Roving Thoughts archives

A thought on what Moretsu Pirates is about

When I started hearing about it and during the early episodes, I expected Moretsu Pirates to be an action show. You know, with pirating (or at least privateering), space battles, and so on. Since then I've come around to the feeling that Pirates is actually a character study, primarily of Marika.

As an action show, Pirates is kind of disappointing because there hasn't been much action; the show's been 'slow-moving' (from an action point of view). Viewed as a show about the characters, I think it's more interesting and the pacing, plots, and focus make more sense and fit better.

(For example, as an action show the resolution of events at the end of episode 12 is terribly disappointing; you have a tense charged situation that should be resolved through exciting action and instead, well, it isn't. But as a character piece it's an interesting view at a side of Marika that we hadn't seen before, among other things.)

All of this leads me to not expect Pirates to have some big action finish in the later parts of the show.

(This is almost short enough for Twitter but not quite. Well, maybe if I was cleverer about writing short things.)

A look back at Ano Natsu de Matteru

I've been thinking over my view of AnoNatsu ever since it ended recently. In the end I can summarize my tangled thoughts this way: I enjoyed the show quite a bit but I don't know if you will, because I don't know how much sense parts of it will make if you haven't also seen Onegai Teacher (which I have).

To start with let's talk about the things that AnoNatsu did well and in particular, I want to talk about how it wasted no time on cliches. If you've watched much romance anime, you know that there's a whole stable of shopworn cliches that the genre uses to stall for time; these are things like the misheard conversation, the important words that are drowned out by some other noise so the target doesn't hear them, the person who can't actually confess their affection (sometimes starting out to make a confession and then suddenly changing the words they're saying), and so on.

AnoNatsu didn't have any time or patience for these cliches. When the show let this sort of situation come up at all (and caused me to start wincing), it immediately moved to demolish it again. Pretty much every single one of these potential cliches was mowed down by the end of the episode in which it first appeared. Indeed, mowing down the cliches was not infrequently used to aggressively move the show on. I found this endlessly refreshing and quite enjoyable.

(For various reasons, I've seen enough romance anime to have become thoroughly tired of these cliches.)

A story like this fundamentally revolves around the characters and I think AnoNatsu did a good job here. The characters generally aren't exceptional but they are well done. As people have said, Kaito and Ichika (the main couple) are a bit boring, but I think that was necessary; I don't think AnoNatsu had the time and space to both make Kaito and Ichika's romance really interesting and also cover the other characters. Instead AnoNatsu makes the leads fall for each other in a pretty straightforward way in order to leave room for other things.

(Although it's unfair I can't help comparing AnoNatsu with Toradora, which had a bit more than twice as many episodes and thus had much more time to let the story grow slowly.)

And finally, let's be honest; Remon pretty much steals the show any time she appears. She is not so much a character as an archetype, the friendly Trickster; you never know what she's going to do next, but it's probably going to be both interesting and knowing.

Which brings us to my major concerns about the show, which are Remon and the ending. I didn't mind the ending, but in many ways it's very abrupt and very Remon. And however much I like her, Remon herself is an extremely convenient if low-key deus ex machina, one that's ultimately responsible for a significant amount of the plot and the foreshadowing and layering in the show. Which is where we get into my overall concern.

AnoNatsu is clearly a spiritual sequel to Onegai Teacher; there are plenty of clear similarities and a certain amount of nodding references. It's probably not a literal sequel (I don't think you can quite reconcile the timelines and the worlds of the two shows) but a lot of things make much more sense if you assume that something like Onegai Teacher happened in the past of AnoNatsu. In particular, it really helps to assume that Remon is also more or less Ichigo Morino from OT, perpetually frozen at her current apparent age.

You can make things in AnoNatsu make sense without this link if you read a certain amount of things between the lines (and I have seen commentary from people who have not seen OT and did enjoy AnoNatsu). But I think that having seen OT and seeing the link at least makes AnoNatsu much easier to enjoy, and I don't have any idea myself how someone without that background would find AnoNatsu.

Liked: yes, clearly, since I eagerly watched all of it despite not normally watching romance anime. However, it's no Toradora; ultimately it will probably be forgettable but fondly remembered.

Rewatch: no. It's not that fascinating.

Using automatic exposure locking

Back in 2008 when I set up my D90 and wrote down my settings, I said this about the AE-L button:

I don't know enough to use exposure holding, but if I do 'tap to hold' seems to be the least obnoxious way of doing it.

Boy, I was kind of innocent back then. Nowadays I have learned what autoexposure locking is for the hard way and I use it reasonably frequently. The simple way to put it is that locking the exposure is the quick way to deal with the importance of watching your exposure from shot to shot.

If you're not in full manual mode, the camera can change the metering during a sequence of photographs; it can do this even if all you're doing is changing the exposure compensation. Locking the exposure with AE-L counteracts this, giving you a stable exposure that you can make consistent adjustments to. Otherwise your attempts to adjust the exposure to get the picture right can be happening on top of quicksand, so that you dial in some negative exposure compensation to correct things but then the camera decides to expose more so in the end your exposure winds up just the same. This is both pointless and frustrating when it happens (and very puzzling if you don't notice the exposure shifting on you; here you are adding exposure compensation yet nothing is happening, or the wrong thing is happening).

I've repeatedly stubbed my toe on this so these days I've learned that if I'm taking a sequence of pictures of the same thing the first thing I should do is hit the AE-L button, especially if I'm just working to get the exposure right. Otherwise, even if I'm just lowering the camera to look at the histogram after I've taken a picture the composition can be just different enough when I bring it back up to my eye that the Nikon matrix metering changes the base exposure.

I maintain that my choice of 'tap to hold' is absolutely the right option for this on Nikon cameras, at least for what I want to use AE-L for. It would be very hard to have to keep one finger on the AE-L button all the time, even when I'm doing things like checking the histogram for specific areas of the picture.