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Recent Anime

Steins;Gate

Okay so now I finished watching this show. On the whole very nice. Plot, in all, was very well done. They expanded on concepts without abandoning old ones, they managed to make things more complex without making it too much more convoluted, basically avoided that thing I was so scared of at the start. Really could see the game roots, but that's okay. The idea of having to go through the old characters and undo their D-Mails is obviously straight game rip, as is like the “final challenge”, but whatever, it makes for good TV too. Sure the relevance of the characters varied so much that you felt a little bit jarred, but there was at least a strenuous thread tying them altogether and keeping it from being completely arbitrary. I think really their drive to avoid plot-weariness through expansion was their biggest, although admirable, mistake, leading to plot-weakness through containment. Once each plot element has looped over itself doubly and triply you definitely get a sense of impressive complexity, but it really starts to fall apart under analysis. Like, FB is Mr. Braun? Sure it's interesting and leads to a series of follow-up “fridge” explanatory twists (was Okabe's unlikely ability to avoid the Rounders due to a soft spot held by their leader? etc) but ultimately it's just another very unlikely thing we're just forced to believe. Like and I am not even close to being done with my beef with this the whole thing about the dichotomy between Mayuri and Chrrrrisstiiiina. All Alpha world-lines tend to Mayuri dying and all Beta ones tend to the Assistant dying? So they need to go for Gamma, aka Steins;Gate! Sure. Wait why didn't that thought occur to them before? Geez I dunno I think for scientists they didn't really explore many of their literally infinite possibilities. I guess there's the factor of it being very psychologically stressful to see your friends die over and over but it really seems more like they were saving it up, twist-like, for the final gambit, which is sort of lame when it's just the first thing you'd think to do. And and what's the deal with chunks of time lines “tending” to things like people dying, anyways? I mean memories of other times manifesting in people when emotionally charged sure I'll let that slide 'cause Okarin's Reading Steiner is arbitrary too so this can function by the same mechanic but the idea of fate in a show that was handling time travel in such a simple and logical way beforehand just bugs the heck out of me. They could have had some way of getting the same effect - choosing between the two girls – if they came up with some clever plot that actually tied the life of one with the death of the other it'd have the same effect, and it'd be less blatant too. Not that I know what that would be but I believe in the power of the human imagination to the extent that any describable story and quality requirement can be met with sufficient work and inspiration. So do it! Oh and one thing that kept confusing me is like going back to Beta would stop CERN from making the time machine and creating a DIS-topia, right? So why did Ze Zombie never mention that when advocating for her own sacrifice? JUST WONDERING.

Okay plot stuff I did like: most of it, still, yeah. The last two episodes sort of seemed sprung on me a bit much, like, suddenly World War III, suddenly we can save Christina, suddenly we can do this thing we should have thought to consider many episodes ago, etc, but it was executed really nicely. Running around the radio tower, the message from the future, stabbing himself... all great. Sure there's asspulls for each of them that diminish it, like uh, accidentally stabbing her, the thing being dry, plus the whole “the only reason it doesn't get published is 'cause it burnt up in a plane (maybe if someone threatened to stab you you should photocopy your valuable document???)” seems really weak but whatever. Oh wait this section is for good things well okay well I think the idea of “the reason no time machines exist is that every time machine's existence inevitably leads to that time machine never existing” is really, really cool, and something I'd almost believe like, given infinite time, the only “termination point” is destroying the machine before it exists, thus it seems like it must eventually happen? I dunno might think about it more later but maybe not because I might realize it's all very silly. Right now it seems mad cool though.

Anyways I realized that, although this is a very high-concept plot, this is still really a character drama, isn't it? Framing a character drama in a high-concept plot isn't a new trick, but it certainly isn't done too often 'cause it's really really hard to do properly. The characters can pick up the slack when the plot starts to trip over itself, which it starts to here, and the plot is good to come up with new things for the characters to do if their “internal drive for plot” diminishes, although overusing this ability can seem really desperate. Despite these reprieves, it's still really hard to actually do this, actually keep it balanced. Evangelion is still probably the best example. Madoka almost, but the beauty of it was that it really wasn't much of a high-concept plot after all, was it? S;G does a good job, though, and I think this is really the greatest strength of it. I was both engrossed by the idea of the next events and the next character interactions. I wouldn't go as far as saying I was “shipping” but I was invested in the idea of the relationships. I always feel sort of bad when they go from VN to anime and all but like two of the relationship subplots get delegated to a couple episodes and a couple scenes in other episodes and you just know they never had a chance. Ah well. His “final” scene with Christina was quite heartwarming, a good conclusion that I worried would be too much or too little. As far as characters went she was probably the best developed, the combination of tsundere and expertise and such went quite nicely, and she was a better foil to Hououin than everyone else, who didn't really acknowledge his most entertaining quirks enough. And oh man they were entertaining, too, weren't they! When he hits his return to form in the final two episodes it was one of those things where every time you feel like they're about to hit that line where it goes from awesome to just pandering your threshold for awesomeness just gets bumped up a little more. Awesome!

I guess that's about all I have to say about Steins;Gate. The movie ought to be like really really good if they don't completely blow it, which I guess there's an outside chance of. All they have to do, really, is come up with a good plot, which is both easy and hard. Like, they have the mechanics and cast to support a billion excellent plots (wait by my own belief system that I casually mentioned earlier this ought to be true of any given set of cast and mechanics, whoops dang hoisted by my etc!) but they still have to be very careful. Do like a “the gang's got another adventure” sort of thing, like, another future disaster must be prevented, and it could feel too irrelevant. Try to one up the show's plot with like “the gang overlooked one thing, now there's another big problem”, like, some paradox they overlooked, SERN still figures them out, Mr. Braun does something??? and they risk invalidating or at least diminishing the impact of the show. Hm examples uh Cowboy Bebop did the first style excellently for their movie because it's main plot was decentralized and obscured enough that they could insert a great adventure without worrying about tying it in. Most anime movies do something like this, but S;G is so plot-y I'm not sure if they could. Well I mean they could just because the premise and characters are so great, but I feel like they feel like they shouldn't. So they'd have to do the second style, which like... Evangelion did it with End of Evangelion, but I don't think anyone ever will have the balls to say “okay we'll do it like they did with End of Evangelion.” plus I honestly don't see where they could fit a gigantic escalation like that. If I had to guess I'd say they'll try to do an ultimate crisis sort of thing where SERN has one more trick up their sleeves, and we see a plot that extends well into the future, we see the effects of SERN's time meddling, there's a new character introduced as SERN villain dude, and there's some sort of scientific showdown (also best new imaginary Discovery channel show: Scientific Showdown – Iron Chef meets Mythbusters – call me if you want to sponsor this idea) and all the characters are shoehorned into the solution but they can only afford to give them like fifteen minutes each, and I find some of this disappointing, but some of the plot twists will be so genius and some of the scenes so powerful that I end up happy to 8 on it.

Which basically is true of the show too! It fell flat at times, it was far too complex and holey to attain any sort of Madoka-esque perfection, nor was it masterful or innovative enough to attain Evangelion-esque mindblowery. Sorry to keep comparing it to these two, it isn't quite far, but it's what comes to mind. Really I guess it should be compared to like Lain or Paranoia Agent or uh other VNs but whatever I'm more familiar with these. It was still really great, though, loads of fun to watch, very emotional, really made very few mistakes overall. I'd recommend it to almost anyone, which, really, is what an anime is trying for more than anything these days. At the very absolute least, it gave us Hououin Kyoma, a character I feel like I will be quoting for ages to come. I kinda want to see a slice of life show with him and the gang just screwing around and coming up with Future Gadgets. Sure it'd make no sense for that to happen without this sort of plot, but bun it's not like any of the other shows I have realistic plots. Actually heck as long as I'm dreaming why not make it so they're all girls, still in high school, and they all have crushes on each other, and forget the science!:

YuruYuri episode 12

I guess it'll make a lot of people mad if I call this the breakout hit of the year after talking about Steins;Gate. Probably so much so that I want to do it, even if Nichijou and especially Madoka are obviously way more worthy of the crown than any of them. So lemme say it: this is the breakout hit of the year! This is a new era in moe anime, when “what people don't want to” was finally just as optimized as “what people do want”. YuruYuri trims all the fat. It crashes right through the bushes most other shows dance around. Homework and exam plots are boring? Skip 'em. It's tiring to get every major character in every episode? Leave 'em out if you want. If the fans complain you've already won. And oh man on this show all they did was win.

This last episode was the most pandering piece of art I have ever seen. If a show was somehow able to give me fifty dollars I don't think it would have been as much of a bribe as any plot element of this episode. Yui's niece doing the intro – that alone is more effective than mailing two hundred bucks to every fan. Extended in-universe Magical Girl show intro, complete with the devotion to really doing the joke I've come to respect then expect from the show? That's like $300 or so I'd say. Every semi-major character showing up for a sleepover in the club room for no reason? Better throw a grand or two on there. Animal costumes? Tomato?? A series of contests – boardgames, impressions, charades, experiments??? We must be in the hundred thousands. Bathing in barrels? Akari rolling away screaming???? Chitose's drunken rampage??!?!?! Welcome to the million dollar episode. That's right: if they somehow just offered to make any viewer a millionaire for their devotion, it would have been less effective, more difficult, less pandering than this. This is at least a billion dollars' worth of concentrated pandering.

Do we have some sort of responsibility to the elder gods of art to not let this sort of thing work on us? Do the blind eyes of immortal Homer weep as his serial epics have traded their heroic conquests and fantastical lands for... schoolgirls and exploding alarm clocks? But is there no land more fantastical than their middle school? No conquest no heroic than that of the heart? Oh... there is? Oh. Okay.

But still! Can't you praise art for efficiency, for optimization, for simple audience understanding? No? Oh. Right, yeah.

So what makes this “the breakout hit of the year... much better than Steins;Gate”? If it doesn't lie in the actual artistic quality than it must be one of those masterpieces of the “low emotions”, the realm of funny sitcoms and movies where one guy fights a lot of guys and party rock anthems. True moe does sometimes transcend this sphere, albeit in a very odd way. I don't want to get into it right now but the emotion of “moe” I would think of as very rich at times, even though it's one of the most “unrealistic”. For a simple proof just try to sample the budding (lol) genre of “sad-moe”, which I just made up now although it does have quite a few examples. I say “just try to sample” because the powerful blend of moe and depression you can feel is certainly rich, and addictive, so good luck looking at just one. I'd like to write about this more later. I think I already know the masterpiece of the genre, although Chris Ware I think has the potential to bring about a revolution in the idea if he wasn't so hung up on the idea of uncute aesthetics. I DIGRESS. Moe can be rich. YuruYuri does not try to be, but it leaves room for it. It is definitely a very simple comedy, and quite a funny one at that, and it's moe elements are so blatant that I cannot argue they achieve any sort of the moe-subtly I hinted at unexpectedly wordily a second ago, but it is minimal enough to leave room for this level of moe-attachment to occur, and that's what really makes it so good.

I want to explain this more but I also don't want to get into some subjects I'd like to talk about at more length with more clarity later so here's a quick pseudo-thesis: by giving us 99% of what we want, YuruYuri has unexpectedly enabled us to imagine 200%. Where there's blatant pairing, as blatant as any fan could hope for, the fan sees pairing more blatant than they could ever have imagined, and this budding (LOL, LOL) new level of emotion is immensely enjoyable to them. The same is true for the jokes and easier to explain: take the Akari is invisible joke: most shows would have given that like, 25% at best, and the fans would have given it 100%. Here, YY has given it 100% (disappearing from the intro, all sorts of genius scenes of things blocking her, etc, etc), and the fans have given it 200% (I don't even know where to start – the expertly edited OP with her removed that shot up like a day after the show started airing is a good enough example). Anything at level 200%, even this most pandering of shows, is a sight to behold. And yes of course fans are going to escalate it like that. Moe slice of life as a genre is all about idealization, so doesn't it seem right that the fans would idealize it too?

Wow I have said very little about the actual content of the show, haven't I? Sorry to my only reader: me a few years from now, scratching my head and trying to remember which show this was out of the haze that will surely develop of all these nearly identical ones. Okay here's some help: there's four girls, but they have some other friends too. Most episodes involve them going to school, but in one they go on a trip and in another one they go to the beach and in a few they have sleepovers. There's implied lesbianism and absolutely no male characters. Is that helpful?? Well, how about this: this was the one that did all that more than the rest. Their friend characters were better developed and more involved. The main four were archetype breaking and had many jokes to their name. The trip and other standard episode archetypes had more jokes packed into them than anyone thought possible. They went to Comiket! The lesbianism was a subtle as a slap in the face. There was a tsundere pair that was as veiled as Garchomp in ubers (baaaaam I hope I still get that joke in a few years because no one else on Earth ever will). It was a step ahead, it was the first moe that knew itself, that looked upon it and its contemporaries and strove boldly ahead where they hesitated. Maybe soon my helpful elaborations will be inaccurate, perhaps the new wave of shows will be self-aware and build on tropes as much as sales patterns, maybe most of this praise should really be going to Nichijou! Maybe next year there will be a show where there's twenty girls, and they all work at a farm, but in their spare time they have a gymnastics team, and they sell the milk from their farm, and okay if you want any more of this trillion dollar idea you have to front me some cash.

Oh yeah and this last episode: well as it was the finale they really had to do just about everything they did. Glad to see more of the Student President, she really grew on me. Some great scenes, some scenes that inspired a confused horror in me that most of the “great” scenes would probably instill in most others. Par for the course? Sure, but that's saying a lot. Sometimes you just gotta pull out all the stops to see what'll happen. Solid 8.5.

The IT Crowd

Watched the rest of season one, some pretty decent episodes. The premier of season two really really impressed me, though. One of the most hilarious episodes of anything I've seen in quite some time. Contains pretty much everything I find funny in a sitcom. They managed one of the most difficult things to do in a sitcom, too – transition quickly from the standard premise to a new setting without it being too forced or time consuming, and, most importantly and most difficultly, while making it hilarious. This is a rare art that most sitcoms usually confined to one setting have a hard time pulling off, often leaving this as the single flaw in these usually otherwise excellent “A trip to the whatever” episodes. So yeah, impressed, hoping the rest of the season will keep on trucking like this. And Roy had a Drinky Crow figure on his desk! I am being pandered to but I love it!!

Community S03E01

I was pretty hyped up for it and it didn't really disappoint. Both guest appearances were great, hope to see more of them. Feel like they've been set up as “recurring roles”. They had a few pretty glaring plot-type problems they needed to deal with – well, needed to deal with if they were to continue being believable and not lapse into that unrealistic “sitcom environment”. Like, you know how it seems pretty unrealistic that everyone spends all that time at Cheers? Like, even though it's way more realistic than many of the premises of Community episodes, something just feels off. And it isn't because they're written to talk like sitcom characters instead of the more “modern” conversational writing of Community. Nor is it stuff like the camera angles. Or maybe it is, because I honestly can't tell you what it is, but something about some sitcoms just seems unreal in a very fundamental and unalterable way. Or rather, deviation from this “feel” too much towards realism or fakeness is a surefire way to make the whole episode incredibly awkward. Aaaaanyways Community, on this scale, is one of the more realistic ones, and if they were to remain so, they had to revisit the whole “study group” thing in the first place. See yeah that's what it really is, validity of premise! Not gonna spend too much time trying to explain this idea any more but hopefully you get what I'm trying to say. If Community didn't readdress why they were all there in the first place, and how they might not actually need to be there, etc, it would have fallen into some sort of weird limbo where the premise stops being realistic and the whole show is unreal. That's what I'm trying to say, I guess. Doing this is also as good an opportunity to re-establish the premise to new viewers, what with it being the premier and all. So fine. And the thing itself was quite heartwarming and well done and the meta-level of using the format of the show as the plot element in the show is cool without being too much. They set up the overarching plot elements of the season quite smoothly – school is broke, Chang as security guard (hilarious!), Omar as Biology teacher (intense!), Abed and Troy moving in together (wait didn't they figure out why that was a bad idea in an earlier episode? What changed?). Very nice, all of them. One thing I didn't like so much was Abed's plot line about getting a new show. It was funny, yeah, and it was like, really Abed, and I get that they wanted a plot like that to establish his character early for new viewers, what with him being the most popular character and all, but it just didn't fit into the rest of the episode at all, completely arbitrary. At least the Dean vs. Vice-Dean vs. monkey-actually-Chang plotline interfered with the Jeff and Study Group as unit plotline (the 2001 parody was pretty great). Oh and also the laziness on the parodies they had Abed watch (unless that itself was some parody of Dr. Who's budget? Nah I don't think so, I think they were just lazy and wanted to be a bit cute about it) bugs me, but I think I'm spoiled by anime doing that in that regard. The highlights still outweighed these problems, though. The final moral at the end with the Bio teacher was very nice, pretty poignant, nice and succinct, near perfect. Great, great, can't wait for more. 8.5.

That's it for now. I still haven't seen the end of Usagi Drop, but I probably will soon. Nor have I seen the finale for Nichijou, but I don't think I'm ready. And Ika Musume starts again soon!!!