Roving Thoughts archives

Brief impressions of the Summer 2017 anime season so far

I'm somewhere between three and 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 but alarming:

• Made in Abyss: This is clearly the best show I'm watching and everything so far has been pretty much universally excellent, but it has been building up an increasingly ominous atmosphere and there's all sorts of rumblings that the manga version goes unpleasant places (and if the anime does too, I'm probably going to drop the show). It's also simply an impressive show, in art, animation, writing, and directing.

Good:

• Princess Principal: This is a limited taste, because the show mixes completely serious material side by side with stuff that it's impossible to take seriously. But the show is fully committed to this (in the same way Thunderbolt Fantasy was) and has made it work so far. Not everything has been completely successful but it's solidly entertaining anyway.

• Senki Zesshou Symphogear AXZ: After a bit of a quiet start where the show did not, say, slice a chunk out of the middle of a mountain in the first episode, AXZ has been steadily ramping up its stakes. It is and remains very Symphogear, which means that it's both over the top and sincere.

Decent to okay:

• A Centaur's Life: This is basically slice of life in a science fiction setting. I read a bit of the manga several years ago and felt that it was both charming overall and reasonably well done, with an interesting mix of genres that could be nicely subtle. The animated version is a little bit less impressive because it's periodically kind of plain and flat in aesthetics and directing.

  Unlike some people, I think that the anime is overall reasonably well done. It's not flashy or 'strong' in some senses, but I've enjoyed elements like some nice character acting. On the other hand, I'm sort of feeling that I'm not going to keep watching the show for its entire run, so maybe I'm fooling myself about the overall production quality.

Popcorn watching:

• Fate/Apocrypha: I'm not watching this for the plot or the Fate lore; seeing as this is a Fate show, both are likely to be stupid or irritating, and in any case both are far too complicated and require far too much background reading for me. Instead I'm watching this for a certain amount of nice animation and a few characters who are amusing and interesting, and so far it has delivered on enough of both to keep me watching.

  (I was actually pleased by a certain plot twist in episode 4, because I found the character involved to be kind of a wet blanket. Of course, Fate shows usually leave me irritated at almost every character.)

• Knight's & Magic: This is what I will call 'competency porn'; you have a character who is very good at something and they do that something a lot, ideally in interesting and amusing situations and with some obstacles in the way. As I've said on Twitter, the show is so earnestly enthusiastic about things that it's charming, despite the basic story-telling limitations. See also this interesting post on K&M's heart-on-sleeve appeal by @iblessall.

  (I've realized that K&M quite reminds me of Rick Cook's Wizardry series, especially Wizard's Bane, the first book.)

In ongoing shows, My Hero Academia continues to be enjoyable to watch, although it has recently started to slip back into the excessive padding habits of the first season. I have tacitly dropped Re:Creators as not sufficiently compelling to make me care enough to watch another episode.

I recently saw the first episode of The Reflection and had some reactions on Twitter. I'm not sure what I feel about the show but it's interesting enough that I'm going to watch the second episode at some point. One way to put my longer term reaction to The Reflection so far is that I'm not sure it really feels like an anime show instead of a show about American superheroes that inexplicably happens to be in Japanese. Not that there's anything wrong with the latter, if it's well done.

Looking back at the Spring 2017 anime season

Once again it's time for my traditional look back at what I watched in this past Spring season, to follow up on my early impressions and my midway views. I could say that nothing really changed from the midway, but that's actually not quite true; I think that two shows actually picked themselves up at the end (WorldEnd and Alice & Zoroku).

Pretty much excellent:

• Eccentric Family second season: Okay, however painful it is for me to admit this, I will; Eccentric Family's second season is not as compelling as the first season was. That doesn't make it bad; the show was still great, beautiful, periodically both touching and scary, and funny, and it's clearly the best show of the season for me. But however intellectually interesting I found what I think is its broad theme, it's probably not going to stick in my memory and my heart the way that the first season did.

Very good:

• WorldEnd: The show fully nailed its ending and in the process become one of the rare shows that made me like what is basically a tragedy. The characters were well drawn and great, the twists stayed pretty interesting, the show is solidly structured, and although I initially thought that the scope of the plot was unnecessarily big, I wound up changing my mind. See my Twitter reactions to the last episode.

• Alice & Zoroku: This show is simply a treasure; it's a show that focuses on children and makes it work (see @iblessall's article for more here). Looking back, everything drove Sana's story even when it didn't entirely seem to, and her character arc was a great one. Everything I said in my midway views still applies.

Alice & Zoroku is probably objectively better than WorldEnd, but WorldEnd is more my kind of show than A&Z is so it's got a slightly higher position in my heart.

Good:

• My Hero Academia: The second season of MHA has handily eclipsed the first one, not necessarily because the material is better but more because the show has worked out how to make its relatively slow pace work for it instead of against it. Since the basic material has always been compelling, removing this road block has turned a show that I liked despite itself into one that is genuinely interesting (despite structural problems like a sports tournament, which is fortunately over now and the show's moved on to more interesting stuff).

Still on the edge and maybe dropping off:

• Re:Creators: Each episode usually is just good enough to get me to watch the next one, but it pushes closer and closer to the edge almost every time. It doesn't help that some recent events have made me feel that a room full of smart characters are missing one obvious thing, and that I'm even thinking about plot holes means that the show isn't fully engaging me.

I solidly enjoyed the first four shows here and found myself pretty much satisfied with the season as a result. Would I have liked more good things to watch? Sure, but unlike in some past seasons I didn't feel sufficiently bored to go searching out other things for popcorn watching and so on.

Some different ways that story endings can be satisfying

I've said before a number of times that what I find satisfying in the endings of shows isn't necessarily what other people do. Today I want to write a bit about that and about some different ways that endings can be satisfying.

As humans, we have a natural desire for our stories to make sense. We can tolerate a certain amount of not understanding things during the story, but by the end we would really like to know what happened and why it happened and so on; we would like to feel that there was cause and effect, not just randomness. A satisfying ending is in part an ending that makes the story make sense (and makes sense given the rest of the story). However there are different ways that the ending can make things make sense and be satisfying, or perhaps a better way of putting it is that there are different things that an ending can make sense of.

A narratively satisfying ending is one that tells us what happened; it resolves the important open plot issues from the story and answers hanging questions, all in a way that makes sense. It gives us narrative closure. In a traditional mystery story, a narratively satisfying ending tells us who did it, how, and why; it is the master detective explaining everything to the audience and the criminal being led off in handcuffs. In an action show, it is the final confrontation with the villains and the victory of the heroes. In a show with important previously unexplained mysteries, a narratively satisfying ending explains them well enough to pacify us (shows often have trouble here, though).

(What is an important unexplained mystery varies from person to person.)

An emotionally satisfying ending is one that answers the emotional, character centered questions raised by the story, giving us emotional closure. When you have dramatic characters in a story, an emotionally satisfying ending resolves their character arcs and says that yes, they changed, grew, dealt with their issues, found the answers they were looking for, and so on. In stories with romances, an emotionally satisfying ending is often one that answers the question of whether the ostensible couple is going to get together.

It's entirely possible to have a story ending that's narratively satisfying or emotionally satisfying without dealing with the other side at all. An extreme example of this is the Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series, where the last two episodes were at least an attempt at an emotionally satisfying ending that said absolutely nothing narratively. The resulting fan clamour allegedly led to End of Evangelion, where Anno shoved a grotesque 'narratively satisfying' ending down everyone's throat. We wanted to know what happened? Anno would tell us, even though we weren't going to enjoy it in the least.

It's relatively common for romance-focused shows to have an emotionally satisfying ending that doesn't attempt narrative closure. Here the core question of the show has always been 'will they get together', and the ending says 'yes they will' without showing us the details of how that plays out. This is the ending with the couple finally kissing for the first time and we shift to the end credits. The first season of Nodame Cantabile ended this way; the core emotional question of the show was always if Chiaki would come to love Nodame, and the ending of the first season said 'yes', even though it didn't cover the actual process of them getting together as a couple.

For me, Concrete Revolutio is an example of a show with a narratively but not emotionally satisfying ending. CR's ending told us exactly what happened and how, and in the process explained the big villain and so on. But it didn't really feel like it resolved many of the character issues, and instead dropped some of them on the floor. An older example is the ending of Eureka Seven AO, and if I want to go to a really extreme point there is the ending of Gilgamesh.

As an anime watcher, what I generally care about are emotionally satisfying endings. The story has to more or less make narrative sense by the end and I don't like gaping plot holes, but I don't demand to know the narrative details of what happens next and how everything resolves itself if the broad outlines are clear from the emotional closure. For instance, I thought that the first season of Nodame Cantabile was perfectly fine on its own and didn't really need any sequels (and I eventually lost interest in said sequels). This is not a universal position by any means; there are plenty of people who care a lot more about narrative closure than I do (and they are not wrong; this is a taste issue).

(Nor do I need all the mysteries to be addressed, even relatively important ones, cf Shingu and some of its unaddressed ones, and also. What mysteries need to be addressed and which don't is something I'm going to wave my hands about for now.)