Ep 15: The High School Girl who Soars the Heavens
Ep 16: Parade
Ep 17: Lips that Lie
Ep 18: Beginning
Ep 19: Maze of the Heart
Ep 20: Mai's Flames, Destiny's Tears
Ep 24: Love is a Battle

Airs on Thursdays
Total episodes: 26 (?)
Official website
RAWs at l33t
RAWs at Saiyaman

This new series is not your typical bishoujo with superpowers anime. Although it started out quite benign and almost cute, there was always some kind of serious undertone, and the story indeed took quite the sinister turn around episode 17.

The story focuses on Takiha Mai, a young high school girl who's just transferred to a private school in order to take advantage of a scholarship and to take care of her younger brother Takumi, who has a heart condition. She works part time in order to save money for Takumi's surgery, as he waits for a donor to become available. On top of all her personal problems, she must deal with new issues which began to take root soon after arriving at her school - she has discovered that she has powers of a HiME (which stands of Highly Advanced Materializing Equipment). HiME have the ability to materialize weapons, and can borrow the strength of their Child, a large mechanical animal-like monster that serves as their guardian. The HiME have much at stake, for when a HiME's Child is destroyed, the person whom the HiME loves the most will die.

There are 12 HiME altogether...and as I mentioned earlier, the new turn of events involves a battle between these HiME. The fate of the world depends upon one HiME surviving the fighting to reign supreme over all, and expel an evil star that's about to decend upon their world.

Pretty surreal stuff. But the animation and music is absolutely wonderful!

I started out loving this series, mainly because I was stunned by the beauty of it, and the concept was really intriguing to me. I also liked the characters a lot, as they seemed so vivid, with lots of typical school-hood charm.

However, after the series became "HiMElander" in the words of mentar, I feel like I've begun to watch a whole new series altogether. I don't mind the new Mai HiME, but I miss old times, when things seemed to make sense, and my favorite characters hadn't been killed off yet. In addition, I was disappointed with how some of the characters turned out (e.g. Mai, Tate) in the recent episodes. I started out really liking their personalities, but now I don't really care about them. Which might explain my tone in my recent posts on this series. Please excuse me if I offend any fans. ^_^;;

Be sure to visit the other blogs I mention below, who do extensive analyses and screencaps of this series.

life line by line
memento
Momotato Daioh
Matthew's Anime Blog (archives)

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