Roving Thoughts archives

Quick things about Kampfer 07

(Warning: mild spoilers.)

From Author:

Why did Kaede (Sakura) lose consciousness?

I concur that we don't have enough information. However, there seems to be a striking pattern that Kaede drops out of the action just when her nose would otherwise be rubbed in the existence of Kampfers, and I doubt that this is a coincidence.

I continue to think that Akane was not shooting seriously for whatever reason. Otherwise, she is an embarrassingly bad shot; has she hit anything meaningful?

(Since Kampfer seems to be mostly a comedy anime, we could be overthinking all of this. Convenience coincidences and comically bad shots are a stock in trade of ordinary comedy.)

From another Author entry and what it points to:

Natsuru has not yet taken showers/baths as a girl. And this is supposed to be a real full-blooded hetero adolescent?? What gives??

He wasn't able to keep the transformation or transform at will previously, so showering was out of question.

Natsuru seems to have gotten much better at transformations as of the start of episode 7; it looks like he can transform at will and hold the transformation at will, but he actually needs to be able to muster the will (which was his problem at night).

My take on his lack of showering et al is two-fold. Minorly, it's likely to be hard on his will. Majorly, it's not as if Natsuru is on his own, and we know that his entrails animal likes both making sarcastic comments and cheering Natsuru's development on, and imagine the potential for either or both if Natsuru deliberately goes off to shower as a girl on his own, no matter what actually happens or doesn't happen. There is much less utter embarrassment in avoiding the whole situation.

(We, and Natsuru, have no idea if entrails animals are aware of it when their person transforms.)

(On a side note, I'm (still) working on getting my followup to Author's reaction to my last entry on Kampfer to say what I want it to say. This writing clearly stuff is harder than it looks. I'm aware that this is somewhat against the spirit of quick reactions and rapidly jotted notes.)

The (lack of) fighting in Kampfer (as of episode 4)

In the Author style of brief notes on things that I ran into elsewhere (via Author, of course): I actually find the current lack of fighting in Kampfer to be pretty realistic.

All of the Kampfers are theoretically ordinary highschool kids who basically got drafted against their will. It feels entirely right that they are generally unenthusiastic about actually beating each other up, or even theoretically killing each other, regardless of what the Moderators may want them to do, and that they would much rather hang out and talk with each other (and, in the case of Shizuku, yank everyone's chains). If anything, they now have more in common with each other than with their classmates.

(This makes me unconvinced that Akane actually is as terrible a shot as she seems to be. It doesn't even have to be deliberate and conscious on her part. Really, humans are startlingly kind when you get down to it; outside of cliched shounen action series, you usually have to work quite hard to get them to hurt and kill each other.)

As for Akane: I think she's just manic (okay, very enthusiastic). Shizuku is just an excuse to let off some energy, as Natsuru was at the start of the show.

(I believe that Akane even more or less admitted that the reason she stopped fighting Natsuru wasn't that they were on the same side but that she didn't have the heart for it after he saved her.)

Mahjong in Saki

One of the things that strikes me about Saki is how unimportant the actual mahjong games are. While it matters who wins (and sometimes how powerful their win was), the show pays almost no attention to the actual process of playing and winning. This is especially striking in the past two episodes (6 and 7), where the show has been focusing on a tournament.

(Sometimes we get a little bit of dialog about strategy issues.)

This is rather unusual for a nominal sports anime, but does mean that you can follow pretty much all of Saki without knowing more than a tiny bit about mahjong. You won't miss much in being unable to follow the games, because there's usually nothing there to follow in the first place.

(While episode 7 does show some gameplay, my impression is that it is just illustrative; it's there to show Nodoka's dominance, not for anything important about the play itself.)