more similarities, but they found themselves in the paragraph above. The whole girls needing to kill each other and how they don't want to do that in order to get the prize and yet they still have to for some reason. I guess saving the world is still a good thing. Other things: one of the girls had a last name of Higurashi, Midori looks like Yoko from an anime I have, and Mai also looks like a girl from another anime.
The music! This is something that I think I did with School Days. I believe I found out about School Days from AA, just like Mai HIME. I went to Piratebay and started to download both the School Days OST (Original SoundTrack for those who don't know) and the School Days anime at once, just like Mai HIME. The thing that happened was the School Days OST finished before the School Days anime did, just like Mai HIME. Unlike School Days, Mai Hime didn't end up to be so depressing. Which I'm grateful for. I'm never going to download the OST before the anime again, or at least listen to it before watching the anime. It is not as though the Mai HIME OST was bad or anything, it just didn't have as good of music as the School Days did (which after watching School Days makes some of the songs give me chills...) I am glad that I am not missing the intro and the outro, which are missing in the School Days OST and the outros got so fucked up in the anime. Damn it! They would have sounded so good, too! If they weren't so fucked up! Aside from the outro for Mai HIME (I fucking love it so damn much!) there are one or too that I liked. The only problem I had was that there seemed to be too few songs for it. Thirty-two is a lot but for an anime with twenty-six episodes it didn't feel like it to me. School Days had twelve episodes and about ten more songs than Mai HIME, not including about six different outros. Rozen Maiden has two seasons that add up to Mai HIME's episode count and above fifty songs for both of them combined. I just feel a little gypped.
Well this was fun. I'm sure there is more that I can add to this but I won't. Anyways... O Yeah! They used the character that represents the noun "dance." However, in English translations it is "My HIME." I think that it really should be "HIME's Dance" or something like that since they do a lot of talk about dancing in the anime as well. Final note, "Mai" is "dance" and also is the main characters name and how she spells it.
Edit: I forgot about the church in Mai HIME. Like in Fate/Stay Night the church houses an enemy of the main character. Other than that it is a joke, just like in real life. There is a devote catholic who ends up becoming a HIME, but she doesn't do much.