2016-12-23
One moment in Concrete Revolutio that symbolizes my issues with it
(There are spoilers.)
When Concrete Revolutio finished in the spring, I had somewhat mixed views of it. My views have only become more mixed and uncertain since then, and I can illustrate some of my qualms with the show by talking about one particular striking moment that has come to symbolize the show's core flaws for me.
Throughout the show, Kikko Hoshino has been not so much the protagonist (that's firmly established as Jiro Hitoyoshi) as our viewpoint character. She is one of the most innocent characters in the main cast and is often shielded from (and therefor surprised by) the darkness orbiting the other characters in the Superhuman Bureau. While she has a powerful dark side, she's only allowed to keep it briefly once it manifests in the show; afterwards, it is forcefully stripped away from her and she goes back to being a normal innocent person.
In the climactic fight at the end of the show, Kikko straight up kills someone. Oh, she doesn't wind up with blood all over her, the show's a bit more subtle than that; she consciously uses her power to teleport the evil bad guy into an energy-draining cell that will suck away all his power and destroy him (and she knows what the cell is and will do, as the bad guy just carefully explained that he was going to do this to Jiro).
Kikko doesn't react. No one blinks. This event is never referred to again. We briefly see Kikko later (in the show's epilogue), and she is completely unaffected by it. As far as the show is concerned, it's as if Kikko killing someone has no effect on either her or anyone else; it's trivial, not worth mentioning or thinking about. If Kikko was one of the other members of the Superhuman Bureau, sure, this would be perfectly in character; many of them are soaked in rather a lot of blood and wouldn't blink at another death. But Kikko is different; she is the innocent. You'd think that killing someone, and choosing to do so, would have some sort of effect on her.
Throughout the show, Concrete Revolutio neglected Kikko. She was our viewpoint character, but this merely made her into a mobile camera; it didn't mean that the show was going to give her more than cursory character development or much of a role in events. Her job was mostly to watch as things happened around her, not to be a player. Neglecting and sidelining Kikko was already one of the letdowns of the show; having her do something that should have a significant impact on her but then ignoring it was the icing on top.
(Using Kikko in the story this way was also something that CR indulged in periodically throughout its run; every so often, Kikko would show up to solve some problem or otherwise bail people out. At the time this often came across as a moment of triumph for Kikko, in that the show was finally giving her an important role, but I'm now not quite so sure of that.)
As I've turned Concrete Revolutio over in my mind in the time since it finished, this moment has become a symbol both of how CR treated Kikko in general and of how CR bit off more than it could really chew.
(This is a 12-days post.)
2016-12-22
The Ancient Magus' Bride is the one manga I'm definitely reading
I have a thing for urban fantasy, books like Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, much of Charles de Lint's output, quite a lot of Tanya Huff's work, and so on. Unsurprisingly this has carried over into my anime watching. Adding a dash of fantasy and magic will attract me to shows that I otherwise would have bounced off of.
As with basically every manga I wind up checking out these days, I stumbled across The Ancient Magus' Bride through anitwitter, the general collection of anime people that I follow there. I took a look because it sounded interesting, and it wound up hooking me right away, pretty much straight from its opening.
The Ancient Magus' Bride is not quite classical urban fantasy, but it's close enough; it is full of the same mixture of magic and normality, of cities and faeries and deep otherworldly wilds. And like the best fantasy, it understands that these fantastic creatures are often inhuman and this magic is dangerous. Well, can be; sometimes it can be beautiful. Sometimes it is both at once. And the fae are not the only monsters in the world, because humanity can supply plenty of monsters all on its own. All of this makes Ancient Magus' Bride very much my kind of thing and I've loved exploring more and more of its world and history as the manga goes along, along with the great characters.
I don't know how the recent OVA would come across for people who haven't read the manga, but for me it does a lot to capture the feel of the manga in animated form. The moments that are new to the OVA still feel authentically true to it (which is no surprise, since the manga's author was involved in the OVA). It's not quite the same as seeing the manga animated (the OVA is a flashback story), but it still makes me unreasonably happy and I'm looking forward to the future OVA installments.
(This is a 12-days post.)
2016-12-21
One nice thing Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo! did
KonoSuba was not a particularly good show, but it was just funny enough to keep me watching in the winter season (apart from episode 9, which falls into the 'burn it with fire now' category). Part of what made it funny was some of its cast of characters and how they bounced off each other; they weren't great people, but they were generally flawed in interesting ways. In the process of this, KonoSuba did something that I have to grudgingly admire it for.
It would have been very easy for the show to make Aqua and Megumin into basically useless characters, people who could talk the talk but definitely not back it up when the time came to do things. They're both already overblown characters and somewhat puffed-up, so it would have been funny and more than that, it would have been entirely typical of the genre. But KonoSuba doesn't do that.
Megumin may be a chuunibyo, but she's also perfectly competent. She can only cast one spell once a day, but it's a very good spell, one of the most destructive spells going; if you can get Megumin pointed in the right direction, nasty things are going to happen to your enemies. As I put it on Twitter once, Megumin is basically a version of Lina Inverse who skipped straight to Dragon Slave and loves it so much that she refuses to learn or use Fireball.
And Aqua, well, Aqua may be petty and flawed and arrogant and foolish, but she's also (still) a goddess. Literally, as the show makes clear. She can and does cast high level magic basically on demand (sometimes foolishly, of course) and do things like purify an entire lake all by herself. Within her sphere of magic there seems to be very little that she can't do if she wants to, and more than once she saves the day when she acts.
KonoSuba could have fully embraced Megumin and Aqua as laughingstock. It didn't; instead it made them competent and powerful, albeit with limitations, blind spots, and flaws. I have to reluctantly give it points for this decision.
(The less said about Darkness the better, and the main character is relatively noxious and unimportant. To my vague surprise the Wikipedia summary claims that Darkness is actually pretty powerful, but in the show she's basically completely ineffective so I maintain my stance here.)
(This is a 12-days post.)
2016-12-20
Bubuki Buranki shows that CG anime has a bright future
Let me admit something that I didn't really say at the time: neither Arpeggio of Blue Steel nor even Knights of Sidonia looked particularly great as anime shows. Arpeggio was serviceable; Sidonia did better, partly because it leaned into its particular gritty SF aesthetics, but that trick only works for a certain sort of show. Based on these shows, you would not be particularly enthused about the future of CG-based general anime.
The good news is that we don't have to worry about that now, because Bubuki Buranki shows that the future of CG anime today is actually pretty bright. I say this due to three things that Bubuki Buranki demonstrated over the course of its run.
First, it simply looks good. Sure, CG anime is not 2D anime so the two look somewhat different, but Bubuki Buranki's visuals go a lot beyond the merely serviceable. They are perfectly good and occasionally great, both in static screenshots and in motion (although the show undeniably improves over its run, with earlier episodes more clunky and less attractive than later ones). But merely looking good is just the minimum requirement in a visual medium like anime; it's table stakes. CG needs more than just that alone.
(You can see examples in, say, Evirus's Bubuki Buranki category and here. The latter shows some first-episode moments where the CG is, well, at least a bit obvious.)
Second, the show consistently exploited being in CG to do things that normal 2D shows either can't pull off at all or can only do sparingly. While the show went in for intricate character and costume designs that wouldn't have worked in 2D anime (cf), for me what really stands out is how expressive it made its characters. Even in ordinary situations, people were often making various sorts of faces at each other; over and over they actually had expressions (sometimes exaggerated ones because hey, this is anime).
(And more subtly all of this carried through into background characters, long shots, and other low-resolution situations. 2D anime often collapses into wacky faces when the animators have to draw characters at even moderate scales, much less small ones; Bubuki Buranki never did that I noticed. This is obviously much easier when you have CG models for everything and just have to make sure that nothing bad happens when you render them smaller.)
To be clear, this doesn't make Bubuki Buranki's CG better than normal 2D anime. It just means that the medium of CG has its own advantages for anime shows, which is nice; if we have to have CG shows (and all the evidence is that we're only going to see more of them), it's good that we're getting something for giving up 2D.
Third and perhaps most important, the show has convincingly demonstrated that it can combine traditional 2D exaggerations and other animation tricks with its CG. I'm not sure if these were actually CG renders styled differently or occasional moments of 2D drawings (or a combination of both), but however it was done the result was both seamless and anime. Here, have some screen shots to show what I mean.
2016-12-19
The spear-point in Thunderbolt Fantasy
(There will be spoilers.)
Under the surface, Thunderbolt Fantasy has an unusual structure. Although it has the expected big spectacular ending in the last episode, the real high point comes a bit less than half way through the second-last episode. The rest of the show is interesting and necessary, but it's also all denouement with a kind of inevitability to it and little real tension (cf). You might wonder how this can be.
Jo Walton has written about what she calls spear-points, which are moments that take on their power because of the weight of the story behind them. To quote her:
When Duncan picks the branches when passing through trees, he's just getting a disguise, but we the audience suddenly understand how Birnam Wood shall come to Dunsinane.
The climactic point in Thunderbolt Fantasy is such a spear-point; it discharges a huge central tension that the show steadily built up over its run. That central tension is the question of Shang, our protagonist.
All through the show there's been a mystery building about Shang. He's not notable or obviously incredibly skilled in the way that other characters are, there are weird things about him, and people go back and forth on how powerful he actually is (especially after he does not so great in one fight). Also, there's a scene where Lin Xue Ya gets to examine Shang's sword and exclaims that it's a terrifying sword, although of course he doesn't say why. So the show has built up all of this tension surrounding Shang. How good is he, really? When is he going to show what he can really do?
Then, part of the way into episode 12, in the middle of a fight, Shang throws away his sword to save Juan and we know the time has come. We're about to get answers at last. Shang is going to have to cut loose.
Thunderbolt Fantasy doesn't disappoint us and it doesn't waste the opportunity. First, Juan exclaims over Shang's sword, finally revealing to us what's so unusual about it so we can understand and believe in what's coming. Then we get a showy wuxia fight scene that's used as an excuse for Shang to show off, lecture us, and demonstrate his real power by curb-stomping everyone involved despite having thrown away his sword. When the dust settles we have answers, a named villain has gone down in a dramatic scene, and Shang has finally revealed himself as a badass.
That sequence, that revelation and its aftermath, is the big whoop it up, fist-pumping moment of Thunderbolt Fantasy. Not because it's the most spectacular or epic fight or the most tense moment, but because it's the scene where the spear-point finally lands, a spear-point that we've been waiting for practically from the start.
(Thunderbolt Fantasy understands how climactic a moment it is, too. For example, the show switches from ordinary fight music to the big main theme fight music when Shang's curb-stomping starts.)
(This is a 12-days post.)
2016-12-18
One little moment from Akagami no Shirayukihime's second season
I was not as enthused about the second season of Akagami no Shirayukihime (aka Snow White with the Red Hair) as I was of the first season, as I mentioned in my winter season retrospective. But as I also said, the second season gave us some excellent episodes and excellent moments in those episodes. Even now I remember some moments in particular, and so here is one of them, from episode 20 (the 8th episode of the second season).
2016-12-17
The tacit pressure of conformity, both to the community and myself
My best N in 2015 agreed pretty well with my year-end APR votes, but my 2014 best N did not. In 2014, my APR vote rated Mushishi's second season as my top show; almost a month later, my post demoted it all the way down to being only my third APR-eligible choice and I was not entirely enthused about it. So, what happened?
Here's the simple version: Mushishi's second season was a show that I was supposed to love, so I did. For a while. I was supposed to love it both because I genuinely loved the first season so how could I not love the continuation (well, there were reasons for that) and also because the anime fan community that I'm part of ostensibly liked the show and gave it critical acclaim. In the face of all of that I buried my qualms (also, also). Mushishi was good, the second season was not obviously bad and had basically all of the same magic, how could I not like it and love it, especially when plenty of people I respected also did?
So I rated Mushishi highly in APR and in public because it was something I was supposed to like as a good anime fan and as myself, even though the second season didn't land with the same impact as the first one (and I felt it at the time). I could only admit to my qualms around the edges and with qualifications that of course Mushishi second season was great, but. But by the time I wrote up my best N in 2014 the passage of time had made it so that I'd stopped being willing to lie to myself about it, and I could more clearly articulate my concerns (and being able to do that helped things along, because I could put logic behind what my gut was saying).
There was no explicit outside pressure here, no one who was pointing derisively at the people who didn't like Mushishi S2 or had qualms with it. It was the more subtle tacit pressure of conformity and expectations. Everyone wanted Mushishi's second season to be great and have the magic of the first one, so I convinced myself that it did, probably partly so I wouldn't be disappointed (us humans hate to be disappointed and betrayed, even by our own expectations).
I don't have any solutions to this general issue. Cutting myself off from the anime fan community and its aggregate tacit expectations is certainly not it; even if I wanted to do that, I'd still have the tacit pressure of my own past watching experiences. It's all well and good to say that I should get more backbone about listening to my gut and taking a contrary direction, but that's hard; the tacit pressure of conformity is real and not insignificant. I think the best I can hope for is to be consciously aware and alert about the possibility that it's acting on me.
(This is another of my 12 days of anime posts.)
2016-12-16
Safety first, or the oddity of bike lights in recent anime
I'm a cyclist, so I'm attuned to little nuances and oddities of how bikes are shown in shows. The one I've been noticing recently is how it seems to have become common, maybe even universal, to show road bikes with bicycle lights on their handlebars. This comes up quite visibly in Long Riders!, where any number of road bikes clearly show them, but it's not the only recent case I remember. Regalia - The Three Sacred Stars had a scene with a road bike in the background, and it too had been carefully depicted with a light.
(Road bikes are the go-fast kind with drop handlebars.)
There's two reasons that this is odd to me. First, road bikes are stereotypically minimal; the people who ride them don't have much truck with things like fenders in case of rain or ways to carry much on the bike. The second is simply that it's extra work for the animators and CG modelers (in the case of Long Riders!); more stuff on a bike is more stuff to draw and more time. Yet the shows still put lights on. I can only assume that having lights on your handlebars on road bikes is so prevalent in Japan that either it would look wrong to not have them or the animators just 'know' that that's part of how you depict bikes.
(I read the blog of someone who does a bunch of cycling in Japan, along with photography, and normally I'd check it to see if his photos of real world Japanese cyclists and their bikes shows them with headlights. Unfortunately his blog seems to be unavailable right now.)
In doing some research I discovered that Japan not only has a legal requirement for front lights (possibly only 'after dark', possibly in general) but that apparently it's actively enforced by the police (cf, and, and). If it's only an after-dark legal requirement, that doesn't entirely explain things, because many cyclists only plan on riding in daylight. Having good lights on during the day is starting to become more common in North America, on the grounds that it makes you more visible to cars and modern bike lights are pretty small and convenient (they're not inexpensive, but people who buy expensive road bikes generally don't worry about that). Maybe daytime lights have taken root in Japan more thoroughly than they have over here.
(In North America you're often doing well if people riding at night have lights and have them on. Even if it's a legal requirement, it's often not actively enforced; the police are too busy with other things.)
As a side note, I've been skimming bits of Long Riders! for reasons beyond the scope of this entry, and it was interesting to discover that the part of the second episode where one character takes her regular bike on the train all packed up in a giant bag is apparently an actual requirement for taking your bike on trains (from the bottom of this), not just politeness and so on.
(This is another of my 12 days of anime posts.)
2016-12-15
How Flip Flappers is using a world-building technique from science fiction
Science Fiction has an information problem. When you set a story in the modern era, your audience already knows a great deal about the setting and how things work; they already have a good picture of what the world looks like. But when you set your story in space, or on an alien planet, or in the future, the audience starts out knowing very little about the setting and so you have a lot of information to communicate to them; you have to create the world for them. Even if you keep the amount to a minimum, you're going to need to feed them some information just so they understand what's important to your story, to at least sketch out the world around the characters and the dialog.
When science fiction was a young genre, back in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s, authors lacked good ways of dealing with this problem and the result often wasn't pretty. But as time went on, SF as a genre developed a bunch of techniques for giving out information to the audience. The evolution of these techniques is part of why old SF stories can now feel clumsy and clunky; what was once the only way of feeding information to the audience is now the way that's only used by people who can't write better (or who don't understand how SF does it).
One of those tools is a trick that gets called 'incluing' (a term coined by Jo Walton, see also). In incluing, you put things into the story that don't fit into the normal world; these are the clues, little pieces of information that the audience will assemble in their heads to build a picture of your SF world. You don't necessarily do anything overt to draw attention to your clues, you just scatter them casually, in passing, through the story. They're just there, waiting for your audience to hit them and have their eyebrows go up. Incluing can work in any medium but is in some ways easier in visual media because it's easier to put things in the background; you don't have to mention the two suns, just have them in the sky. Want to communicate 'alternate world'? Have a bunch of dirigibles floating around in the background of a scene (yes, it's a cliche).
(Jo Walton describes this better and at more length in her article SF reading protocols, which is well worth reading in general.)
If this sounds a lot like how Flip Flappers has operated over its length so far, well, that's not an accident. Flip Flappers is actively using incluing and has been from the start. It has consistently thrown out of place bits and pieces at us in passing as part of its world building and has counted on us, the audience, to assemble the clues and work out their meaning and their place in the world over time. This is a brave thing to do, because it requires the audience to trust that the weird things mean something and are worth paying attention to, and to be blunt a lot of shows have betrayed that trust over the years by including weirdness that turned out to mean nothing and was just there to look cool. But Flip Flappers is willing to bet we'll trust it and the results are spectacular. It doesn't have to pause to explain things; instead it steadily builds up a world one piece at a time, expanding our understanding step by step. And in the process it can promote a character from the background to an important focus.
(This is different from using repeated motifs and symbolism, which Flip Flappers also does, in that we are supposed to actively notice the clues whereas the repeated motifs simply sit in the background, mostly below our awareness. The clues for incluing are explicitly out of place, or they wouldn't work.)
Most anime shows don't do this, for various reasons; the usual ways of explaining a show's world are much more overt, either visually or in the story itself (and sometimes both, of course). Flip Flappers is a rare show that is quite a SF anime not so much in its setting but in how it tells its story (although Flip Flappers' setting of course also includes SF elements).
(Looking back, much science fiction anime doesn't really use incluing very much. I have theories on why, but that'll have to be another entry.)
I suspect that Flip Flappers' significant use of incluing is one factor in some very polarized reactions to it. If you do trust the show, as I do, it is doing great work to subtly illuminate its world and explain things. If you don't trust the show, it is throwing pointlessly weird stuff at you and obtusely refusing to explain itself. We're both watching the same show and seeing the same things, but we interpret them differently.
2016-12-14
Anitwitter pushups [12 days of anime 2016, sort of]
Anitwitter is not why I do some pushups every morning (that would be due to Kirk Tuck). But @B0bduh and @GuyShalev certainly provided extra motivation and a more concrete goal early on in the process, and that still sticks with me. I'm not there yet and recently I've actually regressed (possibly because I'm now doing my pushups more properly, ie deeper), but I keep plugging away. Someday I'll get up to @B0bduh's level (I hope)! And maybe my arms will stop aching one of these days.
(As regular and even extensive cyclist (cf, and), I get a decent amount of exercise in general. But when you're a cyclist, every day is leg day and generally no day is arm day, so I figured that giving my arms some work to do was a good idea. Does it make carrying my not all that light bike up and down the occasional stairs any easier? Answer hazy, ask again when I can do more pushups in a row.)
(Although I don't promise to write twelve entries, this is part of @appropriant's 12 Days of Anime for 2016.)