Roving Thoughts archives

Saying something brief about Black ★ Rock Shooter

Black ★ Rock Shooter (and that's the last time I am adding the ★ character to its title) is technically part of the winter 2012 season; it just started a month or so after everything else.

I thought that the Black Rock Shooter OVA had decently nice action but was otherwise mostly incomprehensible. The first episode of the TV series reduces the action and makes it less comprehensible (and more random) while swapping out everything else for relatively pedestrian drama (admittedly with a crazy person or two). In light of my trimming this season I've so far seen no reason to watch any more of it. If it had kept the quality of action of the OVA I would have watched it for the action alone, but it didn't.

(This is the sort of thing that almost fits in a Tweet, but not quite.)

Trimming the fat, Winter 2012 edition

Due to some things that do not fit into the margins of this blog, watching anime in general has recently stopped being as casual and enjoyable a thing as it used to be. Because of this I'm strongly considering trimming the list of shows I'm watching down to things that I seriously enjoy, as opposed to stuff that's just okay. So I've decided to make a list (or two). Because of what this is, there is a lot of picking on negative aspects of shows that have both good and bad sides.

(I have not yet decided to do this and circumstances may change. But just writing it down makes it more likely.)

Staying:

• Moretsu Pirates: I saw someone do an 'I saw/I expected/I got' picture series for this where the 'I got' was Hunt for Red October. As it happens, I like that approach.

• Nisemonogatari, despite the excessive cleverness it is starting to go places.

• Ano Natsu de Matteru, an enjoyable change of pace and it's avoiding things that make me wince. In fact, the more I see of it the better it gets.

• Rinne no Lagrange, because it's entertainingly silly so far.

• Inu x Boku SS: I'm enjoying this much more than I expected, even after I gave into temptation and read manga scanslations. In some ways, knowing what's going on and what's coming has made it more interesting, not less.

  (Apparently this is the season where I enjoy romance shows.)

This is probably still too many shows.

Kind of teetering on the edge:

• Aquarion EVOL: Redoing the original Aquarion's over the top attacks doesn't make this interesting by itself. On the other hand it is consistently crazy. On the third hand it's 26 episodes.

• Senki Zesshou Symphogear: Too cheap and too generic. The angst fails to be interesting and the doom hangs over the entire thing. On the other hand, every time I watch an episode it's just good enough to make me interested in the next one, and Evirus rates it as his top show this season (you have to follow his syndication feed to see this, the ratings aren't in his actual article except maybe by implication).

  (As I put it on Twitter, I'm not sure if Symphogear is deliberately camp or just cheaply animated.)

On the chopping block with some degree of certainty:

• High School DxD: I was ignoring the unrelenting fanservice (yes, it was hard) and watching this for the straightforward mindless shounen entertainment and to see what sort of crazy thing they'd do next. However the show just finished its first major arc, so now is a good time to stop.

  (I agree with Evirus's summary of it; he and I just disagree about the merits of its generic shounen fighting part. I'm basically uninterested in the fanservice harem comedy bits.)

• Brave 10: Too generic. Would be decent brainless watching if I was more up for anime watching in general.

• Shana III: I'm a terrible completist so I really want to see the finale of the Shana franchise, but I have to admit that I haven't really been enjoying it all that much and I'm several episodes behind already.

• Guilty Crown: fails to be sufficiently entertaining. I watched part of episode 14 and found myself more irritated with the characters and situation than anything else. There are cool bits, but the density of them isn't high enough.

  (It's probably a bad sign that it seems more interesting to read people's episode summaries than to actually watch the episodes. And reactions to recent episodes make it sound like it has gotten worse and worse.)

• Last Exile: Fam: I am just finding this too cliched and sometimes ridiculous, and Fam herself is a goof. I've already been watching it only in bursts.

I don't know if I'd have the willpower to actually drop the shows that I carried over from last season, especially Shana III. Every time I read someone saying that Shana III has done something interesting this episode, my resistance to watching it goes down a bit more.

I started writing this a few weeks ago but sat on it while I mulled things over slowly and actually started following through on some bits. On the other hand, every time I take another pass at this it seems that my opinion's changed a bit. I am sometimes an eternal optimist who finds it very hard to give up entirely on shows, even when I should.

(So it's time to just post this, not endlessly edit and re-edit it. I can always change my mind about shows later.)

Why the fleet battles in Last Exile - Fam have no drama for me

One of the things that Last Exile - Fam, The Silver Wing features relatively prominently is fleet battles with those flying battleships. Unfortunately I find them essentially completely free of drama, which robs the whole thing of a lot of the point.

The direct reason that I find them mostly free of drama is that in an earlier clash with the Silvius, it's been solidly established that the fleet gunners of the Ades Federation have all of the accuracy of Imperial Stormtroopers; despite outnumbering the Silvius many to one and having it dead to rights, they failed to score any really meaningful hits. When you know that one side can't shoot straight, it's hard to take battles involving them very seriously.

The deeper reason is what this demonstrates about the fleet battles themselves: the outcomes of the fleet battles are arbitrary. What happens in a battle and what the outcome is is based purely on what the scriptwriters need, not on any internal logic of the setting and forces involved. If Ades needs to be strong and beat people up, it will; if it needs to be weak or lose, it will. One day Ades can shoot straight and is terribly dangerous, the next day not so much. An outnumbered ship may or may not escape or may or may not be harmed, and there's nothing about the scenario that will let me predict that. Clever twists are guaranteed to materialize when necessary, generally out of nothing. Improbable events will happen as required. This arbitrary nature of outcomes and lack of logic has robbed the fleet battles of most any drama or tension for me; what happens will happen and that's just it, so there's no point in doing anything more than maybe enjoying the scenery.

(It's not quite deus ex machina outcomes, but it's close. A few times it's literally been that when Guild members show up.)

The problem of interpretation: what I indirectly learned from Alien Nine

(There are spoilers here for Alien Nine.)

Once upon a time there was an anime called Alien Nine, which was a four episode OVA series about three gradeschool girls who are 'volunteered' to be their school's alien control officers. Especially it's the story of Yuri Otani, who really hates everything involved with the job; she hates the symbiotic Borg that now lives on top of her head, she hates the dangerous alien animals that they have to fight (and ideally capture alive, and then the girls have to tend to them too), and so on. Although it looks cute and has perky songs, Alien Nine is in many ways an almost unrelentingly brutal series; for all the pastel colours, these are sixth graders being forced into significant danger and the show does not pull its punches. Yuri doesn't deal well with the situation at all while the other two girls hide their own secrets which the series peels back over time.

The series builds to a crescendo of character tension and explosions, reaching its height at the end of the fourth OVA episode. The ending of the show has one of the girls rollerskating faster and faster through the school corridors, then the show cuts to the other two girls reacting in sudden alarm; they burst outside to find the first girl's body lying on the ground. Cue the end credits. That's it, that's the end of the fourth and last episode. When you watch the anime, this is a huge 'wait, what? what just happened?' moment.

Once upon a time I read an analysis of the Alien Nine OVA which ran down all of these events and came up with a solid, convincing explanation of what was going on and what happened (I think it was this one); the short version is that the first girl snapped and ran out of reasons to live. It's frankly a great explanation and makes perfect sense all through.

There is only one problem with this beautiful interpretation of Alien Nine: it's wrong. Alien Nine was a manga before it was an OVA series, and the OVA series is very faithful to the manga. Too faithful, because the OVA series ends abruptly halfway into a manga storyline, and of course the manga storyline continues on to explain what happened to the first girl. And what's going on is nothing like what the analysis came up with from the OVAs.

Reading the analysis (even the first time around) was a very salutory bucket of cold water to me, because by the time I encountered this analysis I'd already read enough of the manga to know it was beautiful, convincing, and incorrect. I of course already knew that our interpretations of anime are filtered through our own views and we may be reading things into an anime that aren't there, but this was the first time I saw it so very vividly happen before my eyes. And it's not as if the interpretation is wrong, in a sense; everything that the person writing it saw in Alien Nine really is there, either in fact or if looked at from the right angle. It's just almost certainly not what the actual creators of the anime intended to be there.

I am far from immune to the problem of interpretation myself, and ever since then I've tried to bear this in mind. What I see in an anime may be far from what the creators put there, especially with the cultural and translation gaps. In the worst case, I may be basing my flights of fancy on a translation nuance or mistake that's not even present in the original Japanese.

(I don't know why Alien Nine was only a four episode OVA and ended in such a bad place. Possibly it was planned for more episodes but didn't sell well enough.)

Noise in space: handwaving Moretsu Pirates some

Via Author, lolikitsune tweets:

watched Mouretsu Space Pirates 3: noise in space. SEEMS LIKE THE SUCCESSOR TO STARSHIP OPERATORS IS NOT HERE YET

I like handwaving, so let me make an excuse for Pirates here. Actually, two of them. The first excuse is that a certain amount of noise might come through contact with the hull and thus with hull vibrations caused by the various machinery operating. But that's probably not good enough.

The second excuse is that everyone was in what we're told are very automated spacesuits, in an environment with fairly smart computers. People notice and react to sound cues. Thus, there is a good case for generating entirely artificial in-suit noises that correspond to important things going on in the outside world, things like airlock doors opening or potentially dangerous mechanisms in operation that you should steer clear of. So far all of the noises in space we've heard in Pirates have been noises from the ship itself, things that could plausibly be faked in the suits for this reason.

(By the way, I understand why shows love their sliding airlocks but I think it's a stupid design. As I picked up long ago from reading Heinlein juveniles, in theory the safest airlock door is one that opens inwards because then it's essentially impossible to accidentally open it until the inside has been depressurized. If the inside is still under pressure, you have many pounds per square inch holding the door very firmly closed. But inwards-opening doors would not make for good staging and good scenes, so we have the kind of sliding ones that we see in Pirates. This has been your digression of the day.)

More on why the Moretsu Pirates zero-G problems annoy me

In response to my entry on zero-G in Pirates, Author noted that problems with zero-G are pervasive and pointed to an example in Rocket Girls (and noted that he's learned not to be bothered by it).

For me, Pirates is different from something like Rocket Girls in two ways. First and most important is that the zero-G mistakes in Pirates are so obvious that I've actually noticed them. I am not an alert watcher for technical details; I'm generally happy to get carried away without worrying about the small things (and the zero-G issues in Pirates are a small thing). It takes a fair amount to make me go 'wait, what?' while I'm actually watching the show. Zero-G in Pirates managed.

(I never noticed the zero-G issues in Rocket Girls, for example.)

Second, using zero-G is an actual setting choice in Pirates. Something like Rocket Girls intrinsically requires zero-G; you cannot have a modern era show in space with helpful artificial gravity. But artificial gravity is a common cliche in future space settings and Pirates could have used it without anyone blinking. When an anime does something through choice instead of need I generally hold it to a higher standard.

(For example, if an anime includes a generic camera I will ignore unrealities about it that would irritate me if the anime is clearly trying to show a specific camera but getting it wrong. You could phrase this as 'if you're going to put in details, get them right'.)

PS: note that Author is in fact more technically correct about the situation than I am. He's using the correct technical term 'microgravity', where I've gone for the slightly inaccurate pop culture label 'zero-G'.

My issue with the zero-G sequences in Moretsu Pirates

Pirates has made the unusual decision to not use artificial gravity in the sole spaceship that we've seen; instead all of the areas of the ship we've seen so far have been in zero G. (It's possible that part of the living quarters have gravity from spin, but the bridge and main ship areas don't.)

Unfortunately there is one bit of how Pirates is handling the zero G sequences that gets to me. It's not how everyone's skirts are apparently nailed down (yes, the schoolgirls are still wearing their uniform skirts in zero G); as noted, this is not that sort of show, and I'm perfectly willing to accept that.

What gets to me is how people maneuver in zero G. Pirates has repeatedly had people floating still in the air, not in contact with anything, and then had them just start moving again without pushing off anything or otherwise having some source of thrust. Sometimes people have stopped in midair (not coasted to a stop, just stopped). It's as if Pirates is treating people in zero G just like people walking along the ground, except they can coast and float and move in any direction.

(Unfortunately this isn't the kind of thing that can be illustrated without an animation clip of some sort.)

Pirates doesn't do this all of the time; a lot of the time people do push off things and stop themselves on things. But not always, and the exceptions make me twitch. I wish that Pirates would either commit wholesale to real zero G or just give up and give the ship artificial gravity.

(Perhaps the clearest example of this happens during parts of the spacewalk in the third episode. I'd try to handwave that as their suit backpacks having some sort of maneuvering thrusters if it wasn't for all of the other times this happens.)

Swallowing a whopper: Giant Robo and the Tragedy of Bashtarle

I tweeted:

The only way I can swallow Giant Robo's Tragedy of Bashtarle is to believe that Daisaku had the most sheltered childhood ever.

This is the kind of thing that only fits in 140 characters if you already know what I'm talking about. So, a blog entry. There are spoilers for the second episode of Giant Robo.

In the first one and a half episodes of Giant Robo, the Tragedy of Bashtarle is presented as a big mystery. Daisaku, our 12 year old protagonist, has never heard of it and has no idea what it is, while both Big Fire and the adult Experts of Justice seem all too familiar with it; mention the Tragedy and everyone shuts up and looks sad. We learn various bits about it over the first episode, such as that it happened ten years ago, that it's allegedly been scrubbed from the history books, and finally that it was some epic Shizuma Drive related disaster involving one of the scientists who invented it going too far. So far, so good; this is all believable and builds tension.

Then partway through the second episode we find out the details. To wit, that the Tragedy of Bashtarle not only destroyed an entire country (the eponymous Bashtarle) and killed one of the five scientists who shared a Nobel prize for inventing the Shizuma Drive, but its seven days of aftereffects also killed 2/3rds of humanity. All of this happened only ten years ago.

Daisaku was two years old then, and he grew up in the Tragedy's immediate aftermath (and he's interested in and knowledgeable about the Shizuma Drive). Yet somehow he has never heard of the Tragedy, not just by name but at all. The massive death toll (and disruption of life) had so little effect on his childhood that he could be completely oblivious to it. Hence why I say that Daisaku has to have had the most sheltered childhood ever in order to make his (and the audience's) lack of knowledge even vaguely plausible.

(Yeah, yeah, Giant Robo isn't the kind of anime where you're supposed to think like that.)

(This has come up now because I'm (re)watching Giant Robo as the first show in my vague 'watch some classic anime' plans for this year.)

PS: the Tragedy of Bashtarle demonstrates that Giant Robo's setting is a lot nicer than the real world (or was, before the tragedy's effects hit). In this world, I'm pretty sure that losing all electricity, machinery, and vehicles for seven days wouldn't come anywhere near that sort of death figures because a significant portion of humanity isn't well enough off to depend on those things in the first place.

The best N anime that I saw in 2011

This is much like last year's best N: what I consider to be the best or most enjoyable N anime that I saw in calendar 2011 (regardless of when they were released). It is in order for at least the first few entries, but after that things start getting fuzzy.

• Shingu: Secret of the Stellar Wars: This is as good as people say it is. Despite strong competition, it's the best thing that I saw this year and I'm very happy to have gotten around to it.

  (Of course, this now makes me think about other excellent classic shows that I may have unjustly skipped over. This year may be the year for watching a bunch of them.)

• Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica: I accept that Madoka is not without flaws and I've read a number of criticisms of it that I agree with. Despite all of that I think it's undeniably a very strong show; it had a powerful story and it told it very well. It was both ambitious and successful. (And other people have already written lots on it with far higher coherence than I'll manage.)

  Some people will not find the story attractive, and I sympathize with them; it's an unpleasant, brutal story. Why do I find it good anyways? Because it's also a powerful story, an affecting one. It never left me unmoved; it engaged me. And it also contained beauty and hope.

• UN-GO: I've already written a bunch of words about the show, so here I'll just say that I find it an excellent grown-up show that is not afraid to be subtle and smart. It is very much a sea change from pretty much everything else I saw this year. This is anime for adults; most everything else was either anime for teens (at best) or anime for otaku.

  In some ways I think this is a better show than Madoka, although it's hard to compare them directly. Madoka is a more powerful show, but it is powerful in a direct and straightforward way; UN-GO is subtle and quiet. Madoka ends with an answer, UN-GO ends with a question.

  (I feel that Madoka is anime for otaku, but justifying that would take an entire entry of its own. Note that I don't consider 'anime for otaku' to be an intrinsically bad thing.)

Shows that I consider 'below the fold', good but probably not memorable over the long term:

• Ao no Exorcist: This is not as good a shounen fighting series as Soul Eater, but that's a very high bar. Soul Eater is about perfect; Ao no Exorcist is merely quite good. Provided, of course, that you like well done shonen fighting anime. I understand that it outran the manga and made up its own ending, which may bother manga purists but doesn't bother me because I found the ending perfectly satisfactory.

  (Well done shonen fighting shows eschew various cliches that make not so well done shows drag out, like endless training sequences or long-running fights.)

• Ben-To: To supplement my note about it, I think that this is in many ways the platonic version of the modern goofy shonen fighting show (as opposed to a serious one, which is what Ao no Exorcist is).

  (For another take on Ben-To, see Akirascuro.)

• REDLINE: This is the most stylish piece of anime that I watched all year; the creators went all out on that aspect of it, deliberately taking a lot of cues from Western comics and cartoons. Unfortunately they neglected everything else, with the result that both the characters and the plot were alternately pedestrian or over the top and the entire assemblage is ultimately a bit absurd, incoherent, and simplistic.

  But man, the style. REDLINE exudes style right from the start.

  (As kind of a photography geek, it cracked me up that in the future a tourist is wandering around with what looks like a twin lens reflex film camera that's long since obsolete even today. Be careful, that thing's a valuable antique. Of course this is part of the deliberate style of REDLINE; a modern digital camera wouldn't be right.)

• Star Driver: In the end I would have to call this an impressionistic show; it was never fully concerned with things except at an emotional level. So we got emotional explanations and emotional conclusions, but not so much straightforward plot-based ones. In hindsight I think that this lack of solidity cost it some impact, which is part of why it's wound up below the fold.

  (Although it started in fall 2010, it concluded this calendar year.)

• Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko: At this distance, I don't think that this was as powerful as I thought it was at the time (and in hindsight the early episodes were more interesting than later ones), but it's still a pretty good show with some great characters and dialog.

• Dantalion no Shoka: The individual stories and story arcs were nice, but in the end there was nothing more substantial present. Anthologies are pleasant but generally not memorable.

Neither Shana III nor Fate/Zero make this listing for various reasons. Possibly I am feeling grumpy about flaws in both of them right now.

At this point I can't fairly evaluate the Kyousogiga OVA because I've only seen it in a bad, low-resolution version. What I saw suggests that a watchable version of it may be quite good, if very kinetic and fast paced.

Honorable mentions for things that I found enjoyable fun (since this year was somewhat short on it and long on blood and grim):

• Dog Days: This is mostly old fashioned light-hearted fun, assuming that you can stand goofy fantasy settings with anime's usual occasional interjection of seriousness. For me the nicest bit of it was a hero who doesn't mind getting pulled into another world by surprise. It doesn't have any real villains, but that's not the sort of show that it is.

  I think that it has two drawbacks; a certain amount of fanservice and a truly excessive amount of coincidences in the last episode in order to engineer a happy ending.

  I would happily watch a second season.

  PS: I agree with Author and Beta-Waffle; Eclair is clearly the best character.

• Kore wa Zombie desu ka: To enjoy this you need to like a certain degree of over the top absurdism, but if you do this keeps topping itself. It also has a reasonably good story and a bunch of interesting characters (even if they're simultaneously over the top). Note that it has a certain amount of gore.

  (Really, I'm serious about the over the top characters. It has an entire clan of vampire ninjas, or maybe they're ninja vampires.)

• Infinite Stratos: To summarize what I wrote, IS is a more or less average old fashioned harem action/comedy show with relatively minimal fanservice. This means that it's an old style (no grimness really allowed) joyful and light action series (to borrow Author's phrasing).

  (I pretty much agree with SDB's criticisms of IS, but I liked the battles enough to watch it when it was airing.)

• Sacred Seven gets a reluctant honorable mention; reluctant not because it's not fun (it is, and it features a couple of great minor characters), but because it's kind of stupid. There's a line between fun and overly lightweight and I think that SS is over it. You mostly have to watch it for the silly crazy things happening.

  (It also features the apparently near-obligatory presence of some dark, bloody stuff in the backstory, eventually helpfully shown to us in flashback.)

  But its first OP was great (both the music and the goofy animation), and as Beta-Waffle says, Arma riding his tiny scooter was never not hilarious. No one can come across as a dangerous tough guy on such a thing.

In total I completed 30 series, OVAs, and movies this year (and watched some amount of a number of other things).

In praise of UN-GO

Describing what makes UN-GO special is hard, but I'm going to take a shot at it anyways to add to my two brief earlier attempts.

On the surface, UN-GO is a show about a detective solving mysteries with the help of his magical assistant. There are many ways that this could go wrong, but UN-GO avoids them all; it does essentially everything right. In the process the show is not so much about the mysteries as about everything that is going on around them, about the characters and the overall situation and the background. The recurring characters and the ongoing situation are both interesting enough to support this. Everything is interesting and multifaceted, and the show is not afraid to use a light, indirect touch to illuminate things. Above all, I felt that the show was plain smart; it was intelligently written and presented intelligent, multifaceted situations.

(One disclaimer: this is not a puzzle show. The mysteries are not necessarily intricately constructed and while the show does often foreshadow the solution, it doesn't always give the audience enough clues for us to come up with all of the answers ahead of time.)

Part of the pleasure of UN-GO is that it is not direct in the same way that many other shows are. For example, there are some unpleasant and creepy people in UN-GO but the show is by and large devoid of the stereotypical ways of showing this; instead it lets these people talk (and has some of their actions come to light) and then leaves us to draw our own conclusions about them. I've read a description that calls it a mature show, and I agree with the label; it's a low key, grown up show for adults that's appealing in a more subtle way than the usual anime fare.

To repeat myself: note that UN-GO is not necessarily a show to watch if you want to see actual justice happen. The setting has a quietly totalitarian government that is a strong believer in 'realpolitik' and quite often the government covers up the actual crimes with politically expedient false explanations and thus lets the real perpetrators go. This isn't presented as a good thing but at the same time the whole system doesn't wind up going down in flames; any successes that the protagonist scores against the system are limited.

(Also, as mentioned the show contains some supernatural elements.)

After seeing the ending of the show, I'm now not certain that I want a second season. The show ends at a very good point but it is a pivot point; a good second season to have to be very different than the first season.

(Explaining this requires both semi-spoilers and a separate entry.)

On a side note I feel that UN-GO exactly the sort of unusual but very good show that justifies noitaminA. It's not commercial in the conventional sense and I suspect that it wouldn't have been made but for the existence of the noitaminA block.

Liked: very much. I feel that this is an excellent show.
Rewatch: possibly (I'm not strong on rewatches, but this is a good candidate to get more from on a second viewing).

Other reviews or commentary: chaostangent, The Cart Driver, GAR GAR Stegosaurus, metanorn. Reviews may contain spoilers.