Roving Thoughts archives

Looking back on the Summer 2011 anime season

It's easy for me to write an entry on my early impressions of a season, full of blind optimism that's based on a few episodes of a show. It's much harder to look back after the fact and admit to myself (and others) where I was wrong, where what I was watching didn't work out and was a waste of time that I should have given up on earlier. Staying silent is the easy way, but I've come to feel that it's a little bit dishonest; it's tacitly leaving up things that I now know are wrong.

As a result, this time around I don't feel like tossing off another breathless early season impression post (for the fall season) without looking back and being honest for once. So here we go, a retrospective view on my views of the summer 2011 season:

Shows I finished:

• Kamisama Dolls: I really enjoyed what there was of this; I found it well done, with interesting characters and situations. Unfortunately it has a non-ending that may frustrate some people; it is basically a 'continued in the manga (and maybe in the second season)' thing, where we don't get any actual answers or real resolution of anything except the immediate situation.

  (If there ever is a second season, I'll happily watch it.)

• Sacred Seven: This was never deep but I always found it entertaining; that it was inextricably silly was part of the attraction. It achieved what I expected of it. Some of the peripheral characters were great.

  (Sadly they changed the opening at some point. I still love the opening song.)

• Dantalion no Shoka: I enjoyed it, but from early on I accepted that it was a horror show and the real purpose of the nominal protagonists was exposing us to the horror stories (and being interesting people), not actually doing anything. As part of this, I'm not bothered that it doesn't particularly have an ending. People who want more structure and an actual ongoing plot that is resolved should avoid it.

  (Evirus calls it the anime equivalent of a collection of short stories, and I think that's a very good description of it.)

Stalled:

• Natsume Yuujinchou San (#9): I like this when I watch it, but I'm unable to feel any urgency about watching it, especially since I basically already know how the stories are going to feel. I think I've probably burned out on feel-good stories of friendship, even if they have supernatural elements.

• Mawaru Penguindrum (#6): That the crazy people have reasons to be crazy does not make them any less crazy or any more attractive. At the same time I do like what this show is doing; I'm just not all that enthused about watching it in practice, so I haven't watched any for a while.

I am someday going to finish Natsume, even if it takes me a year. I don't know if I'll ever watch much more of Penguindrum, and I'm probably going to wait until it finishes so I can read people's commentary on whether it was worth it in the end.

Effectively or actually abandoned:

• Mayo Chiki #2: I haven't been in the mood to watch the kind of comedy that this show delivers. That may change someday, but I doubt I'll do more than dabble in it. My memory is that what it did, it did quite well; it's just that its genre didn't enthuse me this summer.

  (For various reasons my enthusiasm for anime has been at a low ebb lately. In another season I might have watched more of this.)

• Kami-sama no Memochou #4: I didn't consider it a positive development when the protagonist got more and more involved with a Yakuza group. I'm pretty sure that the show disagreed with me about this, and as a result my enthusiasm waned. This may have been unfair, but see above about my enthusiasm.

• Itsuka Tenma no Kuro Usagi #5: The incoherence overwhelmed me.

• Blood-C #7: I stuck with this far longer than I should have. Everything I've read about further developments makes me happy that I abandoned it; extended 'it was all just a hallucination' plots make me grind my teeth for all sorts of reasons. See Aroduc if you want more.

  (And I must say that I am shocked, shocked, that a Clamp-influenced show would have a softly spoken nice person who turned out to be powerful and evil. Who could possibly have seen that twist coming based on Clamp's earlier work?)

• Nekogami Yaoyorozu #1: as predicted, this failed to sustain my interest and I never watched another episode. Various grumpy reviews of it (from Aroduc and SDB) did not help.

That makes five shows that I started out expecting to like and watch all the way through and either stalled out on or abandoned, and only three that I watched all the way through. Maybe that's a typical ratio for people, but I've previously liked to think I had better early judgement.

(Possibly in the past I've just been more stubborn about watching mediocre shows all the way through once I started on them, and giving up on them early is a positive development. Or maybe I've given up on more shows than I vaguely remember, and I should go back and review other seasons too.)

A realization about Dantalian no Shoka

In his usual curmudgeon way, Aroduc has been grumpy about how the protagonists of Dantalian have just stood around for the past two episodes and watched while things happened around them. This has led me to a realization about Dantalian's genre.

Put simply, Dantalian is horror, not action. As horror, Huey and Dalian are our viewpoint to witness things and explain them, but they may or may not have to take any action to resolve the situation and return it to normality. In fact the running theme of the first four episodes is people who do something terribly wrong and are then destroyed by it (often through their hubris).

The first two episodes obscured this by having Huey act, but look back at when he had to act and what he had to do. In each case, Huey only had to act to dissipate the surface manifestation of the destruction (the out of control monsters); the actual responsible person had already been punished by the situation.

This may have already been obvious to other people, especially in light of Dantalian's ending sequence.

(Obvious disclaimer: Dantalian may yet change its genre. The opening has some suggestive bits.)

A brief aside on Blood-C episode 3

(This is the kind of thing that I would put on Twitter if I had a Twitter account. Maybe I should get one. PS: spoiler, sort of.)

Boy, Saya was surprisingly cold-blooded in episode 3 when she just stood by and let the nice innocent baker walk into the monster to get unpleasantly killed. Especially since the show went out of its way to show that the baker hadn't already been mentally consumed by the monster (he was just under its control or something) and probably could have actually been saved.

(And this does not seem to have been red-eyed killer Saya, either. Her eyes were normal in the scene.)

I sure hope this means something important, because Saya is several times less likable and sympathetic now.

On Gosick's ending

The last two episodes of Gosick (which I just recently got around to watching) are so much of a change that I got whiplash, and are among the fastest I've seen an anime series descend into more or less incoherence. It's as if the writer and director woke up after episode 22 and realized that they still had two thirds of the story to cover and only two episodes left.

(There are spoilers here.)

As you'd expect the result was less a story than an extended summary of a story. There were abrupt and unexplained lurches in what was going on (at the end of episode 22 Kazuya was being held by the Ministry to get Victorique's cooperation; at the start of episode 23 he is in military training in Japan). Major story events casually took place offscreen (eg Cordelia freeing Victorique from captivity). What we did see was often drastically out of tune with how Gosick was before. Characters did abrupt changes in characterization that made it hard to care about them. Completely inexplicable yet very convenient things kind of happened. And amid all of this the show spent times on scenes that seemed to do nothing (eg Kazuya's hallucinations, if they were hallucinations).

(I also feel disturbed by what the last two episodes seem to imply about the show's world; they casually present a situation where it seems that Germany may have won that world's version of World War II. Japan has a nice real-world habit of considering WW II to be this not a big deal that other people make too much of a fuss about as it is, so seeing anime downplay it makes me twitch.)

Apart from the last two episodes, Gosick was a decent show. Unfortunately episode 22 doesn't end on a good stopping point so you can't really pretend that the last two episodes never happened.

My early impressions of the Summer 2011 anime season

Another season brings another installment of what is now my regular habit of taking a snapshot of my views of the early episodes that I've seen (just like last time).

Shows I've seen, more or less in the order seen:

• Sacred Seven: it's a Sunrise action series. It's acceptable. I'm sure there's going to be a midseason surprise twist, because that's Sunrise's pattern.

  So far this has my favorite opening of the season, partly because it's so goofy it's impossible to take it seriously. (For some reason I find the hero's little pseudo-motorcycle absolutely hysterical.)

• Kamisama Dolls: the start is interesting and I mostly like the characters. The action helps, although I could do without yet another incarnation of the 'young female character is cutely incompetent' trope.

• Mawaru Penguindrum: the portions of the first episode that were supposed to make sense were well done. I need to see at least one more episode before I actually understand it, though.

  (The second episode is more setup, so I can't say I understand it yet.)

• Kami-sama no Memochou: I like the characters so far, and that's really what a show like this is about; the nominal mysteries are likely to be secondary.

• Blood-C: the first episode was a disappointingly boring introductory episode, and they lose style points for lame exposition. The second episode doesn't add all that much, and the fights seem oddly pointless. Still, I hang on optimistically.

  (Saya exposits by explaining things to her schoolmates, but there's no reason for what she explains to have only come up now, especially since this seems to be a small town where everyone would know all of this background anyways.)

• Itsuka Tenma no Kuro Usagi: there's an interesting story in here somewhere, but I can't help but feel that the actual execution in the first episode is a bit lacking. In many ways this suffers by comparison with Kore wa Zombie desu ka, which covered much the same ground but better and aired only six months ago. The second episode makes me somewhat happier, but not hugely.

  (Also, this sets new lows for casual fanservice, with radioactively censored casual fanservice for bonus fun.)

• Natsume Yuujinchou San: just what I was expecting and hoping for. If you've enjoyed previous seasons (and even if not), this is more of the same.

• Nekogami Yaoyorozu: it's pleasant but the first episode feels a little lightweight. I suspect it may not sustain my interest for long.

• Mayo Chiki: much more amusing than I expected it to be, even if Subaru is about as convincing as a boy as Charles (from Infinite Stratos).

• Dantalion no Shoka: Bearing in mind that I really like this sort of thing in general, I found this nice without being stunning. I expect to enjoy it a lot, although they could always fumble future episodes.

Have not watched due to the description being not to my tastes in various ways (this list is incomplete):

• Ikoku Meiro no Croisee: plain and simply not my genre. I have no opinions on its merits.
• Idolm@ster: also not my genre from descriptions so far, although Author may yet get me to watch an episode.

• Usagi Drop: like Aroduc, I am kind of allergic to melodrama

• Ro Kyu Bu!: you jest.

• Blade: Madhouse's Marvel adaptations have if anything apparently gone downhill since I found Iron Man not interesting enough to watch more of. And Blade was always a second-stringer Marvel character anyways, movies not withstanding.

(I don't really have anything to say about the other shows I've not seen. I may yet watch an episode of some of them in optimistic hopes.)

On Natsume's Book of Friends

Extracted from Aroduc's 2011 Summer Anime preview:

A series that seems to inspire one of two things in people, an intense love [...], or the compelling urge to take a nap.

However fond I am of Natsume Yuujinchou, I have to more or less agree with Aroduc here. NY is pretty much a bunch of heartwarming slice of life stories that just happens to be about the supernatural (or mostly about the supernatural). Given my usual tastes, I have no idea why I like it so much, and I certainly can't recommend it except very selectively; it would bore or annoy a great many people.

(But if quiet, heartwarming stories about the supernatural sound like your kind of thing, you really owe it to yourself to check it out. Consider this a strong plug. You could probably start anywhere without losing much, but starting at the beginning of the first series isn't going to hurt.)

The military in Infinite Stratos

Author:

If IS' military use is prohibited, what is that destroyer doing in the academy's harbor?

If I take IS's background seriously I have to conclude that the whole 'IS military use is prohibited' thing is propaganda, and not very convincing propaganda at that. IS are armed, IS pilots are taught weapons and combat operation, competitions between IS pilots are combat duels instead of any number of other plausible tests of IS pilot skill, IS piloting seems heavily militarized, and so on. I can't think of a single non-combat use of IS we see in the entire series.

If I try hard, I can make the background covered on the Wikipedia page (see also) make some sort of sense. Clearly 'IS will never be used in combat' is a highly unstable balance of power that no one expects to actually last once things get serious, so everyone is frantically trying to get powerful ISs and stockpiling trained pilots (and keeping a careful eye on each other).

(When I was watching the series, I just assumed that there was some secret menace lurking in the background that some of the adults knew about and that all of the IS pilots were being prepared to fight, perhaps alien invaders or something. The IS anime ended right about where I'd expect the big reveal about this to happen in a longer series and I have no idea what happens in the light novels.)

PS: I try not to think too hard about the background in Infinite Stratos. The claimed lack of military use is just one of the issues that are probably best not examined too closely.

Some reactions to commentary on Shingu: Secret of the Stellar Wars

Now that I've actually watched Shingu I've been going back and reading commentary on it that I skipped over before in order to avoid spoilers, and of course I have some reactions to various bits of it. There are spoilers here, along with possibly too many words.

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On one of Shingu's mysteries

Note: contents contain spoilers for Shingu.

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Linux DVD players for anime

For my future reference if nothing else, based purely on watching Shingu on DVD:

Xine on Fedora 8 has much better handling of DVDs than even a bleeding edge mplayer, but mplayer has better deinterlacing and keyboard controls for pausing and so on so I used mplayer. Mplayer did turn the subtitles to mush in a few places so I went back and re-read them with xine. More modern versions of Xine may have better deinterlacing, which would probably make it almost completely superior.

Different players have somewhat different renditions of subtitles. My Xine shows them as solid yellow text; mplayer shows them as semi-transparent white text. Most of the time I prefer mplayer's style, at least when it's not garbling the subtitles.

(The Fedora 8 xine also has the irritating habit of leveling the left and right audio channels when it starts. I deliberately have mine slightly off balance because that's what it takes to sound right in my setup.)

Mplayer usage: gmplayer -nocache -vf yadif dvd://N, where N is the episode/title on disk; at least for Shingu, yadif was the best option for deinterlacing out of the ones that my old computer could do in real time. Occasionally I needed '-aid ID' as well to make mplayer use the Japanese audio track (by default I believe mplayer picks the first audio track; on most of the Shingu DVDs this was Japanese, but on one it was English). You want to stop and start gmplayer to change between titles or otherwise change parameters; when I did it from the gmplayer menus, the very bottom bit of the picture got this shifting green cast. I could not get mplayer's DVD menu support to work at all well, so I did not attempt to use it.

(I suspect that live action may call for quite different deinterlacing options than anime.)

I admit that it was periodically tempting to give in and download a fansub for Shingu, despite having the DVDs. I suspect I would have had somewhat better visual quality (since someone who knew what they were doing would have deinterlaced it well) and a better rendition of the subtitles.

(As I mentioned in my reactions, modern softsubs are clearly better than DVD subtitles. This should be unsurprising; among other things, modern subtitles are higher resolution.)

PS: the sign that one's anime DVD needs deinterlacing is that things moving sideways get this comb effect at the edges, as half the pixel lines are displaced relative to the other half. It's very visible.

PPS: if people have opinions on the best Linux DVD player for anime and the best settings for this, I'd love to hear them. I can't say I've done extensive experiments here.