Roving Thoughts archives

Knight's & Magic and the power of honesty

Knight's & Magic doesn't exactly have a promising premise and plot; in fact, it basically sounds like a wince inducing piece of wish-fulfillment fanfiction. A mecha otaku dies and is reincarnated as a kid genius in a world with mecha where he can use his other-worldly ideas to make the best mecha ever and be fawned over by all and sundry? Many people would give such a show a wide berth. But despite this unpromising premise, the actual series was surprisingly good, with an infectiously earnest enthusiasm and a a heart-on-sleeve appeal.

Originally I was going to write about the power of this earnestness and embracing your genre, as Thunderbolt Fantasy did last year. But earnestness by itself doesn't make a show good in the way that Knight's & Magic is; there are plenty of quite earnest works that are actually kind of terrible, and Knight's & Magic could very easily have gone off the rails itself, falling into complete absurdity and losing much of its appeal. Instead, I've come to feel that the crucial ingredient that made the show work is honesty.

Knight's & Magic is a show that is honest with itself, and as part of that it's honest about what it is; it's wish fulfillment and it never pretends otherwise. Knight's & Magic takes things seriously (it's not a satire or a farce), but it's not a serious, realistic work and it doesn't try to be one. As part of this it quite deliberately dials everything up to at least ten, not for comedy but because it's more fun that way. While earnest fun is the heart of Knight's & Magic, I don't think it would have been possible if the people behind it had not understood and appreciated what it was, warts and all.

As part of dialing everything up to at least ten and going straight for fun, K&M is completely transparent about how the plot is on Ernesti's side. This is in a way another side of the show's honesty; the show is always clear about its fundamental nature, including its ultimate niceness (at least as far as the good guys are concerned, and this is a show with very clear good guys).

Another part of this is a surprising honesty about giant robots, because the final showdown is framed as the romanticism of giant robots versus the practicality of other options. Ernesti explicitly admits this and declares that he doesn't care; he's going to defeat Gojass's creation in order to preserve the world for giant robots because that's what he loves. He wins, of course, and it doesn't feel out of place because the thumb of the plot has been on his side all along and has never made any pretense about it. Knight's & Magic is as honest about loving giant robots, with their contradictions and all, as it is about the rest of its nature.

(You can read the ending of the show as partly a nod to this conflict being a never-ending one.)

(This is part of @appropriant's 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

Sidebar: Ignoring the long shadow of Gundam

Like many giant robot shows, Knight's & Magic winds up wanting to have its cake and eat it too. On the one hand, the most interesting giant robot fights are generally against other giant robots, and in situations where there is real tension. On the other hand this means war, literally; people are fighting each other in those giant robots and dying in those pretty explosions. The contradiction between war as a cool thing with awesome giant robots and the brutal, bloody consequences of war is deeply embedded in the genre since at least Gundam.

Knight's & Magic basically ignores this. It's not that it pretends that there aren't people dying in the pretty explosions (it's pretty explicit that there are, actually). Instead, it pretends that this is no different than when the characters were fighting giant monsters earlier in the series. The opponents are different and more challenging and the fights are cooler because they are giant robot versus giant robot (or giant robot versus giant flying robo-dragon), but that's it.

(To be fair to Knight's & Magic, the show also ignored how there were plenty of people dying 'heroically' against the giant monsters. It did have one little plot section about how scary fighting is, but promptly brushed it off.)

Within the show this pretense works, but that's by authorial fiat. Outside of the show, well, there's at least a long history of doing this and the audience is probably used to it. Knight's & Magic is not a show you think deeply about, anyway. I twitch here because I'm quietly scarred by Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket.

Checking in on the Fall 2017 anime season 'midway' through

It's time once again for a much of the way through update on my earlier impressions of this season. By now the shows have all shown their cards and my views and expectations have been solidified. In the process one show is turning itself into something amazing.

Excellent:

• Land of the Lustrous: This has just gotten more and more stunning as it goes along. The show has steadily ratcheted up the tension and the stakes, all the while with excellent execution in so many ways. The latest episode (episode 9) is a stunning peak of atmosphere and all of the crows coming home to roost at once, and nothing bad even happened in it.

  (LotL was good from the start but the early episodes weren't as excellent as the later ones have been. Not because they were bad, but simply because the show had to patiently build up the background and the overall situation before it could start all the rocks rolling downhill.)

• Girls' Last Tour: This continues to be beautiful and touching, among other things; it's been quietly and subtly exploring various bits of philosophy amidst the ruins of humanity's time on Earth. Each episode always pulls me in so well that I blink and it's over.

  (Recent episodes increasingly make it feel like the show as a whole is going somewhere, in a way that's slowly increasing an unseen tension. Parly this is because the show's increasingly making it clear that this setting is basically the end of the road.)

  One thing worth mentioning is that Girls' Last Tour has really amazingly good sound direction and design. The show's sound work is an important part of the overall atmosphere and mood it achieves, and the show make it sound effortless; the music and atmospheric sounds simply work so well.

• March comes in like a Lion: The recent arc around Kawamoto Hina has been generally stunning and wrenching in a good way, and in the process has pulled March back from brink of semi-boredom. Hina's story is so oppressive that I'm glad March has moved the focus mostly off it for the past few episodes.

Land of the Lustrous is more my kind of thing than Girls' Last Tour is, but otherwise I wouldn't want to rate them against each other. Land of the Lustrous is more straightforward and so comes across as more powerful to me; Girls' Last Tour is a lot more quiet and indirect, and it seems very likely that we'll get less answers from it (partly because answers aren't the point).

Very enjoyable to me:

• The Ancient Magus' Bride: This has continued to be a solid anime of a manga that I love. I don't think it's stunning and there have been some bits that were awfully anime in a conventional way, but the whole thing remains very enjoyable to watch; I really like seeing these stories animated and enjoying my foreknowledge of what's coming. To its credit, the superdeformed comedy bits have gotten better and better integrated over time.

They're okay and I'm getting what I expected:

• Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond: I've recently realized that this is basically an anime version of an American superhero team comic book. We have the same team of powerful people who have reasonably spectacular episodic fights and adventures, and the same fact that there is no overall plot or story movement. As an anime this is far more hard-edged than an American superhero comic would be, but it's basically the same experience.

  I'd probably be more enthused about BBB & Beyond if I cared about the characters, but I don't. Not even Leo, not any more.

• Kino's Journey (2017): I've realized that a major problem with the show is that it's simply shallow. It wants to address big philosophical issues, but its approach is bluntly obvious and feels like we're being beaten over the head. This would be okay if the show was otherwise beautiful or interesting, but it's not; it's generally flat otherwise.

  I've said on Twitter that Girls' Last Tour is what Kino's Journey should be and I stand by that. GLT is graceful and beautiful where KJ is straightforward and plain.

  (I don't remember what I saw of the original Kino's Journey being like this, so I should definitely go watch it at some point. Probably not this season, though.)

Neither of these shows are exactly good, but they're okay and at the moment I'm willing to keep watching them at a popcorn show level. To be honest, part of that is due to the name and history behind each of them. If I hadn't seen the first season of BBB, I might not be watching this one.

I'm getting tempted to check out Just Because!, so I may have something to say about it soon. I've officially dropped Recovery of an MMO Junkie after pausing it early on; the romance story may be charming, but I'm apparently not in the mood for that particular take on it.

Comedy and seriousness with the Kawamoto cats in March comes in like a Lion

March comes in like a Lion has always tried to blend some comedy into its serious overall tone. This has not always worked very well, because it's mostly been broad, silly comedy that could easily feel out of place amidst the rest of the show (and that was when the comedy even worked, which I feel it often didn't). One of those somewhat jarring comedy elements has been the Kawamoto family's cats, who've generally been presented as goofy things that the show went as far as giving voices to, so the cats could natter on about wanting some of the food on the table and so on.

Then came the most recent run of episodes, starting with episode 26, where Kawamoto Hina is in real emotional distress and the household is roiled with emotions. Now suddenly the Kawamoto cats are cats, presented with realistic looks, and we see them pressing up against their humans, trying to reassure them, or hiding under the table from the tensions around them. None of them speak, none of them are comedic or goofy. The mood has shifted and the cats are one of our bellweathers of that shift.

I really like this and think it's quite clever. It's not obtrusive; the cats and their behavior is a background thing in these scenes that you wouldn't consciously notice unless you were looking for it. But both that behavior and the shift from their previous behavior and presentation quietly helps reinforce the whole mood. And I think it wouldn't work as well as it does if the show had kept the Kawamoto cats as merely ordinary cats before; it is the shift from broad and unreal comedy cats to silent real ones that helps sell it so well.

(This elaborates on a tweet or two of mine, because I feel like it.)