Roving Thoughts archives

Some shows that didn't work out for me in 2017

Every year, there are a certain number of shows that I start with high expectations and hopes, fully expecting to enjoy them, and then things don't work out. I'm always sad when this happens; I want to enjoy shows, especially shows that I'm looking forward to, but every year there are times when this just doesn't happen, and not because the show turned out to be a disaster in some way or is clearly a 'not for me' show. These are the shows that by all rights should work for me, but for various reasons the show and I never connected. Often it's hard for me to drop these shows, because I feel like I should like them but I just don't. Somehow the magic that should be there has leaked out.

(Shows that are actively bad or that are clearly not my kind of thing are much easier to let go of, partly because it's a lot more clearcut. It's still disappointing but it's a mild disappointment. It's also easier to let go of shows that I had no particular expectations for in the first place, ones that just had some initial promise but I wound up deciding that I didn't like them enough.)

Today, for my own reasons, I want to look back at my collection of such shows from this year (or at least the ones that stand out to me), not to condemn them but 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.

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

• Blue Exorcist - Kyoto Saga: I quite liked the original Blue Exorcist back in the day, but this version didn't catch fire with me. I don't feel as sad as I might, because it's been so long and I never really expected another season from Blue Exorcist (and we did get a decent movie); also, I didn't entirely feel that this was really a continuation of the original because it had to reset a number of things from the anime-original ending of the first show. In a way you could say that this is a different show than I thought I was getting, one that just happens to sort of use the same setting and some of the same characters as the Blue Exorcist that I watched. And who knows, maybe my tastes have changed since 2011.

  I think the show was competently made and I've heard that it followed the manga fairly well, so I suspect that manga readers are pleased by this season.

• Little Witch Academia: Oh, this one hurts. I lost interest after five episodes of this much heralded Trigger TV series version of a couple of quite good OVAs. There were a number of specific things, but in the end it basically turned out the way I'd been afraid of since I heard it was being turned into a TV series, which I'll summarize as 'the pacing and feel changed a lot'. The first OVA had only so much time and it had to cram a great deal in; as a result, everything moved at a rapid clip and there wasn't time to look very deeply into anything, which made it a madcap ride. With far more time to fill and the natural expectation that it would go into much deeper detail on the characters, character growth, and so on, the TV series could never have managed the same feel.

  (The second OVA was somewhat closer to the feel of the TV series, since it was an additional story invented after the first OVA was successful, but it was still far denser and more condensed than the show.)

  I wound up labeling LWA as 'not for me' instead of dropped because I think it not working for me is mostly about my tastes in pacing, characters, and so on.

• Rage of Bahamut - Virgin Soul: The original Rage of Bahamut was a flawed but generally very good show that really got the cinematic Hollywood action-adventure feel and important things like how to have awesome moments. Virgin Soul had a great premise, the same director, and more running time (and hopefully plenty of production time), all of which gave me great expectations for it. Perhaps what happened is something similar to what happened with Little Witch Academia, where adding time (and focusing more on characters) required slowing the pacing down and coming up with more elaborate and complex plots.

  (With that said, the show has its own serious issues in how it handles Charioce; for one discussion of this, see here.)

• Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond: This is a regrettable late addition (not just this season, but late in the season at that). It's actually been useful at showing me another thing about my tastes, because there's absolutely nothing wrong about BBB & Beyond as such; it's delivering exactly what's on the can, and in quite good quality as far as animation, story, and so on is concerned. It's just that BBB & Beyond is not going anywhere in particular and it turns out that I want more than that, even from my popcorn watching. But for people who like to see these characters ramble around Hellsalem's Lot and find out bits about their background and day to day life, well, I can see the appeal. My understanding is that this season is very much like the manga in that respect, so manga fans are probably quite fond of it (and irritated that the first season apparently pruned back so much from the sections of the manga that it covered).

  (The first season of BBB did have an ongoing story working its way through the episodes, with Black and White and everything they were tied in to. It also had the advantage that it was introducing us to Hellsalem's Lot.)

  (A confession: there's a part of me that wants to keep on watching BBB & Beyond, although I'm pretty convinced I'd just wind up disgruntled if I did. After all, I'm only two episodes away from the end of this season; surely I can just finish it out. But no. That's a combination of the sunk cost fallacy and my completionist nature.)

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.

• Re:Creators: I didn't have high expectations for this at the start of the season, but the initial stuff was cool and the high concept was interesting. It kept me interested for 14 episodes, which is at least ten more than many shows manage, and there are any number of nice bits and characters that still stick in my mind. Also, the OP music remains excellent (I prefer the first OP's music to the second, but they're both good).

  In retrospect, Re:Creators had a good line on 'cool'. Perhaps this is partly because many of its characters were consciously supposed to be fictional (plucked into 'reality') and so did not have to be given feet of clay in order to feel more realistic; they could mostly run on the rule of cool and nothing else. For example, Mamika is almost too perfect in the show itself; in a work where she was intended to be a real character, she'd probably have been made more tangled and ambiguous and less appealing as a result. But I wave my hands here.

  (Sometimes this didn't work in the favour of the character and the show. Yes, I'm still sore about Magane.)

• Fate/Apocrypha: I have a mixed relationship with Fate as a whole and I did drop and then un-drop this after the first episode, but I still keep hoping for a Fate series that delivers all of the cool stuff (including but not limited to fight action) but without the other things that are probably inevitable given that this is both Fate and a TV series (with a TV series' production limits). Some aspects of F/A were great, too, but for me they wound up as too little in too much of an ocean of stuff I was too indifferent to.

  (Overall I feel I got what I wanted from the show, since I went in with modest expectations and stopped watching when I felt I was about done. But I still feel sad that it wasn't more. I'll probably always feel this sadness every time I watch a Fate work and it doesn't knock me out of the park.)

• A Centaur's Life: It feels like a miracle that such a peculiar and far-out manga got animated in the first place, so I'm only mildly sad that various aspects of the actual implementation didn't work for me. Perhaps the interesting bits in the show will have persuaded some people to check out the manga and gotten them hooked on it.

  (The manga really is far more out there than you might expect just from the premise. It gets really weird in places, especially as it goes on.)

Perhaps it's silly to go into new shows with expectations at all, since any long-term anime watcher knows that anything can happen with a new show (for bad or good), but it's also entirely human. People aren't perfectly logical robots; we're always influenced by emotional factors and our knowledge. Even if you deliberately shield yourself from hearing anything about a new season, you know that some shows are successors to shows that you liked (or adopt a manga you know something about), and that builds up inevitable expectations.

PS: I'm deliberately not considering shows that I actually finished even if I wasn't as taken with them as I expected and wanted to be. This is for shows that didn't work out to such an extent that I stopped watching them, not shows that merely disappointed me for various reasons or that turned out to be less than I'd hoped for or expected.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

Story endings can be broad or narrow ones

I've written before about the different ways that story endings can be satisfying, where they can deliver either or both of narrative or emotional satisfaction; they can wrap up the plot or resolve the emotional conflicts a character had, or both. Today I want to talk about an additional dimension in story endings that plays into how satisfying people find them.

Story endings can be what I'll call broad or narrow. A broad ending is one that ties up as much as possible of the open issues in the story, while a narrow ending ignores many of them and only addresses a few. It's most common for this distinction to matter narratively, because the plot side is where it's most common to have a lot of outstanding issues; usually the emotional side of a story is already concentrated on only a few characters, so the story doesn't need to cover very much to give them emotionally satisfying resolutions. However, in some situations you can still have an emotionally narrow ending, because you just ignore issues with secondary characters or focus in on only a few characters in an ensemble cast.

(For example, I feel that Eureka Seven AO had an emotionally narrow ending. There were character conflicts and themes that were simply dropped on the floor in the ending, if they even existed, since the ending focused purely on Ao.)

One way to get an emotionally unsatisfying ending is to have it be emotionally narrow. The show may wrap up the central character's conflicts and themes, but it ignores all of the rest; we the audience then feel that these other characters have basically been dropped on the floor, reduced to unimportant spear carries when the show had previously implied that they were important.

You can obviously get a narratively unsatisfying ending by having it be narratively narrow. However, a narratively narrow ending doesn't have to be unsatisfying, at least to some of the audience, because not infrequently there are plot questions that are fine to not answer . The show has to stage its mysteries somewhat carefully in order to make it clear that not getting answers is a possibility, which includes not making the answer to them be important for understanding things. But done well this can avoid a common problem with mysteries.

(In practice we already accept that many things about the setting of a show will not be explained in any depth, even things that are reasonably central to the show's premise. For one example, many science fiction series involve a great deal of technology for things like faster than light travel or flying cars that's simply never explained. Ghost in the Shell doesn't explain the mechanics of cyborgs, ghosts, hacking things, or the various weapons; it's enough for the story that we get a vague idea of how they work and what their limitations are.)

Of course, what works may vary from person to person. For a personal example, in Shingu I'm fine with Muryou's mysteries not being answered but other people aren't necessarily so happy.

Pacing in manga versus anime

Back in the summer season, I found A Centaur's Life uninspiring and wound up dropping it. As odd as it sounds, this fascinates me, because back in the day I read some of the manga and found it generally fascinating, beautiful, and engaging (including all of the material that I watched in the show). And it's not as if the show was badly produced or badly made; the presentation was simply relatively bland, flat, and unimaginatively straightforward. A Centaur's Life is not the first show where I've liked the manga but found a competently made show uninteresting, and over time I've developed some theories about why. One of them has to do with pacing in manga versus anime.

The obvious difference is that a manga's pacing is substantially under your control, while the pacing of anime is fixed on rails. When you're reading a manga, you can slow down to absorb and soak in a page or a panel, or reread an exchange of dialog to clarify it. Or, if the manga is slow and drawn out, you can speed up. If there's a long exchange of dialog with no important changes in the panels, you can go at your reading speed or skim the panels, and if there's little dialog you can whip through the panels themselves to absorb what's happening.

(Some of the time, low-dialog panels are actively designed for you to go through fast on the first read, to feel the rush of action or events.)

In anime you have none of this freedom. The show advances dialog and events exactly as fast as it's chosen to animate them, no faster and no slower. If there are fascinating things you're not naturally free to linger over them, because the show drags you away; those things are only there for so many frames and so many seconds. Crucially, if things are slow and getting boring, you can't move along any faster; you're locked to the pace of dialog and movement and change that the show has chosen, waiting as the show ticks away seconds in animation or slow pans or characters talking and talking.

(In some video environments you can freeze frame, frame by frame, skip around, and maybe even play things at faster than normal speeds, but it's not at all as natural as reading manga faster or slower and it's likely to have other effects, such as distorting the sound.)

A broader difference is that I've come to believe that much manga is naturally paced faster than anime is, where covering the same story content simply takes longer in anime form. At least for me, I can go through 16 or 32 pages of most manga in under half an hour; in animated form, the same content often takes at least an episode and perhaps more. There are exceptions, primarily for works that are heavy on action, but A Centaur's Life is mostly not one of those. Instead, like many manga, it's got a lot of talking in various settings, accompanied by situations that can be illustrated in a panel or a page or two.

In anime, you have two or three issues that take up (extra) time. First, people can only speak so fast, usually slower than you can read dialog in a manga (although there are exceptions, as anyone who's ever had to pause the video player to read all the subtitles knows). Second, you have to animate things actually happening; you can't imply it with action lines or panel to panel transitions the way that you can in a manga (for a discussion of how action is implied in manga but must be shown in anime, see Kumi Kaoru's analysis of the Nausicaa manga). On top of this, manga drawing can be very dense with implications and many things packed into a single panel or page, which works because readers can slow down to absorb them all; in anime you must draw out all of this long enough to insure that a decent portion of your audience will have seen and absorbed everything. Of course, given that dialog takes more time, this need to draw visual things out can be handy.

An interesting example of speed in manga versus anime comes up in The Ancient Magus' Bride. As covered by Emily in The flower language of The Ancient Magus' Bride, the first episode features in part a number of views of the flowers around Elias' home, as Chise arrives with Elias for the first time. All of this feels perfectly natural and well paced in the anime. In manga, the same events are covered in equally unrushed form in about two and a half pages, with far less detail. On the one hand, this smaller manga space makes it faster to go through (and two of the pages are are a double page splash spread). On the other hand, this means that the manga can't imply or show all of the flowers (and all of the meanings) that the anime can. Sometimes drawing something out at anime pace and filling the time the dialog requires can give you greater depth and interest.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)