2015-10-02
I watched Akagami no Shirayuki-hime and quite liked it
In my early views of the season I listed Akagami no Shirayuki-hime as 'not for me' after watching two episodes. Recently I decided to pick it up again, partly because this season leaves me bored during the week and partly because it kept getting praised on Twitter. I wound up quite liking it.
Part of the problem the show has is best exemplified by an Evirus tweet to me in reaction to my watching it:
@cks_anime How many kidnappings are you up to now?
If you saw only the first couple of episodes, what you'd expect from the rest of the show is the typical otome-game pattern where Shirayuki would keep getting kidnapped and then rescued by a succession of men who would wind up orbiting her and perhaps snarling at each other. This is not what happens at all. Instead the kidnappings in the first two episodes are the only instances. From episode 3 onward, Shirayuki pretty much handles her own problems. Nor is there any romantic tension; it's very clear that Shirayuki and Zen are a couple.
Shirayuki-hime is not your typical romance show, or indeed your typical show at all; I summarized it as 'charming'. Some people will dislike it, because it doesn't really have conflicts, tension, or dramatics over the romance. Basically all problems that come up are cleared away by the end of the episode (or at most the end of the next episode), and to enjoy the show you have to be able to enjoy watching Shirayuki relentlessly and charmingly clear away every obstacle in her way through optimism, hard work, and stubborn refusal to yield.
(I'm serious about that. Shirayuki bulldozes every single obstacle in her way over the course of the show, regardless of what it is. She may be very nice but absolutely no one who gets in her way has any chance of success.)
I found the whole thing just what I was in the mood for. Shirayuki and Zen both came across as far more mature and sure of themselves than the typical romance story protagonists, the romance progresses satisfactorily, and pretty much all the characters are nicely drawn (even if they're not deep or conflicted) and I enjoyed spending time with them. The show is not afraid to be a bit subtle with stuff. Mind you, there were things I didn't entirely like and I suspect that my enjoyment was increased by being able to batch-watch it.
There is going to be a second cour of Akagami no Shirayuki-hime and apparently it's going to avoid the curse of other romance shows and not introduce stupid artificial tension to prolong things. (I went on a Twitter rant about Marmalade Boy doing just that.)
I've been doing a lot of my 'blogging' on Twitter
If you follow my Twitter as well as this blog, you've probably noticed that I write a lot more commentary on Twitter these days, commentary that maybe could be blog entries. I think there's a number of reasons why I've wound up doing so much on Twitter compared to here:
- It's simpler and lower-friction. I don't have to come up with an
entry title, open up my editor, and so on; I can just Tweet. My client's
'new tweet' entry bar is right there.
- It's socially accepted to be terse, casual, unrefined and so on, because
the medium itself is short. No one really expects carefully elaborated
deep thoughts in 140 characters. Whenever I write actual blog entries
here I feel the need to carefully lay out my views in paragraphs,
elaborate on things, answer possible counter-arguments, and so on.
(And if 140 characters is too short, I can string a few Tweets together.)
- It's okay to be short (indeed, it's expected). By contrast, if
I try to write a blog entry that's only a couple of sentences long it
just seems wrong; it's too short and somehow disappointing. I have an
irrational but definite feeling that blog entries should be multi
paragraph things.
- All of this makes it faster. I'll probably spend a hundred tweets
worth of time and effort on this blog entry by the time I'm done,
and the reality of my life is that I only have so much time and
energy to write (and the lion's share of that will always go to
my techblog).
- And I have to be honest and confess to another reason: I suspect that I have a bigger audience on Twitter than I do here. At one level I don't care about how much of an audience I have; at another level I am conscious both of the reach to effort ratio and the fact that if I want to influence people, Twitter may be a better payoff.
In short, it's much easier to fit tweeting in around the edges of my life. I can throw a brief unrefined thought or reaction out there in a minute and be done, in contrast to the much more of various things that I put into entries here.
I do feel that I want to blog here more. I have ideas for entries, but I generally don't get around to actually writing them (or I write them very slowly). I don't have any answers, though. In part I'm writing this entry in the hopes that just writing it will encourage me to blog more.
(Perhaps I should start copying what I feel are noteworthy tweets from Twitter to here, such as my periodic tweeted reactions to episodes of shows (eg, also).)