Roving Thoughts archives

Why I have a very bad view of Gilgamesh

Gilgamesh (also ANN, MAL) is a 2003 anime series with a distinct and somewhat offputting art style and a bunch of reasonably interesting characters and things going on. That's about all you can read of this entry if you want to avoid spoilers, but this is one time I think that you should embrace them even if you're planning to watch the show and read on.

(If you don't know Gilgamesh and want to follow the rest of this entry I recommend reading the summaries above. Note that the Wikipedia page has full spoilers for the ending.)

I'm generally not someone who is deeply sensitive about endings. It's not that I'm indifferent to their quality, but by and large my feeling is that even a bad, disappointing, or incoherent ending merely makes the overall show unsatisfying; the good work that the show did before its ending remains even for endings that you can't just basically ignore outright. I also have no particular problems with non-ending endings (I've long since become inured to incomplete works in all mediums), although of course I prefer ones that feel complete. As a side note I find this a useful attitude to cultivate because many shows have problems with their endings.

(My standards for what makes an ending feel complete is probably different from most people's, but that's another entry.)

Gilgamesh is a very, very big exception. It has the worst ending I can remember watching, an ending that is so bad that it retroactively tainted and ruined the rest of the show for me. Even today it makes me angry (never mind what it did at the time). This is not because the ending is technically bad; it is perfectly coherent, well animated, relatively easy to follow, and so on. The problem is what the ending of the show actually is and there are two parts to that.

Throughout the run of Gilgamesh the show built up the question of why things in the Heaven's Gate facility happened as a big mystery (which always risked ordinary disappointment). The lesser problem with the ending is that the show gives this mystery the most asinine and petty explanation it could, and does so out of the blue. It turns out that all of the massively big events underlying the show happened because of (drum roll please) love and jealousy. For extra points, the character involved had no idea of this and the show doesn't give us any hints until this is sprung on us at the last moment. It is a giant 'was that it?' moment and probably the most unsatisfying explanation for a big mystery that I've ever seen a show pull.

The greater problem with the ending is that the show goes on to give us a 'rocks fall, everyone dies' ending in which the world is destroyed and the protagonists along with it. All of the protagonists' heroism to date in working against that is useless; they lose. In fact they are quite literally slaughtered, one by one, often in cruel and deliberately humiliating ways. The show is clearly not happy to just kill them, it wants them to suffer on the way down. This sort of death is an excellent way to make me hate a show.

(It is not quite carnography because the show doesn't lovingly dwell on the blood and carnage of their deaths; in fact I remember it as relatively antiseptic as far as that goes. It just wants to grind into us that the characters are totally ineffective at resisting their deaths even when, where, and how they had previously been shown as competent, and sometimes to humiliate the characters in the process.)

Oh, and all of this comes out of the blue. There are no real hints in the show about either part of the ending, nothing to prepare us for the joke of the ultimate cause and the total bleakness of the ending. My memory is that up until basically the last episode it looks like we're on track for a good ending.

This is cruel nihilism on an epic scale. I've never seen a show extend such a giant middle finger to everyone watching as Gilgamesh did and as a result the ending utterly ruins the show for me. It's impossible to think back to what happened before with any good feelings, partly because the protagonists spend all show fighting against this ending and I know that they are just going to their deaths.

(The middle finger is much worse than End of Evangelion and comes much more out of nowhere.)

Who is to blame for a badly written show that's based on a light novel?

Kyoukai no Kanata has not been a particularly well written show and it recently concluded with an ending that's fairly broadly considered unusually tacky and bad (personally I wasn't bothered too much but I had low expectations). However all of this got me thinking.

Kyoukai no Kanata is by KyoAni and we've been blaming them for its writing flaws (partly because KyoAni has done excellent work in the past), but it's based on a light novel series. It seems highly unlikely that KyoAni made up a number of the major problem elements, especially the ending of the series; that pretty much has to come straight out of the light novel. Can we really blame KyoAni for 'bad writing' when the bad writing comes straight from the original source and KyoAni's choices are to use it or to come up with anime-original material? In a real way, KyoAni's only choices were to animate Kyoukai no Kanata, terrible writing and all, or to pass on it entirely. We can blame them for choosing bad material in the first place but perhaps not for writing as such.

(This is especially so when one of the reasons that light novels, manga, and so on are used as sources for anime shows is to increase the sales of the original source. I expect that this works much better when the show sticks to the original material instead of inventing its own, and as a result the production committee is likely to be fairly against anime original material.)

But wait, there's a wrinkle here. The Kyoukai no Kanata light novels are actually published by KyoAni themselves and the anime itself may be an entirely KyoAni product without outside sponsors. At the least this gives KyoAni much more knowledge and influence over the adaptation process (although not necessarily total control, since the novel's author might still object to anime-original material) and also much more control over whether it got animated at all. Does this increase their blame for the bad writing? Should it also make us view them more cynically on the grounds that they probably animated this not because it was particularly well written but because it would sell?

(Let's skip over them publishing the light novels, because as far as I can tell almost all light novels are as bad as this one probably is.)

I don't have any particular answers here, just things I'm thinking about. Oh, and the obvious note: nothing about this means that KyoAni is excused in general for making a disappointing show with bad writing. It just changes what sort of blame I'll give them. If KyoAni didn't really write the show (or the flawed bits), the sort of blame changes to 'doing a straight adaptation of a bad work' and perhaps this is less of a failure than doing a terrible job of scriptwriting.