Roving Thoughts archives

The one bad moment in Sora no Woto

About a year ago I wrote that Sora no Woto had one moment that made me unable to unreservedly recommend it. I've kind of owed my readers (or at least Author) an explanation of that moment ever since then, so here it is. This is a spoiler in that knowing this may detract from your enjoyment of the series, which is a pity because it's (otherwise) an excellent series, full of the kind of things that I like.

The one bad moment comes at the end of episode 8 (here is a brief full summary of the episode). In the episode, the garrison is expecting an important call that has to be answered and Kanata (the main protagonist) volunteers to watch the phone. After drinking refreshments with visitors, she's stuck alone and her sense of duty glues her to the phone even as her need to use the toilet grows increasingly urgent. Finally someone else shows up and Kanata bolts for a bathroom in desperation.

So far this is only moderately crass and it actually is important for the plot that Kanata has a reason to dump the phone duties on the first person to show up. But it leads to the bad moment: the ending of the episode strongly implies (but does not state outright) that Kanata does not make it to the bathroom in time and ends up peeing herself.

This implied ending is noxious, crass, unnecessary, pointless pandering. There is no need for it, it doesn't even vaguely serve some plot (or character) point, and it's never mentioned in future episodes. The episode would have been just as well served (better served, really) if it had ended with, say, Kanata diving into a bathroom and slamming the door. And it's not as if Sora no Woto had any other moments like this; as far as I can remember, it doesn't even have any fanservice.

I still like Sora no Woto a lot. But I like it despite this bad moment and the existence of this bad moment makes me think very grumpy things about the people behind the show.

(To be clear about something: I dislike the moment but I'm not utterly horrified by it. What really annoys me is that it exists at all.)

A note on Infinite Stratos's Laura (and Ichika)

Author in reaction to my revisiting IS:

[...] The best shows of the genre have always had quirky, interesting characters injected into their relatively stock situation ([...]). IS has, well, Charlotte and an honorable mention in Laura.

It is also curious how our psychopath haremette gets points from Chris. My tastes lay, or actually run at full speed, in the opposite direction

The short answer is that I differentiate between attractive characters and interesting ones. I don't think that Laura is necessarily an attractive character; as Author mentions, she's more than a little bit off. But she's not a standard haremette straight from central casting, as many of the others are (childhood friend, stuck up rich girl, tsundere, etc). Her crazyness (and the resulting lack of genuine attractiveness) is why she only gets an honorable mention in comparison to Charlotte.

I would say that Ichika is far from stereotypical in the way harem leads usually are not. If they are not doormats, they are assholes, and there's nothing else.

First off, I have to admit that I don't actually remember much of what Ichika did in IS.

To me, Ichika falls into the general category of romance leads who just sort of muddle along in an undistinguished manner (much like the protagonist in, say, Otome Youkai Zakuro). Ichika is not a passive doormat, but he clearly didn't make much of an impression and I don't remember him doing anything much to take charge of the chaos around him. 'Did decently well for a teenaged boy' doesn't make him interesting.

(Mind you, it's hard for a male lead to do much in a harem setting without destroying the setting since he can't exactly pick someone and tell the rest of the girls to go away. Sustaining the 'harem' bit intrinsically requires that the character at the center not do anything definite. I suspect that this is one reason the genre fell out of favour, since it requires things to spend a lot of time not going anywhere.)