Sora no Woto

So I just finished watching this. Last few episodes had me in like, permanent mouth-dropped eyebrow-raised shock while I just constantly thought "WAIT THIS ISN'T MOE." I mean the last few of the initial twelve, by the way. Apparently there's a few DVD only episodes that I didn't get, but I think I'll save those for later. Spoilers follow, by the way.

It is a pretty cruel thing when something comes along that is, on paper, exactly what you would have wanted, but has some almost monkey-pawish twist that you never would have thought to specify not on paper. I can think of a few recent examples:

Cultris II
What I wanted:
-Awesome UI
-Great netplay
-Smooth controls
-100% focus on speed
-Tons of competition

The twist:
-I am terrible at it

Project M
What I wanted:
-Melee speed, gameplay, mechanics
-More characters and stages and such
-Online play (that I can't get working)

The twist:
 -Characters land on their feet instead of their knees?!?


Infinite Jest
What I wanted:
-Pynchon + Chris Ware + Mike Judge
-Plot involving art so moving it is deadly
-Information on tennis/film/AA

The twist:
-Made me feel stupid?


Shaft in Africa
What I wanted:
-Shaft in Africa
-Shaft shoots someone while lying in bed (I saw this in the trailer)

The twist:
-No twist

The King of Limbs
What I wanted:
-A collection of beautiful music written with the sprawling almost Krautrockish density of "These Are My Twisted Words"

The twist:
-No "These are My Twisted Words". Also cannot stop thinking that it's one track short. More about this later.

 Sora no Woto
What I wanted:
-The character aesthetics and antics of K-On!
-The cultural aesthetics of a Miyazaki film
-Solid character development
-Genuinely touching and powerful scenes
-A nice soundtrack
-Great animation and VA work
-A rich and mysterious plotline that compels both on the character level and the overarching world level, and ties the two together
-Technological mysteries like those of Evangelion
-A real sense of an entire structured world

The twist:
-YOU CAN'T HANDLE IT

 Seriously, I don't know if it was just the mood I was in or something, but this series had me reeling. The dissonance I talked about in the last post had not only amplified, but the moe-hijinks had pretty much entirely been phased out. What's crazy though is that they can't really get rid of the moe aspects when the characters are intrinsically moe, and your memories of all of them are so moe, and such. So you're seeing these characters that will never stop being "moe" in your mind, and they're caught in such horrific circumstances, and it's just madness. An even better example of this, I think, are Takotsuboya's doujins (I hesitate to admit I've read these, but I don't think that'll surprise anyone who knows what they are and no one else will really care?) - but that's almost less devastating (although it's still pretty effing devastating) since the personalities of the characters have also begun to become sort of ugly, if not as ugly as their situations, and that knowledge gives the reader a small reprise through the distance - i.e., allows the reader to separate the canon characters from the doujin counterparts. No such luck here. In fact, as the story becomes more brutal, the characters develop to become even more likable.

And it's a small miracle that these characters are likable. Viewing them objectively, they're all fairly stereotypical, almost embarrassingly so at times. As their characters develop, they merely embody more stereotypical characteristics of their stereotype. Their plot arcs are all fairly standard as well. I feel like I can think of characters from other anime that could replace every character here without missing a step. The sole exception is Noel, but her lack of stereotype is more that they started with Rei and then compiled a list of things that Rei wouldn't do, or would only be implied to do after the "opening up" that happens with every Rei-type character, and had Noel do them with little provocation. I almost think the scene with her and the naked enemy soldier is a deliberate reference to this.

But they're still great characters! I'm convinced their stereotypical nature stems not from a lack of creativity or effort, but to have the effect of implying that more character development happened than was actually shown or explained. It's a very strange effect, but I noticed that I was assuming all sorts of things (mainly personality-wise, but sometimes even things about their history) about characters that weren't even true. Unconsciously, I had felt like I was learning things about characters when I was actually just remembering other characters that were similar. Again, this seems symptomatic of poor writing, but it was actually quite a beneficial effect on the show, as these strange character mashups in my mind were very solid, and very likable. This allowed the story to progress quickly without needing "character motivation exposition", something a series requires many seasons to be able to do. They also did a great job of "plot optimization" with this in mind, i.e. they knew exactly what scenes were necessary and which weren't to reinforce the image of the characters in the viewer's mind, and they were able to advance narration through natural, character-driven interaction (unlike the stilted and robotic exposition new series often resort to when they fear the viewer won't be able to learn both plot and personalities at the same time). Said plot progression was also hastened by the almost total refusal to explain things to the viewer. Picking up on historical mysteries piecemeal was one of the most fun parts of the series, and although I was worried, what with the whole "new girl on the scene, needs everything explained" providing their perfect opportunity to bring the plot and fun to a screeching halt to explain what's going on, they left things vague but interesting to the end and beyond, without making trying to them confusing for the illusion of depth or making things so vague that I doubted there would be a satisfying story to tie them together. This was taken to the extreme in one episode when a civilian asks Kanata about the current peace talks, plot-justified exposition on a silver platter, and they decided to prioritize her character over pandering to the viewers by having her be totally clueless. Great.

So the characters can really be thought of as "streamlined into stereotypes", optimized to resonate with the viewer quickly and deeply. That works. The story they work them into isn't entirely fresh and is still full of a lot of cliches, but they serve the same purpose. When you hear references to wars, orphans, churches or whatever, you don't need to be sat down and told exactly what sort they were for them to have their intended effect. This assumption on the part of the viewer also makes their mysterious elements actually more compelling - as the viewer is "sated" by what they assume to know, the refusal to divulge further doesn't feel like the viewer is being starved of knowledge, but that any desire they have to know more speaks for the quality of the show - it has sparked the bonfire of curiosity, not withheld the coal for the curiosity steam-engine.

And with that horrible analogy I'll end this blog post half finished because I know if I try to work on it tomorrow I'll redo parts or just give up on it so I might as well solidify this progress.