Okay here we go with another exciting blog post.
Video blogging
So I tried doing this, it had “pros” and “cons” and one of the “cons” was “no prose”, hardy har. Seriously though it was a lot easier but generally worse in terms of content. Also the youtube uploader thing straight glitched out and I lost a video so that’s sort of lame. I may do it again if I have like, something interesting come in the mail or something.
New Music
Venetian Snares - Fool the Detector
This actually came out awhile ago but I only got around to listening to it now. Very solid little 4-track thing from Venetian Snares, really shows off his “eclectic diversity” of being both “beautifully grotesque” and “grotesquely beautiful”. Doesn’t go full like, baroquelectronique which he does occasionally and always does very very well, but I’m okay with him saving that or whatever. “Ego DSP” has a funny line in “We could communicate through advanced telepathy from the bottom of the ocean to the 747” which I might just like a whole lot because of the Boards of Canada song called “747”.
Big Baby Gandhi - NO1 2 LOOK UP 2
Okay so I already spent a blog post on this one but oh wow this is good, I just cannot get over how good this was. A few of the tracks grew on me a lot and sure a few didn’t but “Get $$$” remains at the absolute highest degree of addictiveness. Album of the year thus far? Or is that still Gods Father?!?! Or is that...
Lil B - #1 Bitch
Lil B has certainly leveled up if he can just grind out mixtapes this good now. I haven’t listened to all of this because like holy cow it’s another hour and a half of the Based God. I did hear a lot of it on Youtube, though, as it came out. Pretty good but no Gods Father, but what could be?
Future Music
Death Grips - The Money Store
This comes out... April 24th. Pretty exciting! I mean of course it’s Death Grips the middle name might as well be Intense. I’ve heard “Lost Boys” and “The Fever” off of this, both were pretty impressive but I think I liked “The Fever” better. “Lost Boys” is all cool and noisy and stuff but “The Fever” to me is the evolution of stuff like “Known For It”, which has always been my favorite sort of Death Grips song. Seriously, the beat that comes in around :50 is the sort of thing that makes you want to tear your brain out.
Sigur Rós – Valtari
This comes out May 28th. I liked Meo Suo etc etc well enough but I dunno I felt like the band was pretty steady on the pop direction. Well actually I just sort of figured they were done with studio albums in general, what with the live stuff and such. Plus I’d just gone for awhile not really listening to them or anything, I dunno why, I guess I was just sort of burnt out on the idea? So when I heard rumors there was a new album I was both skeptical and not really enthused enough to get over my skepticism. But when that single came on, oh man, "Ekki Múkk", that is a DANGED GOOD SONG. Back to their original style with like double sophistication and more of an electronic than earthy sound. I’M DOWN, SIGN ME UP, etc, etc.
New Matryoshka LP
I think I’m more excited for this, actually. Sigur Ros have made some of my favorite music of all time, sure, but honestly, the some like, 30 total tracks we’ve heard from Matryoshka – remixes included – each of them, I think, could stand on that tier. Seriously! Well, maybe not seriously. But wow this band, not since Everything is Made in China have I felt like a group was specifically engineered to fit my tastes. The aesthetics, the titles, the language, the subject matter, the SOUND! That impossibly beautiful Matryoshka sound! I must find a physical copy of this, because finding the previous two albums seems less and less likely...
Other Music
My playlist right now looks something like:
1. DJ Command - “Smooooch・∀・ -秋葉工房 mix-”
2. LMFAO - “Sorry for Party Rocking”
3. McKenzie Eddy - “Blood Runs Cold”
4. DJ YOSHITAKA-G - “GOLD RUSH”
5. IOSYS (Arm & miko) - “ねこ巫女れいむ”
6. TheBoxX vs. J Arthur Keenes Band - “Whazashmup”
7. Death Grips - “The Fever (Aye Aye)”
8. Why? - “A Little Titanic”
9. dowson0417 - “Nadeko vs Tsukihi: Renai Circulation vs Platinum Disco”
A lot of these have really cool music videos too so for your convenience here is a Youtube playlist of all of them!
“GOLD RUSH” is just all hype all the time. “Blood Runs Cold” is intimidatingly cool. Other stuff is catchier than should be legal. “A Little Titanic” has really infected me, though. All of Oaklandazulasylum, which I just realized isn’t just “Oaklandasylum”, sometimes just captivates me and seems really extra mysterious and alluring. But then usually I’ll become hyper obsessed with one song from it, like I have here. A lot of the techniques that now seem old hat for anticonites seems really exposed here, which is cool, it sort of makes you focus more on the technique as technique and not the effect. Like the cadence on the “I fucked your girlfriend and I’d probably do it again/You slashed my tires and I’d hope that you’d do it again” and the little xylophone part, Why? does that stuff all over but here it’s right in the forefront, how cool is that? Renai Disco/Platinum Circulation is a solid contender for best song of all time, btw.
Animes
Strike Witches 2
Overall I was pretty impressed with this. I talked about it on the video blog or whatever but yeah, solid show. Problems were like... ending wasn’t very emotionally poignant, final battle was sort of underwhelming aside from a few scenes, too much people just wiping out fodder ships, weird pacing when they have reaction shots of the characters and such, and the fact that they just lost their powers and disbanded is pretty anticlimactic, I dunno still an okay end. Maybe the movie will be more powerful? Like they were essentially fighting an inanimate object in the end. Actually I had a lot of the same beefs as I did with the climax of Fishman Island, it just seemed like the whole structure of threats was out of whack, nothing really “gripping”. Aside from the ending most of the episodes were pretty well paced and such. And the animation is always just beautiful, soundtrack pretty good too. It’s no Sora no Woto but it’s a good lesson in how to make a insanely popular version of such a thing. But yeah, more than enough reasons to enjoy this show. The propeller noises they make when they fly around alone is more than worth it.
Black Rock Shooter
Okay I’ve been thinking a whole lot about this and I still can’t really figure out what I think of this show qualitatively. There’s so many aspects where it’s just clearly so, so, so good, and yet, it is at times just dumbfoundingly ignorant of some of the cardinal rules of good storytelling. Let’s break it down?
Simplicity, Elegance and Unity
A professor of mine was talking about aesthetic qualities and he sort of offhandedly named the three above as ideals by which you could measure an idea, as opposed to more pragmatic ones like truth or efficiency. I really really like these terms, I think I might adopt them as my go-to benchmarks for what I think of as “story fiction”. Story fiction is basically any story where your primary emotional investment is in what happens next. This is distinct from fiction where you’re more involved in things like philosophical resolutions or character arcs or things like the prose or art. Not that you can’t be involved in those things with story fiction, but they won’t be a means to an end. Or they will be. For awhile I had a streak of mixing that up every single time I said it. It was like a streak of twelve. It just doesn’t seem intuitive to me, sorry!
Anyways, I feel like story fiction should be as simple as possible. This is my big beef with Christopher Nolan films and I don’t get why people tolerate his throwing so much expository junk at the screen. Just because he happens to shoehorn it in again later? The thing with stuff like a Chekov’s Gun is that it’s just sitting there on stage, it’s not like you’re given a Powerpoint on the properties of gunpowder. I’m all for high concept, er, low concept? That’s another one that’s thrown me around. If you’re describing the plot and you keep saying things like “except when” “but only if” “here, let me draw you a diagram” and you haven’t yet begin to cover the events of the story, something is wrong.
But don’t get me wrong! I like a complex concept as much as anyone. But I like it for the concept, i.e., the concept has to actually be cool and the story has to focus on fleshing it out as much as possible. 2001 is a film with several really cool complex concepts, and it dives right into them. You’re not all caught up in the plights of the astronauts, really, you’re more curious about the conceptual things. Or something like a Pynchon novel or Infinite Jest – all sorts of stupefyingly crazy ideas, but it’s about the ideas more than anything! And when it isn’t, like when it’s about relationships or something where you are more emotionally involved in the plot or the characters than the concepts, the two aren’t conflated. And the exposition isn’t just dumped on you, there’s some actual charm used in it if there’s any exposition at all! Nolan films eff this up big man, I can never like the characters ‘cause the premise is too convoluted and all he does is follow the characters around and try to make me like them, he doesn’t actually work with his premise at all. It’s like assembling some big mechanized awesome modernist sculpture and hanging your family photos on them. More to the point, it’s like Black Rock Shooter, which kept throwing stuff at what was initially a pretty simple premise and ended up having to throw much of it away.
What is the concept of Black Rock Shooter?
Apparently there’s another world. “Okay.” This world looks really cool and it has really cool looking people in it, and they fight all the time. “Awesome!” Now, these girls in the other world are some how linked to girls in the “real world”, which is the world you and I know. “Alright...” They aren’t the same person, but they look pretty similar. And get this – the conflicts of the real world are reflected in the other world, like, one girl is like holding another girl hostage with guilt, and in the other world, she’s being held prisoner literally! And stuff like the dialogue or some visual motifs and such carry over! “Wow, THAT is cool!”
Yeah yeah! And uh, the girls in the real world, they have dreams about the other world! “Uh, that’s alright, I guess.” Yeah! And the girls like, share in these dreams, like, they somehow communicate? “Um, okay, but...” And like, although their personalities overlap in some cases, in some cases they don’t, and like, sometimes the girls will be trying to be nice irl but in the other world they’re killing each other and such, so there’s that... “Oh. Um...” And then uh, if the version in the other world dies, memories of like, some specific traumatic incident leave you. Or sometimes you forget about a person entirely for some reason? “...What?” And uh... you can like, go into a trance, or something? And then you’ll be in the other world? “W-what?” And one time a girl switched with her other self!
Okay. So it’s getting pretty convoluted, right? Like, that concept could have been much simpler, and it would have let the plot move so much more freely, y’know? That whole second paragraph could have been dropped and the plot could have essentially been functionally equivalent, or at least, the good parts of it.
So what is the plot of Black Rock Shooter?
So there’s five main characters who have these other-world versions: Mato/Black Rock Shooter, Yomi/Dead Master, Kagari/Chariot, Yuu/Strength and Saya/Black Gold Saw. Saya is a school councilor in the middle school that the other girls attend. They have all sorts of dramatics amongst themselves, largely motivated by the concept of YOU CAN ONLY HAVE ONE FRIEND AT A TIME and Mato’s wanting to get involved with stuff. At the same time, their other world counterparts engage in cool-looking fight scenes vaguely analogous to their irl fights except that Mato is relentlessly nice to everyone whereas BRS is killing everyone.
Okay. I’m okay with that. That’s great. 8 episodes of that would be fine.
Things get really weird when Saya stops just giving advice and seems to start sadistically manipulating them so they feel guilty and terrible. Plus characters keep having weird episodes of amnesia and huge personality changes when their other world version dies, but the consistency of this is never clear. Saya-chan is manipulating them so this happens to them or so it doesn’t happen to them, and her motives are contrary/in alliance with Black Gold Saw’s????? More dramatic episodes and then the history of Saya and Yuu is revealed after everyone forgets about Yuu for some reason. Yuu somehow knows about the other world, and she was bullied badly, but she manages or something because of the other world, and then her house burns down, and then she switches with Strength in the other world????? And then Mato falls into a trance, and is in the body of Black Rock Shooter and sees her kill Dead Master and freaks out ‘cause it looks like she just killed Yomi, and then she becomes Insane Black Rock Shooter. And then Saya and Yuu try to use trance powers or something to stop Mato, who is trapped inside?? Insane Black Rock Shooter, or something, and it eventually works, and then she’s Black Rock Shooter and shoots a big rainbow cannon with everyone’s help, and then everyone is friends and the series is over.
What?
I have beef with this story. It’s way more complicated than it needs to be. It is presented very inelegantly, with doubling up on ideas that seems just short of retconning, weird inconsistent logic and exposition that is brick-on-head subtle or pointlessly vague. It’s hardly unified, seems very incohesive and often inconclusive. But you know what? It doesn’t have to have a good story! Lots of things have terrible stories, or no stories, and they’re awesome! I don’t have to be emotionally invested in what happens next, like I said, I could be invested in all sorts of other things. And some of those things I did get really caught up in, for sure! Other parts I didn’t.
Basically the plot was a huge convoluted mess that kept tearing itself up and changing it’s mind, but it was all for the sake of something else, right? Some moral message, or character study, or aesthetic masterpiece? I have to think if they didn’t want to go for exactly what they went for, they would have kept it simpler, right? So does it succeed? Bluntly, respectfully: no, sort of, yes.
What is the moral message of Black Rock Shooter?
I have absolutely no idea. This, I think, is even more of a cardinal sin than screwing up the plot. If I don’t understand what is happening, I should understand why it’s happening, at least, I think? For any character at any given time I think I can maybe work out what sort of motivation they have. It seems to change by the second, but I could maybe do it. What I can’t figure out is like, is this motivation aligned to their other world version or not? Is it something I should be cheering or crying about? I mean I’m all for vagueness and ambiguity in emotional response but like, geez, I never really understood if characters were succeeding or failing, becoming emotionally stronger or heading for breakdown, facing reality or deluding themselves or what.
At the core I think is the little picture book of The Many Coloured Bird. I like this as a story device, generally. I like this specific implementation, too, like, the sad ending and such, sure. But the message of the story is uh, you should have many different experiences? And the show seems to support this, like, at the end, they’re like, “We’ll take in all the experiences” or whatever. But so does the bird have to die or not? And is their dying in the other world good or not? Like should they be fighting and not dying or like, why is it resolved at the end when they’re all standing around in peace? It turns into the world from the book there but like... why? Are things better off or worse overall? Has there been some sort of general emotional instrumentality through the school or what? Who’s the villain? Who’s the hero? Was Saya-chan right in her manipulation or not? I can’t stop with these questions, and they aren’t the cool sort of ambiguous questions where you can’t think about them ‘cause there’s like no evidence and the show seems to think you should know. I bet if they stretched this out to 13 episodes it would make a lot more sense?
The only message I know for sure that this show has is that in the beginning, some people acted like they could only have one friend at a time, and this caused trouble. But by the end, people realized that they could have three or even four friends and that was okay. If all the other messages of the show could be expressed like that, I’d be very happy with it.
Seriously like, it’s really sort of sad. My favorite example is with that book thing, the scene where Mato gets frustrated with it and scribbles her own ending into it. That’s an amazing scene! That’s probably my favorite scene in the whole show. But like, sure, I was invested in the character, I liked the character, I LOVED the scene itself, like, the writing, the voice acting, the framing, timing, all that, but I just didn’t know what sort of emotional reaction I was actually supposed to have. I didn’t know if this was triumphant or terrifying or what. I still don’t know.
And I just came across this dialogue that I think exemplifies pretty much every beef I have with the show. Yuu, who everyone but Mato has forgotten about, and Mato almost forgot about for some reason, is “explaining” the premise to Mato (these are Commie’s subs):
“We talked about it in training camp, didn’t we, Mato? The World where someone bears your pain and fights for you... It really exists. But, see... It’s not a completely different person. It’s another you, in another place. The other you is always fighting, taking on your worries and messed-up emotions... And then, the other you dies in battle and ceases to exist. But as the other you dies, still carrying the burden of your troubles, you’re released from your messed-up, festering feelings! Like Kohata, and Kagari. Their biggest obsession was cut loose, and they became free. If the other playful bird dies in that place, the one in this world will be let loose from the trouble eating away at her.”
What?
What does that mean and what am I supposed to make of it?
But what about those characters?
They’re great, still! All very likable and interesting! Mato and Yuu especially are really interesting looks at the “good girl” archetype. The look at Mato in the 7th episode where they talk to other characters about her and Yuu’s dialogue during the big fight scene are both great! But they aren’t really motivated or supported through the story at all, are they? I caught myself thinking that some characters had some back story or something that they actually didn’t, they like, somehow perhaps unintentionally abused the fact that I’d get confused about archetypical characters. So basically everyone was underdeveloped, except Saya-chan, and yes I see the double entendre. And she only feels developed because she essentially has two distinct character arcs. And yeah I get that one too.
But again! They have fairly complex characters here and they give them a bit of analysis. Yeah, they’re archetypical, but they do have some interesting flaws and such. If they weren’t going to use them to some end, they’d have run with something simpler.
What BRS did right
So why did I stick with it? Why did I spend so much of today trying (mostly futilely) to establish exactly what I didn’t like about it? Well, there really doesn’t need to be a reason, I mean, I kept up with Naruto and it’s gotten worse than I would have guessed things could get. But really, there’s some stuff in this show that is just so objectively good by any standard that I could not possibly pass it up. The most basic foundations of anime – animation quality, character design, voice acting, soundtrack – are all phenomenal. The fight scenes are usually pretty nicely paced, sometimes they overdo scenes of just slow panning around someone spraying bullets, but the sheer amount of visual intensity in such scenes usually keeps me interested. Scenes like the aforementioned one of her scribbling in her book were pretty frequent, too, and although none of the premises were super original, they were always really intense, albeit emotionally confusing. And plus they seemed to be breaking some new ground in terms of fanservice – not only did they have all the standards (regular, yurigoggles, shouting, explosions) but also plunging full into some of the areas explored by Madoka et al – madness, bleakness, manipulation, etc. You might be like “hey some of those were plot devices too!” but I don’t think they really were and I don’t think that matters. But yeah like Saya starts to choke Mato and then she stops and I still have no idea why any of that happens, but I do know it was a good scene and my mouth was gaping and I was like wow what in the heck is going onnnnnnn this is soooo cooool.
Black Rock Shooter vs. Strike Witches
See basically Strike Witches makes none of the mistakes I talk about here. The characters are simple, but they have depth – simple depth. You actually know stuff about them. The premise is like dumb simple and the morals are pretty black and white. When they deviate from that sort of thing with like, MC girl showing sympathy to the humanoid Neuroi, or the internal conflict with the army... well, I almost wonder if they regarded that sort of stuff as a mistake, ‘cause season 2 had practically none of it... but at any rate, they kept that pretty simple too and let you move past the details of the situation to the issues at the heart of it.
I feel weird saying that a project borne from uh a vocaloid song to become a huge multi-media franchise is too ambitious, but they really should have realized that they couldn’t push the next Madoka just by trying really hard. As far as success in sales etc go – which, as much as it hurts to admit it, is really the only thing studios care about – I have a hard time figuring out if BRS will surpass something like Strike Witches. It’s weird, I feel like there’s such a big dichotomy between the two when they’re pretty similar – a bunch of girls and fight scenes and explosions and most stuff is just there to attempt to justify fanservice. They both had a pretty simple concept initially but Strike Witches just stuck to it to the point of near tedium while BRS seemed never satisfied with letting the audiences understand what was happening.
I guess really the show I ought to compare BRS to isn’t Strike Witches, exemplary of the pack it was trying to distance itself from, but Madoka, the show I felt pretty often it was aping. I mean both have five principle characters, a conceptual plot that got more complicated and mixed school dramatics with spectacular fight scenes. But like, ask yourself, was there any time in Madoka where you didn’t understand at all what was happening? Where you weren’t sure if the scene was happy or sad? Where you didn’t understand why someone was doing something? I certainly never experienced that, and I know I was a whole lot more invested in Madoka.
So I dunno. I hope I got across what bugged me about the show but it’s surprisingly hard to encapsulate neatly.
I guess that’s about it
2011 posts soon maybe. Other regular blog features maybe dead due to harddrive crash getting rid of most of them? I guess I could do them again but whatever.
