Roving Thoughts archives

My (Twitter) reactions to the first episodes of the Summer 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).

• Hina Logic ep #1: A perfectly competent but uninspiring episode in the 'girls have adventures at school' genre. It lacks any great spark. →

• Katsugeki Touken Ranbu episode 1: The action is decent but the writing comes across as pedestrian and merely functional. It's kinda empty. →

• Knight's & Magic episode 1: This is goofy popcorn fun, even if it's not deep or complex. Sometimes I like competency porn shows. →

• Fate/Apocrypha episode 1: One incoherent battle plus a ton of exposition, minus any interesting or attractive characters. Nope, pass. →

  (Then I changed my mind.)

• Symphogear AXZ ep 1: Really it's the same as it ever was. The show's wisely not tried to top the start of last season & just gone straight. →

• Made in Abyss #1: On the one hand, this was a great starting episode; it had fun, great characters, solid writing, great animation, etc. →
  On the other hand, I keep hearing that Made in Abyss's story goes really grim & dark. I guess I'll keep watching until things get terrible. →

• Princess Principal ep 1: Yes, this is a bit absurd. But it's also great; it's an excellent genre piece with lots of smart & beautiful bits. →

• A Centaur's Life episode 1: This has a certain amount of charm, but it's mostly being carried by the manga & its visuals are only decent. →

• Guru Guru episode 1: Too manic and didn't particularly tickle my funny bone. This isn't for me; I don't have the 8-bit RPG love necessary. →

In the end I've decided to skip Welcome to the Ballroom, especially after the sakugablog article on it carefully threw cold water over people who wanted it to be anything more than 'a well-made high school sports show about an unusual sport'. High school sports shows almost never work for me these days.

There are a few other shows that look potentially interesting if I was really wanted more things to watch, like Restaurant to Another World and maybe Altair: A Record of Battles, but so far I'm fine with only watching this much. As usual I'm skipping all of the shorts, especially since none of them sound particularly attractive.

One obvious thing characters in Re:Creators should be doing but aren't

(There are spoilers here.)

For the last couple of episodes of Re:Creators I've been griping about something on Twitter, first indirectly and now explicitly:

And the people in Re:Creators really need to stop allowing Altair to have a platform to build a larger audience & more powers with.

In the spirit of not doing all my blogging on Twitter, I'm going to write more here, mostly in the form of tweets with added commentary.

@UgokiGyokuyou: lol you want censorship? Take down all those fanvids/fanfictions and prevent new ones to be uploaded?

@cks_anime: Taking Altair stuff down would probably attract too much attention, but they could make sure that Altair-related content is kept quiet.
Eg have Altair stuff lower down on 'popular <X>' pages than it should be, and don't let new fanvids/etc show up very high no matter what.
The latter is especially important since we've been told that popular new fanvids can give Altair new, expanded powers. That's v. dangerous.

Re:Creators has essentially explicitly stated that Creations in general and Altair in specific derive their power and their abilities from having an audience see and accept things with the character in them (manga, games, novels, anime, art, fan works, and so on). Since Altair is a standalone creation, entirely based on fan-created materials, she has no 'canon' to shape, define, and limit her the way that other Creations do; instead, everything comes from fans watching fan-made videos and art on the in-show equivalents of NicoNico and Pixiv and making them popular. It's been explicitly stated that some of Altair's dangerous powers come from secondary fan videos, ones made not by Altair's initial creator but instead made as goofy bits and pieces by other fans, then given power by enough people seeing and enjoying them.

It's probably too late to wipe Altair's existing videos and art from the NicoNico and Pixiv equivalents; fans would probably notice, there would be a controversy, and you'd cue the Streisand effect, which is exactly what our protagonists don't want. A similar thing holds about actively blocking new Altair-related content from appearing at all. However, you can certainly do things to limit the damage. Visibility and popularity rankings are generally opaque and reasonably subtle manipulations of them are unlikely to be noticed and reacted to. So NicoNico and Pixiv could be coerced to slowly and quietly lower the ranking and prominence of existing Altair-related content, and especially to manipulate their systems so that new content would not be seen by a large audience by, for example, appearing at the top of 'hot new content' pages even if it normally should.

(New content is especially dangerous because popular new content can probably give Altair new and expanded powers, in the same way that secondary fan videos has already given her some that weren't in her original video source.)

This is not big or loud, and it's not fast, but the characters in Re:Creators are already playing a relatively long game with a six-month action plan. They might as well use the government power they have access to and this time in an attempt not just to build themselves up but to quietly undercut Altair's base of power, that being her audience. Every bit helps and they have an uphill struggle.