Roving Thoughts archives

One pivotal moment where Kemono Friends shows its quiet excellence

Today I want to talk about the spear-point moment in Kemono Friends. There will necessarily be spoilers and what I write may not convince you, because by nature spear-points rely on the weight of story that's come before them for their power.

Spear-points are often active and loud, like last year's spear-point in Thunderbolt Fantasy, but they don't have to be. Sometimes a spear-point is a quieter moment that would not otherwise work without the weight of the spear the story has put behind it; everything has been built up to allow this moment to exist and to convince.

For most of its run, Kemono Friends was all about the cheerful adventures of Kaban and the Friends in Japari Park. Sure, there was some danger from things like the Ceruleans and the environment, but it was the danger of a kid's show; it was there to create tension and have our characters solve problems, such as in episode 9. Then, at the end of episode 11, Kaban sacrifices herself to draw a giant Cerulean away from the incapacitated Serval, ending up being swallowed by it. This was quite something, as was the effects on people watching. Although this was an extremely powerful moment (and one fully earned by the show's work to build up to it), it's not the big spear-point. The spear-point is what happens the next episode, when Kaban basically comes back from the dead.

Bringing people back from the dead is very hard to do well. To truly sell it, the story must make it not merely excusable but inevitable, the logical and emotional consequence at the tip of the spear that was built piece by piece as the story progressed. The logical steps of Kemono Friends' spear are straightforward (I've put them in a sidebar), but what that really means is that they're woven deep into the subtle worldbuilding of the entire setting; they're straightforward because they're foundational. Kemono Friends didn't surprise us with anything that went into Kaban's return because by the time we got there we already knew the pieces; we'd been shown them before bit by bit as part of previous events. As far as logic went at the spear-point of Kaban's return, it was inevitable.

But logic by itself isn't enough; returning from the dead needs effort and emotion too, to give significance and weight to such a momentous thing. So the final episode of Kemono Friends opens with an epic, climactic running fight against the giant Cerulean, one that sees all of the Friends we've met over the course of the series show up to help out with their own abilities (for good reasons that go back to that subtle worldbuilding). On the surface it's an attempt to rescue Kaban from the Cerulean and defeat it, but it also makes us feel that all of these Friends working together so hard and caring so much about Kaban deserve more than to be left with nothing. They and especially Serval have earned having Kaban come back. And so it comes to pass, with not a dry eye in the house.

(It also helps that we the audience wanted Kaban to come back, so that Kemono Friends could finish as the cheerful and good-natured show that it had been all the way through up until then. Kaban's return is firmly centered in the show's genre.)

Kaban's return from the lost is not a big explosive moment; it's not epic in the way Shang's fight was last year, or shocking in the way Kaban's sacrifice was. Instead, it's quietly, intensely emotional. It's Serval embracing Kaban, crying as she repeats what she said in the first episode, "I won't eat you!" It's a miracle that is perfectly logical and completely earned, at the tip of a meticulously crafted spear that stretches all the way back to the start of the show.

Kemono Friends makes it all look easy, when it's anything but.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

Sidebar: The logic chain in question

Friends are created from ordinary animals (or pieces of animals), and when swallowed by a Cerulean, they are stripped of their Friend nature and reduced back to their original animal form. Kaban is a Friend, and when she was swallowed by the Cerulean she was reduced to a glowing ball which would condense to her original form. But Kaban is a human and the original form of a human is still a human, so when the ball evaporated to reveal her animal form, it was still Kaban.

I won't call Kaban's nature a mystery of Kemono Friends because it was always pretty obvious what she was to the viewers. But it was the central pivot around which all of the series revolved, and if we had any doubt about what she was, this ended them; Kaban is a human Friend (and we know her origins). To quote the Professor, "They [humans] truly are a mysterious species."

Some shows that didn't work out for me in 2017

Every year, there are a certain number of shows that I start with high expectations and hopes, fully expecting to enjoy them, and then things don't work out. I'm always sad when this happens; I want to enjoy shows, especially shows that I'm looking forward to, but every year there are times when this just doesn't happen, and not because the show turned out to be a disaster in some way or is clearly a 'not for me' show. These are the shows that by all rights should work for me, but for various reasons the show and I never connected. Often it's hard for me to drop these shows, because I feel like I should like them but I just don't. Somehow the magic that should be there has leaked out.

(Shows that are actively bad or that are clearly not my kind of thing are much easier to let go of, partly because it's a lot more clearcut. It's still disappointing but it's a mild disappointment. It's also easier to let go of shows that I had no particular expectations for in the first place, ones that just had some initial promise but I wound up deciding that I didn't like them enough.)

Today, for my own reasons, I want to look back at my collection of such shows from this year (or at least the ones that stand out to me), not to condemn them but to create a little memorial to them and to what could have been. That these shows didn't work out for me can say as much about me as it does about the shows.

In the order that they aired and I sadly walked away from them:

• Blue Exorcist - Kyoto Saga: I quite liked the original Blue Exorcist back in the day, but this version didn't catch fire with me. I don't feel as sad as I might, because it's been so long and I never really expected another season from Blue Exorcist (and we did get a decent movie); also, I didn't entirely feel that this was really a continuation of the original because it had to reset a number of things from the anime-original ending of the first show. In a way you could say that this is a different show than I thought I was getting, one that just happens to sort of use the same setting and some of the same characters as the Blue Exorcist that I watched. And who knows, maybe my tastes have changed since 2011.

  I think the show was competently made and I've heard that it followed the manga fairly well, so I suspect that manga readers are pleased by this season.

• Little Witch Academia: Oh, this one hurts. I lost interest after five episodes of this much heralded Trigger TV series version of a couple of quite good OVAs. There were a number of specific things, but in the end it basically turned out the way I'd been afraid of since I heard it was being turned into a TV series, which I'll summarize as 'the pacing and feel changed a lot'. The first OVA had only so much time and it had to cram a great deal in; as a result, everything moved at a rapid clip and there wasn't time to look very deeply into anything, which made it a madcap ride. With far more time to fill and the natural expectation that it would go into much deeper detail on the characters, character growth, and so on, the TV series could never have managed the same feel.

  (The second OVA was somewhat closer to the feel of the TV series, since it was an additional story invented after the first OVA was successful, but it was still far denser and more condensed than the show.)

  I wound up labeling LWA as 'not for me' instead of dropped because I think it not working for me is mostly about my tastes in pacing, characters, and so on.

• Rage of Bahamut - Virgin Soul: The original Rage of Bahamut was a flawed but generally very good show that really got the cinematic Hollywood action-adventure feel and important things like how to have awesome moments. Virgin Soul had a great premise, the same director, and more running time (and hopefully plenty of production time), all of which gave me great expectations for it. Perhaps what happened is something similar to what happened with Little Witch Academia, where adding time (and focusing more on characters) required slowing the pacing down and coming up with more elaborate and complex plots.

  (With that said, the show has its own serious issues in how it handles Charioce; for one discussion of this, see here.)

• Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond: This is a regrettable late addition (not just this season, but late in the season at that). It's actually been useful at showing me another thing about my tastes, because there's absolutely nothing wrong about BBB & Beyond as such; it's delivering exactly what's on the can, and in quite good quality as far as animation, story, and so on is concerned. It's just that BBB & Beyond is not going anywhere in particular and it turns out that I want more than that, even from my popcorn watching. But for people who like to see these characters ramble around Hellsalem's Lot and find out bits about their background and day to day life, well, I can see the appeal. My understanding is that this season is very much like the manga in that respect, so manga fans are probably quite fond of it (and irritated that the first season apparently pruned back so much from the sections of the manga that it covered).

  (The first season of BBB did have an ongoing story working its way through the episodes, with Black and White and everything they were tied in to. It also had the advantage that it was introducing us to Hellsalem's Lot.)

  (A confession: there's a part of me that wants to keep on watching BBB & Beyond, although I'm pretty convinced I'd just wind up disgruntled if I did. After all, I'm only two episodes away from the end of this season; surely I can just finish it out. But no. That's a combination of the sunk cost fallacy and my completionist nature.)

Then there's some shows that I'm more mildly let down and sad about, where it doesn't hurt as much that I and the show didn't work out.

• Re:Creators: I didn't have high expectations for this at the start of the season, but the initial stuff was cool and the high concept was interesting. It kept me interested for 14 episodes, which is at least ten more than many shows manage, and there are any number of nice bits and characters that still stick in my mind. Also, the OP music remains excellent (I prefer the first OP's music to the second, but they're both good).

  In retrospect, Re:Creators had a good line on 'cool'. Perhaps this is partly because many of its characters were consciously supposed to be fictional (plucked into 'reality') and so did not have to be given feet of clay in order to feel more realistic; they could mostly run on the rule of cool and nothing else. For example, Mamika is almost too perfect in the show itself; in a work where she was intended to be a real character, she'd probably have been made more tangled and ambiguous and less appealing as a result. But I wave my hands here.

  (Sometimes this didn't work in the favour of the character and the show. Yes, I'm still sore about Magane.)

• Fate/Apocrypha: I have a mixed relationship with Fate as a whole and I did drop and then un-drop this after the first episode, but I still keep hoping for a Fate series that delivers all of the cool stuff (including but not limited to fight action) but without the other things that are probably inevitable given that this is both Fate and a TV series (with a TV series' production limits). Some aspects of F/A were great, too, but for me they wound up as too little in too much of an ocean of stuff I was too indifferent to.

  (Overall I feel I got what I wanted from the show, since I went in with modest expectations and stopped watching when I felt I was about done. But I still feel sad that it wasn't more. I'll probably always feel this sadness every time I watch a Fate work and it doesn't knock me out of the park.)

• A Centaur's Life: It feels like a miracle that such a peculiar and far-out manga got animated in the first place, so I'm only mildly sad that various aspects of the actual implementation didn't work for me. Perhaps the interesting bits in the show will have persuaded some people to check out the manga and gotten them hooked on it.

  (The manga really is far more out there than you might expect just from the premise. It gets really weird in places, especially as it goes on.)

Perhaps it's silly to go into new shows with expectations at all, since any long-term anime watcher knows that anything can happen with a new show (for bad or good), but it's also entirely human. People aren't perfectly logical robots; we're always influenced by emotional factors and our knowledge. Even if you deliberately shield yourself from hearing anything about a new season, you know that some shows are successors to shows that you liked (or adopt a manga you know something about), and that builds up inevitable expectations.

PS: I'm deliberately not considering shows that I actually finished even if I wasn't as taken with them as I expected and wanted to be. This is for shows that didn't work out to such an extent that I stopped watching them, not shows that merely disappointed me for various reasons or that turned out to be less than I'd hoped for or expected.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

Story endings can be broad or narrow ones

I've written before about the different ways that story endings can be satisfying, where they can deliver either or both of narrative or emotional satisfaction; they can wrap up the plot or resolve the emotional conflicts a character had, or both. Today I want to talk about an additional dimension in story endings that plays into how satisfying people find them.

Story endings can be what I'll call broad or narrow. A broad ending is one that ties up as much as possible of the open issues in the story, while a narrow ending ignores many of them and only addresses a few. It's most common for this distinction to matter narratively, because the plot side is where it's most common to have a lot of outstanding issues; usually the emotional side of a story is already concentrated on only a few characters, so the story doesn't need to cover very much to give them emotionally satisfying resolutions. However, in some situations you can still have an emotionally narrow ending, because you just ignore issues with secondary characters or focus in on only a few characters in an ensemble cast.

(For example, I feel that Eureka Seven AO had an emotionally narrow ending. There were character conflicts and themes that were simply dropped on the floor in the ending, if they even existed, since the ending focused purely on Ao.)

One way to get an emotionally unsatisfying ending is to have it be emotionally narrow. The show may wrap up the central character's conflicts and themes, but it ignores all of the rest; we the audience then feel that these other characters have basically been dropped on the floor, reduced to unimportant spear carries when the show had previously implied that they were important.

You can obviously get a narratively unsatisfying ending by having it be narratively narrow. However, a narratively narrow ending doesn't have to be unsatisfying, at least to some of the audience, because not infrequently there are plot questions that are fine to not answer . The show has to stage its mysteries somewhat carefully in order to make it clear that not getting answers is a possibility, which includes not making the answer to them be important for understanding things. But done well this can avoid a common problem with mysteries.

(In practice we already accept that many things about the setting of a show will not be explained in any depth, even things that are reasonably central to the show's premise. For one example, many science fiction series involve a great deal of technology for things like faster than light travel or flying cars that's simply never explained. Ghost in the Shell doesn't explain the mechanics of cyborgs, ghosts, hacking things, or the various weapons; it's enough for the story that we get a vague idea of how they work and what their limitations are.)

Of course, what works may vary from person to person. For a personal example, in Shingu I'm fine with Muryou's mysteries not being answered but other people aren't necessarily so happy.

Pacing in manga versus anime

Back in the summer season, I found A Centaur's Life uninspiring and wound up dropping it. As odd as it sounds, this fascinates me, because back in the day I read some of the manga and found it generally fascinating, beautiful, and engaging (including all of the material that I watched in the show). And it's not as if the show was badly produced or badly made; the presentation was simply relatively bland, flat, and unimaginatively straightforward. A Centaur's Life is not the first show where I've liked the manga but found a competently made show uninteresting, and over time I've developed some theories about why. One of them has to do with pacing in manga versus anime.

The obvious difference is that a manga's pacing is substantially under your control, while the pacing of anime is fixed on rails. When you're reading a manga, you can slow down to absorb and soak in a page or a panel, or reread an exchange of dialog to clarify it. Or, if the manga is slow and drawn out, you can speed up. If there's a long exchange of dialog with no important changes in the panels, you can go at your reading speed or skim the panels, and if there's little dialog you can whip through the panels themselves to absorb what's happening.

(Some of the time, low-dialog panels are actively designed for you to go through fast on the first read, to feel the rush of action or events.)

In anime you have none of this freedom. The show advances dialog and events exactly as fast as it's chosen to animate them, no faster and no slower. If there are fascinating things you're not naturally free to linger over them, because the show drags you away; those things are only there for so many frames and so many seconds. Crucially, if things are slow and getting boring, you can't move along any faster; you're locked to the pace of dialog and movement and change that the show has chosen, waiting as the show ticks away seconds in animation or slow pans or characters talking and talking.

(In some video environments you can freeze frame, frame by frame, skip around, and maybe even play things at faster than normal speeds, but it's not at all as natural as reading manga faster or slower and it's likely to have other effects, such as distorting the sound.)

A broader difference is that I've come to believe that much manga is naturally paced faster than anime is, where covering the same story content simply takes longer in anime form. At least for me, I can go through 16 or 32 pages of most manga in under half an hour; in animated form, the same content often takes at least an episode and perhaps more. There are exceptions, primarily for works that are heavy on action, but A Centaur's Life is mostly not one of those. Instead, like many manga, it's got a lot of talking in various settings, accompanied by situations that can be illustrated in a panel or a page or two.

In anime, you have two or three issues that take up (extra) time. First, people can only speak so fast, usually slower than you can read dialog in a manga (although there are exceptions, as anyone who's ever had to pause the video player to read all the subtitles knows). Second, you have to animate things actually happening; you can't imply it with action lines or panel to panel transitions the way that you can in a manga (for a discussion of how action is implied in manga but must be shown in anime, see Kumi Kaoru's analysis of the Nausicaa manga). On top of this, manga drawing can be very dense with implications and many things packed into a single panel or page, which works because readers can slow down to absorb them all; in anime you must draw out all of this long enough to insure that a decent portion of your audience will have seen and absorbed everything. Of course, given that dialog takes more time, this need to draw visual things out can be handy.

An interesting example of speed in manga versus anime comes up in The Ancient Magus' Bride. As covered by Emily in The flower language of The Ancient Magus' Bride, the first episode features in part a number of views of the flowers around Elias' home, as Chise arrives with Elias for the first time. All of this feels perfectly natural and well paced in the anime. In manga, the same events are covered in equally unrushed form in about two and a half pages, with far less detail. On the one hand, this smaller manga space makes it faster to go through (and two of the pages are are a double page splash spread). On the other hand, this means that the manga can't imply or show all of the flowers (and all of the meanings) that the anime can. Sometimes drawing something out at anime pace and filling the time the dialog requires can give you greater depth and interest.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

Link: Kumi Kaoru's fascinating analysis of Miyazaki's Nausicaa manga

"At First, I Wanted to be a Manga-ka": Analyzing the Nausicaa Manga by Kumi Kaoru part 1 and the continuation part 2 is a translation of Kaoru Kumi's fascinating visual and technical analysis of Hayao Miyazaki Nausicaa manga. Kaoru Kumi starts her analysis this way:

As soon as the serialization of Nausicaa began, manga lovers began to praise it highly. It seems like the two things you heard the most about it were “it’s quite cinematic” and “its style is dense and hard to read.” [...]

Putting that aside, what exactly does “cinematic” mean, anyway? [...]

She goes on to provide an explanation for what cinematic means in the context of a manga (drawing evidence from how films connect shots to other shots), give examples from other manga, and then analyze how Nausicaa itself does this. The result is a fascinating breakdown of how the manga works so well and genuinely feels cinematic, with a side discussion of how the same things would have to be presented in anime form in order to work well. In the process she mentions some fascinating details of manga, such as how the production process for commercial manga (with work split between the manga-ka themselves and assistants) influences how panels have to be composed, and how a fast or slow publication pace changes what sort of art can be in a manga.

This is just a taste and an inadequate summary. If this sort of thing is at all to your interest, read the whole thing. If I'm any guide, be prepared to set aside some time, because it completely absorbed me for the duration.

(Via Ogiue Maniax's 10th anniversary post, itself via Author.)

It officially is 'sleigh beggy' in The Ancient Magus' Bride

In The Ancient Magus' Bride, the protagonist, Chise Hatori, is a special kind of mage, and for a long time there's been some confusion over what English language term should be used for what she is. Specifically, there's been confusion and disagreement over whether she is a 'sleigh beggy' (the official Seven Seas manga version) or a 'slay vega'. Last year I wrote an entry about this, after Crunchyroll translated the term as 'slay vega' in the first episode of the OVA, partly because my personal preference is for 'slay vega'.

Since then, two things have happened. First, Crunchyroll is airing The Ancient Magus' Bride TV series, and in the TV series Chise is a 'sleigh beggy'. More importantly, we now have official confirmation from the mangaka:

@drewtnguyen: @EzoYamazaki00 HELLO! QUESTION! First, thank you for the signature at CRX! Second, how did you come up with the name スレイ・ベガ? Thanks!

@EzoYamazaki00: Hello！Thank you for coming. It is words of the Isle of Man.The words hint at a fairy or a fairy and a human child.

(Via @hikaslap. It's relevant to know that a 'sleigh beggy' is a relatively obscure type of faerie from the Isle of Man (see eg here or here, and also the discussion here).)

This pretty much settles any debate over the official English term for what Chise is. Crunchyroll has changed its translation (although its subtitles for the first OVA episode still use 'slay vega') and Kore Yamazaki herself has given us an unambiguous answer. The Seven Seas manga translation was faithful to the mangaka's intentions, wonky explanation and all.

(I do wonder how the Crunchyroll 'slay vega' translation for the first OVA episode came about (and if anyone got yelled at over it), but we'll probably never hear that story.)

I still stand by my view that it's an unfortunate choice, but it probably doesn't matter very much, especially for the TV series. Although 'sleigh beggy' does have a meaning, most people are going to read it as a weird arbitrary combination of words, just like they would have read 'slay vega'. Arguably it has less meaning that 'slay vega', because people would probably read implications into the 'slay' part of that.

(This is part of @appropriant's 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

Kemono Friends shows that CG versus drawn animation is ultimately unimportant

Kemono Friends is made almost entirely in CG, and they're famously pretty janky and limited, with a stilted and awkward look (even when it tried). The show was made with so few resources that it took them until episode 7 to make the bus's wheels spin in the opening. Kemono Friends is also really good. Not 'good for its limited budget'; genuinely good, to the extent that it's likely to make any number of people's end of year lists (mine included). Kemono Friends has a depth to it that anime rarely manages, and the show does it without ever losing its lighthearted charm.

Would Kemono Friends have been better if it was made with adequate resources using traditional 2D drawn animation instead of scrappy shoestring CG? Probably; I'm willing to believe that all of the charm could have been maintained with better art and animation. How about a version of the show made in great 2D drawn animation but without the excellent writing and direction that Kemono Friends had? There are some people who would say that such a show would be better than the Kemono Friends we got because it would look much better, but I'm not among them. The greatness in Kemono Friends doesn't come from how it looks, it comes from what's in the show, and if you take that away it doesn't really matter how pretty what's left looks. A pedestrian but beautiful show is still a pedestrian show. As we've seen more than once, not even KyoAni's many talents can save a show from its own writing.

What Kemono Friends illustrates, once again, is that whether a work is made in CG or with drawn animation is far less important than what's in the work. While we've had illustrations of this before, Kemono Friends is extremely handy because it has such a gulf between its visual appearance and its quality of writing and execution. You almost never get amazing things that were made on a shoestring and show it.

This is what I mean by calling CG versus 2D animation ultimately unimportant. The difference between the two is not nothing, but moving from one to the other moves the overall quality and impact of a show far less than other things do.

(Well, for most people. There are people who care a lot about sakuga; for at least some of these people, CG is pretty much a deal killer in the same way that a mandatory English dub mostly removes my interest.)

As a corollary, that a particular show will be made in CG instead of hand-drawn animation is well down the list of things to worry about. You should be worrying much more about things like who is making it, under what conditions, what they feel about it, and what their goals are, because all of those are far more likely to change whether the end result is good or bad.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

Knight's & Magic and the power of honesty

Knight's & Magic doesn't exactly have a promising premise and plot; in fact, it basically sounds like a wince inducing piece of wish-fulfillment fanfiction. A mecha otaku dies and is reincarnated as a kid genius in a world with mecha where he can use his other-worldly ideas to make the best mecha ever and be fawned over by all and sundry? Many people would give such a show a wide berth. But despite this unpromising premise, the actual series was surprisingly good, with an infectiously earnest enthusiasm and a a heart-on-sleeve appeal.

Originally I was going to write about the power of this earnestness and embracing your genre, as Thunderbolt Fantasy did last year. But earnestness by itself doesn't make a show good in the way that Knight's & Magic is; there are plenty of quite earnest works that are actually kind of terrible, and Knight's & Magic could very easily have gone off the rails itself, falling into complete absurdity and losing much of its appeal. Instead, I've come to feel that the crucial ingredient that made the show work is honesty.

Knight's & Magic is a show that is honest with itself, and as part of that it's honest about what it is; it's wish fulfillment and it never pretends otherwise. Knight's & Magic takes things seriously (it's not a satire or a farce), but it's not a serious, realistic work and it doesn't try to be one. As part of this it quite deliberately dials everything up to at least ten, not for comedy but because it's more fun that way. While earnest fun is the heart of Knight's & Magic, I don't think it would have been possible if the people behind it had not understood and appreciated what it was, warts and all.

As part of dialing everything up to at least ten and going straight for fun, K&M is completely transparent about how the plot is on Ernesti's side. This is in a way another side of the show's honesty; the show is always clear about its fundamental nature, including its ultimate niceness (at least as far as the good guys are concerned, and this is a show with very clear good guys).

Another part of this is a surprising honesty about giant robots, because the final showdown is framed as the romanticism of giant robots versus the practicality of other options. Ernesti explicitly admits this and declares that he doesn't care; he's going to defeat Gojass's creation in order to preserve the world for giant robots because that's what he loves. He wins, of course, and it doesn't feel out of place because the thumb of the plot has been on his side all along and has never made any pretense about it. Knight's & Magic is as honest about loving giant robots, with their contradictions and all, as it is about the rest of its nature.

(You can read the ending of the show as partly a nod to this conflict being a never-ending one.)

(This is part of @appropriant's 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

Sidebar: Ignoring the long shadow of Gundam

Like many giant robot shows, Knight's & Magic winds up wanting to have its cake and eat it too. On the one hand, the most interesting giant robot fights are generally against other giant robots, and in situations where there is real tension. On the other hand this means war, literally; people are fighting each other in those giant robots and dying in those pretty explosions. The contradiction between war as a cool thing with awesome giant robots and the brutal, bloody consequences of war is deeply embedded in the genre since at least Gundam.

Knight's & Magic basically ignores this. It's not that it pretends that there aren't people dying in the pretty explosions (it's pretty explicit that there are, actually). Instead, it pretends that this is no different than when the characters were fighting giant monsters earlier in the series. The opponents are different and more challenging and the fights are cooler because they are giant robot versus giant robot (or giant robot versus giant flying robo-dragon), but that's it.

(To be fair to Knight's & Magic, the show also ignored how there were plenty of people dying 'heroically' against the giant monsters. It did have one little plot section about how scary fighting is, but promptly brushed it off.)

Within the show this pretense works, but that's by authorial fiat. Outside of the show, well, there's at least a long history of doing this and the audience is probably used to it. Knight's & Magic is not a show you think deeply about, anyway. I twitch here because I'm quietly scarred by Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket.

Checking in on the Fall 2017 anime season 'midway' through

It's time once again for a much of the way through update on my earlier impressions of this season. By now the shows have all shown their cards and my views and expectations have been solidified. In the process one show is turning itself into something amazing.

Excellent:

• Land of the Lustrous: This has just gotten more and more stunning as it goes along. The show has steadily ratcheted up the tension and the stakes, all the while with excellent execution in so many ways. The latest episode (episode 9) is a stunning peak of atmosphere and all of the crows coming home to roost at once, and nothing bad even happened in it.

  (LotL was good from the start but the early episodes weren't as excellent as the later ones have been. Not because they were bad, but simply because the show had to patiently build up the background and the overall situation before it could start all the rocks rolling downhill.)

• Girls' Last Tour: This continues to be beautiful and touching, among other things; it's been quietly and subtly exploring various bits of philosophy amidst the ruins of humanity's time on Earth. Each episode always pulls me in so well that I blink and it's over.

  (Recent episodes increasingly make it feel like the show as a whole is going somewhere, in a way that's slowly increasing an unseen tension. Parly this is because the show's increasingly making it clear that this setting is basically the end of the road.)

  One thing worth mentioning is that Girls' Last Tour has really amazingly good sound direction and design. The show's sound work is an important part of the overall atmosphere and mood it achieves, and the show make it sound effortless; the music and atmospheric sounds simply work so well.

• March comes in like a Lion: The recent arc around Kawamoto Hina has been generally stunning and wrenching in a good way, and in the process has pulled March back from brink of semi-boredom. Hina's story is so oppressive that I'm glad March has moved the focus mostly off it for the past few episodes.

Land of the Lustrous is more my kind of thing than Girls' Last Tour is, but otherwise I wouldn't want to rate them against each other. Land of the Lustrous is more straightforward and so comes across as more powerful to me; Girls' Last Tour is a lot more quiet and indirect, and it seems very likely that we'll get less answers from it (partly because answers aren't the point).

Very enjoyable to me:

• The Ancient Magus' Bride: This has continued to be a solid anime of a manga that I love. I don't think it's stunning and there have been some bits that were awfully anime in a conventional way, but the whole thing remains very enjoyable to watch; I really like seeing these stories animated and enjoying my foreknowledge of what's coming. To its credit, the superdeformed comedy bits have gotten better and better integrated over time.

They're okay and I'm getting what I expected:

• Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond: I've recently realized that this is basically an anime version of an American superhero team comic book. We have the same team of powerful people who have reasonably spectacular episodic fights and adventures, and the same fact that there is no overall plot or story movement. As an anime this is far more hard-edged than an American superhero comic would be, but it's basically the same experience.

  I'd probably be more enthused about BBB & Beyond if I cared about the characters, but I don't. Not even Leo, not any more.

• Kino's Journey (2017): I've realized that a major problem with the show is that it's simply shallow. It wants to address big philosophical issues, but its approach is bluntly obvious and feels like we're being beaten over the head. This would be okay if the show was otherwise beautiful or interesting, but it's not; it's generally flat otherwise.

  I've said on Twitter that Girls' Last Tour is what Kino's Journey should be and I stand by that. GLT is graceful and beautiful where KJ is straightforward and plain.

  (I don't remember what I saw of the original Kino's Journey being like this, so I should definitely go watch it at some point. Probably not this season, though.)

Neither of these shows are exactly good, but they're okay and at the moment I'm willing to keep watching them at a popcorn show level. To be honest, part of that is due to the name and history behind each of them. If I hadn't seen the first season of BBB, I might not be watching this one.

I'm getting tempted to check out Just Because!, so I may have something to say about it soon. I've officially dropped Recovery of an MMO Junkie after pausing it early on; the romance story may be charming, but I'm apparently not in the mood for that particular take on it.

Comedy and seriousness with the Kawamoto cats in March comes in like a Lion

March comes in like a Lion has always tried to blend some comedy into its serious overall tone. This has not always worked very well, because it's mostly been broad, silly comedy that could easily feel out of place amidst the rest of the show (and that was when the comedy even worked, which I feel it often didn't). One of those somewhat jarring comedy elements has been the Kawamoto family's cats, who've generally been presented as goofy things that the show went as far as giving voices to, so the cats could natter on about wanting some of the food on the table and so on.

Then came the most recent run of episodes, starting with episode 26, where Kawamoto Hina is in real emotional distress and the household is roiled with emotions. Now suddenly the Kawamoto cats are cats, presented with realistic looks, and we see them pressing up against their humans, trying to reassure them, or hiding under the table from the tensions around them. None of them speak, none of them are comedic or goofy. The mood has shifted and the cats are one of our bellweathers of that shift.

I really like this and think it's quite clever. It's not obtrusive; the cats and their behavior is a background thing in these scenes that you wouldn't consciously notice unless you were looking for it. But both that behavior and the shift from their previous behavior and presentation quietly helps reinforce the whole mood. And I think it wouldn't work as well as it does if the show had kept the Kawamoto cats as merely ordinary cats before; it is the shift from broad and unreal comedy cats to silent real ones that helps sell it so well.

(This elaborates on a tweet or two of mine, because I feel like it.)

On Princess Principal's ending

(There are some spoilers here.)

In my retrospective on the summer season, I said that Princess Principal wound up as more of a prequel than a story and waved my hands a bit about why that was so. Today I want to write more details about that. The first question to ask is if Princess Principal has a conventional ending. Usefully I can answer that based purely on story structure, without having to talk about the specifics of what happened.

There are two ways to have a conventional ending to a story; you can resolve a significant ongoing plot issue or you can move some dramatic characters significantly forward in their character arcs (or you can do both). If you're ending an entire work you wrap up the big things (for characters and/or the plot); if you're just ending a season, you just wrap up a medium-scale plot or move characters forward but not all the way to the end of their stories. Looked at purely through this structural lens, Princess Principal does neither. The show had no large scale plot as such (although it did have an overall situation that created the fundamental story conflict), and while the protagonists were all dramatic characters, none of them resolved their character arcs or ostensibly made dramatic changes.

At the same time, things very clearly happened over the course of Princess Principal; the protagonists all wound up in a significantly different place than they started out. The show is not simply an episodic collection of adventures where at most we find out character backgrounds and then get a brief two-episode 'climax' at the end. That these changes happen and what they are is why I call Princess Principal a prequel.

In the very first aired episode of Princess Principal, Dorothy and Chise have what is in retrospect a crucial conversation after Dorothy casually lies to some normal students:

Chise: That was a bold move.
Dorothy: It's best not to sneak around with these things.
Chise: I see Ange isn't the only one with a knack for lying.
Dorothy: Spies are all liars. You're lying to me now, Chise.
Chise: As are you.
Dorothy: So what do you say we try being honest with each other?
Chise: The idea has its charm. But if we stopped lying, we wouldn't be able to stay friends.
Dorothy: Is that really friendship?
Chise: Even parents and children lie to each other.

This deliberately sets up the usual genre atmosphere for spy stories where all of the characters have their own interests, trust is purely temporary, things aren't as they seem, and betrayal may lurk around the corner at any time. All of the protagonists have their characteristic roles in this atmosphere; Ange, Dorothy, and Chise are outright spies with their own interests and secrets, Princess is the mystery, and Beatrice is the naif outsider. In fact the entire first episode is there partly to establish this overall atmosphere, since the episode's plot is a classical spy story of deception, hidden motives, and betrayal.

Over the course of the rest of the series, all of that changes. As all of the protagonists undergo character development, we see them quietly transmute from a collection of spies thrown together into a group of comrades. This reaches its climax in the ending of the show, where over the course of the show's only real plot arc, one by one all of the characters deliberately choose to turn their backs on their previous associations and instead choose the people who've now become their friends. By the ending epilogue, these people have stopped being a group of spies thrown together and become a team that happens to work as spies. It's to Princess Principal's credit that all of these decisions feel inevitable in the light of everything we've seen the characters go through together. Of course Chise is going to come back. Of course Dorothy is ultimately going to quietly choose the people who've become her friends, and to let Ange know that.

In other words, Princess Principal is the origin story of a team, the prequel that explains how they came to be before they go on to have thrilling adventures together (if Princess Principal ever gets another season). It's not a whole story in and of itself, because it doesn't really go anywhere or resolve anything (either in plot or in character development), but the characters themselves change in important ways; they end as different people than they started and they've made real decisions in the process.