Anime Thoughts: Sound of the Sky

While I have managed this year to get started on watching a pretty fair number of anime series "weekly," more or less as they air over in Japan, I suppose I'm still just as likely to not quite pick up on the "preview charts" and other early discussion and instead come to a slow awareness of a series as I overhear other people discussing it. This was a case with a short series from last year I first heard called by its Japanese name, "Sora no Woto" (although there were different ways of Romanising the hiragana characters in the title); for some reason, I was amused by the impression I was forming and summing up as "cute girl soldiers stationed at the edge of nowhere after a war in another time and place, and they look like the K-ON! characters." (I suppose I hadn't seen K-ON! either at that time, although I knew that series about "high school girls forming a rock band" was becoming very popular.) However, while the show was being officially streamed, I just couldn't seem to get around to fitting it into my viewing pattern and starting to watch it. Things just might have stayed like that had the series not been licensed for DVD release by Nozomi Entertainment, the boutique label of the online anime store Right Stuf; respecting the work they do (including releasing the Aria anime), I put in an order for what was now being sold by the translated title "Sound of the Sky," waited for it to ship, and then needed a while to get around to opening it.
( After getting around to that... )