Roving Thoughts archives

Checking in on the Summer 2013 anime season 'midway' through

It's time for the semi-traditional midway update to my early impressions. The overall summary is that this is an excellent season with multiple stunning shows.

Things I'm (still) watching, in order:

• Uchouten Kazoku: What Eccentric Family truly excels at is its storytelling (which is not the same thing as plot or action). UK doesn't have the most original or attractive sounding plot but none of that matters; what it excels in is in a sense its execution, of how the plot is conveyed to us. That's storytelling, a collection of moments like raindrops.

  UK has the best characters of the season (for me) and Yasaburo has a great narrative voice (which is, unsurprisingly, a storyteller's voice). To be honest I was hooked on UK from his opening narration in the first episode.

• Gatchaman Crowds: I have no coherent words to sum up the complexity and plain smartness of this show. It continues to twist and turn in ways that are simultaneously surprising and entirely logical and to be a rocket heading, well, somewhere. This show is fast-paced (without feeling at all rushed) with not an ounce of flab on it.

  Hajime continues to rock. Everyone does, really, but especially Hajime. DIY Hajime really sold me on the show.

• Rozen Maiden Zurückspulen: This is a fine show but I find it hard to watch, partly because of the feeling of creeping doom. Unwound Jun is not in a good place and not having pleasant experiences and after six episodes it's hard to shake the feeling that he is not going to have a really happy ending.

  (Probably it gets more cheerful if I watch more.)

• Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya: I have to revise my initial opinion: this delivers plenty of well executed magical girl fighting action and some great Type-Moon jokes and references. The second half of episode six was especially epic. The core plot remains nothing special enough to write home about but the overall execution is more than enough to keep me watching.

  I think that this is much more enjoyable if you know enough Fate-verse lore to get most of the major references, such as the cards and what happens with Illya in episode six. I'm not sure how interesting it is for someone without that background.

• Monogatari Series Second Season: My interest level has climbed up from where it was initially but the show is still not really rocking my world. It's okay and interesting enough for me to keep watching, partly because it's now stuck Araragi in a tough situation.

Now declared a miss:

• Stella Jogakuin Koutouka C3-bu: The short version is in my tweet. The long version is that the show is not really about the action, it's about the character drama and the character drama (and the characters themselves) did not hook me. I might have stayed watching purely for the action but there isn't enough of it and it's merely ordinary (which is what you'd expect if it's only there to support the character drama).

  (This stands in contrast to Girls und Panzer where the action was interesting by itself and I cared more about what happened with the characters.)

In ongoing shows from last season (and before) Majestic Prince remains excellent, I am sort of watching Railgun S every so often in bursts, and Yamato 2199 is absolutely great (and I will catch up sometime).

(I'm treating Yamato 2199 sort of how I treat really great treats; it's so good that I keep saving it to savour slowly. This is kind of silly but it's very me, and the show lacks the weekly new episode release that would otherwise prod me into action.)

Two views of Gatchaman Crowds' Joe

Thomas Zoth (note spoilers disclaimer):

And Joe? Always so cool with his smoking and drinking and apparent disinterest in his attractive young co-workers? He’s actually suicidal. His self-destructive impulses were, somewhat surprisingly, self-destructive.

My view of Joe is less grim and dark than this one. What I think is that Joe is living in a dream.

In real life Joe is a Toudai graduate who has somehow wound up in what is basically a relatively unimportant and certainly unimpressive civil service job. Outside of the office he has a second life as the classical heroic badass, too cool for words to contain; he hangs out drinking in bars looking suave and acting mysterious, for example. One way to interpret this based on the information the show has given us so far is to view Joe as Walter Mitty with actual powers. His oh so cool life as a Gatchaman is fundamentally an illusion and an act, an escape from the mundanity of his day to day drudge and something that gives his life importance and meaning. He acts the way he does because this is how heroic badasses are supposed to act; he is deliberately living out the cliche whether he admits it to himself or not. His entire self is defined and sustained by being the hero, not the civil servant.

(Spoiler warning.)

In this reading, Joe collapses against Berg-Katze in episode 7 because Berg-Katze systematically destroys Joe's dream life by shattering the illusion. There is a really revealing dialog at the end of the fight; after Joe has been unable to do anything to Berg-Katze, Berg-Katze plays the voice of Joe's inner self and digs in to Joe with the following:

[...] I can't possibly win. It's impossible. I acted tough until now, but in the end, I'm just a civil servant. I wanted to make it big, but I knew my limitations from the beginning, really. Oh, well. I guess I'll just keep trailing on in life. Not like there's a whole lot I can do, anyway. I should just give up on my dreams and resign myself to being a nobody. [...]

This is Joe's secret and soul-destroying terror: that his daytime life is the reality and his nighttime cool heroism is the illusion. Forced to face it, Joe lacks the strength to go on anyways and his doubts consume him.

(The translation I'm using comes from Commie's fansubs.)

Bike helmets are a distraction

It started on Twitter, where a conversation caused me to have a realization that's obvious in retrospect:

@cwage: so, B-cycle is awesome, but it occurred to me recently that it basically promotes people riding bikes in the city without a helmet. discuss.
[...]
@cwage: let me rephrase my earlier tweet: Nashville is not (yet) a bike friendly city. not enough infrastructure. not nearly enough bicyclist density
@cwage: thus, automobiles lack awareness, and B-cycle users are largely inexperienced riders. the combination (without helmets) is terrifying

@cks: @cwage I think the combination would still be terrifying even if the B-cycle riders wore helmets.
@cks: .@cwage Wearing a bike helmet is not a substitute for avoiding getting hit or crashing. It's just a minor safety boost if you do.

There is a lot of fuss made about people being irresponsible when they don't wear bike helmets and about how you need to wear a bike helmet to be really safe and so on. Some places have mandatory helmet laws, some places just strongly encourage it through social mechanisms (Toronto is the latter). Helmets may or may not increase your safety in practice for various reasons; there are serious arguments that they don't help once you take a total view (instead of focusing just on what happens once a cyclist gets hit).

But all of that misses the issue that I summarized in my last tweet: helmets are only a marginal improvement and if they do any good you're already in trouble. They're a consolation prize if you have an accident; you may be hurt but sometimes you'll be hurt less than if you hadn't been wearing a helmet. It's much more important not to have the accident in the first place. Getting people to wear helmets is something you think about after you've tried to keep them out of accidents in the first place. Someone who is wearing a helmet but riding unsafely or in a dangerous situation is much worse off than someone without a helmet who is riding in safety.

(This is especially bad if wearing a helmet has convinced the cyclist that they can ride more aggressively and less safely because now they have protection. Wrong (but very human).)

That's what I mean by helmets being a distraction. In practice the 'wear your helmet' advocacy has wound up causing people to focus on helmet wearing to the sad exclusion of keeping cyclists out accidents. Given limited resources, limited attention spans, and human psychology, we'd be much better off if people ignored helmets and focused on accident prevention.

(I understand the various reasons why people can't, including that it's very hard to pass up an obvious harm mitigation measure.)