Roving Thoughts archives

Understanding Bakemonogatari

Here is something that I did not see and understand until the last (aired) episode of Bakemonogatari smacked me in the nose with it: Bakemonogatari is really a love story. A romance, like Toradora.

And like Toradora, I think that it is a good one. It does not have a love triangle, because that's not the kind of story it is telling; it is more telling the story of how two peculiar people come to fit together and to more or less understand each other.

I don't want to say that the supernatural elements of Bakemonogatari are just trappings, because they're a lot more than that, but ultimately they're the means to an end and not an end to themselves. Right from the beginning, the important things that wind up happening are all about the characters, not about the monsters.

Sidebar: on Bakemonogatari's art style

Bakemonogatari has a somewhat peculiar and often minimalistic animation style ('cheap' is the uncharitable label). While I didn't mind it, I can understand why other people dislike it and feel that the studio was being lazy. However, it strikes me that an advantage of the art style is that it leaves you without distractions for the dialog, which is important as Bakemonogatari often has very dense dialog that you really want to pay attention to.

Quick things about Kampfer 07

(Warning: mild spoilers.)

From Author:

Why did Kaede (Sakura) lose consciousness?

I concur that we don't have enough information. However, there seems to be a striking pattern that Kaede drops out of the action just when her nose would otherwise be rubbed in the existence of Kampfers, and I doubt that this is a coincidence.

I continue to think that Akane was not shooting seriously for whatever reason. Otherwise, she is an embarrassingly bad shot; has she hit anything meaningful?

(Since Kampfer seems to be mostly a comedy anime, we could be overthinking all of this. Convenience coincidences and comically bad shots are a stock in trade of ordinary comedy.)

From another Author entry and what it points to:

Natsuru has not yet taken showers/baths as a girl. And this is supposed to be a real full-blooded hetero adolescent?? What gives??

He wasn't able to keep the transformation or transform at will previously, so showering was out of question.

Natsuru seems to have gotten much better at transformations as of the start of episode 7; it looks like he can transform at will and hold the transformation at will, but he actually needs to be able to muster the will (which was his problem at night).

My take on his lack of showering et al is two-fold. Minorly, it's likely to be hard on his will. Majorly, it's not as if Natsuru is on his own, and we know that his entrails animal likes both making sarcastic comments and cheering Natsuru's development on, and imagine the potential for either or both if Natsuru deliberately goes off to shower as a girl on his own, no matter what actually happens or doesn't happen. There is much less utter embarrassment in avoiding the whole situation.

(We, and Natsuru, have no idea if entrails animals are aware of it when their person transforms.)

(On a side note, I'm (still) working on getting my followup to Author's reaction to my last entry on Kampfer to say what I want it to say. This writing clearly stuff is harder than it looks. I'm aware that this is somewhat against the spirit of quick reactions and rapidly jotted notes.)