The pronunciation is just "holic" (or "horikku", rather) in Japanese, but I've heard plenty of English fans call it "ex-ex-ex-holic"... ^^;
I really like the art style of xxxHolic, especially the color illustrations, but I agree that they seem rather distant...especially next to CLAMP's older illustrations, which are so detailed and engaging in comparison. xxxHolic feels sort of experimental and atmospheric... which is cool for illustrations (they used it to good effect in Clover) but not so cool for plot... xxxHolic meanders a lot and never quite feels like a fully developed series. It teases with little snippets of knowledge that you have to put together to figure out what's going on, but nothing ever gets revealed or resolved! That gets frustrating after a while... and with CLAMP's habit of not finishing series, who knows if we'll ever see a real ending.
I love the bickering relationship between Doumeki and Watanuki, though - it's basically recycling characters from a previous CLAMP manga, Legal Drug, but I don't mind so much because they're cute~ Himawari gets on my nerves even after her "secret" is revealed. She's a very shallow character... she's always buying gifts while Watanuki makes things from scratch, and he's too dumb to realise that she's not that nice of a girl...
Yeah, Maru and Moro (both girls, btw) are just soulless parts of the shop, so they can't leave. Annoying, but I rather like them anyway~
The little nods to Tsubasa and other CLAMP series are especially annoying because I (and a lot of other fans) feel that CLAMP has grown lazy by resting on all of their past successes... now all they have to do to have a guaranteed hit is throw together the good parts of all of their old stuff and give the characters new names (if they bother to do even that much). When they have to explicitly reference the past series that they're copying from anyway, it draws attention to the decline.
Not that xxxHolic is a bad series, though. I really do like it, but I wish it would just be a straightforward Japanese supernatural mystery story with a slashy touch to (one of my personal favorite subgenres~) instead of stretching itself thin by trying to cover too much.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2007-06-11 07:47 am (UTC)I really like the art style of xxxHolic, especially the color illustrations, but I agree that they seem rather distant...especially next to CLAMP's older illustrations, which are so detailed and engaging in comparison. xxxHolic feels sort of experimental and atmospheric... which is cool for illustrations (they used it to good effect in Clover) but not so cool for plot... xxxHolic meanders a lot and never quite feels like a fully developed series. It teases with little snippets of knowledge that you have to put together to figure out what's going on, but nothing ever gets revealed or resolved! That gets frustrating after a while... and with CLAMP's habit of not finishing series, who knows if we'll ever see a real ending.
I love the bickering relationship between Doumeki and Watanuki, though - it's basically recycling characters from a previous CLAMP manga, Legal Drug, but I don't mind so much because they're cute~ Himawari gets on my nerves even after her "secret" is revealed. She's a very shallow character... she's always buying gifts while Watanuki makes things from scratch, and he's too dumb to realise that she's not that nice of a girl...
Yeah, Maru and Moro (both girls, btw) are just soulless parts of the shop, so they can't leave. Annoying, but I rather like them anyway~
The little nods to Tsubasa and other CLAMP series are especially annoying because I (and a lot of other fans) feel that CLAMP has grown lazy by resting on all of their past successes... now all they have to do to have a guaranteed hit is throw together the good parts of all of their old stuff and give the characters new names (if they bother to do even that much). When they have to explicitly reference the past series that they're copying from anyway, it draws attention to the decline.
Not that xxxHolic is a bad series, though. I really do like it, but I wish it would just be a straightforward Japanese supernatural mystery story with a slashy touch to (one of my personal favorite subgenres~) instead of stretching itself thin by trying to cover too much.