Roving Thoughts archives

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.)

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.)

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.)