Roving Thoughts archives

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.)

On Princess Principal's ending

(There are some spoilers here.)

In my retrospective on the summer season, I said that Princess Principal wound up as more of a prequel than a story and waved my hands a bit about why that was so. Today I want to write more details about that. The first question to ask is if Princess Principal has a conventional ending. Usefully I can answer that based purely on story structure, without having to talk about the specifics of what happened.

There are two ways to have a conventional ending to a story; you can resolve a significant ongoing plot issue or you can move some dramatic characters significantly forward in their character arcs (or you can do both). If you're ending an entire work you wrap up the big things (for characters and/or the plot); if you're just ending a season, you just wrap up a medium-scale plot or move characters forward but not all the way to the end of their stories. Looked at purely through this structural lens, Princess Principal does neither. The show had no large scale plot as such (although it did have an overall situation that created the fundamental story conflict), and while the protagonists were all dramatic characters, none of them resolved their character arcs or ostensibly made dramatic changes.

At the same time, things very clearly happened over the course of Princess Principal; the protagonists all wound up in a significantly different place than they started out. The show is not simply an episodic collection of adventures where at most we find out character backgrounds and then get a brief two-episode 'climax' at the end. That these changes happen and what they are is why I call Princess Principal a prequel.

In the very first aired episode of Princess Principal, Dorothy and Chise have what is in retrospect a crucial conversation after Dorothy casually lies to some normal students:

Chise: That was a bold move.
Dorothy: It's best not to sneak around with these things.
Chise: I see Ange isn't the only one with a knack for lying.
Dorothy: Spies are all liars. You're lying to me now, Chise.
Chise: As are you.
Dorothy: So what do you say we try being honest with each other?
Chise: The idea has its charm. But if we stopped lying, we wouldn't be able to stay friends.
Dorothy: Is that really friendship?
Chise: Even parents and children lie to each other.

This deliberately sets up the usual genre atmosphere for spy stories where all of the characters have their own interests, trust is purely temporary, things aren't as they seem, and betrayal may lurk around the corner at any time. All of the protagonists have their characteristic roles in this atmosphere; Ange, Dorothy, and Chise are outright spies with their own interests and secrets, Princess is the mystery, and Beatrice is the naif outsider. In fact the entire first episode is there partly to establish this overall atmosphere, since the episode's plot is a classical spy story of deception, hidden motives, and betrayal.

Over the course of the rest of the series, all of that changes. As all of the protagonists undergo character development, we see them quietly transmute from a collection of spies thrown together into a group of comrades. This reaches its climax in the ending of the show, where over the course of the show's only real plot arc, one by one all of the characters deliberately choose to turn their backs on their previous associations and instead choose the people who've now become their friends. By the ending epilogue, these people have stopped being a group of spies thrown together and become a team that happens to work as spies. It's to Princess Principal's credit that all of these decisions feel inevitable in the light of everything we've seen the characters go through together. Of course Chise is going to come back. Of course Dorothy is ultimately going to quietly choose the people who've become her friends, and to let Ange know that.

In other words, Princess Principal is the origin story of a team, the prequel that explains how they came to be before they go on to have thrilling adventures together (if Princess Principal ever gets another season). It's not a whole story in and of itself, because it doesn't really go anywhere or resolve anything (either in plot or in character development), but the characters themselves change in important ways; they end as different people than they started and they've made real decisions in the process.

Brief impressions of the Fall 2017 anime season so far

I'm now anywhere from three to five episodes into everything I'm watching, which is long enough for most shows to show their cards and for my opinions to firm up. So, as usual, here's how my views of this season have shaken out, to follow up on my first episode reactions.

Excellent:

• Girls' Last Tour: This is beautiful and touching and funny; it makes cartoony character art fit into its scratchy desolate setting art, and has very good use of background music. I called this 'slice of post-apocalyptic life' initially, and it is that but it's also much more. It's also quietly sad and tragic, because this is life after life has stopped and periodically Chito and Yuuri will have conversations that remind you that their lives are startlingly desolate. I keep hoping for a good ending for the two, but I don't think we're going to get it.

• Land of the Lustrous: Above all, what makes LoL great is the characters and their interactions, especially Phos. There are plenty of excellent things in the rest of the show; it's beautiful (in an unconventional way), the setting is full of interesting and intriguing questions, the building they live in is great, the show makes excellent use of CG and integrates it wonderfully with conventional 2D animation, and so on. But none of them would matter half as much without the compelling characters.

  (Following my standard views, I hope that the show never tries to explain the mysteries of the setting. It's based on an ongoing manga, so I suspect that this is a good bet.)

Very enjoyable for me:

• The Ancient Magus' Bride: I love the manga and this is very much my kind of thing, so I can't possibly be unbiased here. With that said, this is a good, solid anime version of the manga, but there's nothing so far to elevate it over the manga or add much unique to the manga. It's beautiful but not stunning, and if you've read the manga I don't think this is essential to watch (although you'll probably enjoy seeing Ancient Magus' Bride animated well, in a solid adaption). People who haven't seen the manga are apparently enjoying this, too.

  In a side note, I continue to think that AMB's periodic brief digressions into superdeformed comedy are a mistake in animated form. They work in the manga, but I think that's because manga panels are more isolated from each other than moments in a TV show are. In the animated version, the SD moments undercut the mood and impact of the beautiful regular animation. The comedy would be just as good without the characters going so SD.

  (The realities of TV anime production were always sort of tilted against AMB being stunning in the way I wanted it to be. But then, Flying Witch arguably managed it, although the manga was sparser than Ancient Magus' Bride.)

As good as always:

• March comes in like a Lion: On the one hand, this is still the same show it was before it paused. On the other hand, I'd like things to be moving more than they are; the first few episodes this season have mostly been fiddling around with small things.

Okay:

• Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond: This second season is a perfectly acceptable and decent episodic action/comedy show. It's competently directed, with decent production values, animation, background art, and so on. But it's not anything more, and the first season definitely was more, for all that it was also flawed; the first season had Leo learning about his powers and an overall plot arc.

  I'm watching BBB & Beyond this season as my empty popcorn action show watch, which it's reasonably decent at.

• Kino's Journey: At first I thought that this had some interesting editorial things to say about Kino through its choice of which stories to adopt (and when). Then I discovered that the stories it was adopting had been chosen by an audience vote. A popularity contest is not the way you get a good adoption that has something of its own to say, or even one that illuminates the characters to people who aren't already familiar with the material.

  If I was a smart person, I might drop this and use the time to watch the original Kino's Journey series, which didn't suffer from this issue and apparently does have things to say.

Probably being dropped after the next episode:

• Children of the Whales (#4): I can't do better than my Twitter summary:

  I would have to describe Children of the Whales as some combination between 'lethargic' and 'tiresome'. But it's very pretty so far.

  I'm watching the next episode only because I want to find out some secrets about the setting and they're probably going to explain them next episode. Otherwise, this has turned out to be an essentially empty and flat show, one that is paced far too slowly for its own good (some of the character dialog is also pretty painfully direct and obvious).

Paused and probably dropped as not for me:

• Recovery of an MMO Junkie (#2): This is charming but I haven't found it particularly compelling. Perhaps some parts of it also cut a little bit too close to the bone for me.

Dropped:

• Garo - Vanishing Line (#3): This is a completely straightforward but unexceptional show, and unfortunately what it's about isn't very interesting to me; it's a monster of the week tokusatsu show in animated form with a specific and not entirely attractive atmosphere. The result is an okay action show and I like Sophie, but it has no spark and this season my slot for an empty action show is better filled by BBB & Beyond.

  (Some people like Gina but I'm not entirely sold on her.)

I keep hearing good things about Just Because!, so I may look at it at some point despite what I said in my first episode reactions, partly because the season is slowing down for me (I've basically dropped three shows at this point).

My (Twitter) reactions to the first episodes of the Fall 2017 season

As before I'm collecting here all of my tweeted reactions to the first episodes I've seen (in the order that I saw them).

• Kino's Journey episode 1: That was solid as an exercise in setting and philosophy, with a reasonably appealing viewpoint character. →

• Girls' Last Tour episode 1: That was a nice mood piece, full of great little moments & willing to be quiet. Slice of post-apocalyptic life. →

• Land of the Lustrous ep 1: That was a solid and interesting start, even if I don't entirely like one of the character archetypes on display. →

• The Ancient Magus' Bride ep 1: A good solid adaptation of a marvelous manga. It's not as exceptional as the original but it does a good job. →

• BBB & Beyond episode 1: That was a perfectly okay adventure story that said little beyond itself. Basically a reintroduction of everyone. →

• Garo - Vanishing Line episode 1: This was decent popcorn action, with some nice touches, some teeth-grinding bits, and not the best fights. →

• Code Realize episode 1: An unexceptional implementation that doesn't exceed its genre and thus is not for me. ♯

• Children of the Whales ep 1: That was reasonably nice and reasonably pretty, but it sure had a lot of exposition narration & infodumping. →

• Recovery of an MMO Junkie episode 1: That was okay, but probably not good enough to get me to watch what's going to be a romance show. →

• March comes in like a Lion episode 23: A solid restart, emphasizing the positive growth in Rei's situation and probably setting things up. ♯

I've decided to skip Inuyashiki for various reasons (and Crunchyroll has the manga if I feel interested in skimming at some point). This season is probably too busy for me to look into Just Because!, since I've mostly sworn off shows set in high school, although it's getting good reviews. Finally, Juni Taisen is just not my kind of show.

(High schools and especially high school romances are basically played out for me at this point; I've seen so many that a show has to be exceptional to keep my interest. March comes in like a Lion is an exception (in the non-romance category); Toradora was an exception in the romance category.)

Looking back at the Summer 2017 anime season

Once again it's time for my traditional look back at what I watched in this past Summer season, to follow up on my early impressions and my midway views. Overall I would call this a decent season with one clear stand-out show that is far ahead of everything else I watched.

Excellent with an amazing finish:

• Made in Abyss: While the show wasn't flawless, it was always beautiful and full of the strangeness of the Abyss (and often tense), and it built up to a jaw-droppingly stunning and emotional final episode. I have no words. The last track of Kevin Penkin's beautiful soundtrack is going to stay with me for a long time.

  (In both its last episode and an earlier episode, Made in Abyss managed to achieve the kind of genuine emotional power and impact that very few shows can even approach.)

  I would love to see a second season of Made in Abyss that was as well-made as this one, but if we never get any more, the send-off we got was everything I could have asked for. It is and feels like a real turning point and transition point in the story, and that's a good place to stop.

Pretty good once the dust settled:

• Princess Principal: The show's overall execution was very good, but in the end I stand by my view that it's more of a prequel than a story, and that somewhat lessens the impact. It's not as simple as there not being enough story and plot; the very short version is that while everyone is a dramatic character and they all had character development, none of them went through a full character arc.

  (The character who comes closest to having no development is Beatrice, but the show goes out of its way to show that she's working to change herself.)

• Senki Zesshou Symphogear AXZ: By now you're either on board for the Symphogear experience or you're not. If you are, this was a fine installment, full of all of the elements that make the show itself. I liked how the show was spared the need to give things a big ending and wrapup due to there already being a fifth season on the way. See also Evirus's writeup.

Enjoyable:

• My Hero Academia: I enjoyed the show overall and I do generally like hanging around with the characters; I'll probably miss them while they're gone (there's yet another season coming, of course). I'm not really happy about the cast being pulled into epic, world-spanning plots and stories; I would rather see them living a high school life and occasionally being on the periphery of greater events. But this is a Shonen Jump title, so we get what we get.

  (I continue to be happy that MHA didn't try to give Bakugo any sort of tragic backstory.)

Fine popcorn watching:

• Knight's & Magic: It was very earnest and did what it set out to do pretty well. It was also surprisingly forthright about the fundamental irrationality and unreality of giant robots, and in the context of the show I don't object that romanticism won out because the thumb of the plot was clearly on its side; the plot has been on Ernesti's side all along.

Survived to the end of the season by the skin of its teeth and then dropped:

• Fate/Apocrypha: I finished out the nominal season and turning point (episode 12) and then stopped because there was very little about the show that I was interested in. I think I may finally be done with the Fate ride as a whole; it basically always ends the same way and I can read about the plot twists and the spoilers on my own if I want to.

By the end of the show, Made in Abyss single-handedly justified this season (to the extent that seasons of anime need any justification). I'm generally happy with everything else that I watched except Fate/Apocrypha, and continuing to watch that past the first episode is my own fault. I knew what F/A was from the start, but I let myself be talked into continuing with it for the splashy animation; by now I should know that that doesn't work for me.

Made in Abyss and characters going through brutal things

So what happened is that I saw someone on Twitter wondering if they should catch up on Made in Abyss, because they'd heard (and seen from screenshots) that some brutal and unpleasant things happened to the characters and were partly wondering if the show was being gratuitous with them. This sparked a stream of thoughts on Twitter:

Made in Abyss's latest episodes are wrenching and powerful, but are they necessary? And is this a question that matters?

I don't think MiA's events were gratuitous or overdone & things mostly focused on the emotional impact. The body horror was probably needed.

'Body horror' is not quite the right description for 'people getting hurt badly', but Twitter has length limits. The show definitely presented the situation in a way that was intended to make it wrenching; this was not pleasant, pretty, antiseptic stuff, it was visceral and cringe-inducing and painful to watch. Within the context of the episodes I don't think the show dwelt on things in a way that would have made it torture porn or pain porn; the focus was very much on how all of these horrible things affected the characters, especially Reg. The horrible things got shown to give Reg's reactions context and weight, and the show framed things claustrophobically to focus on this (cf, which has spoilers).

(See Nick Creamer's description in his week in summary post for more concrete stuff, but note that it has spoilers. He calls episode 10 'viscerally excruciating' and I would have to agree with that.)

As for the overall necessity, we have to wait and see how the story develops. I think there are early promising signs based on Nanachi.

That the events in the episode are non-gratuitous doesn't necessarily mean that the episode itself (and those events) are actually necessary. We won't know how necessary the events were overall until we see the story and the show's themes develop more. However, I think there are already clear promising signs, because the course of the story has clearly shifted after the events of episode 10.

Story elements don't necessarily have to have a point; they can be there for emotional impact. But terror and pain are empty w/o a meaning.
Made in Abyss certainly delivered emotional impact. Whether it used too much terror & pain for that is still open and also a personal call.

This is the question of whether the question in my initial tweet even matters. If Made in Abyss episodes 10 and 11 evoke such a strong emotional reaction from us, do they have to be 'necessary' in the larger scale of the plot? After all, stories are in large part about the emotional reactions they evoke and episode 10 certainly did that.

I don't have an answer but I do have an opinion, which is that some ways of evoking emotional responses are cheaper, easier, and more shallow than others. Kicking a puppy is a bad cliche for a good reason. Tormenting characters just to get a reaction from the audience is lazy and unappealing, and in the process it lessens the impact of the entire work. I personally don't think that Made in Abyss has crossed this line, but then I'm a jaded anime watcher.

(And I will admit that there are caution signs in some things in Made in Abyss, things that came up in passing that I'm not sure really needed to be there. Some of these questionable bits have been there from early on in the show.)

Checking in on the Summer 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 this point both my views and my expectations have solidified, although I'm still hoping for a surprise or two.

Still excellent:

• Made in Abyss: I recently characterized this as a quest without active opposition (so far), where the obstacle in the way of Riko and Reg is the Abyss itself, with its creatures and its very nature. The show is doing extremely well at portraying this and making things feel real, and it's been a very enjoyable ride despite the fact that we keep being told that Riko is never coming back from the journey she's making.

  With that said, I have no idea where the show is going and how it's going to come to a satisfying ending point. But the ride is so interesting that I don't care.

Very good, surprisingly:

• Princess Principal: The show has remained fully committed to its core nature and as a result has delivered a whole series of episodes with pretty solid impacts (and a few that were just fun), even if they're nothing novel in terms of plots. I've been particularly taken with the writing, which is often (although not always) willing to let things be indirect and count on us to get it.

  This has turned out much better than I would have expected from the premise.

Good:

• Senki Zesshou Symphogear AXZ: It's more Symphogear and it's being very itself by leaning into its over the top stuff and building on bits and pieces of past seasons in a way that makes its world feel real and lived-in. It's absurd, of course, but Symphogear has always been an absurd show.

• My Hero Academia: The show continues to move along pretty well, mostly avoiding the pacing pitfalls of the first season and the tournament pitfalls of the first part of this season. MHA isn't great but I do like watching it. It has charm.

Popcorn watching:

• Knight's & Magic: This remains more or less pure-hearted fun, although in the long shadow of Gundam it's hard to have the cheerful reaction to a war between two groups of humans that I think the show wants me to have, especially when it kills plenty of people on screen. For now I'm ignoring the cognitive dissonance and enjoying it anyway.

• Fate/Apocrypha: This has mostly delivered on a stream of reasonably spectacular fights with only a few diversions into annoying attempts at philosophy and character development and so on (all of which Fate is generally terrible at). Unfortunately, while I enjoy Astolfo and Mordred goofing around, my actual investment in any of the characters is almost nil so all of the action mostly feels empty and pointless.

Dropped:

• A Centaur's Life: I wound up feeling that the only thing the show had going for it was its gimmick, and with the show's bland and so-so production, that wasn't enough to keep me watching. I have some theories about why this material worked much better in manga form than animated, but that's for another entry.

• The Reflection: After watching a number of episodes I realized that I was only interested in it as a peculiar and interesting artifact, not as something to actually watch. I wasn't particularly invested in either the characters or the plot and the writing could be painful.

I've got enough shows that I want to watch that I've felt no particular need to seek out more or dig into my backlog (the latter is kind of a pity, since I have some good stuff I want to get to someday). More shows and more good to excellent shows would be nice, but I'm okay with what I have.