Roving Thoughts archives

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).

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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.)

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.

PS: Long Riders! turns out to have a crazy level of attention to detail that almost no one is going to notice.

(This is another of my 12 days of anime posts.)

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.

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.)

Checking in on the Fall 2016 anime season 'midway' through

It's time for a slow-moving midway update on my early impressions. This is late enough that shows are generally moving towards their climaxes instead of wallowing in the midway point, but that just gives me a better idea about them (and perhaps more room to get let down in the end, but I don't really want to be pessimistic this season).

Great:

• Flip Flappers: This is my kind of show in the same way that Kyousougiga was, in part because it's a show that's whole-heartedly embracing the potential of its media and could only have been done in animation (and I'm biased towards that). But as Space Dandy taught me, mere animation firepower isn't enough to hold my attention; what really matters is the characters and the story. And that has been compelling and thought-provoking all on its own. This has easily become the show I anticipate the most every week.

  (It's also one of the rare shows that gets me to actively think and talk about it a lot (cf). Mostly I'm a quiet consumer of anime, so a show that I can't get out of my head is unusual.)

Very good:

• Sound! Euphonium second season: This is stuffed with all of the things that KyoAni does so well these days; it is beautiful, full of lovely character touches, loaded with great scenes, and so on. But the story has not (yet) come together with the power and drive that the first season had, with everything sprinting forward to a single destination.

  (Also, I have grumps with the most recent episodes.)

Good:

• March comes in like a Lion: As with my early impressions, ultimately I continue to just like it. The show's shifted from painting portraits to moving Rei forward (even while it looks back to explain him), which is a good and necessary development. Unlike some people, I'm not bothered by the periodic funny interludes; if anything, I think that they're an important part of making the show work as a whole.

  I'll wave my hands here, but I think that without these interludes I'd find the show too unrelenting. And in a way they're true to real life, because in real life ordinary and even funny things go on around us even as we go through our own darknesses. March lives inside Rei's head a great deal, but there's more to the world than just that.

• BBK/BRNK: The show remains solid and fun, along with sometimes being beautiful and sometimes surprising me. It can also be exceptionally silly and funny, which is part of its goofy charm.

Popcorn entertainment:

• Brave Witches: Yes, I know, I dropped this after the first episode. I changed my mind, because apparently I wanted some popcorn entertainment this season and this is inoffensively tolerable in its genre beats (although sometimes it stumbles a bit).

  Why this and not Regalia? In part, apparently because flying witches dogfighting CGI aliens is more my thing that giant robots are (even with the no-pants thing).

Dropped:

• Regalia - The Three Sacred Stars: I'm going to wave my hands here, but certainly a large part of it is that giant robots are not really my thing and some of the characters were overly annoying. (I basically dropped this as the result of writing up my early impressions, as I suspected would be the case.)

Part of me still wants to take a look at Fune wo Amu, but I've been sitting on this for most of the season and haven't done anything about it so if I'm being realistic it's probably not going to happen.

In Memoriam: Looking back at the Spring 2006 anime season (part 2)

(This won't make much sense without reading part 1 first.)

If you remember the Spring season of 2006 reasonably well, you may notice a striking omission from the list of shows I'd looked at in part 1. Namely, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya aired that season but I didn't even mention it. How could I possibly write about the Spring 2006 season and not cover Haruhi?

As it happens, I have a record of my initial reaction to Haruhi's first (broadcast) episode, back in the spring of 2006:

gregory says "Have you watched The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya?"
You say "I admire the high concept of starting off the first episode as a crappy tragically bad student film. At the same time, it means that the first episode is a crappy, stereotypically bad student film."
You say "So no, effectively not."
gregory laughs

As it went on, my friend Gregory Blake wound up loving Haruhi and he did his best to try to get me to watch it. Unfortunately, if you know Haruhi you know that it's very difficult to try to explain why it's so worth watching without actually spoiling the surprise. While he was alive, Gregory didn't spoil me and he failed to persuade me to power through that first episode of a terrible student film to get to the meat of the show.

After his death, I wound up feeling that because he'd loved Haruhi so much I should watch it basically in his memory. And once I was watching it, well, I wound up really loving it; Haruhi somewhat retroactively became one of the highlights of the Spring 2006 season for me. Call it part of Gregory's legacy. Even today my memories of Haruhi are inextricably tangled up in the circumstances under which I came to watch it.

(So yeah, Gregory was totally right about it being something I'd enjoy. And I'm even glad he didn't spoil me about it, because that definitely was a good double-take.)

Thank you, Gregory Blake, for that careful, spoiler-free, heartfelt advocacy for a show that you loved. In memoriam.

In Memoriam: Looking back at the Spring 2006 anime season (part 1)

In the spring of 2006, I'd reached a point where I felt I had things to say about anime but I didn't quite feel like running my own blog for it for various reasons (despite already having a technical blog). A friend I knew online very generously offered to let me write guest posts on his blog and I decided that my first post would be a summary of the season's episodes that I'd seen so far. I wrote up my views but for various (bad) reasons I sat on my post and didn't actually publish it on my friend's blog right away. I more or less had time to hesitate and get up my courage, right?

Then my friend Gregory Blake died. Well. So much for that.

In the end it wouldn't be until 2009 that I started writing about anime stuff again. However, I am an inveterate electronic packrat so I never threw away that post about the start of the Spring 2006 season, even though it was never going to see the light of day after Gregory's death. For various reasons I've decided to dust it off, reformat it slightly, and run it here, ten years and change later.

If you read through my list of shows below and remember the spring season of 2006, you may notice an elephant (not) in the woodpile. Therein hangs a tale, and since this entry is already long enough I have put it in part 2 of my story.

(For the really curious, my original HTML file, untouched since May 14th 2006, is here.)

My Spring 2006 brief impressions (all text below is from 2006)

Some brief capsule summaries of my views on this season's new shows, because I feel like running my keyboard off and gregory has generously given me a platform to do it from. I'm not going to try to describe the shows (especially in one sentence); look them up in the usual set of places. If I don't mention it, either I haven't seen it yet or I'm not watching it at all for various reasons.

Rating scheme: how eagerly I am looking forward to the next episode, from +3 ('must have right now') to -3. Because I am a fan, I watch down to -1 or -2, depending on how busy I am. Ratings are pretty much relative, since they depend on what else is coming out at the same time.

• The Third - Aoi Hitomi no Shoujo (1-2): +3

  Ass-kicking female protagonist plus sardonic sidekick plus mysterious goings on equals WIN. As usual, a show that I think is good is getting fansubbed only slowly.

• Black Lagoon (1-3): +2

  Modern piracy has never looked quite this stylish; the over the top take on the violence fits in.

• Air Gear (1-6): +2

  Generic but well executed 'sports' anime; empty calories, but tasty and I keep coming back for another bite. I don't even mind the crazed goofyness of the sport.

• Zegapain (1-4): +1

  Giant robots are not usually my thing, but this is well animated, laced with lots of mysteries, and things keep happening.

• xxxHOLIC (1-5): +1

  So far mostly a charming tour through the supernatural.

• Ergo Proxy (1-9): +1

  A stylish future plus a bunch of mysteries, but it may be about to start explaining things (which is the doom of many an otherwise good show).

• TOKKO (1-2): +1

  I am a sucker for supernatural mysteries mixed with action; I could live without the fanservice.

• Tale of Saiunkoku (1): +1

  I don't mind ancient China (with the serial numbers filed off) and so far all of the protagonists are interesting (and some are spunky).

• Higurashi no Naku Koro ni (1-5): +1

  Supernatural horror/mystery mixed with harem game, with ordinary animation. The horror aspects are unusually well done, and I never know what's going to happen next.

• Simoun (1-2): +1

  The world setup is intriguing, but it remains to be seen where the anime will go with it; the plot and action have barely gotten off the ground. This would be a +0 except that I'm hoping it goes somewhere cool, and soon.

• Yume Tsukai (1-3): +0

  A lighthearted show about hunting down bad dreams. So far the formula is charming instead of tiring.

• RAY the animation (1-5): +0

  The adventures of a very peculiar surgeon. Well animated but contains a number of over the top elements that make me twitch, and may drive me away in the long run.

• Makai Senki Disgaea (1-4): +0

  Redeemed from a lower rating by not taking itself seriously. It's goofy and amusing, but very definitely empty calories.

• Tsubasa Chronicles Second Season (1-2): +0

  More of the same of the first season. I wish they'd hurry up with the real plot, although that's unlikely since this has the stately pace of a magical girls' show (substituting feather of the plot arc for monster of the week).

• Good Witch Of The West (1-2): -1

  A semi fantasy setting that is over-supplied with girls with robust glowing cheeks. I'm not sure where this is going and I'm not sure I'm interested in finding out, partly because it seems to be rather shoujo.

• Utawarerumono (1-3): -1

  There is nothing wrong with this anime; it's just failed to really engage my interest after three episodes. Some of the characters are a little too generic, too.

• Kiba (1-3): -2

  Pretty much a paint by numbers action anime, complete with the moody misunderstood protagonist who turns out to be really good with an important power.

• .Hack//Roots (1): -3

  Dropping mysterious hints in the first episode does not equal actually creating any interest, at least for me.

• Soul Link (1): -3

  This show wears its panties on its sleeve practically from the opening scene. Not particularly well animated, far too generic, and much too much fanservice.

Overall this seems like a relatively ordinary (or even weak) season. No show really makes me sit up with enthusiasm; there's no Mushishi or Noein. The Third is closest, but it probably would have been only a +1 or so in January.