Roving Thoughts archives

Netflix versus the discourse (on Anitwitter and elsewhere)

I usually think of myself as someone who watches anime as a pretty solitary activity. It's not really true, as I've understood for some time (for instance, I know I face the tacit pressure of conformity), but most of the time I can not really be conscious of the social side of my watching; it's just sort of there, as something that happens. This year, Netflix provided an interesting reminder of that social side.

With a weekly show, there's always a current episode, the most recent episode that aired and then became available here, and that's what most people are watching and reacting to and talking about. While the discussion is generally at its most intense the day the episode becomes available, not everyone watches it or reacts to it right away. And even if you watch it later in the week (as I often do for some shows), there's still people to talk to about it or read current reactions to it in various places. This whole environment enables a discourse that is focused on that episode; it's the obvious thing about the show to talk about, to react to, and to frame a discussion around.

Netflix shows did not work this way. Netflix released most or all of the anime shows it funded this year in the same way that it releases other TV series, which is to say all at once, with every episode immediately available. In particular, it released Devilman Crybaby that way, with all episodes available January 5th. Some people burned through the entire show in the next day or two; some people burned through it in a week; some people took much longer. One of the results was to distinctly attenuate the discussion about Devilman Crybaby, because people who wanted to talk about it lacked the common ground of a 'current episode'. If you were an early watcher, you might avoid discussing things because of spoilers, or have only limited other early watchers you could talk about things with. If you were a later watcher, you might have to carefully not look at early discussion in order to avoid spoilers and in any case your current episode might be old news to a lot of people.

(And even if you didn't deliberately avoid spoilers, you had to go find old discussions, or have them already bookmarked and saved; they weren't on top of Anitwitter, feed readers, Animenano, and so on.)

I don't know if this lack of fan buzz hurt or even helped Devilman Crybaby, either to get more viewers or to get people to think about the show more independently than they might have in the discourse's usual echo chamber. I do know that it made my own experience of Devilman Crybaby feel distinctly different from watching weekly shows, and I likely didn't discuss it half as much as I would have done if it was a normal show.

(Also, of course, the experience of burning through something as intense as Devilman Crybaby over a short period of time is definitely different than it would have been seeing it at a one episode a week pace. I don't know if a forced weekly pace would have made Devilman Crybaby more or less powerful, but it certainly would have made things feel different.)

I suspect that Netflix's mass episode drop also lead to less blog entries and so on about Devilman Crybaby than there would otherwise have been. Certainly I expect it led to less episode by episode analysis, because there really wasn't much point unless you wanted to do a close reading of the whole show or record your reactions and thoughts on an episode by episode basis. But with that said, Shin Mecha Guignol did a very interesting series of articles on each episode.

I also watched Netflix's B - The Beginning and some of A.I.C.O. - Incarnation, each of which was made available all at once and each of which didn't get too much discussion that I saw, but with both of them I think there are what you could politely call other factors at work as well. Violet Evergarden is an odd case, because it was available week by week everywhere except in the US, where it was available all at once at the end of its weekly run; as a result, I experienced it week by week as a normal Winter 2018 show.

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

The moment when Laid-Back Camp's Nadeshiko won me over

In the beginning of Laid-Back Camp, Nadeshiko comes across as mostly your typical progatonist for these sorts of shows; an energetic but ditzy newbie, all full of both enthusiasm (to drag us along) and ignorance (so we can have things explained to us). She had her moments, but in the beginning I was worried that I'd get tired of her.

In the fourth episode, Nadeshiko and the other two members of the Outclub head off to a campsite in what turns out to be a longer walk than they expected. The other two turned up at the starting point with reasonable modest amounts of stuff, but Nadeshiko had a significant load and as they started walking, what I was expecting was the obvious cliche that Nadeshiko had made a newbie mistake in her enthusiastic loading up.

Laid-Back Camp didn't do that. Instead, Nadeshiko walked the other two into the ground; as Chiaki and Aoi were slowing down, she was still cheerfully going along, load and all. Nadeshiko hadn't made a mistake at all. Instead, she was just that strong, untiring, and capable. That was the moment that sold me on Nadeshiko as a great character, not at all the genki maniac airhead that I had expected and been afraid of.

Looking back, there had been flashes of that even before the fourth episode. For instance, in the first episode Nadeshiko had biked all of the fairly decent distance from her home to the campsite, and didn't seem any the worse for it. But the fourth episode was where it became clear to me, and that moment in the fourth episode is what clinched it.

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

Devilman Crybaby

So, yeah, I watched Devilman Crybaby. It was an experience.

Before I started watching, what I knew was that this a Yuasa adaptation of a famous early 70s Go Nagai manga, funded by Netflix and so without broadcast content restrictions. The first episode pretty much delivered what I expected in that regard; as I said on Twitter, it was very over the top in Go Nagai's usual way, and gleefully and faithfully rendered by Yuasa (eg). I also said something that I didn't intend as foreshadowing, but:

I didn't get emotionally pulled into Devilman Crybaby because many parts were absurd, but that's probably the best way to consume Go Nagai. To be actually in the show would be terrifyingly intense even in this episode; distance helped a lot.

Yuasa's Devilman Crybaby turned out to be very good at kicking you in the feels, to put it in the modern idiom. It became nothing like it had started out as, mutating from an over the top operatic exercise in excess to something very powerful by the end. I went into Devilman Crybaby expect to get interestingly executed pulp. I wound up getting far more, with real emotional impacts.

(In retrospect, the mood of the striking and compelling OP was also foreshadowing. That's not a pulp show's OP, in either animation or music.)

To talk of whether or not I liked Devilman Crybaby seems almost beside the point. Devilman Crybaby is not here to be liked; it's here to put you through the wringer, and what you make of that experience is up to you. My own ride through Devilman Crybaby was quite the rollercoaster, even though it didn't entirely pull me in (also).

After I'd finished the show, I read Wikipedia's article on the manga, which covers the metaphor Go Nagai intended for the whole story. I see where and why Go Nagai was going, but only intellectually and I have to view it as very much a product of the early 1970s and the Vietnam war. It's not something that resonates with me, for all that it feels like Go Nagai had to have been very passionate about it when he created Devilman.

(Although I don't know if it's the case, it certainly feels like Devilman has to be an angry work, with Go Nagai railing against one aspect of the world and people. But this is all me reading things into Go Nagai's central metaphor.)

Devilman Crybaby is in some ways a messy show, one that feels abbreviated in spots; I suspect that people who've read the Devilman manga will have a deeper appreciation of the show than I do. I'll probably never rewatch it, and I certainly don't love it; not only was it wrenching, but Yuasa's version stays faithful to the manga's downer ending (which is apparently famous and iconic). But I'm not going to forget it any time soon, and I have no regrets about watching it. It is, very definitely, a powerful work. And a very Yuasa one.

(This is part of @appropriant's 12 Days of Anime 2018.)