Roving Thoughts archives

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.)

Reconsidering Infinite Stratos

Primarily due to Author's quiet advocacy, I've been thinking back about my view of Infinite Stratos for a while now. I've come to think that I (and the echo chamber of the anime blogosphere) may have been unduly dismissive, so I've decided to take another pass at what I think about it.

Stripped of its particular setting, Infinite Stratos is an old fashioned harem action/comedy show done pretty much straight, of a kind that we don't see very much any more (it's firmly in a genre that runs all the way back to, say, Tenchi Muyo! at least). The reason we don't see these sort of shows much any more is that they've been out of favour for a while, partly because the genre used to be overused by a lot of generic shows of this nature.

(I think this genre issue is part of the general dismissive reaction to IS.)

Despite the disfavour there's nothing wrong with the genre as such, and the genre means that IS is a cheerful action show of a sort that isn't very common these days (as Author notes). It's even relatively free of fanservice (which seems to be an ingredient that gets put into everything these days, much like salt and sugar). However, within its genre I think that IS is average. What brings it down to average is most of the characters, who are decidedly ordinary and even stereotypical (some of them almost painfully literally so, such as the pushy childhood friend). The best shows of the genre have always had quirky, interesting characters injected into their relatively stock situation (who could forget Tenchi Muyo's Ryoko and Ayeka, for example). IS has, well, Charlotte and an honorable mention in Laura.

(I don't think it's any accident that Charlotte is a fan favorite; she's one of the few interesting, non-standard characters in IS. That she's aware and smart is an extra bonus, since aware people are rare in harem action shows.)

What's in IS's favour is that it's unusual for today. Genuinely lighthearted action shows are uncommon right now; even something like this year's Sacred Seven had tragedies and death in the backstory. IS skips all of that, at least in what got animated, and that made it (as Author puts it) joyful and live.

(You should ignore my quibbles about the setting; they apply only if you take the show's background seriously, which I think you shouldn't. The background is just an excuse for the harem action fun.)

My short form summary is that IS is an average show, but shows in its genre aren't being done very much today and even an average harem action show is a nice contrast from much of today's anime.

Looking back at the Fall 2011 anime season

As the Fall 2011 season winds down, it's time for me to take an honest retrospective look back to go with my early impressions, to see how well I did at predicting what I'd watch and how much I was seduced by early impressions.

(My reasons for wanting to do this are more or less covered here.)

When I try to order the shows I watched this season, I have a problem; how actively I watched shows doesn't correspond with how good I think they are. I actively watched several shows primarily because they were mindless, undemanding entertainment; other, more demanding shows languished because they weren't quite good enough to overcome the need for more attention and more involvement.

Things I have clear ordering opinions about:

• UN-GO: This is by far and away the best show of the season for me. It does essentially everything right. I need to write a proper appreciation for it but in the mean time I want to say that this is plain the smartest show of the season, and it was not afraid to assume that its audience was smart too. One aspect that I particularly liked is that it felt no need to have bad people kick dogs just to make sure we got that they were bad; instead it was perfectly content to just let them talk and have the audience draw our own conclusions.

  I don't know if we'll get another season of this, but I really want one.

  Highly recommended (with the qualifications from the early impressions). Watch two or three episodes and pay attention, then see if you're hooked.

• Ben-To: This didn't even make my initial list of shows to watch, but once I started doing so it rapidly became my second favorite show of the season. It's not a deep show but I think it's very well done for what it is. (I wrote a longer note about it.)

  In another season it might not have done so well, but for this season it was clearly the best lightweight anime; all of the other candidates were either flawed, too serious at times, or both. Ben-To never forgot that above all it was supposed to be fun, to make me smile, and it handily succeeded.

At this point rankings become split by the watchability versus quality problem:

• C3: Competent but flawed, this was ultimately a lightweight show, but that's what made it easy for me to watch it on a regular basis. I found it enjoyable and I like that it never descended into predictable harem antics; things always kept happening. It's nice enough that I'd watch a second season if they made one.

  (In short, this is junkfood anime.)

• Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon: This mixed just enough action to keep me watching despite the incoherence, slow moving stuff, and huge amount of background information needed to understand what was going on. Sadly it wasn't even really good action.

  This was another junkfood show.

  If I was smart, I would skip watching the second season. I suspect I'm not going to be that smart.

• Guilty Crown: It's been pretty. The action sequences are nicely done by and large. The whole thing makes an acceptable, generic action show (although it may yet end badly). If examined too closely you will become grumpy, so try not to do that.

  I think this is an average show (maybe sub-average), but many of the things that drag it down to average also made it very watchable for me, partly in kind of a train wreck way.

• Fate/Zero: I had a very bipolar relation with F/Z this season; some times I couldn't wait to watch the next episode, but sometimes I sat on it for quite a while (eg the Rin episode). I think it's objectively better than say C3 but it was clearly the less watchable show for me, partly because it's a lot more serious and heavy; it was never a show I could watch for mindless enjoyment. It's also moving somewhat slowly.

  Fate/Zero has irritated me by going on a season-long pause at a significant cliffhanger. Right at the start of a major fight is not where you should have a three month pause.

• Shana III: Oh, Shana. What can I say about you? The best I can say is that recent episodes have picked up the pace and interesting things are now happening. But up until recently, things were slow and boring (and I did not like Shana as a helpless prisoner, thanks; the Shana I like is an action heroine). Also, there remain major question marks over where this is going, so I give it fifty/fifty odds that I will wind up disliking the ending.

• Last Exile - Fam, The Silver Wing: It's okay. It's decently done and decently enjoyable. It's not thrilling. I'm interested enough to keep watching, slowly.

• Persona 4: There isn't anything wrong with this, it's just that it was never compelling enough to get me to watch it except when I was a bit bored, which is why it's at the bottom of this list. I watched 8 episodes and then stopped for a month before watching the next four, which probably made the pace more tolerable.

Abandoned:

• Maji de Watashi ni Koi Shinasai (#4): once it became obvious that this was going to be almost entirely harem antics, not the amusing action of the first two episodes, I dropped it.

In some ways, I did a lot better this season than in summer in that I've remained interested in all of the shows that I started out watching (and even found another partway through). Although it's disappointing that none of them picked up their game, the flaws of Guilty Crown, Shana III, and Horizon were obvious from the start so I'm not going to call myself overly optimistic about any of them.

(If I was less invested in the Shana series, watching Shana III would be a mistake.)

In another way this was not a great season; the only two shows that I was clearly and consistently enthused about were UN-GO and Ben-To, and I encountered the latter because I felt uninspired about watching all of my other options. There's a bunch of decently acceptable shows and one (Fate/Zero) that I sort of think I should feel more enthused about, but the evidence shows that I was kind of meh about most everything.

A little something about Ben-To

Ben-To didn't even make my initial list of shows to watch this season; I only looked at a couple of episodes when I saw a passing mention of it somewhere as the most GAR show of the season and thought that was interesting enough to take a look at it (at the time I was bored with most of my other options).

(To me, 'GAR' connotes a kind of more or less deliberate over the top nature in the spirit of Gurenn Lagann. This is probably not how most people use the term.)

The description is right, at least for my version of GAR. Ben-To has been plain fun (although I could have done without some of its attempts at sex-based humour involving Satou, the lead character). While it follows standard tropes of shonen action that may grate on some, I'd describe it as earnest but not serious; to put it one way, it has a light touch. I think it helps that the premise of 'people fight over half-price bento' is inherently hard to take seriously.

(Another thing I like is that Ben-To's willing to be subtle and not completely spell things out.)

Ben-To is not really about the fighting, either. It spends almost no time on the actual fights or on shonen fighting tropes like the characters powering up (there are a few fights that get animated but not in any real detail). Instead it focuses on the things around the fights, especially the characters, and the characters are interesting enough (sometimes in an over the top way) to sustain my interest.

In a pleasant change it had relatively little fanservice and what fanservice it did have was generally confined to specific scenes instead of being thrown in your face every so often. (In short, no panty shots despite a fair number of girls fighting in skirts. It kind of makes me sad that this is an unusual thing.)

(I will admit that I was probably always predisposed to like Ben-To because it has that rarity in anime, strong female characters that kick ass.)

Its conclusion is satisfying (in a predictably heartwarming way) but isn't an ending. Ben-To is not the kind of show that has an ending that way. I don't think it needs any more episodes; it's said everything that it really needs to say.

Liked: yes, definitely.
Rewatch: possibly but probably not. However, I'm going to have fond memories of it.

I've given in to the Twitter bandwagon

Long after this particular train has left the station, I've decided to climb on board. You can find me as cks_anime.

It's already proving vaguely handy for quick reactions and snarky comments that are too short to make entries here, or at least to make entries that make me happy. Expect more of the same and maybe some conversations with other Twitter people. I may someday start aggregating the standalone tweets here, but who knows.

(Entries here feel kind of heavyweight, since they need a filename and and a title and so on. Maybe I should let go of that.)

Being surprised by the programs of noitaminA

noitaminA is a programming block that is either derided or saluted (depending on your perspective) for running 'arty' and experimental shows instead of your usual fair. I don't usually pay much attention to things surrounding the shows that I watch (like staff), so from anime blog reading so far I've vaguely had the impression that it was mostly uninteresting (and often pretentious) anime with much more misses than hits.

(For example, Fractale was a noitaminA show. The general consensus is that it was not a success.)

Today, for reasons beyond the scope of this entry, I decided to actually look up the facts. And the facts surprised me. For a start, noitaminA is much older than I had vaguely thought; the programming block started in 2005. But the real surprise was that noitaminA has run a significant number of shows that I've enjoyed and a surprising number of shows that I would not have expected to be their fare because they are action-oriented shows.

All of the following shows are noitaminA ones:

• both Honey and Clover and Nodame Cantabile, which are notable for being slice of life romance shows that I really liked despite not liking either slice of life or romance.
• Moyashimon, which is both crazy and educational (really, it makes microbes fascinating and cute).
• Eden of the East

(Other notable, eye-raising shows include AnoHana and Usagi Drop (aka Bunny Drop).)

Surprising action shows on noitaminA that I've watched include Toshokan Sensou (which I did not finish), [C] and this season's Guilty Crown. Arguably Eden of the East should also be considered an action show.

Looking at the full list shows me a significant number of clearly successful shows (even if a number of them are not to my tastes and I didn't watch them), many of them relatively conventional series from an artistic perspective. It's clear that noitaminA doesn't have anything to apologize for, and if I discuss a noitaminA show I have no reason to prefix it with 'even though this is on noitaminA, you should totally pay attention anyways'.

(Oh sure, there are also failures and drastic artistic experiments like The Tatami Galaxy, but far less of them than I had vaguely thought.)

PS: I don't think you can even argue that noitaminA may have started out strong with things like Honey and Clover but has fallen down lately. Just this year I have read plenty of praise for AnoHana and Usagi Drop, for example.

Discovered about UN-GO's creative staff

Quoted from randomc's episode 6 writeup:

[Mizushima and Aikawa] have already proved themselves adept at translating unusual source material to anime by the brilliant job they did with Oh! Edo Rocket, which was adapted from a stage play by Nakashima Kazuki (who also wrote Gurren Lagann) [...]

I generally barely notice exactly who the creative staff behind anime works are, but this is a set of connections that genuinely startles and impresses me.

(One interesting note is that according to ANN Mizushima also directed Hanamaru Kindergarten, which had a startlingly interesting set of ending animations that are well worth tracking down on their own; each one did its own little mini-story in various genres, complete in a minute and thirty seconds or so. I didn't watch HK itself, but I quite enjoyed the ending segments. I believe you can find them on Youtube.)

For future reference, ANN entries for Mizushima, Aikawa, and Nakashima.

(In another interesting thing, Nakashima not only wrote the original stage play of Oh! Edo Rocket, but he also wrote the script for one episode. I wonder how odd it felt to be scripting his own work as filtered through someone else, since Aikawa was 'series composition' for OER.)

My (somewhat) early impressions of the Fall 2011 anime season

Another season brings another set of shows that I've seen a few episodes of. Now I want to write down my impressions of them so that I can look back later and reflect on how wrong I was. This is a smaller set than I've done previously; for various reasons, I haven't had as much time and enthusiasm for watching anime lately.

Shows I've seen, more or less in the order seen:

• Maji de Watashi ni Koi Shinasai: The first two episodes were goofy fun, but I found the third episode kind of boring. Having people talk about their feelings is not what made me interested in this show; as a harem show, we've seen all of this before and MajiKoi is not doing anything particularly unusual in that department.

  (By this point I don't actually care why generic female protagonists one through N are pursuing the male protagonist, so the less time any harem show spends on trying to explain it the better. Infodumps and flashbacks take valuable time away from more potentially entertaining things, like crazy fights. I think that this is one thing that Infinite Stratos got right; to the extent that it bothered to create reasons at all, it generally showed them during the show instead of having characters explain things.)

• Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon: the action scenes were well animated. Everything else was almost completely incoherent, silly, or both. I wish they hadn't attempted to explain any of the background; I think it would have worked better. Unfortunately, I am feeling somewhat lost in subsequent episodes due to the large cast that's somewhat hard to keep straight. In fact, the more episodes I watch the less I can keep things straight, which is busy draining the drama from all of the nice action scenes.

• C3: The more I've watched of this the more interesting it gets. The first episode was a not bad magical girlfriend story (unfortunately with the now apparently mandatory fanservice); the next four episodes picked it up from there and kept getting more interesting. Of course, it's possible that things will slow down now that many of the characters have been introduced; there is a certain tendency in anime for manic openings that almost immediately slide into something predictably boring, and as a harem/magical girlfriend show this could easily go that way. I'm optimistic, though.

• Shakugan no Shana III: I feel quite ambivalent about this. It's nice that they're making things happen, but what happened with Yuji gave me whiplash and they still haven't explained it. But if I'm being honest, I have to admit that I've been watching Shana for long enough that I'm probably going to stubbornly see this through to the end no matter how it is.

  (I agree with Aroduc that this show has pacing problems. I managed to accidentally watch the third episode before the second episode and I didn't even notice. It might even have improved the experience.)

• Guilty Crown: The first few episodes are a perfectly acceptable beginning to a perfectly ordinary action show, of a type we've seen before (most recently in Sacred Seven). I'm willing to watch that, especially since it seems nicely animated and they're willing to be amusing.

  (The third episode ends on a surprising note, which I like.)

• Last Exile - Fam, The Silver Wing: The first episode is a nice dose of action and interesting things (although it suggests a somewhat predictable path for future episodes; I think that I can look forward to another installment of 'stuck up princess gets exposed to normal life'). Its connection to the original Last Exile seems unclear, but it does successfully remind me of the good early episodes of its predecessor.

• Persona 4 The Animation: People who are familiar with the game may get more out of this than I do, but for me this comes across as an ordinary, acceptable action series. I don't expect anything deep or moving, but I think I'm going to be kept reasonably entertained.

• Fate/Zero: Given that I kind of know that the story ends badly, this is more interesting and enjoyable than I expected. It's well done and the characters are interesting (and I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to dislike the ones that I by and large dislike).

• UN-GO: I've seen three episodes of this and the more I see the more I've liked; I like the characters, the interactions are interesting, it has a decided tinge of the supernatural to help, and the mysteries aren't cliched and aren't too obvious (at the same time you can see the answer coming). I could still get bored of the 'mystery of the week' formula, but so far it's looking good.

  Note that UN-GO is not necessarily a show to watch if you want to see actual justice happen. The setting has a quietly totalitarian government that is a strong believer in 'realpolitik' and in the first two episodes the government covers up real crimes with a politically expedient false explanation and thus lets the actual perpetrator go. In fact the second episode implies that the nice government agent we see a lot of may have calmly had an innocent person killed to reinforce the coverup. To its credit I don't think that UN-GO considers this a good thing (and various characters are starting to push back against it), but I also don't think we're going to see this totalitarian system go down in flames over the course of the series.

  (So far I am carefully not thinking too much about this aspect, but it may get to me at some point.)

• Mirai Nikki: When I watched the first episode of this, I had managed to forget that the premise had the protagonist trapped and forced to fight for his life. That he is a middle schooler and has a crazy person hanging out with him does not increase the chances that I will watch any more of this. (She is at least an interesting crazy person, though.)

  (Then I skimmed some information about later episodes, and apparently I missed the memo that this is a brutal and grim show with lots of unpleasant things happening. So, definitely no more for me and I could have saved my time here.)

Of these shows, I expect to watch C3, Fate/Zero, Shana III, Last Exile, and Guilty Crown all of the way through (more or less in that order of enjoyment), barring a show getting stupid and bad. MajiKoi I expect to watch one more episode of and then probably give up as it becomes clear that the first two episodes were exceptions, and Horizon is losing my interest fast. Persona 4 depends on if I feel I have time and interest. For UN-GO, I hope to watch it all the way through but I'm aware that I may get abruptly bored with a mystery a week.

May watch an episode of if I feel enthused at some point:

• Chihayafuru: I have in the past enjoyed sports anime, and I think that this is broadly one. On the other hand, I've got enough to watch this season as it is, so the sensible thing may be to skip this.

Have not watched for various reasons:

• Invasion! Squid Girl (aka Shinryaku! Ika Musume) second season: This wins some sort of peculiar award as the series I most wish that I could appreciate, but as I've already determined it's not for me.

  (Second place in this category goes to Idolm@ster on the strength of various blogging. This shows the power of compelling writing.)

• Phi-Brain: Kami no Puzzle: I've decided to more or less declare a moratorium on shows where the protagonists are forced into danger because someone will kill them if they don't (I've previously called this the 'trapped protagonist' genre). To put it one way, I don't really enjoy watching things where the protagonists are basically screwed and doomed from the start.

  (It helps that most everyone is reporting that Phi-Brain is pretty bad.)

Looking back on the Summer 2011 anime season

It's easy for me to write an entry on my early impressions of a season, full of blind optimism that's based on a few episodes of a show. It's much harder to look back after the fact and admit to myself (and others) where I was wrong, where what I was watching didn't work out and was a waste of time that I should have given up on earlier. Staying silent is the easy way, but I've come to feel that it's a little bit dishonest; it's tacitly leaving up things that I now know are wrong.

As a result, this time around I don't feel like tossing off another breathless early season impression post (for the fall season) without looking back and being honest for once. So here we go, a retrospective view on my views of the summer 2011 season:

Shows I finished:

• Kamisama Dolls: I really enjoyed what there was of this; I found it well done, with interesting characters and situations. Unfortunately it has a non-ending that may frustrate some people; it is basically a 'continued in the manga (and maybe in the second season)' thing, where we don't get any actual answers or real resolution of anything except the immediate situation.

  (If there ever is a second season, I'll happily watch it.)

• Sacred Seven: This was never deep but I always found it entertaining; that it was inextricably silly was part of the attraction. It achieved what I expected of it. Some of the peripheral characters were great.

  (Sadly they changed the opening at some point. I still love the opening song.)

• Dantalion no Shoka: I enjoyed it, but from early on I accepted that it was a horror show and the real purpose of the nominal protagonists was exposing us to the horror stories (and being interesting people), not actually doing anything. As part of this, I'm not bothered that it doesn't particularly have an ending. People who want more structure and an actual ongoing plot that is resolved should avoid it.

  (Evirus calls it the anime equivalent of a collection of short stories, and I think that's a very good description of it.)

Stalled:

• Natsume Yuujinchou San (#9): I like this when I watch it, but I'm unable to feel any urgency about watching it, especially since I basically already know how the stories are going to feel. I think I've probably burned out on feel-good stories of friendship, even if they have supernatural elements.

• Mawaru Penguindrum (#6): That the crazy people have reasons to be crazy does not make them any less crazy or any more attractive. At the same time I do like what this show is doing; I'm just not all that enthused about watching it in practice, so I haven't watched any for a while.

I am someday going to finish Natsume, even if it takes me a year. I don't know if I'll ever watch much more of Penguindrum, and I'm probably going to wait until it finishes so I can read people's commentary on whether it was worth it in the end.

Effectively or actually abandoned:

• Mayo Chiki #2: I haven't been in the mood to watch the kind of comedy that this show delivers. That may change someday, but I doubt I'll do more than dabble in it. My memory is that what it did, it did quite well; it's just that its genre didn't enthuse me this summer.

  (For various reasons my enthusiasm for anime has been at a low ebb lately. In another season I might have watched more of this.)

• Kami-sama no Memochou #4: I didn't consider it a positive development when the protagonist got more and more involved with a Yakuza group. I'm pretty sure that the show disagreed with me about this, and as a result my enthusiasm waned. This may have been unfair, but see above about my enthusiasm.

• Itsuka Tenma no Kuro Usagi #5: The incoherence overwhelmed me.

• Blood-C #7: I stuck with this far longer than I should have. Everything I've read about further developments makes me happy that I abandoned it; extended 'it was all just a hallucination' plots make me grind my teeth for all sorts of reasons. See Aroduc if you want more.

  (And I must say that I am shocked, shocked, that a Clamp-influenced show would have a softly spoken nice person who turned out to be powerful and evil. Who could possibly have seen that twist coming based on Clamp's earlier work?)

• Nekogami Yaoyorozu #1: as predicted, this failed to sustain my interest and I never watched another episode. Various grumpy reviews of it (from Aroduc and SDB) did not help.

That makes five shows that I started out expecting to like and watch all the way through and either stalled out on or abandoned, and only three that I watched all the way through. Maybe that's a typical ratio for people, but I've previously liked to think I had better early judgement.

(Possibly in the past I've just been more stubborn about watching mediocre shows all the way through once I started on them, and giving up on them early is a positive development. Or maybe I've given up on more shows than I vaguely remember, and I should go back and review other seasons too.)

Link: A demonstration of an issue with ETTR

This link requires a bit of explanation (if only so that I can remember it later). The person I'm linking to took a standard colour checker test target and took a properly exposed shot then a series at increasing positive exposure compensations (ie, exposing to the right), postprocessed all of the overexposed photos to correctly expose them again, and then cropped strips of the colour targets and stacked the same strips from each exposure. The goal is to clearly see any colour shifts caused by ETTR.

(As he notes, some are deliberately overexposed, going beyond what you should theoretically do with ETTR. Of course they do represent what happens if you accidentally overexpose in the course of trying to do ETTR.)

Part of what I like about this is that it's an experiment that anyone can do (if you have a colour checker test target). Your camera and processing system may well give you different results than his, but either way you'll have learned something interesting.

So: Experiment: ETTR hue shifts and now the revised Experiment: ETTR hue shifts (reformatted).

PS: obviously you should do this test with the camera on a tripod and locked at a single ISO, unless you also want to test the effects of ISO on colour shifts. Although that too may be a useful test, depending on how you're thinking of using ETTR.