girl cartoons

An announcement

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 03:32:42 -0700

These last seven months have been a great experience—I’m grateful for the warm welcome I’ve gotten from the ‘sphere, and this blog has been a fun and challenging way to get myself to think more deeply about anime as a whole.

But I want to work my way deeper into that, and Tumblr’s no longer a convenient way to accomplish that.

So from here on I’ll be hosted on Wordpress, on the dasaku network, at http://8c.dasaku.net, with all thanks to the eminently sexual Randall Fitzgerald. The MO’s exactly the same, but this way things will ideally be a little more convenient than, a little less buggy than, and exactly as ugly and austere as they were here.

I’m also streamlining things, and mixing http://erodatabaseanimal.tumblr.com/ in with the new site, under the “smut” category.

On the site now is a new post, “Mediation of Sentimentality in Aria The Animation”, as well as both Ero Database Animal posts and a handful of old posts from here. To make it look full, you know.

So, I’ll see you over there.

Ookami-san and her enigmatic finale

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 22:56:19 -0700

Between the amount of plot resolved, the skipped OP and the rearranged ED timing, signs would indicate that 11 was the final continuity-relevant episode of Ookami-san and her Seven Companions, and that 12 is likely an unrelated “bonus” episode. While the ending seems to have disappointed many, I think the episode managed to do quite a lot, and recalled much of what made episode 05 such a dense and important experience. Its sudden conclusion, as well, was as deftly-executed as it was inevitable.

In short: the driving force behind the denouement of episodes 10 and 11 was not Shirou, but Liszt.

The most obvious evidence of this is found in Liszt’s brief appearance at the end of Ryoushi and Shirou’s fight. Liszt quietly steps in and brings the entire conflict to a halt; he refers to the fight as having been “sold” to Shirou; he then calls off the entire preceding conflict with a dismissive clap as if wrapping up a rehearsal. Liszt’s demeanor, and Shirou’s quiet acquiescence, only make sense if one assumes that Liszt has some significant degree of power over the situation.

This is foreshadowed, both subtly and obviously, throughout the developing action. During the sale, when accused of not helping, Liszt opaquely replies “I’ve been doing plenty of work myself”—the obvious implication is simply that his contribution to the effort has been off-screen; however, every other member’s actions are well-accounted-for in the preceding montage. In the rescue operations of episode 11, Majo and Liszt know exactly where to find Otsu and Alice within a very brief time period, despite their locations not being discovered on-screen at any point. Finally, during the assault on the front gates of Onigashima High, the narrator highlights this theory directly: “Those 30%-off loans are certainly coming in handy—I wonder if the president prepared them just for this?” We can infer from this that Liszt knew very well how events would play out, long beforehand.

The loan discount subplot itself should raise suspicions: much of the chaos and disarray that allowed Shirou’s kidnappings to work at all was generated by the sale, an ostensibly sudden measure on Liszt’s part which still manages to fit perfectly into Shirou’s scheme. Without the sale, characters who were preoccupied or unaccounted for and therefore easy to manipulate would have likely been in better contact, or better-prepared to respond to Shirou’s actions.

What this would seem to suggest is that the events of episodes 10 and 11 are not simply Otogi Bank’s reaction to a plot by Onigashima, but a facade being acted out unbeknownst to the majority of the players. And, as mentioned above, Liszt and Shirou’s demeanor in the concluding scenes would seem to indicate that between the two Liszt is the more likely mastermind.

Many scenes and interactions make a great deal more sense in light of this, such as the way Shirou and Ryoushi’s fight plays out: when Ryoushi finally lands a hit on Shirou, he seems ready to escalate the fight, grinning widely and saying “This means you’re prepared for more than that, right?” This could be dismissed as a simple action-scene cliché, but we could again infer from a literal reading that Shirou is for some reason forcing himself back to avoid actually injuring Ryoushi.

Moreover, Shirou’s various proposed motivations for carrying out this whole plot add up vaguely to a perverse desire for entertainment—”I enjoy watching people in despair”, “to watch your group fall to pieces”, “to see how hard you would fight for Ryouko” and so on. His only motive is the sadistic pleasure he takes in watching the scheme unfold—a complex, tightly-woven scheme whose elegance depends on specific actions taken by both sides.

The proposal that the driving force behind most of Ookami-san is controlled by outside forces is not new: in episode 05 Liszt explained at length that Onigashima High’s entire purpose as an institution was to cause conflict with Otogi High, and that the town itself was devised for the sake of producing brilliant students at Otogi. The ending animation, as well, is rife with imagery of theater (e.g. the opening and closing curtain) and facade (e.g. the paper cut-out art style of the characters and environment). Finally, most of the events of the preceding request episodes were planned out in advance by Liszt, often with multiple intended goals outside the actual fulfilment of the request.

With all of this taken into account, it is not at all strange to propose that nearly every scene in the show deserves reading both as actual narrative events and as facades contrived by its characters.

Highschool of the Dead; what I'm doing here

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 04:28:13 -0700

I’m watching Highschool of the Dead as a fun show. I watch it, primarily, for the action and the sex and the production values. That is what I download it for—the adrenaline.

But, if its writing weren’t excellent, if its characters weren’t well-developed, if everything but the animation were lazy and shoddily-done, that wouldn’t be a proper defense of any flaws it might have. If something’s worth defending, it’s worth defending right, and defending well. Accusations of plot holes, weak writing, this show deserves better than a dismissive “get over yourself, it’s about zombies and tits”. It deserves a defense as impassioned and straight-faced as does Kon or Scorsese or Nabokov.

Sure, that’s me taking things too seriously, but I do that. Because I think it matters.

That’s why I dropped Shukufuku no Campanella but am watching Asobi ni Ikuyo—not every anime has to be The Tatami Galaxy, but if my goal is solely entertainment, there are far cheaper ways to pass the time than anime fandom. I watch anime because time and again it’s shown me that it can be something more, and if I can’t see that something more—if a work appeals to me only on the simplest of levels—then I can’t bring myself to dedicate hours of my life to it. Implied in my choice to watch a given anime is my preparation to defend that anime’s status as a meaningful way to have spent those hours of my life. And in Highschool’s case, as in Queen’s Blade’s before it, that means dissecting the plot of a show I watch primarily for the sex.

That’s not everyone—I understand that. I make a special effort not to engage people who aren’t interested in this level of discourse on the subject. It’s not my place to decide how seriously someone else takes something, and I doubt anything but frustration would come from any efforts in that direction. I don’t even mean this dismissively—someone else’s choice not to waste hours of their life studying foreign cartoons or writing longwinded essays about them says nothing to me about that person’s intelligence. It’s not everyone, but it is me.

I respect anime as a medium. I respect each anime individually. And, to me, the most important element of respecting something is not ignoring or glossing over its flaws. Defending some element of an anime by declaring that it’s “just anime” or “just a fanservice show” may pass for accurate explanation, but I can’t acknowledge it as legitimate excuse. I love Neon Genesis Evangelion not regardless of, but in spite of its shallow symbolism and underdeveloped characters. I don’t “forgive” the show for those things because I prefer to appreciate it as a meta-narrative of Anno’s depression, I consider it a vital part of my love of the show that I know and understand and appreciate those things which it does wrong as much as any of the work’s detractors.

As ghostlightning put it:

[Minmay] is grossly imperfect and generally makes a mess of things – and not in a winsome, moe fashion as one may expect from such a statement. She represents my view that I love Macross not because it’s the best anime I’ve ever seen. Rather, I esteem it above all other anime because of my love for it.

This is the train of thought I apply to every anime I watch. And every book I read, and every song I listen to. If I love or hate something, it matters to me to understand why I feel that way, and what it says about me, as distinct from my own or others’ critical opinion of the work. Writing here, or on Twitter, is my outlet to fulfil an inexorable need to appreciate anime beyond simply enjoying it.

Details like the distribution of pantsless and pants-wearing characters in Strike Witches or the reasoning behind Highschool’s female cast leaving the house in various states of undress aren’t particularly relevant to my enjoyment of the work. But they’re by no stretch inconsequential to the work’s quality—critics don’t point out inconsistencies because their detract from the work’s greatness quotient in some abstract technical sense, they complain about inconsistencies that are jarring and that can pop the bubble of suspended disbelief for those who don’t actively choose to enforce their bubbles. From the perspective of the viewers, and of the producers, both of the above issues are clearly driven by a desire to parade lightly-dressed females in front of the camera; however, this meta-justification doesn’t excuse either of the above in and of itself.

The in-world logic used to justify such details is there because without it each show would simply be a series of visually-stimulating images, a great sound and fury. Anime, as any works, are made meaningful by their efforts to incorporate their visceral titillation into a convincing narrative. That narrative isn’t incidental to or distinct from their role as “fun” or “entertainment”; the two are intertwined. Highschool’s deeper narrative and thematic content aren’t divorced from or “bonus” to the way I enjoy it—rather, they are integral to.

Alternate title: “Why I Bite My Tongue When You Say You Like It Because It’s ‘Just Good Fun’”.

Ookami-san and viewer fantasies

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 18:33:00 -0700

With five episodes aired, Ookami-san and her Seven Companions has, to many, shown itself to be a slickly-produced but generally vapid bit of entertainment: while its fairy-tale allusions give it a lush and full world in which to play out, little of any real significance has been done with them. However, just below the surface, Ookami-san seems about to bubble over with some truly intriguing ideas. For instance, in episode 05, Liszt’s speech detailing the workings of the Aragami Syndicate has set a perfect stage for a treatise on the conflicts of personal freedom and the importance of societal infrastructures.

But perhaps most interesting is the show’s protagonist, Ookami - that is, the fact that Ookami is the protagonist. Ookami-san clearly adheres to the moe aesthetic, and shows signs of the ever-more-popular adherence to an Azuma-esque database model of character definition, albeit played with in its grounding every character in an established cultural myth. However, in contrast to most shows in this vein, while the series is clearly marketed toward males the central character is female.

In nearly all anime of the moe aesthetic, if named male characters occur at all (in contrast to, say, K-ON! or Strike Witches), a male character is almost certainly the protagonist; that is, whether or not they are the most important element of the plot’s progression, the story unfolds from their point of view and is framed around their personal struggle. Zero no Tsukaima is about Saito; Angel Beats! is about Otonashi; even Chu-Bra!! is told largely from the perspective of Komachi seeing Nayu’s world from the outside.

This is a pattern one can observe in nearly any medium, genre and cutlure - if a work is marketed to a specific gender, its protagonist’s gender will very often reflect that. However, in recent anime marketed at an adult male audience, this has become not just a cultural custom but in many senses a defining part of the genre, largely because of its friendliness to viewer insertion. The ever-growing presence of moe fetishism and escapism in both the creative and marketing aspects of the moe aesthetic hinge upon the ability for the viewer to imagine (primarily) himself in the shoes of the protagonist.

But Ookami-san quite clearly revolves around Ookami herself, and not Ryoushi, the strongest viewer-insert candidate. The plot reflection moments are in Ookami’s room with Ringo, and narrative elements are arranged such that Ookami fills the classic action protagonist role. For example, in the school-storming scene in episode 05, the show plays the common pattern of whittling the team down to just one character from each side in the final confrontation - here, that character is Ookami-san, and Ryoushi is simply one amongst many heroic sacrifices made to help her reach her goal.

Moreover, Ryoushi’s defining character attributes are all suggestive of a supporting character: a distinctive accent, a crippling fear played for laughs, and a degree of explicit sincerity which is strikingly rare among male protagonists. He is defined and given concrete personality to a point which makes him, if not useless, then of very narrow use as a viewer-insert. He is a sympathetic character, but in the way that a real character is, rather than a character designed to be the focal point of the audience’s fantasies.

Ookami-san isn’t a show about an average high school boy trying to win over an outwardly-cold girl, but a show about a girl trying to deal with her growing feelings for a boy who confessed to her. The fantasy is not served to the viewer on a silver platter.

However, Ookami is still very clearly sexualized, and presented as an object of desire - this is, after all, a show aimed at men. Her fanservice-friendly uniform and the narrator’s regular comments on her bust size clearly mark her as a character who is being objectified for the audience’s titillation, even as she is the locus of the show’s emotional narrative. A clear parallel in this regard from the shoujo market is D.N.Angel, an ongoing manga and 2003 anime: the main character Niwa Daisuke, and his alter-ego Dark, are the point from which the story is told and the character around whom the romance revolves. However, Dark is - as a defining character trait - visually a tall and atractive bishounen of the sort shoujo manga normally use as the subject of fanservice and objectification.

In not just ignoring but actively subverting the established gender mores of their readership, both Ookami-san and D.N.Angel force the viewer to consider their relationship with the work more closely, without necessarily being aggressive or deconstructive. Rather than attempting to destroy the viewer’s fantasy altogether, they opt to explore and interrogate that fantasy, on the viewer’s own terms.

Shukufuku no Campanella: the logical extreme of otaku escapism

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 22:54:40 -0700

With three episodes aired, Shukufuku no Campanella is a competent show by many standards - it sports an impressive voice cast, decent animation and fun character designs. However, those elements outside of its production values tell a very different story. The setting, plot, characters and dialogue are all extremely simplistic and one-dimensional; but the way they are presented suggests not so much a lack of competence on the creators’ part but rather an active effort to excise all depth and conflict from the setting.

Escapism plays an important role in all art; fantasy, as a genre, makes particular use of it. But here Shukufuku does not simply weave escapism into its narrative, the escapism is placed at the forefront of its priorities. Shukufuku accomplishes nothing but escapism. The show’s denizens exhibit not the roughness of a writer without the inspiration or talent to write characters of substance, but rather a series of faces which have been perfectly sanded down to an absence of any unique personailties or ideas.

Leicester, the player-insert in the eroge Shukufuku is based on, is odd among self-inserts in that he is not, as in harems such as Clannad or Love Hina, made up of a bare set of traits and flaws which the average otaku is meant to identify with; rather, he lacks even the definition afforded to those characters, leaving almost no mental impression whatsoever.

The plot, too, is purified of any meaningful conflict or progression: the action scenes play out in such a way that the show appears to be constantly assuaging the viewer that everything will be all right - that there is not the slightest possibility of anything actually going wrong, and that there neither is nor ever was any real threat present.

But what makes this different from the swaths of slice-of-life and iyashikei anime on the market? These are shows which in many cases appear similar: little to no conflict, often one- or two-dimensional characters and so on. Still, for the most part, slice-of-life shows centered around real-life settings use that format as an alternative to classical narrative, still in pursuit of making some statement about life but via a new means of communication. Iyashikei franchises such as Aria and Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, similarly, use their otherworldly setting and eccentric pacing to communicate ideas about those parts of life not exciting enough to support a classical narrative.

In short, they still act as art, as attempts to explore and understand the human experience - a goal which Shukufuku sets aside from the start. It acts not as art, designed to provoke thought or entertainment, but rather as a kind of cheap sustenance for the mind. It stimulates the viewer in the way that shaking keys excites a baby - the sights and sounds are tailored not to engage the viewer in their world, but to distract the viewer from the one around them. It is, in a sense, the ultimate manifestation of Azuma’s “cultural database” - a series of images presented solely to sate the otaku’s craving for new tropes and memes to organize.

Technology and the western otaku subculture

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:25:27 -0700

A friend on Twitter mentioned the hold Tanabata seems to have on the western otaku. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was Tanabata in particular or if there was some relevance to Japanese festivals in general. Particularly in America, our landscape of cultural celebrations and holidays is negotiated in significantly different terms: of our cultural celebrations which permeate most of the culture, a large part are either pagan-via-Christianity feast days (Christmas, Easter) or primarily-capitalistic celebrations invented/popularized by corporations (Valentine’s day, Mother’s day). Few of the distinctly-American federal holidays (Veteran’s day, Memorial day) have any sort of consistently-implied means of recognition associated with them. As new a country as America is, and as much as its culture leverages the “melting pot” metaphor, there simply has not been time for anything as detailed or pervasive as Tanabata to have developed.

But this speaks to a larger trend in why anime might be the most appropriate medium to the sort of people who make up much of the modern otaku subculture. For clarity, I refer here mostly to the “deep” otaku subculture, such as those found in the aniblogsphere and who keep up with current news and broadcasts, and not as much to those whose fandom is mostly mediated through licensed DVDs. This clarification is important because I want to look through the lens of how large a role the internet plays - that is, you can only have an otaku subculture like the sort developed in the aniblogsphere and on Twitter in areas with reasonable access to internet - by implication, either first-world or inordinately rich, which implies certain things about the culture’s advancement of infrastructure and the users’ technical literacy.

So you have a non-Japanese otaku subculture made up of people who are tech-savvy, live primarily in developed or developing countries, and, most likely, spend a lot of time in front of computer screens. The appeal of the culture depicted in anime becomes clearer here - not just festivals like Tanabata or natsumatsuris, but even the cultural depiction of technology becomes relevant. Computers are enough of a rarity in anime that anime like Hidamari Sketch can center gags around it, and Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuuutsu can make a plot point out of attempting to find a computer in a publically-funded school. These shows’ settings are modern, and take place in extremely-developed cultures, but the presence of computers is far less ubiquitous than its viewers are likely accustomed to.

It plays, more subtly and perhaps unintentionally, to the same kind of ideas that Avatar exploited intentionally - the allure of digging deeper into your established technological infrastructure until you’re so deep in that you come out the other side - negotiating the desire for a simpler, perhaps more “right with nature” culture with the convenience of the technology-infused culture we take part in. Otaku are seeking emotional and cultural solace in bits of data fired into their brains from thousands of miles away.

Arakawa Under The Bridge and hiding from the "real world"

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 15:00:30 -0700

Akiyuki Shinbou’s latest project, Arakawa Under The Bridge, has nearly drawn to a close, with its thirteenth and final episode airing next week. The show has so far, in true Shinbou style, played its thematic ideas close to the chest, slowly building up characters and grand ideas via his trademark comedic pacing and eccentric visual delivery. In episode 12, we see the most explicit development and acknowledgement of these themes since the revelation of Hoshi’s past in episode 09 - there we got a brief glance at the reasoning of those who came to the bridge entirely willingly; here we see what keeps the Ichinomiyas away from it.

The immediate conclusions people I’ve heard from generally draw from any of the bridge’s inhabitants are, first, that they are in some way mentally damaged or inhibited, and second, that their choice to live under the bridge is motivated by an unwillingness to grow up and participate in the common understanding of the “real world”. The chief abjectly refuses to acknowledge that his kappa appearance is a costume; Tooru gave up a successful office career to walk a line-painter around under a bridge. These are, at first glance, people who failed to live up to the stresses of the modern world and therefore relegated themselves to being the dregs of society.

Ichinomiya Kou, on the other hand, exemplifies a wide range of accepted societal markers of success - a self-made, wildly successful businessman, classically handsome and fully versed in the motions of polite society, a model capitalist. The Ichinomiya family motto, and particularly its execution, could have been taken straight from the pages of Rand. But, as Arakawa has regularly hinted and as it said outright in episode 12, all of these traits obfuscate a wide range of his own insecurities and psychological inhibitions.

In the first scene of episode 12, Nino comes to Kou’s aid, saying “It’s fine, everyone is afraid of ghosts, bugs, bell peppers and their fathers”. Hoshi, and likely a good part of the audience, responds with a disbelieving “how young do you have to be to be scared of those things?”. Kou being rushed by his father into an adulthood in which emotion and compassion are weaknesses and any human interaction deeper than simple exchange of goods is unforgiveably wasteful left him with a full 22 years for those simple, childish-to-most fears to become deeply ingrained in his psychology. Kou’s childlike preferences at that level seem as strange to the rest of the bridge’s denizens as someone wearing a star mask or claiming to have come from Venus.

And his father Seki’s humanizing monologue near the end of the episode, where he implies that his own embracing of the Ichinomiya motto is as a result of his inability to cope emotionally with his own experiences with love. Kou, much earlier on, displayed many of these same insecurities - his inability to accept any measure of altruistic kindness from Nino, and later his need to rationalize her favors to him as simply a less obvious kind of capitalistic exchange. Both Seki and Kou hide from the possibility of emotional interaction by single-mindedly pursuing profit.

In his time under the bridge these insecurities have been worn down a great deal; Seki’s meeting with Nino, which so closely parallels Kou’s own first arrival at the bridge, gives us a point of reference to just how much Kou has changed in the past twelve episodes. Kou’s own story of maturing and overcoming his past insecurities is embodied in his attempt to altruistically put his own set of acquired skills to work in protecting the community he’s become a part of, just as Nino, Hoshi, P-Ko and the others have.

What Arakawa asks here is this: is it really a mental or psychological failing to reject a set of accepted social ideals relevant to pure accumulation of capital profit, and instead strive for a set of accepted social ideals relevant to building a community? The structures occurring in the community under the bridge are very in line with those at work in any small communal living scenario - how much is the choice between these ways of thinking a dichotomy, and to what extent are they mutually exclusive or zero-sum - which is the “real world”? With Seki on one end and the bridge denizens on the other end of a loosely capitalist-communist dichotomy, Kou’s struggle is to find an ideal point between the two.

Tatami Galaxy's haunting ending theme

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 10:00:00 -0700

Mr. Avisch at The Fool wrote a great article on Tatami Galaxy a couple weeks back, ending with a note about the ending theme, calling it “haunting” and “morose” and noting how its mood seems to conflict with the tone of the series itself. That had me thinking a bit more about the song than I usually think about ending themes when I noticed that the strange, conflicting sound of the ED really does make perfect sense.

The visuals of the animation itself play an important role: the video consists of various rectangles with door markings, as with a house floor plan. This motif is used to generate a variety of interesting images - a purple and yellow floor-plan expanding and multiplying through a canvas of red-and-grey pairs, a Fibonacci square of rooms, a yojouhan (the titular four-and-a-half-tatami square room) flitting around, to name a few. The mood is chaotic and unpredictable, with the rooms shifting in size, orientation and place unpredictably.

Perhaps the most fascinating, and the one which tipped me off to the intended symbolism, is the very last: an imposing mass of solid-grey rooms slowly converge on one pale green yojouhan. The music builds to a climax, the camera shakes uncontrollably, and finally the mass closes upon the small room. This nervousness, this “haunting” tone, is Watashi’s internal struggle.

Tatami Galaxy is a show about choices - the interplay of the characters’ decisions with their fates, through however many incarnations, and what those choices can and can’t affect - and about the connections formed between people based on or in spite of those choices. The rooms of the ending, in their tentative exploration and in their frantic attempts to move faster, paint a visual of these connections.

When the rooms move fluidly and cleanly out of each other, they depict tentative, paced explorations, such as Watashi’s choice of club. As they begin to simply appear, one in front of another, as the mass desperately attempts to keep up with the speed of the camera, they depict unforeseen snap judgments - Watashi’s struggle between the three girls in episodes 06 through 08, for example. At a few points in the animation, separate masses reach out and connect to each other via long hallways, marking decisions that connect one person-mass to another.

And that final shot, with a homogenous mass of decision-rooms closing in on a lone yojouhan, mirrors perfectly our protagonist’s apprehension and futile attempts to avoid making commitments or following through with his own decisions.

B Gata H Kei and the appeal of incompetence

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 10:19:09 -0700

Episode 10 of B Gata H Kei was uncharacteristically fast-paced, given the tone the last few episodes have set. It hearkened back to the frantic pacing of the first episode, in more ways than one.

In particular, the final scene of the episode brought with it the culmination of a subtle secondary idea the show has been building up to in Kanejou. From her first appearance at the school festival, and more formally on her introduction as a main character, Kanejou has unmistakably branded as the closest the show is likely to come to a villain. At every turn she is conniving, hoping to control the school for no reason but the fun of it, and making herself the biggest inconvenience to Yamada in particular possible - fitting for a self-centered sex comedy rival. And an incestuous crush, to boot.

But most of those things describe Yamada - her ostensible goal of sex with 100 men is nothing if not a (misguided) quest for social stature; she is manipulative and coarse in pursuit of her goals; and she hates and inconveniences Kanejou at least as much as vice versa. So why is one such a likable protagonist, and the other such a loathsome rival?

Perspective - Yamada is a narrated character. Her “erogami” follows along with the audience, noting all of her mistakes and insecurities - things which make her human and relatable. Kosuda, as well, grew a dimension and became a tangible character with actual depth around when his own erogami was introduced. B Gata reveals its characters’ humanity in spite of the front they present to the world through these little-explained, semi-diegetic fourth-wall-sitters. And in episode 10, both Kanejou and Miyano’s erogami are introduced.

Miyano’s erogami appears during an emotionally-tense dialogue with Kosuda in which she’s barely able to contain herself while advising the boy she loves about his love of another girl. It provides some light comedic relief as a transition into the following scene, but also serves to signal to the viewer that she is a real character - her emotions here are as real as any in the show, and she is not simply a clumsy set piece in Yamada and Kosuda’s romance.

Kanejou’s erogami is more devious in its appearance - after Kanejou “kidnaps” Kosuda and begins her efforts to seduce him, she finds herself at a loss for what to do. Her erogami appears, and she instantly becomes a nervous wreck reminiscent of the Yamada of the first few episodes - not thinking straight, she begins stripping in front of Kosuda, at the same time exhibiting more of a will to attack than to seduce in her body language. For a moment she is the spitting image of Yamada, shoving Kosuda in a storage closet and pulling her shirt open defiantly.

Suddenly our awareness of her unsavory sexual motives take an immediate backseat to her mental breakdown, and her despicable antics give way to a light, comedic tone. Most important, within the span of a few seconds, she becomes human. When we see behind the veneer of her outer persona - in a more honest sense than our discovery of her brother complex - she is irrevocably humanized. She is, at worst, only as bad as the girl we have been rooting for since the very first episode.

The enigmatic intentions of Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 19:40:20 -0700

Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou was, I think, this season’s biggest long shot - though it teased viewers from the beginning with the groundwork of a brilliant dramatic premise, the first handful of episodes seemed to ground it firmly as a harem anime, while the ED did its best convincing us that that was the intent. Despite this, between episodes 05 and 10 the show has certainly cemented its strength as an engaging action series with a relevant social message.

Daimaou has shaped that original premise - that our friendly protagonist was destined to become an evil demon lord who would terrorize mankind - into a powerful commentary on the symbiosis of religion and hierarchical power structures. The clearest turning point was the beginning of episode 09, with a young Akuto standing up to a priest who told him to thank God for the priest’s donation, telling the priest that ”God is nothing more than a system created by humans”. This hearkens back to the earlier parts of the series, in which Akuto admits that he has no strong personal investment in the church but simply sees its power and social sway as the most efficient means to accomplishing as much good as he can.

We see others in positions of power alluding to this more and more throughout episodes 09 and 10 - that the importance of the religion and of stopping Akuto stem not from the will of any actual gods but from their need to preserve the system which supports them. It’s reminiscent of the final conflict between structure and morality of Gurren Lagann, but is so far more nuanced and taken more seriously.

For example, even in the midst of the leaders’ mobilization of a front against Akuto, many of the players are still most interested in vying for power - as with Teruya Eiko murdering to take control of her clan’s army, then exploiting the Hattori family’s dedication to honor and tradition and their god to send Junko and Yuuko on a suicide mission.

So the show loosely outlines a 2x2 division of thought with regards to religion - those who believe in religion, or at least in their religious traditions, versus those who don’t, and those who exploit others’ belief in religion to their own ends versus those who don’t. The 1A and 2A groups, those who exploit others’ beliefs and may or may not themselves believe, are not very clearly defined, but one can certainly place the cunning Eiko and so far our primary villain Yamato Bouichiro. The former is currently exploiting others for the short-term goal of becoming dominant in the Teruya clan; the latter, if the principal is to be believed, has been fabricating and engineering conflict grounded in religion to perpetuate a hierarchical government for over 100 years.

The 1B group, believers who do not exploit others, is probably comprised of the majority of the world’s citizens and is best detailed in Junko. Her dedication to either her family’s religion or traditions, which the show has been indicating to be a less and less important clarification, is leading her along with the rest of her clan to their death at the hands of a *A.

Finally, our 2B group, those who neither personally subscribe to a religion or exploit others in the name of that religion, is comprised most clearly of two characters - our protagonist Akuto and the school’s principal. For a pair of atheists in a world where the supernatural is canon and a genre and medium with deep socially-conservative roots, these two characters are depicted in a remarkably positive light - the former already established as putting little or no stock in the systems of religion, and the latter having lost his faith when he realized that the “will of the gods” he had been following was engineered for a political purpose.

Hiroshi, and his Brave persona, illustrate the internal conflict of these ideas - his dedication as a superhero to the preservation of the status quo and systems already in place clashes with his respect for and trust of Akuto’s motives. As of episode 10 he’s placed his allegiance with those in power and the destiny laid before him, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see his change of heart marking the climax of the series.

Daimaou has two more episodes yet, so I’m uncomfortable proposing any concrete thesis for its intended final treatment of these themes - for one, given the conservatism present in anime and the dedication to tradition throughout Japanese works, I doubt the ending will be an unqualified endorsement of the importance of personal freedom over religion and respect of power. But the pieces are all in play, and the show has proven that it’s prepared to do something with them.

Affection and inauthenticity in The Tatami Galaxy

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 10:00:00 -0700

2DT mentioned at the end of a great post on Tatami Galaxy a couple weeks back that he noticed some similarities between Tatami’s Akashi and Bakemonogatari’s Senjougahara. This made a few things click for me, as I hadn’t yet been able to get a grasp on what fascinated me so about Akashi.

The clearest and most obvious comparison is, as 2DT noted, their “inauthenticity”, their difficulty in expressing their feelings in a natural way. To coin an abominable neologism from one which has already lost almost all meaning, they seem to exhibit something of a “post-tsundere” archetype - they aren’t so much reluctant to admit their love to themselves as they are reluctant to be reluctant. Senjougahara expresses her feelings for Araragi in explicit, self-aware language, but with a tone so dry that it’s hard to believe she’s sincere. She hides her feelings in plain sight, pushing them out in front of her rather than attempting to bottle them up. Her affection is “tell, don’t show” carried to an absurd degree.

Akashi displays a similar inauthenticity - she never fawns over Watashi, but she follows him everywhere - even from episode to episode.

Episode 04 included some tacit confirmations that the series is linear in a more concrete sense than previously indicated - the ever-present fortune telling gag almost reached out and knocked on the fourth wall, and Watashi is displaying deja vu-esque recollections of the events of previous episodes. Episode 06 made it about as explicit as it could be. The show is most definitely progressing in a loosely-linear manner - from Watashi’s point of view.

But the rest of the characters still exist independently, which is where Akashi’s inauthenticity reveals itself. Assuming that, on each reset, Watashi consciously changes his choice of club, then the only way Akashi could “simply happen” to appear in each club - the film club, the cycling club and the disciplehood of an eccentric eighth-year student - is if her choice of club was made after, and in response to, Watashi’s own.

Episode 06 muddles this, with Akashi present only through implication at the very end of the episode, and various other consistency-violating ideas introduced to the episode’s romance: not only is the only love interest up to this point disregarded, she’s replaced with a love triangle (…plus one, perhaps) with two completely-new characters. But she does appear, and with strong implication that of the three choices Watashi has been debating throughout the episode, she, the fourth choice, is still the correct one.

I had been loathe to commit to the idea so far, as appealing as it was to my own tastes, but it’s fairly clear by now that Watashi getting together with Akashi is almost certainly the show’s destination.

The Tatami Galaxy and our inevitable mistakes

Sat, 08 May 2010 14:53:00 -0700

The Tatami Galaxy (Yojouhan Shinwa Taikei), in its three aired episodes, has drawn comparisons for both its unique visual style and frantic delivery to the work of acclaimed studio Shaft under director Akiyuki Shinbou. However, there is little to this comparison beyond the fact that Tatami and Akiyuki Shinbou’s work can be ambiguously categorized as visually “abstract” - Shinbou’s style is - particularly recently - much sharper and more aggressive, even in shows such as Hidamari Sketch, and the surreal elements are primarily non-diegetic. Conversely, Tatami’s visual style gives off a more unfocused feeling, drifting between more-directly-surreal scenes which the characters react to directly.

Tatami’s premise, across its first three and likely fourth episodes, is that each relates the story of main character Watashi’s (“I”, “anonymous”) first two years in college - in entirety. The variance between episodes is mostly in the details, such as which club he joined and met Ozu in, and consequently where he is or what he is doing when the same basic series of events happens. There has been some difference between the episodes in which events happened, but the overlap between them is heavy - while the cake and Watashi’s promise to Akashi didn’t occur in episode 03, other elements such as the keychain were played down in episode 2. It’s too early to tell whether his success in these lesser events will improve as the show progresses.

It’s also too early to tell exactly how the show’s chronology is presented - while each episode retreads an identical timeline, there probably aren’t eleven Watashis walking around at any given moment. The rewinding clock at the end of each episode implies that each retelling isn’t, for example, an alternate universe, but there are still many other ways the timeline could be reset. The ever-present voice-over seems to imply that the story is at some level a personal recollection - but is he simply rewriting his recollection each time with new memories? Is there some sort of supernatural force at work which actually reverses time and allows him a chance to revise?

Whatever method the reversal works by, the show is fairly liberal with its indications of the idea’s importance - every episode includes multiple instances of Watashi complaining that if he had only joined a different circle his college experience would have been so much better, and that it was all Ozu’s fault that he wasted so much of his life.

But Ozu shows up in every club Watashi decides to join - it’s become obvious that, within the story, Ozu is in every instance planning to get to Watashi in order to make his life a hell. Why? The most obvious assumption so far is that Ozu represents something about us, which follows and finds us everywhere, no matter where we hide from it. It’s been established in the show that the characters’ faces are interchangeable - each “character” design indicates a few personality traits but the details of each character’s life are rewritten each episode. So it’s unlikely that Ozu represents one static human who hunts down Watashi regardless of where he runs to.

In fact, this applies to Watashi as well - his hobbies and tastes change with each episode; perhaps there are eleven Watashis running around. Perhaps there are, say, 6.69 billion Watashis. 6.69 billion unremarkable faces running around every day, making stupid mistakes, missing out on incredible opportunities, being crushed under the wheel of fate and their own incompetence. Maybe Watashi is us.

The continuity jokes, such as the old woman’s price hikes, appear to indicate that this doesn’t hold up as a literal reading of the premise. But Tatami is so surreal that I doubt in eleven episodes there will be any one satisfactory literal reading. The message of natural predestination is much more applicable to human life in a framing that makes it realistic - not, as in Suzumiya Haruhi’s Endless Eight arc, that given identical environmental input a person will produce the same emotional output 15,532 times in a row, but that given the similar input of “the modern world” six billion people will produce comparable outputs in each of their lives. The message speaks not to individual human nature but to the aggregate human experience.

Of course, with only one-fourth of the show unfolded by now this is mostly speculation, but that’s what I have so far.

B Gata H Kei, nostalgia and shows with guts

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 21:03:00 -0700

B Gata H Kei has certainly been a ride so far - I had this theory building up for episodes 1-3 that under its absurd premise the show was best classified as a “monogamous harem” - the sort of harem characterized by Love Hina, Ai Yori Aoshi and the like - which has been somewhat on the decline in recent years.

The cast of girls in a monogamous harem are there primarily, if not purely, to give the viewer something nice to look at while the self-insert protagonist and the Designated Ladyfriend beat around the bushes of a chaste puppy love. These shows made it as explicit as possible from episode 1 which girl the boy would get in the end, and any sexual tension with the other characters was incidental or played for laughs.

The “monogamous” harem was succeeded by the modern harem: in some cases there may be a loose understanding of who the “chosen girl” is, such as Nagi in Kannagi, but it has become much more popular not to give away the plot so readily. This manifests in shows such as Akane-iro ni Somaru Saka, which builds up two or more threads of romantic tension but ends the show before the protagonist comes to a decision.

In a reasonable number of examples this amplifies the show’s drama by generating an actual conflict between the characters, but in almost all cases of a harem show going this route, the primary usefulness is the increased plausibility of a sequel, or a fear on the writers’ part to offend those parts of the viewership who prefer any girls aside from the lead. This becomes especially popular in visual novel adaptations, many of which were written based on the explicit understanding that the audience was given their own choice of which girl won in the end. This fear of commitment on the writers’ part can be seen in many “monogamous harems” as well; the difference is the degree of evasion of closure, as well as the degree to which the viewer knows which girl will win.

What intrigued me about B Gata H Kei was the sheer directness it showed in its signaling of Yamada and Kosuda as the clear designated couple, to a degree reminiscent of Love Hina and the like - ignoring for a moment the show’s tagline and ostensible premise, the first episode played out exactly like the introduction of a chaste harem of the Ah! My Goddess! variety. Episode 1 prepared, and episodes 2 and 3 expanded on, Yamada’s incorrigible timidity.

The art style also seems to evoke a just-slightly-aged aesthetic: the thought sequences are as bright and exaggerated as contemporary shows, but the downplayed and subtle character designs evoke a just-gone era of Love Hinas and Narue No Sekais. The OP, as detailed by 2D Teleidoscope, evokes a distinctly nostalgic tone, as does the ED. The sum of all this seems to indicate that, contrary to some critics’ surmising, this isn’t the latest step forward in moe anime’s misogynistic lumbering gait, but rather an appeal to the audience’s memories of yesterweek.

But, to carry this train of thought further, nostalgia almost always indicates a longing for earlier, more innocent times. In the context of a show appealing to the viewer’s nostalgia for monogamous harems, what moral is it trying to relay? The implication would seem to be that from the writers’ perspective, the monogamous harem was a more innocent depiction of budding romance. And, for all of their dirty humor and titillating fanservice, monogamous harems depict a view of relationships which is extremely compatible with socially conservative, heterosexual-normative ideas: one man and one woman, paired up by whatever hand of fate you’re fond of, both exhibiting to a T their societal gender norms.

However, episode 4 marked a serious departure, and I think foreshadowed the show’s larger intent not just to present short-range nostalgia aesthetically, but to comment on it in a contemporary context. This episode broke all of the rules - an intentional, intimate kiss before the end of the first cours, again intentional and consensual groping between the two, here played not for laughs but as a distinctly intimate moment. One of the defining criteria of a chaste harem is, well, the chasteness - it would be difficult now, even by sex comedy standards, to expect anyone to believe seriously that Yamada and Kosuda are still at a will-they-or-won’t-they level of relationship.

Moreover, as much as she attempts to contain herself in her set, submissive gender role - waiting to be asked out, going to absurd lengths to force Kosuda to be the one to take the intiiative - her cover slips with extreme regularity. Yamada is, explicitly to the audience and fairly obviously to the show’s characters, the driving force in their relationship’s acceleration. As much as she depends on others (importantly, always girls) to direct her, she’s as “in control” of the relationship as either of the two could be, in a clear and overt sense.

Again setting aside the “100 fuck buddies” plot contrivance the way one takes for granted the “get laid pact” at the beginning of an American Pie-like comedy, Yamada is, if probably not a direct challenge to gender roles, at least an attempt to depict modern fluctuations thereof. (cf. 2D Teleidoscope again)

The show will certainly find plenty of (impossibly shameless) ways to make the tension last, but it’s made a bold move early on to distance itself from being simply another tease of a puppy love harem.

K-ON!! hits its stride

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 16:55:52 -0700

My unwarranted optimism for K-ON!! seems to, as of episode 3, be paying off. The hinting at more serious development of the maturity angle wasn’t just a fluke, and they’re actually managing it well this time.

Episode 2 was reasonably explicit in its reference to Azusa’s growing estrangement from the others, shown in the straightfaced moment where Azusa noticed the freshmen getting used to their new clubs and in gags such as the “new member” at the end - KyoAni are doing an admirable job of weaving a tempered discussion of the effects of growing up into the apparently-vapid “moeblob” show its viewers and critics expect.

Episode 3 expanded upon this in a new direction I certainly didn’t expect, though - the other members seem to feel anxious as well. On one level Ritsu’s crisis with drumming is a(n effective) vehicle for 22 minutes of fresh gags, but it indicates so many other things. It shows character consistency, something which I argued in my last K-ON! post had been in decline in the OVA and the new season’s first episode. This might not be particularly of note in works of fiction in general, but for a show which regularly receives the sort of flak that K-ON! does, I think it bears notice. Anxiety about not “shining” and the absurd ways she decides to try and remedy the problem exhibit minute details of Ritsu’s personality established over the course of the whole series so far.

The questions of maturity the show has been raising with Azusa will most likely be directed at the other girls as well - after all, Azusa won’t be the only one affected by the girls’ graduation, and the others all have their own personalities and hang-ups that this impending split seem to be stressing. Ritsu has her own image problems to address, which I definitely think run deeper than episode 3’s half-hour reconciliation addressed.

This theme of maturity hearkens back to the first season’s twelfth episode, in which Yui reflected on how she had grown over the past two years, and at least become more determined if not much more competent. I’d predict more from season two developing her and Ritsu’s characters, and Mio’s monologue in episode 3 ideally implies that her character might be dropping the moeblob ball for a moment or two in the near future. KyoAni definitely seem prepared to really speak to the themes they’ve set up.

Ashita wa, donna hi ni naru kana?

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 21:14:00 -0700

Hidamari Sketch is over.

Yes, the most recent season is over, but in a more broad sense I’d posit that we won’t be seeing a fourth season in the style of Hoshimittsu. Shaft seem to have said about all they can with this.

Episode 12 of Hoshimittsu essentially wrapped up everything I proposed in my previous HS post. Nazuna and Nori have become part of the Hidamari Apartments in-group: they are treated by outsiders (Yoshinoya and the landlady, most obviously) as a contiguous part of a new group of six, and the cinematography reflects this. Most telling is the number of shots of the six of them intermixed during this episode, with very little to divide them from the other four outside of the pairing with each other that we see equally with Yuno/Miyako and Hiro/Sae.

If, as I proposed before, season 3 was a response to seasons 1 and 2, that statement has been made. Continuing the series any further in the style of Hoshimittsu would serve no real purpose. Granted, the show could always be expanded in some other way, but I think most of the questions left to ask that Sketch is in any position to broach would be better-addressed by other franchises - for example, Sketch has already commented in passing on the issue of seniors graduating and leaving their juniors behind, and K-ON!! has already primed itself to engage that dilemma at length, so a fourth season focused on Hiro and Sae’s departure would be uncharacteristically redundant.

The series as it stands simply works so perfectly as a beginning-to-end statement that I have trouble imagining any way that tacking more manga-adapted gags on to the end could improve the franchise as a whole.

K-ON!!, growing up, and the heart of slice-of-life

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 20:27:42 -0700

So, the first episode of the new season of K-ON!! has aired, and under all but the most superficial scrutiny it’s a completely different show - whether for better or for worse, one can’t yet know. But it’s definitely not just another 13 episodes of K-ON!.

I side firmly with the crowd who loved the hell out of season 1 - it sits among the 10/10s on my MyAnimeList account, for a very unique, very specific reason - it was *technically*-perfect. A technically-perfect specimen of the “girls do thing” slice-of-life genre. The animation was lively and frame-perfect, the voice cast were stellar, the joke timing impeccable. The character development was subtle and well-woven, and the show did a brilliant job of quickly and efficiently creating an emotional bond with the viewer. Essentially, if even the smallest part of you was open to what K-ON! had to offer, your trust was repaid in spades.

Granted, it’s not hard to understand the mindset of those who hated or disregarded it - it really didn’t offer much substance beyond that artificial emotional connection, and it was tailor-made to appeal to a very particular sort of customer. I use the term “customer” over “audience” here intentionally.

What this all equates to is that K-ON! was, essentially, a perfect product - nothing could possibly have been added to or taken from it to make it any more brilliantly-marketable. Which I unashamedly admit I am perfectly fine with.

Of course, anyone could tell you that, but I have my own theories about why K-ON! was so perfect, what elements of it served that emotional resonance. It’s something central to the slice-of-life genre, and I think its absence is by far the biggest departure from K-ON! in K-ON!! as well as the first OVA: K-ON! was intimately and obsessively focused on life.

Every moment of K-ON! was spent in close, delighted scrutiny with the details of everyday life. Overarching consistency be damned, what mattered in K-ON! was seeking out the inherent joy in every banal moment. It was a “slice of life” in the truest sense of the phrase - even the trappings of plot the show sprinkled on top every once in a while were swept away as quickly as they settled. Who cares about practicing for Budoukan? These cookies are divine!

While this is, I think, one of the things which most irritates non-fans about the slice-of-life genre, I would posit that for fans it is in fact the point. How much further do you have to look than Genshiken spending a full 22-minute episode on Madarame trying to tell Kasukabe that her nose-hair is sticking out? Slice-of-life in any medium thrives on taking the banal and analyzing and interrogating it until it becomes either absurd or relatable. K-ON! did so masterfully, with a cast of characters who, if somewhat ridiculous, were internally-consistent to a fault. Perfect simulacra of human beings.

The recent OVA departed from this strongly, and I think embraced all of the facets of the TV series which non-fans so rightfully criticized. The characters lost that sense of consistency and personality, and became mere vehicles for jokes off of the tropes they had perfected. The storytelling moved from a disjointed series of utterly-enchanting moments to an emotionally-detached summary of events. Distant shots of the girls doing… things… while uninspired incidental music looped behind them made up a disheartening amount of the runtime. Those wonderful little moments kept happening, but the director was too busy laughing at that Yui’s clumsiness or how much of a scaredy-cat that Mio is to give them a passing glance. The show discarded an already-perfect heart for the sake of a half-developed brain, which it showed no real interest of improving. It *became* the show everyone had been criticizing all along.

K-ON!! episode 1 appears to be following in the OVA’s footsteps. Yui has transformed from a somewhat air-headed but at some level earnest character into a walking failed punch line whose actions bear only the slightest relation to external stimuli. Mio has become even more of a fearful blob of moe. The hamhanded voice-over exposition has devolved from tongue-in-cheek to depressingly sincere. Hilarity ensues just off-screen, just out of earsight, while the viewer sits dumbfounded, unable to articulate just exactly when the spell was broken. K-ON!! has become a parody of itself.

But that’s actually the one hope I have for season 2, as flimsy as it may be - if K-ON!! steps up to become an intelligent response to K-ON!, it could communicate an extremely powerful message. The first episode contained hints of this - if the underlying theme of season 1 was “Budoukan would be cool, but right now it’s teatime”, the theme of season 2 episode 1 is “What are we supposed to do when teatime is over?”

K-ON!! finds itself in a somewhat opposite place to another popular slice-of-life show, Hidamari Sketch. In the former, the majority of the central cast including the ostensible main character is in their last year, and must cope with the fact that they are a short year away from leaving behind their shy junior; in the latter, the pivotal character of the show is among the juniors being left behind. Each of these shows is in a position to make a potent statement about maturity and the passage of time - Yui et al desperately want a way to feel like they aren’t abandoning Azusa; Yuno et al have to come to grips with their impending abandonment.

I think the shows will arrive at very different conclusions to this overall situation, but I’ll focus on K-ON!! here.

K-ON!!’s stance as yet, as made explicit by Yui near the end of the episode, is that teatime still hasn’t ended, and that that is perfectly fine. Straining themselves to build an artificial new Houkago Tea Time that Azusa can play with (in the sense of a toy as much as a band) is a futile and perhaps even undesirable endeavor. They can’t craft a new circle of friends for Azusa, and it would be wrong of them to try. In short, who cares about next year when we have tea to drink right now? Why should we force ourselves to grow up, at the price of our childhood? Where K-ON! perfectly distilled the timelessness of time spent with good friends, K-ON!! has charged itself with addressing the reality outside of the bandroom.

Whether or not that’s a defensible conclusion, and whether or not K-ON!! will muster enough substance to defend it, is as yet undetermined. But I’m nothing if not a doe-eyed optimist.

Time in Hidamari Sketch

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 01:31:00 -0700

Shaft’s anime adaptation of the slice-of-life comic strip Hidamari Sketch is marked by the studio’s distinctive and sometimes bewildering animation style, an excellent cast of voice actors and a markedly leisurely pace, even in the context of its genre. It is made particularly unique by its timeline: the events of the first two seasons unfolded in nonlinear order - a handful of episodes from the second season even comprised two stories each, which occurred months apart - and the last episode of the second season occurs the day before the first episode of the first. Both of these scenes jump between points in time in Yuno and Miyako’s first year at Yamabuki High.

The third season modifies this formula slightly - seven half-episodes occur during the year of S1-S2, but all 12 episodes consist either in part or in whole of a linear storyline starting at the beginning of the next year and following the two new additions to the cast. This season introduces something else new, as well: a half-episode taking place three months before the first year.

Now, airing in an anachronic order is in no way unique to Sketch. Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu made a stir the year before with its strange airing order, and in that case matters were exacerbated by the fact that at its core Haruhi had a classically-cohesive plot. Filmmakers both western and eastern have been telling stories in nonlinear order for decades, and nonlinear storytelling has its roots in pre-common-era writing. However, in any case where an artist chooses to tell a story in deliberately non-chronological order, they must have some reason in mind for doing so.

The 2002 French film Irreversible, for example, related its story in reverse to underscore its statements about fate and determinism; the aforementioned Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu, arguably, was aired in the order it was for the utilitarian purpose of mediating pacing issues which become apparent when watching the show in chronological order - all of its disjointed, slice-of-life adventures occurred chronologically after the more interesting main plot had ended. In any case where an author or director chooses to tell a story in a way contrary to the way their audience expects, one must assume there is a purpose or reason to the decision.

It is also worth considering the intent of the slice of life genre - disavowing the classic plot arc for the sake of a more natural narrative, the viewer is in fact simply shown a “slice” of a fictional character’s life, as if it were torn from the middle of their autobiography. The thematic usefulness of this is to communicate a truth about life in a more authentic way by creating not just characters but units of time which the viewer can actually relate to. This is the relevance of Sketch’s strange chronology - it is a core aspect of the show’s thematic commentary on everyday life.

Sketch’s chronology of Yuno’s first year at Yamabuki High is intentionally scattershot and unpredictable; apart from a small handful of interesting coincidences such as the aforementioned first and last episodes of the “first year” arc comprised of the first two seasons, the order of events displays no obvious pattern, and unlike Suzumiya Haruhi which was rearranged chronologically for its DVD release, this random order was preserved in Sketch’s own home release. This is because that very disorder and vehement abandonment of a linear story speak to Sketch’s thematic statement that such elements are completely irrelevant to the things it wants to say.

The characters of Sketch mature over chronological time the way one might expect, but due to the episode order this change occurs in a way which will escape any viewer who doesn’t carefully consider the relationship between chronological and episode order. Yuno is praised for her incomplete sketch about a month after she is inspired to focus on improving her skills - but to the viewer, the events occur in reverse order, with nearly two full seasons between the two events, and her work on the former sketch occurring half a season after it has been put on display. Sketch occurs as a series of vignettes, all but entirely disconnected and related in a manner particularly characteristic of nostalgic reminiscence - important memories and the explanations of those memories and completely unrelated occurrences are related with no semblance of order, and context is filled in unceremoniously as the conversation progresses.

For example, in season 1 episode 3, Yuno is seen caring for a caterpillar in chrysalis. This caterpillar is not actually introduced until the next episode in which she finds him, and hatches two episodes later. In the episodes from season 2 which occur in this time frame, the caterpillar is present again, mentioned in passing as the characters notice it. These offhanded continuity nods serve to forcefully remove the viewer from the occurrence of events, making clear to them that they are witnessing these events from outside, through the lens of the actual characters’ experiences. This stands in stark contrast to most shows of its type, where if there isn’t an explicitly-designated self-insert character for the viewer they are at least treated as an invisible witness to the events as they unfold.

The viewer does not get to grow along with the characters because the characters have already grown by the time the viewer arrives. The denizens of Hidamari Apartments have grown, past tense, into a group of close friends, and the viewer now stands at the edge of this in-group, offered a short tour of its foundation and history. This idea is elucidated best, ironically enough, by the break from this style of storytelling in season 3.

The two most notable differences between seasons 1-2 and season 3 are the introduction of linear storytelling and the two new characters whose stories are told. Nazuna and Nori, new freshmen who just moved in to Hidamari Apartments, arrive in a new environment to find four girls senior to them who have grown into close friends over the past whole year, as summarized by seasons 1-2 - expressed to the viewer in brief accounts of fewer than fifty days out of that year. The linear storytelling in season 3 is much more dense - almost half of the time between the first and last day of the second year covered by season 3 are covered in episodes. Season 3 marks the point where Sketch “begins” chronologically, and the entire past thirty episodes have all been, essentially, flashbacks and backstory for the current season.

In fact, there are a few points in season 3 where this subtext of reminiscence becomes an actual in-story framing device, such as between episode 5A and 5B - Arisawa, a character as-yet unmentioned, calls Yuno by mistake at the end of “future” episode 5A, just before the beginning of 5B which explains when the two first met on a night during year 1. Similarly, episode 2B of season 3 is marked in-canon as Miyako reminiscing about the year before, and episode 3A is told in parallel to 3B to show Yuno and Sae’s comparable sincerity in their respective fields.

The first two seasons of Hidamari Sketch are imbued with a fixation on the nostalgia of a small in-group, and the inaccessibility of a true appreciation of that unique nostalgia to those who were not part of that in-group while the memories were being made; the third, and one might fairly guess any potential future seasons, considers this fixation in closer detail, and provides a new vantage point for the viewer to observe from - two self-inserts in as-yet-undeveloped characters who are just as outside of the Hidamari in-group for the time being.

new post on the way. this could come in handy.

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 21:18:35 -0700

new post on the way. this could come in handy.

Repost: I liked Endless Eight.

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 20:47:00 -0700

I originally posted this on my old Wordpress blog; I’m plagiarizing myself here because I think the tone and style of this essay is a good summary of what I want this blog to look like overall. Fresh content to follow, one hopes.

It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t the greatest thing I’ve ever seen, and they probably could have done better by their fans than eating up over half of the long-awaited second season with a weird groundhog day gimmick.

But, such as it was, I liked it – all eight episodes, watched in two sittings of four episodes each.

A (relatively) prestigious, hugely-marketable animation company doesn’t make an eight-episode plot arc out of one episode’s worth of plot just to troll. Watching Endless Eight from the perspective of “why the hell would they do this?” was the key part in enjoying it for me.

Endless Eight was first a moe slice-of-life show’s indictment of the entire moe slice-of-life genre, and second a defense of that genre. Most people seem to think three episodes was the most they should have done, and that they wouldn’t have minded the plot recycling if it had only lasted that long – which is true, from a standpoint of anime being purely an entertainment medium. It could have accomplished a fun storyin just three episodes but, and I know this sounds like an absurd cop-out, but those next five episodes are what make itart, and where Endless Eight has something to say.

Around episode 5 I realized something: watching Endless Eight didn’t feel any different from watching other anime serially. It didn’t impart the feeling of watching one episode over and over again, even though on a conscious level I knew it was. I think this was on purpose – KyoAni made a conscious effort to get across the natural slice-of-life feeling throughout. The slight variations in events and responses.

To explain better, essentially every moe slice-of-life show is essentially just an application of various occurrences and events to a set of essentially fixed character archetypes. X event happens, Y character reacts in the way the audience expects them to. Mikuru can trip over her own feet a million times at a thousand different locations in a thousand different absurd outfits, and every time Kyon is going to make a shocked face and narrate how adorable he thinks she is to the audience. Just how much difference is there between near-identical punch lines to superficially-distinct setups and near-identical punch lines to explicitly-identical setups?

That was, I think, the message Endless Eight actually got across – it made the implicit repetitiveness of moe shows such as itself explicit, for a period long enough that viewers would have to take notice.

Kyon’s pun, early in each episode, is I think one of the places where the scope of their thesis is most evident: “shimin puuru yori shoumin puuru”/”public pool, more like a pool for the masses”. This sort of jaded commentary, which pervades the entire show, is intended to set Kyon apart as a clever, realistic character; and yet, fed the same variables, he produces the same punch line every time without fail. His jaded realism, like the jaded realism of your average person in real life, only strikes us as indicative of intelligence because it’s acquired that connotation, when in practice it’s just the shape of another archetype.

The second point which I think made this clear was just howrepetitive it was. In Yuki’s bi-weekly briefing, she mentions the sheer number of variations on the week that have occurred – they went twice to the Bon festival more times than they went once, and had six different part time jobs over the 15,532 iterations. But across all eight instances we see, hardly any of these variations appear.

Why? They animated each episode completely separately anyway, so the repetition saved them no time or money. Any changes to the plot that big would have offered tired fans some respite from their irritation. The only possible reason to stay so perfectly true-to-form is that whatever they were trying to get across depended acutely on this repetition.