Roving Thoughts archives

Bokeh in anime: selective focus, blur, and the anicamera

SeHNNG recently wrote about the anicamera, the imaginary camera that 'films' anime. As it happens I have an interest in this area, so today's topic is the interesting issue of out of focus blur in anime.

(Well, interesting to me, partly because I'm an amateur photographer.)

Most anime scenes have everything in focus (what photographers would call infinite depth of field). This is the natural look of painted and drawn art and what we think of as the conventional way things are, but it's not entirely realistic; real cameras and lenses can at best fake it, and film usually doesn't have everything in focus this way even if we don't consciously notice when we're watching. However, every so often anime likes using selective focus with areas deliberately out of focus, sometimes together with shifting the focus from one person in the scene to another to draw your attention along with it. In this as in much else anime is consciously emulating film cinematography, which uses selective focus and focus changes for very similar reasons.

Back in the days of physical cels, my understanding is that this selective focus was achieved when the cels were filmed. Instead of stacking all of the cel elements that made up a shot right on top of each other, you'd add some sort of spacers to separate some cels from the others and then focus the camera on the particular cel you wanted in focus; the cel to cel distance was enough to throw the others at least somewhat out of focus. In the new modern world of digital animation with no actual camera creating the final shot, selective focus is presumably created by selective deliberate blurring of appropriate digital layers in the image as it's composited together.

This is where we get to talk about photography (and cinematography) with physical lenses. One of the things that (some) photographers care about is bokeh, the characteristics of the out-of-focus blurred area of a picture. Different lenses can give you quite different bokeh; some are considered good and smooth, others bad and harsh. Back in the days of physical cels, the blur you got in a selective focus scene was determined by the lens used in your rostrum camera; you got whatever blur the lens gave you and that was that. But in the new world of digital animation, the blur you get is created by software. And software can do whatever you want.

Which brings us to the interesting bit. Now that the anicamera is fully virtual and all software, someone has to actively decide what the out-of-focus blur will look like. The bokeh of a selective focus anime scene is now entirely up to the people creating or using the software. So I wind up wondering things like whether some directors deliberately try to make the blur look natural (or to emulate a specific camera lens or look), if people painstakingly emulate the specific out of focus look of traditional cel animation rostrum cameras, or if the programmers just do a simple generic image blur and call it a day.

So far I don't think I've seen any anime that's deliberately done a high-bokeh scene, one where almost everything is thrown out of focus (the current common cliche for still portraits and certain sorts of lazy artsy photographs, and sometimes seen in films shot with DSLRs). It may come someday, though, especially if this look enjoys a burst of popularity in film cinematography.

(I suspect but don't know for sure that physical cels couldn't do this sort of drastic out-of-focus areas. Software almost certainly can if someone wants to create it, especially if the scene is being partly created in 3D and then flattened during compositing.)

My view of the chronological order of Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita episodes

(There are some semi-spoilers for Jinrui here, but this is deliberately mostly opaque if you haven't actually seen the show.)

I'll put my conclusion first and then write on about my justifications later. Based in large part on Vance's comment at A&V, my assumed chronological order of episodes is: the school portion of 11-12, 10, the epilogue of 12, 7-8, 5-6, 1-2, 9, and ending with 3-4.

There is a clear ordering of some episodes: the school portion of 11-12, 10, 7-8, and then all episodes with the Assistant (1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 9) in some order. It's strongly implied that 1-2 follows shortly after 5-6, since Watashi's hair is cut at the end of 6 and episode 1 is the only other episode where she has short hair (and she returns to long hair before the end of the episode).

(Although I think the ordering is sensible, I don't think the show supports Vance's logic about the relative positions of 9 and 5-6. In 6, Watashi is rationally afraid because she's around a bunch of angry people who are upset over what she's deliberately done; in 9, her screwup is mostly accidental and pretty much private.)

The position of the non-flashback epilogue of 12 is not clear to me. It has to go after 10 (since Watashi has fairies) and before 3 (since the epilogue is the first time since school that Y and Watashi have seen each other). I think it can't happen shortly before 3 since the dialog between Y and Watashi in 3 implies that it's been a while since they saw each other. Based mostly on Watashi's relative equanimity in 7-8 onwards, I prefer to put it between 10 and 7-8.

It makes both internal and thematic sense for 3-4 to be the chronologically last episodes. In internal logic, 3-4 is where Watashi is the most hands-off and concerned about the fairies and their enthusiasms (an attitude that makes sense for her to have after 9). It's also where the faeries are the most overtly weird and ostentatiously magical in what they do. And, as Vance mentions, it's set in winter or very early spring, unlike all of the other episodes. Thematically, 3-4 can be read as a meta-commentary on the show itself and episode 4 climaxes with the characters' (manga) series being canceled, the characters waking from a dream, and so on. Applications to the end of the anime series itself are obvious.

(Read this way, many of the lines at the tail end of 4 can be given double meanings. Consider Watashi's line that the fairies' mangas are too hard, for example, given that Jinrui itself requires work to understand at more than a superficial level.)

I have no idea what chronological order the original light novels are in and I'm not sure it matters. I'm inclined to consider the anime a separate creation from the LNs instead of an attempt to adopt them literally. (The things I see in the anime may be there in the LNs too, but I'm not assuming that. Jinrui feels like something where the anime may have gone in its own direction.)

A theory of decline

One of the periodically recurring tropes in anime is humanity being in decline; not through a loud apocalypse or for any visible reason, but people are just quietly diminishing. This season's Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita puts this in the series premise (the title of the show means 'Humanity Has Declined') but there are plenty of others, such as Sora no Woto and the classic Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. In the version of the trope that I'm thinking of, the cause of the decline is never stated (and the decline itself is often just a background detail, not the main focus of the show). One of the things that this generates is a lot of speculation about why humanity is in decline in any particular show. What catastrophe do the creators imagine having hit us?

As it happens, I have a theory on this. Japanese creators are almost uniquely placed to vividly feel one particular quiet catastrophe in real life: a low birth rate. The Japanese total fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world, well under the replacement rate necessary to just hold the population level constant (see eg Wikipedia). The effects of this decline are apparently visible all over Japan, especially in less attractive areas with lower populations. The whole issue is considered a serious problem (especially when combined with an aging population), with various government attempts to encourage children, discussion in the press, and so on. Extrapolating Japan's very real issue with a low birth rate into a future setting is a natural thing to do.

(As you'd expect, I believe that one of the most visible signs is fewer and fewer schools with fewer and fewer pupils. This has cropped up as a plot point in contemporary shows; for example, I remember the climax of the GTO live action series taking place at a now-shut-down rural school that one of the characters had attended.)

A really low birth rate is a great fit for the typical anime decline of humanity. It's slow but devastating, it's quiet, and there's nothing really to fight or to make a fuss about. There's no singular event that's causing the problem, just a whole collection of small individual decisions. Life goes on, the world shrinks (because there are fewer and fewer people in it), and so on.

(And with fewer people in the world you start to progressively lose technology that you no longer have the manpower to run the infrastructure for. It takes a lot of people all through a supply chain to run a modern chip fab, for example, especially once you include things like the transportation infrastructure, the water supply, and so on.)

Reassessing the Summer 2012 season midway through

I feel like writing something here and while I have any number of entry ideas circling through my head I can't manage to get enough spare time, energy, and enthusiasm to write them. A midseason review of Summer 2012, however, I can bang together pretty easily so you get it.

(The short summary is that I have added two new shows, Joshiraku and Nobuna, and effectively dropped two of my initial ones, one because it's bad and one because it's not good enough.)

Hits:

• Moyashimon Returns: I would like more microbes and fermentation than it is currently providing, but this is doing a reasonable job of delivering the fun of the first season.

• Dog Days': This continues not going anywhere. I'm a bit sad but I'm still watching it for the same reason Author is; it's something I can watch without having to invest too much in it. I can just sit back and quietly enjoy it.

  (Dog Days' is ideal for this because I know there it's extremely unlikely for there to be any significant sudden angst, dark drama, or whatever. It'll probably keep on being cheerful light action all the way through, maybe with a little tinge of more serious stuff towards the end.)

• Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita: I sometimes feel like Jinrui is beating me over the head, but when it's on it's often really on and it's on fairly often. I continue to really like how the show is willing to be quiet when it's clever (instead of the all too common habit of making something obvious just to make sure that you get it).

  Jinrui has had all of the best awesome moments of any show this season so far.

  It's quite possible (and even likely) that Jinrui is my kind of show but not yours, much like UN-GO.

• Sword Art Online: This was always nice looking but has now shaped up to be a competently executed and reasonably engaging show. It's not really going anywhere right now but I'm willing to give it a pass while it explores the scenery.

  (I believe SAO is currently adopting side stories from the light novels; if so, it shows.)

  SAO has so far avoided beating us over the head with character death and the whole 'stuck in a game' situation while also not ignoring the issue, which is more than I expected. The various character reactions to the situation seem reasonably realistic.

• Oda Nobuna no Yabou: This was a late fill-in, but so far it's been pretty entertaining in a straightforward way and the protagonist amuses me. It's good that the show isn't really taking itself too seriously. It's not flawless; in particular it's doing the common anime thing of not letting the nominally competent and dangerous female character actually do much more than acting semi-tsundere while the male protagonist gets to magically solve all (or at least most) of the problems.

  (I was persuaded to give Nobuna a try due to various chatter in my section of the Twitter-sphere, possibly especially including Jinx's work.)

• Joshiraku: This is entertaining and amusing. I wish I found it more consistently funny, because then it would be a must-watch instead of something that I'm working through slowly.

  (I know I'm not getting all of the jokes here, even with explanations from the translators, but I find even the jokes that I don't get to be interesting for reasons that don't fit in this margin.)

Entertaining but still hovering on the edge:

• Campione: Some bits of this are tiresomely ordinary but it continues to be decently executed and thus decently watchable. I'm enjoying it partly for Erica Blandelli, who is a character type that we don't get to see very often.

• Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon II: This continues to deliver a good amount of crazy wackiness and decent action, which is what keeps it watchable for me. The ninja is my current favorite character.

  (As far as I'm concerned, the less Toori and Horizon talk the better.)

• Hagure Yuusha no Estetica: The more I actually think about this show the more I feel conflicted and a bit disturbed. On the one hand the action and plot are decent. On the other hand it spends a lot of its time on serious (and sometimes extreme) fanservice and the male protagonist's behavior is objectively decidedly skeevy. If I tune out the fanservice (which is my usual reflex) and don't think too much about the protagonist's behavior it's an enjoyable show, but I'm not sure I should be doing that.

  (Writing this entry may have persuaded me to more or less put it on suspension. I'll see. Certainly I have enough to watch this season without watching any more of it, and it's not so interesting that I'll miss it if I don't watch any more.)

Now declared as misses:

• Muv-Luv Alternative - Total Eclipse (#4): I watched about three episodes too many of this; in the future I hope that I'm smart enough to drop shows that waste my time for the first two episodes. There's just nothing interesting in this show for me and plenty that's boring, irritating, or cliched (or all of the above).

  (Everything I've read about subsequent episodes has confirmed my decision to drop it.)

• Rinne no Lagrange season 2 (#2): There's nothing wrong with it but it's apparently not interesting enough to make me sufficiently enthused to watch more.

In ongoing shows, Eureka Seven AO continues to rock while honesty compels me to admit that I haven't watched Accel World for several weeks; it's possible that the charm has worn off and I've gotten bored without realizing it.

(On the other hand, writing this may cause me to start with AW again.)

The problem with Dog Days' second season

I tweeted:

The problem with this season of Dog Days is that we're just hanging around; unlike the first season, we're not going anywhere.

I feel like expanding on this a bit more than fits in 140 characters.

Right from the start of the first season there were things actively happening and the characters had a problem to deal with. The major reason (or at least excuse) that Princess Millefiori had for summoning Cinque at the start of the show was that Biscotti was in a big pinch, with Galette and Leonmichelle relentlessly attacking, winning, and taking more and more territory. By the time this was fully dealt with, the problem shifted to returning Cinque back home. Certainly things were light-hearted, but the characters were always working on and towards something; I always had the sense that things were going somewhere.

There is nothing like this in Dog Days' so far. This season we've been doing nothing more than hanging around with the characters and taking in the spectacle; what was in service to something in the first season is simply empty this time around. This is enjoyable and amusing (Dog Days' is competent and even well done) but it doesn't really feel like the show is necessary.

(You can argue that the show needs quiet in order to set up the characters and get us immersed in them. My reply is that the first season managed to do this just fine without having to stop and wander off sideways.)

Even if the second season starts going somewhere soon, it will have wasted at least a quarter of its run on fluff (I'm being charitable and spotting it a couple of establishing episodes). If the second season doesn't go anywhere, well, I'm going to wind up kind of wishing that they hadn't bothered to make it.

(But I'm sure the Blu-rays and DVDs will sell well to the fans who wanted to see more of their favorite characters.)

Looking back at the Spring 2012 anime season

As before, now that the Spring 2012 season is over it's once again time for me to take honest look back to go with my early impressions. This is an especially relevant exercise to me this time around due to the strength of the spring season.

Shows that I actively watched (and finished where applicable):

• Eureka Seven AO: This is the real surprise of the season for me. The show's excellent execution has compulsively pulled me along and turned it into my highest priority show to watch.

  (With recent plot developments I find myself really regretting that I never got around to watching the original Eureka Seven; I suspect that I'm about to absorb a certain amount of spoilers for it and miss a certain amount of stuff.)

• Lupin III - The Woman Called Mine Fujiko: I predict that this show is going to be polarizing people for years. It had highs and lows and I'll agree that it didn't succeed with everything it tried, but it's still stunning and powerful; its high points were excellent and it hit them quite frequently. Even most of its low points were still quite enjoyable for me. I had no problem with the ending and actually quite liked it; in many ways it's the only answer the show could possibly have given to the question of 'who is Mine Fujiko?'.

  To be clear, I consider this show a significant success overall. Although it was sometimes not as easily entertaining than other shows and it has rough spots, I currently consider it the best show I watched this season.

  (I'm being cautious here because this is the sort of show where my initial feelings sometimes change later, once I have some distance from it. If I don't wind up reconsidering things with more time it'll easily be one of my best N shows of 2012.)

• Moretsu Pirates: I basically wrote my summary of this for my Winter 2012 retrospective. I will echo a whole lot of other people and say that this is a lightweight SF adventure story. In the end I think it's overly lightweight and thus flawed.

  (I don't think that things need to be grimdark, but ultimately the show never convinced me that Marika was really working for her victories. In the larger picture everything fell into place too easily, although the show managed to make the individual moments dramatic. This really undercut the seriousness of nominally serious situations.)

• Accel World: I'm continuing to enjoy this as what it is, which is a well executed shonen fighting show. I don't think it's a great show (and it's clearly not to everyone's taste) but I'm consistently liking it.

  (I'll admit that I periodically don't watch it for a couple of weeks and then watch several episodes in a burst.)

• Fate/Zero: This is technically well executed and fills in the background for Fate/Stay Night but in the end it mostly left me cold. A large part of it is that I wasn't interested in the characters. Another part is the erratic pacing, which didn't improve from the problems of the first season.

  But when Fate/Zero was pretty it was very pretty. Some of the fights were spectacular.

  (The best bits of Fate/Zero were Waver's bits. If FZ had been from Waver's perspective and been focused on his maturation, it would be a much more interesting show. Of course then a lot of Fate fans would have hated it.)

• Haiyore! Nyaruko-san: As I should have expected, this turned into a reasonably funny but ultimately ordinary magical girlfriend comedy; the periodic horrifying bits of the first episode that gave it a sharp edge disappeared almost immediately. Inertia caused me to watch it all the way through.

Shows I still intend to watch more of:

• Hyouka (#6): It's beautiful and well done but somehow I haven't had the energy to actually watch it except very occasionally. I really do like it when I do watch it, though.

  (The nasty thing to say about the show is that it's a beautiful shell wrapped around an empty void. I'm not convinced that this view is wrong.)

• Aquarion EVOL (#17): as I mentioned in my Winter 2012 retrospective, no sooner had I written about why I was still watching it than I stalled out for vague reasons, partly because it was getting plot in the good craziness.

• Tsuritama (#2): I don't have any reason for having stalled on this; I just did. I want to watch the next episode, just not enough to actually get around to it. It's been praised enough that I do want to continue with it, which may be foolish.

  (I might be better off being honest with myself when I don't find a much-praised show that I was initially very enthused about compelling enough to actually watch more of.)

• Sankarea (#4): The show is pretty and decent and does interesting things and all of that good stuff, but somehow I don't find it compelling. Maybe this means I should formally abandon it, but the commentary about it I've seen in the ani-sphere keeps making it seem attractive.

  (I stalled out after episode #4 in large part because the ending of the episode left me expecting that the next episode would take a particular boring plot turn, one that I wasn't looking forward to sitting through. It turns out that this is not the case.)

With a relatively busy summer season starting up, watching more of these shows may turn out to be more of an aspiration than an actual plan. Especially since two of these shows that I'm actively watching are continuing in the summer season.

In theory, may watch more of someday:

• Tasogare Otome x Amnesia (#3): There's nothing wrong with this and a decent amount that's nice, but there wasn't enough in the first three episodes to really hook me. I've already seen plenty of magical girlfriend shows.

Abandoned or dropped:

• Sakamichi no Apollon (#2): I could flail around and blather about this, but the truth is that it failed to hold my interest enough to get me to watch the third episode. Based on my exposure to bits of commentary about the path the show took, I tacitly decided to abandon it; I'm just not that attracted to an adolescent drama, even one with jazz and good directing.

  I sometimes find myself regretting this. I know it has great moments that I'd enjoy (I've actually recently seen some in Youtube clips that people have shared); the problem is getting to them.

• Jormungand (#3): The show committed the cardinal sin of spending a large amount of episode 3 on a boring, stupid action sequence involving some new characters mostly made from cardboard. The combination is deadly, especially when the preview for episode four promised more of the same.

  (I was quite disappointed by this development.)

• Kore wa Zombie Desu? of the Dead (#2): In the end I thought that this continuation was okay and decently entertaining but not necessary. The first season said enough and I had other things to watch and do this time around.

• Zetman (#2): Bleah. After two episodes, something about this had thoroughly rubbed me the wrong way. I didn't just find it boringly generic, I actively disliked it and didn't want to watch more.

I'm certain that someone, somewhere, has put forward the aphorism that in practice your priorities are shown not by what you say they are but what you actually do. This season made a nice illustration of that, as what shows (and how many of them) I wound up watching were (shall we say) somewhat different than what I put forward in my initial brief views. Particularly striking is that basically all of the 'artistic' shows I thought I was going to follow got stalled or dropped; what I actually watched was almost all action shows. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I'd certainly like to think that I'm the kind of anime watcher who enjoys things other than (often brainless) action shows, but the evidence on that is a bit scanty right now.

(The counter argument is that it's not as if I didn't try out other shows at all. Forcing myself to watch shows that I don't genuinely like and feel enthused about is just stupid, even if they're objectively good or theoretically broadening my horizons. Still, people like Author keep making things like AKB0048 and Tari Tari sound attractive.)

I'm not sure how to score this past season with my standard metric, partly because I avoided trying to figure out what shows I was likely to actively follow in my early impressions (if I had any private ideas about that at the time, I've since forgotten them since I didn't write them down). I kind of consider several abandoned or stalled shows to be failures but that's partly because they're shows that everyone says are pretty good.

Brief early impressions of the anime of the Summer 2012 season

As before, here are my impressions of another season's first few episodes, or at least of the shows that I have bothered to watch. This time around I'm using a different format, partly because I hope to be much harsher about what I will continue watching.

(The order within each section is roughly how good or interesting I think each show is.)

Hits:

• Moyashimon Returns: I really liked the original Moyashimon and I'm glad to see that this continues the wackiness of before, educational interludes and all. You probably want to watch the first series before trying this one out because it pretty much starts in the middle without bothering to explain very much.

• Dog Days': I liked the first series, as lightweight as it was, because it was genuinely cheerful and fun. The second series is delivering more of the same (so far, but I have no reason to think that will change).

Hits that could easily fumble things in future episodes:

• Hagure Yuusha no Estetica: I'm with SDB here; the first episode is a refreshingly different take on the whole collective of usual light novel cliches. I like that the protagonist is competent, confident, and has things together; you might even call him sort of grown up. On the other hand the setting and basic premise mean that the show could easily go downhill from here.

• Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita (aka Humanity has Declined): I'll be honest; I didn't find the first two episodes of this as darkly humorous or as funny as the rest of the ani-sphere seems to have. What has hooked me for now is a moment that was the punchline and logical consequence of a series of things that we were shown through the first two episodes. I can't help but feel affection for a show that's willing to be that clever, subtle, and patient.

  (Despite that I'm not so taken with Jinrui that I'm willing to elevate it to a hit just yet.)

• Campione: based on the near universal thumbs down of this that I saw in my slice of the anime twitter-sphere and blog-o-sphere, I was expecting something terrible or at least utterly boring. Well, that's not what I got. This may be a collection of light novel cliches but it's a well assembled one; I was entertained throughout the entire first episode. With that said, the first episode was all background and who knows what happens next.

  I expect to keep watching this as long as it avoids falling into boring cliches and then drop it like a hot potato. My cynical side gives that an episode or two.

  (Having watched (part of) both Hidan no Aria and Dragon Crisis, among other bleah-inducing light novel adoptions, I feel qualified to say that Campione's first episode is no Dragon Crisis (much less HnA) and that I am not entertained by everything. Execution matters.)

Need to see more of before I can say one way or another:

• Sword Art Online: Time for me to be contrarian. The first episode of SAO was workmanlike and pretty but also disappointing; it was a barely disguised massive info-dump to set up the background to the actual show, which might perhaps start next episode. We haven't even seen one of the major characters yet and the characters that we have seen are mostly ciphers so far. Since lots of people praise this, I'm willing to give it another episode to see if the actual story is engaging.

  (The difference between SAO's first episode and Campione's first episode is that the latter managed to say a lot about the characters and the former basically didn't.)

  Beyond that, I have no idea if I'll be able to tolerate the premise or if it will turn out to be too close to what I've called the 'trapped protagonist' genre. If the show plays up the angst of the protagonists seeing people die around them or similar things, I'm out.

  (I've read some people praising SAO as compared to Accel World because the stakes are higher in SAO than in AW (where the characters aren't risking anything except the ability to keep playing a game). I, uh, disagree with this view, to put it one way. Shows are not necessarily improved by the grim prospect of death.)

The core difference between SAO, Campione, and Estetica is that the latter two had first episodes that were engaging but potentially highly atypical while the former had an unengaging first episode but I'm willing to give it another episode to see if it gets better.

• Muv-Luv Alternative - Total Eclipse: To be blunt, the first two episodes were a waste of time (and the second episode was an exercise in brutality). The first episode almost put me to sleep with a barrage of stuff about characters I could barely be bothered to tell apart, as well as a moment that had me yelling at the screen. The second episode then bloodily slaughtered everyone except the show's protagonist just to make sure we got the point that this war was horrible and dangerous and that the alien menace was thoroughly unpleasant. Apparently the real story starts in the third episode and people say it is much better, honest. I suppose I'll watch the next episode to see, since I've already invested the time to watch the first two. (This is the fallacy of sunk costs in action.)

  (I'm going into TE basically cold. I understand that it's at the tail end of a series of spinoffs of spinoffs of spinoffs or something, but I don't know or care about any of the details and I expect the show to stand on its own.)

On the edge:

• Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon II: The first episode delivered crazy action but I remember what happened after the first episode of the first season (and it did not involve more crazy action). Still it looks like there's probably going to be at least one more episode of fighting and Horizon is good at making that interesting.

  With my new found determination to drop things rapidly instead of sticking grimly to them, I think I'm going to watch this until people start standing around and talking to much and then immediately drop it.

• Rinne no Lagrange season 2: The first season was kind of like a lightweight, inoffensive version of an action show, and the first episode of this season is much the same. I feel conflicted because once again this is just good enough to be casually enjoyable and entertaining while I'm actually watching an episode.

  If I was smart, I would probably drop this now and use my time for something more productive. I'm probably not that smart (and watching this is pretty certain to be brainless, which is sometimes useful).

Misses:

• Arcana Famiglia: I would really like to like this show because the premise of a strong female character kicking ass and taking charge of her own life is rare and attractive. Unfortunately the execution of the first episode was basically a paint by numbers exercise that left me disinterested in all of the characters, the heroine included. I have no enthusiasm for seeing more, especially since descriptions of the second episode do not exactly make it sound thrilling (or even vaguely exciting).

I haven't watched anything else from this season yet and at the moment I'm not planning to; none of the remaining shows sound interesting enough to draw my attention (at least not now that I'm trying to be pickier than I have been in the past). As always, this could change if Twitter and blogs manage to make something sound sufficiently attractive.

(Sometimes that even works out and I wind up watching a good show.)

My problem with Fate/Zero: the characters

One of the reasons that I wound up watching Fate/Zero only sporadically and without any particularly burning enthusiasm is that I found basically all of the characters to be, in Author's phrasing, jerkfaces. Out of the entire collection of Masters and Servants and secondary characters, the only one I actually found likable was Waver (and even then he's only truly likable after he's matured). Even the much-admired Iskandar is not all that nice when you get down to it, for all that he serves as a good father figure for Waver.

(The closest any Servant comes to being likable are Saber and Lancer but they're both what I'll call 'Heroic Stupid', each blindly heroic in their own different ways. They're both capable of doing cool things but that doesn't mean that I find them sympathetic.)

There are two areas of special failure that I want to single out. The first is that Fate/Zero reduces a number of characters to cartoon villainy or close to it, most noticeably Ryuunosuke and Caster but also people like Kayneth to a lesser extent. This is lazy storytelling and pretty much made these characters boring, which was not helped by the story's ham-handed attempts to make them vaguely sympathetic (often at literally the last moment).

(It's possible to make totally evil characters still be interesting, but it takes being clever instead of just kicking dogs. Caster pretty much just kicked dogs, metaphorically speaking.)

The second is Kiritsugu. The story's attempt to make him sympathetic by giving him a tortured background simply persuaded me that he had been damaged from the start. I felt that his actions and reactions were too unrealistic for anything approaching a normal child and the story didn't convince me that he'd been broken by excessive stress; instead I wound up feeling that Kiritsugu was a natural killer who had latched on to the idea of 'justice' as a substitute for any innate sense of morality.

(In the Fate-verse, this struck me as completely unsurprising for a mage and the child of a mage. Let's face it, a lot of mages in the Fate series are badly morally damaged; just look at Tokiomi's actions with Sakura for one example.)

(I was prodded to write this entry by Schneider's entry (via Author). I entirely agree with him on the Fate/Stay Night characters versus the FZ ones; the cast in F/SN is much more likable and interesting to me and as a result I found F/SN much more engaging than I did F/Z.)

Sidebar: On Iskandar

My view of Iskandar is kind of tangled. On the one hand, he spends a lot of time in the show being a likable guy and a good person for Waver to be around. On the other hand, I can't watch those segments without remembering what Iskandar ultimately believes in and that at the core he is not a good person (no matter how nicely he may act); instead, he is the King of Conquerors, larger than life in vices as well as virtues. I can't listen to even his early enthusiasm for taking over this new world he finds himself in without thinking about what his words imply.

(We may laugh at his ambition, but Iskandar is serious. He would throw the world into fire and sword simply because he wants it. I can't forget this even when he's personally nice to people.)

Looking back at the Winter 2012 anime season

This is what you could call 'extensively delayed'. Since the Winter 2012 season is well over by now, it's more than past time for another one of my retrospectives to go with my early impressions and my followup on what I was probably going to actually watch.

(If I was clever I'd claim that I'm doing this so late in order to wait for Moretsu Pirates to finish so I could have a proper view on it, but the truth is that I just sat on this for various reasons.)

The short summary is that I finished everything that I thought I was actually going to. That would be:

• Moretsu Pirates: This wound up never being deep but generally managed to be entertaining. The details were best not thought about too deeply, because it turned out that the show's attitude towards zero-g was typical of its attitudes towards almost everything. Still, it was a fun ride and the kind of light entertainment that we don't often see these days.

  (I sympathize with Author, but I've long ago managed to gain the ability to turn off my brain when watching a lot of anime.)

  My concise summary is that Pirates turned out to be entertaining but not serious, nowhere near up to the overall level of Sato's various famous series (which managed to be both entertaining and substantive). I don't know if this is the fault of the source material, the adaptation process, or both. If you want more depth on this view, see Jonathan Tappan (via Author).

• Nisemonogatari: I didn't like this as much as Bakemonogatari (and there were parts of it that made me twitch), but on the whole I enjoyed it. At this distance I find I don't have anything substantive to say about it. It delivers the *monogatari experience, which is either good or bad depending on your views of that experience.

  (The twitch inducing stuff in Nisemonogatari is a sufficiently complex subject that it does not fit in the margins of this entry.)

• Ano Natsu de Matteru: I enjoyed it and have already written enough words about it.

• Rinne no Lagrange: This is not finished as such, since we've only seen the first half so far; the second half is coming up in the summer season. While I enjoyed the first half I'm not quite sure I enjoyed it enough to actively watch the second half. Overall I would say that its flaw is being a bit lightweight without the characters, setting, and situation being sufficiently intrinsically interesting to offset this.

• Inu x Boku SS: This was charming and generally made me smile, and had the grace to end at a good spot (the manga series is ongoing). It delivered more or less what I was expecting, with somewhat less supernatural stuff than I was hoping for.

  (My attitudes on the anime are tangled because I read ahead in the manga, so now I find it hard to cleanly evaluate either. I will say that the anime was well enough done that I found myself enjoying watching stuff that I'd already read.)

Theoretically going to finish real soon now:

• Aquarion EVOL: I wrote something about why I was still watching EVOL and then kind of stalled out on it when it appeared to be starting to mix plot into its crazy hijinks (plot is not what I was watching EVOL for). Still, what I've read says that it finished quite well and certainly I watched it all through the actual Winter 2012 season.

I managed to not watch any more of Shana III, although I may change that someday. I also didn't watch any more of Senki Zesshou Symphogear (in fact I think I stopped immediately after writing that it was teetering on the edge back in this).

As a general comment: giving up on watching shows partway through instead of grimly sticking to them out of a misplaced, neurotic sense of completeness turned out to be a remarkably liberating thing and feels quite good. I don't regret anything in Winter 2012 that I stopped following, even if (as in the case of Shana III) they may ultimately turn out to be kind of good. I really should have started doing this long ago and I hope to do more of it in the future.

(Well, okay, I already have with the Spring 2012 season, but that calls for another entry.)

(As before, my reasons for wanting to do this retrospective are more or less covered here.)

Waver's moral development over the course of Fate/Zero

Here's a little theory of mine.

(Spoilers for a bit of the last episode of Fate/Zero.)

In the epilogue of Fate/Zero, there's a telling little scene with Waver that I feel shows his moral development over the course of the series. Over supper with his host family the Mackenzies, he tells them that he's decided to start traveling and he's going to be taking a part time job to raise money for this, so can he stay at their place for somewhat longer?

There's two interesting things about this. The obvious thing is that he bothers to ask them them instead of coercing them with magic, as he did earlier in the series. However you can argue that he has no choice here because Glen Mackenzie already saw through his earlier magical coercion, but I still think that this shows a shift in his attitude towards his host family.

More interesting and less obvious is that Waver is bothering to get a part time job at all. All through the previous parts of Fate/Zero, Waver never showed any signs of worrying about money; if anything, he and Iskandar seemed to spend it freely and casually. My assumption is that Waver was using magic to deal with the problem, either to get money or to coerce people into believing that they'd been paid (probably the former since Iskandar seems to have had no problems buying things without Waver present). But now something has changed and Waver wants to get the money he needs honestly and legitimately, even if it takes more work and time.

(It seems unlikely that Iskandar was the source of Waver's money and he has no choice with Iskandar gone. We know that Iskandar was summoned in Fuyuki City, after Waver traveled all the way from England to Japan.)