Roving Thoughts archives

Some shows that didn't work out for me in 2018

Last year I wrote about some shows that didn't work out for me, and this year I've decided to do it again for my own reasons. As with last year, these are shows that I started with high hopes, shows that by all rights should work for me, and then things didn't work out. I'm almost always sad when this happens, because I want to enjoy everything I watch and I want to have more things to watch that I enjoy. As with last year, this is not to condemn these shows, it is to create a little memorial to them and to what could have been. That these shows didn't work out for me can say as much about me as it does about the shows.

(To a certain extent, these shows teach me something about my own tastes, which is part of why I want to write all of this up.)

In the order that they aired and that I walked away from them:

• Katana Maidens - Toji no Miko: It's been a pretty long time since we had a show like this, but sadly the show we got had pacing issues that I eventually got tired of. I really do want to like action/adventure shows that revolve around women, because they're relatively rare, but this one didn't work out despite quite a lot of initial promise. There was a time when I'd have kept on watching this despite the pacing, but not this year. There's a part of me that still regrets not powering through to watch all of Katana Maidens.

• Violet Evergarden: This is a beautiful and well crafted show, one that by all rights I should have been more fond of than I actually was. I have theories about why I wound up failing to really be pulled in emotionally, but they're at best hand-waving over the fundamental reality that this is yet another KyoAni show that didn't work for me.

• Lupin III Part V: Lupin is a classic series and has been doing its general action and adventure thing for a long time, with a well honed stable of characters and a bunch of movies that I've generally enjoyed and so on. It definitely feels like I should enjoy Lupin TV series, and it also feels almost like an obligation as an anime fan to do so. But I keep bouncing off the actual TV series, with the notable exception of The Woman Called Mine Fujiko. Apparently I don't love these classical characters quite enough to follow them around for six or twelve hours or so at a time, even if that time is spread out over one or two cours.

• Full Metal Panic! Invisible Victory: As I put it, the magic leaked out for me somewhere over the past decade (or more) since the last time there was any Full Metal Panic!. The good news is that the old FMP lives on in my heart, no matter what.

  (It's odd, but this hurts less than Little Witch Academia did last year. I think it's because I already have the pleasant memories of the original Full Metal Panic! series.)

• My Hero Academia: MHA is pretty good shonen action and all of that, and I stopped watching it just before a climactic arc or two that were apparently very good. My feelings on dropping it is that this says something about the pacing issues endemic in a long-running shonen series and also something about how long I'm willing to watch one series these days. I look back on the days when I could watch a hundred episodes or more of something and wonder how I did it.

  (Possible the answer is 'less other things to eat up my time with'.)

Then there's some shows that I'm more mildly let down and sad about, where it doesn't hurt as much that I and the show didn't work out.

• GeGeGe no Kitaro: There's a lot of nice things about Kitaro, and it would be a perfectly wholesome show to follow on a regular basis (with some great characters). I just don't have any real interest in following a kids show, because some of the things inherent in its nature leave me too unenthused.

  Sadly this is a bad omen for me ever really enjoying any of the Precure iterations, because they're fundamentally kids shows too.

• Golden Kamuy: This is an acclaimed action and adventure manga with some great characters and a well realized anime version (bears excepted), but I wound up not really caring about what was going on.

  Looking back over everything that worked for me and didn't work for me this year, I suspect that this is a sign that I'm losing my interest in straight action stories. Over and over again this year, I've passed or dropped shows where the primary appeal was action and intricate cunning plots going on. It's not just Golden Kamuy, it's also things like A.I.C.O., Angolmois, Sirius the Jaeger, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, and Persona 5 The Animation (and Full Metal Panic! Invisible Victory to some extent).

  (On the other hand I definitely enjoyed B - The Beginning, for all that it was very firmly planted in this genre. It wasn't anywhere near high art, but B knew full well how to be both entertaining and compulsively watchable.)

• Darling in the FranXX: I said way back when that I didn't have high expectations for DarliFra, which is why I'm not more let down when I decided that it wasn't interesting enough to continue watching. When you don't expect much to start with, there's not much letdown when it doesn't work out.

(I don't list Hinamatsuri here simply because comedies failing for me is the routine state of life.)

Writing this up has helped me clarify and put into words some things that I was already feeling in my gut. For instance, it seems pretty likely that Vinland Saga is not going to be something that I enthusiastically watch in 2019, since it falls straight into the general genre area of Golden Kamuy and other similar things.

As with last year, I'm deliberately excluding shows that I finished, even though I have things I could say there (and I may do so in another entry). This is for shows that didn't work out to such an extent that I stopped watching them.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime 2018.)

A moment where SSSS.Gridman exploits distorted camera perspective and superdeformation

(There's a bit of a spoiler for SSSS.Gridman here.)

One of my ongoing interests is things around the anicamera, the imaginary camera that 'films' anime, and along with it the various deliberate artistic distortions animation uses (including in CG), such as smears and super-deformed things. Studio Trigger is of course no stranger to any of this, as anyone who's watched their shows like Space Patrol Luluco or Kill la Kill knows, and so it is not surprising that various aspects of both of these show up regularly in SSSS.Gridman.

So, for example, there's this beautiful shot from episode 10:

This isn't just beautiful, it's also full of deliberate anicamera artifacts, including lens flare, veiling haze, and the wide angle lens effect of putting curves on horizontal and vertical straight lines.

But the case I really want to talk about is from SSSS.Gridman's sixth episode, where Yuta meets a little kid who wants to talk to him (and yes, this is kind of dim, as they're in an alleyway; the kid is on the right):

She really wants to get Yuta's attention and Trigger winds up giving us this classical looming, super-deformed shot:

Ha ha, no. That's not super-deformed. She's a kaiju.

To be fair, she told us that she was, and there was some advance visual warning as the scene unfolded (eg the shadow here). Trigger didn't spring this on us by complete surprise, however funny and startling that might have been; instead they built up the atmosphere for an unsettling moment. But it was still a pretty startling moment for me, and probably for a lot of viewers. Everything in our anime viewing pushed us towards a reading of that first looming shot as being exaggerated and super-deformed, not literal. And then SSSS.Gridman cut away to confront us with the unsettling reality.

That's why in the title of this entry I used 'exploited' instead of 'used'. Trigger did not actually use superdeformation here; instead they deliberately exploited our expectations of it in order to give us a startling moment.

(There is probably a bit of implicit wide angle distortion going on in the looming shot, for impact, but in a comedy SD moment it would be exaggerating the SD looming.)

PS: The revealing side shot is unrealistic in a normal cinematographic way, because the characters are nominally in a pretty narrow alleyway. In real life there's no way you could back the camera up enough to get that sort of normal perspective shot from the side without running into the side of the alleyway, so you'd have to do this on a soundstage. Which is of course routine in films.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime 2018.)

On watching a lot less anime this year

Looking back on this year in anime for me, one thing that definitely stands out is that I've watched a lot less shows than I usually do. It hasn't been because I'm out of time, or because I have some limit on how many shows I want to watch. Instead it's because I've become a lot more willing to listen to my gut, to mostly not watch things unless I'm actually enjoying them, and to drop shows that I've stopped being interested in even if they're quite late in their run (and I thus have a lot invested in watching them, in a way).

(It would be snappy to say that I'm watching less but enjoying it more, but that's not true. The shows that I'm enjoying are not magically better than they ever have been, it's just that I'm not watching much else.)

Looking back, things here have probably been building for some time (cf my Winter 2014 grump), but this year is evidently when my feelings quietly boiled over and I started cutting back pretty drastically. I dropped or didn't even start a lot of perfectly decent or okay shows this year that I probably would have watched in past years, and I've mostly not checked out shows that are outside of the areas that usually work well for me, even if they're getting a lot of praise (this season, for example, there's Bloom Into You among others).

When I started watching less, I think that I wondered if I'd feel idle and bored and wind up just coming back to fill up my time with anime again, especially since in the past I've used various shows basically to fill the time over a cup of coffee or the like (cf, and also). It hasn't worked out that way, for all that there's a part of me that wants to feel the urge to watch more. Although I sometimes think 'a year ago I'd have been watching anime at this point in my week', I've not wound up short of other diversions to fill up my time with (if nothing else, there's always my technical blog).

This all feels like a vaguely unsettling big change of some sort. I've been watching anime for a fairly long time, and usually a fairly decent amount of it, much more than I currently am now. When you suddenly get less active in a fandom you were previously pretty active in, well, it's natural for certain thoughts to spring up in your mind. Is this a sign that I'm about to quietly slide mostly out of anime fandom entirely, as I've slid out of other things in the past? I don't think it is, but then I probably didn't think that about the other fandoms either, not at the start.

(On the other hand, my past dropping out of fandoms has generally been pretty abrupt, even if I didn't do it deliberately. This is not that kind of 'doing it one day, stopped almost entirely the next' that those have often been.)

However, this also doesn't feel like something that's going to reverse itself. I don't look around and feel that there's spare time I could watch more shows in if I wanted to (perhaps old classics, or things I have fond memories of, like Stellvia); instead I feel that I'm basically watching as much anime as I have both time and interest for.

Who knows. Maybe I've just gotten a little too jaded and worn down about anime, and it'll wear off in a while. There's certainly a part of me that wants it to, that identifies as an anime fan who watches fairly voraciously, that wants to go back to four or five shows a season the way 'it should be'. Or maybe I've finally stopped feeling like I should watch everything just because I started watching anime in an era when we grabbed for whatever scraps we could get because they were so rare. Anime today is a feast of simulcasts and available shows that we can pick or choose from, and that's a great thing.

(These personal ramblings and reflections are part of my contribution to the 12 Days of Anime 2018.)