#despite the fact that Isekais do exist and like aren’t that rare

[detective-piplup]

hey. you could make some wild miriabi x sv au with arven being like some kinda angel. & his parents beign the kindsa people fullof hubris when it comes to angels (protip don’t be like this. do not taunt the angels)

LOOKS AT YOU… OHOHOHOHO??

[natsubeatsrock]

Should our heroes break the rules?

You'd think I would have ended this series with the previous entry. Think of this as the true conclusion to the series. I like to do this whenever i write series like this and this might be the best way to do it. In the other posts in this series, I've talked about ideas that could be considered important guidelines for writing and analyzing characters and series. But, is there ever a reason to reject these ideas?

Let me talk about another passion of mine: music theory. Beginners to western harmony learn three basic no-nos to their harmonizations: no parallel octaves, no parallel fifths, and no doubling of the seventh scale tone. The reasoning behind this is to achieve a sound similar to Johann Sebastian Bach, arguably the greatest composer of Western art music.

There are two problems with this set of rules. One, not all composers write in a style similar to that of Bach. In fact, most composers nowadays don't write music like him. Two, Bach has examples where he famously breaks his own rules. They're rare, but Bach has moments where parallel fifths and octaves can be found in his music.

It's often said that rules are made to be broken. I don't know that that's a great way to live, but it gets at something important about the philosophy of disobedience. As much as rules exist for a reason, we as humans have a fascination with exploring ways to circumvent the rules as close as possible before we get in trouble. Part of the fun of the creative process is exactly that we, as creators, get to play with established elements.

It's worth mentioning that Bach and his contemporaries didn't come out of nowhere. Many of them were doing something that would be considered breaking the rules of composition only about a century before their time. And once they died and their styles of music became standard, others started writing music that broke those rules. It got to the point that concepts such as the nature of music itself are up for debate.

In regards to writing, one thing I've said many times in this series is that context is what's important. What is the series about? What story are you trying to tell? Depending on your answer, play with the conventions of what is to be expected of you.

Sometimes, it's worth playing with the rules because you want to show the problems with them. Sometimes you'll keep the story similar to what is expected with one or two changes that fundamentally affect the nature of the series. Sometimes, you want to provide a scenario where what's expected is less than helpful for the characters in the series.

In a previous entry in the series, I talked about how Re: Zero and Konosuba do this with the isekai genre. Konosuba presents a reality where Kazuma isn't enjoying his new world experience because of the people around him. Re: Zero presents a reality where Subaru isn't enjoying his new world experience at least in part because of his special ability.

Of course, it's worth keeping two things in mind when talking about doing things differently. One, any good story has to do something to differentiate itself from the many different stories like it. Two, there is no shame in following genre conventions fairly closely, without doing much to add to the genre. As long as you enjoy the story, there's no shame in doing what you want.

A great example of this is Hunter x Hunter. Despite what anyone tells you, there's not a whole lot that Hunter x Hunter does differently from other shonen actions series. However, it does everything that other series have done at the highest level possible. While other series have that one arc that's darker than others, very few of them match up to the Chimera Ant arc. Plenty of series have had tournament arcs, but there aren't many that match up to the Heaven's Arena.

What matters most in the creation process is doing what you want. It doesn't matter if someone's done something similar to what you want to do. As long as you aren't doing the exact same thing as them, have fun writing what you want.

As an analyst, it's important to recognize what a creator did and what it means. A lot of this means that you will and should figure out what was the intent of the creators. Often, you'll find things that weren't intended by the creators to be a thing. I think that's fine as long as you're not arguing that something that didn't happen in the series did. To be blunt, there's "death of an author" and rejecting reality.

Of course, I would be remiss to end this series without mentioning the most important part of the equation. Always have an explanation. If you write something, think of why you did. If you're an analyst, explain how you came to your conclusion. Your explanation doesn't always have to be deep or extensive. However, it's important to know the "why" behind any and all "what" situations you find yourself in.

I had the idea to explain what goes through my head when it comes to how a series makes certain decisions. It started out as just wanting to explain why I'm fine with characters forgiving and not killing. I ended up with the series we got. I’m glad that I’ve been able to finish this series. This has been fun and I can't wait to talk about other specific series soon.

The end.

[deltaengineering]

Bummer Anime 2018 Part 2: shoujo to the rescue

It got better, mostly because it could hardly get worse. That doesn’t mean it was a smooth ride, of course. I would like to state, for the record, that I’m not trying to be the funny guy who hates everything here; the season’s just that unusually bad. As before, the source for the ad copy at the end of each block is this.

Asobi Asobase

What: A bunch of assholes play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

✅ It’s another exuberant comedy, and unlike Chio-chan, I can’t catch this one on the execution: It has the technical chops and honestly good comedic timing.

❌❌ Initially wants to make you believe it’s a pleasant cute girls doing cute things show, but what it actually is is a brutally annoying and ugly explosion in the reactionface factory. Since the production values are there, it’s rather too good at that.

❌❌ I was trying to compare it to something, and the best I could come up with was rage comics. Yeah, it’s anime rage comics. It’s that bad.

❌❌ I would feel more benevolent towards it if it were shorter, but at full length its high energy screaming based assault is mostly just tiresome.

♎ This is one of those rare shows where even I will say your mileage may vary. It’s really good at what it does, but I hate everything it does. Hooray for the subversion, but at the end of the day you’re still annoying and ugly.

ANN sez: “It's this exact mix of stupid crassness and innocent naiveté that I think truly defines high-school life, and Asobi Asobase nails it perfectly. “

Hyakuren no Haou to Seiyaku no Valkyria

What: A smartphone with a light novel protagonist attached time travels to the bronze age, establishes a incest-fascist harem regime with the power of Wikipedia.

❌❌ read the synopsis again please

❌❌ there’s more idiocy than that, believe it or not (ex.: smartphone hotline to his actual imouto, for the feels), but I haven’t got all day.

❌❌ Basing your isekai shit on “history” (i.e., a LN author’s idiotic idea of history) instead of an MMO or whatever only serves to piss me off even more.

❌❌ Actually not better than Isekai Smartphone, which makes it one of the worst anime episodes I have ever seen. Congratulations. The only thing it has over Death March is that it doesn’t spend 80% of the time in menus, but it makes menus look pretty good so it’s a wash.

ANN brainfarts: “Yuuto also seems to be limiting his phone searches to historically accurate things as well, which shows that he's really thinking about the fact that he's in the past – no one's inventing the rocket here, they're just learning to grind grain and use the phalanx formation for battles.”

Phantom in the Twilight

What: Chinese girl travels to London, inadvertently inherits her great-grandma’s vampire harem. 

✅ Step 1 of every otome harem appraisal is determining how much of a wet blanket the protagonist is; Ton here is pretty spunky and even gets to kick some ass, so well done on that.

✅ Some of the right kind of nonsense for my taste, stuff like chav goblins and Jiangshi with miniguns is always appreciated.

✅ Random shows ending up with bizarre minimal techno soundtracks is still something that I approve of.

❌ Still not the glorious kind of nonsense that Dance With Devils had, nor the disregard of actual romance in favor of comedy that Dame x Prince exhibited. It’s an otome-ass otome harem and that’s not inspiring confidence for the long term.

❌ Looks cheap, and that won’t be getting any better.

ANN sez: “The fantasy worldbuilding here also felt far more sturdy than in many similar shows; this isn't a world where the Good Fantasy Guys fight the Bad Fantasy Guys, this is a world where creatures like goblins and spriggans and werewolves all exist, all possess their own cultures and priorities, and uneasily rub shoulders with each other.”

Jashin-chan Dropkick

What: Demon snake girl wants to murder the chuuni gothloli that summoned her, gets owned right back.

❌❌ It’s the second coming of Dokuro-chan, with every punchline being torture. Quite literally for the characters, and consequently for the audience as well.

❌❌ Needless to say, the entire cast (there’s some additional supernatural babes, none of which make much of an impression) are jerks and the show being wantonly mean-spirited towards them does not cancel that out. 

❌ Somehow the second anime about eating reptile ass in recent memory. But Maidragon, as lame as it was, wasn’t as terrible as this. Jashin-chan won’t get into insipid family feels any time soon, but the alternative is worse.

ANN sez: “If this is your taste in humor, it may be worth giving a second episode to see if it starts pulling that off.”

Kyoto Teramachi Sanjou no Holmes

What: Handsome genius antique dealer appraises old pottery and his assistant’s soul.

✅ I have to admit that if you somehow decided to make a otome version of Sherlock without anything so crass as murder, this is how you’d do it. It works.

✅ The leading pair has simple but effective chemistry.

✅ The studio behind it has mostly done porn OVAs before, which is the kind of meta-humor I can get behind.

❌ Based on a series of novels, so naturally the talkytalk gets out of hand.

❌ Doesn’t have the highest budget, tries to make up for it with rainbow-colored garishness. Not a dealbreaker but it could get tiresome.

ANN sez: “While Yagashira cuts a handsome figure as the bishonen, Aoi has more of an ordinary appearance – perhaps deliberately so, since I suspect that the source novels were originally aimed at female audiences.”

Shinya! Tensai Bakabon

What: Showa-era gag manga gets on air again after decades, repeatedly points out how hilarious that is.

❌ Beat-for-beat the same first episode concept as Osomatsu-san.

❌ The main difference is that Bakabon is more willing to look old as fuck, but when they arrive at the non-ruse look at the end of the episode, it’s the same as the non-ruse look that Osomatsu-san ended up at the end of its own first episode.

❌  So guess what, constantly takes potshots at Osomatsu-san, despite being a blatant ripoff of it.

❌❌ When it doesn’t reference Things You Know (if you’re a middle-aged Japanese salaryman), it references its own sorry showa-era gag manga self.

❌❌ I didn’t even like Osomatsu-san but this is an embarrassment.

♎ On the bright side, not as likely to provide fujos with incest shipping material. I fully expect to be proven painfully wrong on this.

ANN sez: Nothing. Way too Japanese for them, I suppose. 

Angolmois - Genkou Kassenki

What: Historical action show wherein a bunch of misfits in medieval Japan fight the Mongols.

✅ Fairly decent action and animation thereof.

✅ Characters seem alright for this sort of thing. Maybe a bit too tryhard violent for my tastes, but that’s still within acceptable parameters.

❌❌ The looks are ruined in postproduction. I could live with the heavyhanded color correction, but what really kills it is the same omnipresent static paper texture over every single shot. It’s bad when it doesn’t change between shots but it’s devastating when it doesn’t move along with zooms and pans, which this show has a lot of.

❌❌ Seriously, I haven’t seen anything as senselessly destroyed by a single AfterEffects layer since Garo: Vanishing Line’s Parkinsonscam, but at least that only affected impact frames. Here it’s literally every frame. Delete that PNG you damn fools.

❌ So yeah, it’s okay-ish but that’s not enough to survive one boneheaded executive decision that’s impossible to ignore. It just comes out as a net negative.

ANN sez: “From its beautifully animated, choreographed, and directed fight scenes to its generally dynamic compositions and keen understanding of visual economy, Angolmois is a visually stunning production.”

Lord of Vermilion - Guren no Ou

What: Tokyo gets enveloped in red mist which raptures most of the population and turns the rest into JRPG characters. They start fighting, we promise.

❌ Has the shape of an obvious Persona clone, but isn’t one; it’s actually based on an arcade CCG. So the source material isn’t very classy to begin with.

❌❌ Haphazardly thrown together so it’s hard to care about anything, especially not the characters.

❌❌ Opens with a flashforward to the climax, so we know this will just end up as overdesigned dudes and dudettes having allegedly epic battles that the show can’t afford to make look good, but can afford to make very red. Thanks for the heads up, I guess.

❌ So it’s quite bad, and not even funny-bad like Caligula was.

ANN sez: “There are always a few action shows like this every season, and they're always entirely overshadowed by that season's versions of shows like My Hero Academia and Banana Fish”

Grand Blue

What: City slicker moves to a beach town expecting to end up in Amanchu; ends up in Animal House instead.

❌❌ Say it with me: Every punchline is the protagonist making a shocked face at dumb meatheads doing something stupid.

♎ For something that I feel like I should hate every second of, I actually didn’t hate it all that much. I even thought it was mostly sort of enjoyable. I don’t really know what exactly does it but I can offer some ideas:

✅ While the punchlines (well, punchline) may be bad, the jokes themselves aren’t. This is a real sitcom with larger-scale comedic setups than you usually see in anime, jokes build upon each other and keep escalating.

✅ Sleazy fratboy humor about partying hard and drinking like an idiot isn’t very profound, but rare at least in anime. And it’s amusing that the overall conceit is that it’s preventing iyashikei from taking place. Novelty counts for something. 

✅ Manages to build awkward comedic situations about buff dudes with their dicks out without resorting to the same old gay panic jokes. Just regular panic, no homo.

✅ Makes a good Friday beach bum combo with Harukana Receive, which incidentally also got better by embracing its more prurient side.

ANN sez: “If Grand Blue Dreaming has a major Achilles heel, its that it isn't self-aware enough to recognize when a joke has run its course. ”

Happy Sugar Life

What: Yandere sociopath adopts a preteen girl (from a parking lot). It’s cute, only not.

✅ Is fully aware that everyone in this show is an asshole and is honestly trying for subversive. At least on the surface.

✅ Goes all on on the imagery, which works. At least on the surface.

❌❌ Simply exploiting the contrast between cuteness and insanity got old about a decade ago; this cranks up the presentation on both sides but doesn’t really add anything new.

❌❌ About as mean-spirited and unpleasant as Mahou Shoujo Site, while having even less to say. 

❌ Doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere; it’s just going to be the main character pwning other people that are just as flamboyantly fucked up as she is, but not as good at it. Starting with a flashforward to the (very edgy, of course) ending like Lord of Vermilion doesn’t help either. And even if they end up rusemanning what is implied there it won’t be much better.

ANN sez: “Happy Sugar Life was on my list of most-anticipated anime this season because its combination of disparate elements seemed so utterly perverse that I was curious to see how they could possibly fit together.“

Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight

What: Girls slowwalk in an academy for stage arts by day, get into metaphorical superbattles by night.

✅✅ What can I say, it’s Love Live x Marimite with a glossy coating of Ikuhara-style operatics. A total deltabait concept if I’ve ever seen one.

✅ Clones the storytelling approach of Ikuhara but not many of his specific directing mannerisms; Since I’m tired of the latter but a sucker for the former, this is a good thing.

✅ In a similar vein, this trades Ikuhara’s functional ciphers for actual characters and his enigmatic arthouse plots for something that obviously makes sense. 

✅ How gay? So gay.

❌ Has the opposite problem of Grand Blue: This is a show that should blow me away, but doesn’t. In fact, if it didn’t bring the big damn musical theater complete with one of the best and most appropriate henshins I’ve ever seen near the end, I’d say it was fairly lame.

❌ Probably has something to do with that in the course of casualizing Ikuhara, the “real” world ended up too bland and the characters too generic. I get that it’s for contrast, but it can be done far better (see Yorimoi for an example).

✅ In any case, it still seems easily worth watching even if it’s not as good as it could be. Maybe it’ll even get better.

ANN sez: “All I can say for certain is that it comes completely out of nowhere, and that it raises all kinds of questions about what kind of series this is going to be.“

Yuragi-sou no Yuuna-san

What: Impoverished ghost hunter checks into a haunted hot spring and interacts with the harem that happens to live there.

❌ As generic a 90s ecchi harem comedy as they come; my correspondents tell me that this is extremely reminiscent of Love Hina. Shockingly it’s actually based on a 2016 manga, but you wouldn’t be able to tell.

❌ As such, an abundance of accidental boobplants and other saucy accidents makes up the bulk of what’s going on this show.

✅ The main ghost girl is fairly cute; The main dude is also relatively bearable and has at least one good joke in his backstory (which I won’t spoil), so the core dynamic is surprisingly fine. If the rest of the harem weren’t there, this wouldn’t be such a bad setup. 

❌ Features those dastardly breast-hiding light rays, reportedly even in the AT-X version. This doesn’t affect a large part of the show (the majority is more like the cap above), but boobies are probably still the only reason anyone cares about any of this.

♎ Certainly not good, but the lame shit of yore is not what I’m going to spend energy getting mad at in 2018. The 24 minutes I’m ever going to spend with it felt more nostalgic than anything.

ANN sez: “Ninja girl Sagiri comes off the worst from the situation, with nearly all of her dialogue spent promising to beat the crap out of anyone who doesn't measure up to her moral code. I imagine there must be more to her and the rest of the supporting cast than what we've seen so far, but at the moment they seem an awful lot like stock characters.”

Sirius the Jaeger

What: A broody werewolf and his team of assorted bad dudes hunt vampires in 30s Tokyo.

✅✅ Looks ace, this is an action show with deluxe everything. It better, because being directed by Masahiro Ando is pretty much the start and end of this show’s unique selling points.

✅ Interwar Tokyo with a bit of a gothick twist is a cool setting, and this show can afford to portray it properly.

❌ Seriously though... edgy vampires and edgier werewolves. Come on, son.

❌ Just like Banana Fish, this is a highly polished implementation of something that fundamentally isn’t very interesting to me.

✅ I’d still take it over Fanana Bish because this doesn’t seem to take itself so bloody seriously and is far more comfortable with just being moody action schlock. It’s also less showoffy, believe it or not. What else are you going to watch? Sirius the Jaeger is what you’re going to watch. Sorry.

ANN sez: They only have a preview from Anime Expo, and that boils down to “The second episode is where things start to get interesting.“ I sure hope so.

Well, we got a few acceptable shows in if nothing else, I’ll leave it up to you to figure out which ones those are. I’m cutting my losses here, see you in three months for a hopefully more bountiful season.

[bookwormguri]

I don’t normally do this, but I’m going to take a moment to gush about Re:Creators and why I think anyone who is a creator of art should watch it, while also not-so-subtly grumbling about the reception it’s gotten. I’ll try to remain as spoiler-free as possible.

First I want to talk about my grievances so it doesn't seem like I’m incapable of seeing the flaws of the series. Although, if you’ve read any reviews about it, nothing I say will be new info. 

Pacing: The biggest issue I had was with the pacing of the series. Unlike some, I don’t think the story could have been told in 12 or 13 episodes. Doing so would have made the large cast seem extremely unwieldy and would have sacrificed characterization. However, it seemed very obvious in the middle part that they struggled with pacing. 

For example, I practically marathoned the series, but when I saw the preview for the next episode was a hot springs episode I stopped watching for the night, convinced that an episode like that probably wouldn’t lend much to the plot (I was right). The hot springs episode was probably by far the largest annoyance, but there were many many scenes that could have been trimmed for fat. After Mamika left, almost any scene in the bad guy’s camp had me reaching for my phone to scroll through tumblr. Those scenes lacked depth after the moral compass Mamika was gone. They mostly amounted to getting a small glimpse of a new baddy and Altair brooding and being maniacal.

Altair’s Power: Which brings me to my second biggest gripe, Altair. I love her concept. The reason for her infinite power shows that the showrunners have their pulse to fandom. I know people harp on her because she’s basically a Hatsune Miku rip-off (which, if you’re pissy about characters in this show being similar to existing characters and franchises BOI do I have bad news for you about the entire concept of this show), but I don’t think that is where her weaknesses stem from. 

Part of Altair’s being is that she in infinite, almost god-like in her own right. In the universe of Re:Creators this powerset makes perfect sense and plays well into the big questions the show is asking. However, the showrunners need to remember for as meta as Re:Creators is, it is still a show. Having Altair being a walking Deus Ex Machina and coming up with a new power to perfectly counter the heroes every time is dull and gives zero constraints to her. Basically, I mean there wasn’t an ending I could see our heroes beating Altair with her infinite number of reality-bending scores. That unknown is nice for some people, but for me, it just made me afraid they were going to pull out some power of friendship bullshit at the eleventh hour.

Altair’s Motivations: I think I’m in a small camp, but I LOVE Altair’s dialogue. In the beginning, she seems like a very complicated character, the kind of wickedly smart villain that happens once in a blue moon, the kind that makes you go, “Well, they aren’t wrong, but they’re going about it all wrong.” Unfortunately, this part of her characterization gets severely played down in the second half. She turns more into a one-note villain that means nothing to defeat. In addition, since we see so much less of her in the second half it makes her resolution mean less imo (I say this and someone who cried the whole time). I adore her speech at the end. I think it was a nice callback to the line she had said only an episode or so earlier:

“Clever logic is a slave to emotion.”

And that’s what I think defines Altair as a character. She is someone who has so much despair and anger, but she justifies it with logic and simplicity. And in the end, it’s also what becomes her end. The problem is, we don’t get to see the illogical and emotional side of her often enough. Clever audience members can infer it, but this pivotal part of her character isn’t given the spotlight it needed to avoid the finale feeling OOC of her to most.

Now that we’ve gotten those out of the way, I’m free to gush and rant as much as I please! First I want to address some common critiques I’ve seen on the series:

Sota: One of the most common issues people bring up is the blandness of the “main character” Sota, or rather, the audience insert. I won’t say he is not that, but for vastly different reasons than I think others would slap that “warning” on him.

Many people are quick to label Re:Creators and reverse-isekai show. Again, I won’t argue with the genre label, but I do think that out of all the genres and themes within the series, isekai is actually pretty insignificant. Re:Creators at its core is not about “what would you do if anime characters came to the REAL WORLD,” moreover it is tackling questions about the essence of creation, media and our relation to it. So how does this relate to Sota?

I think Sota is often written off as just a “self-insert” character because that is a staple of the isekai genre, the genre that I propose is not actually that prevalent, I estimate the same with Sota. Sota is passive, yes, but he also has his own story arc and despite him saying that he is only the narrator, I think the story of Re:Creators is really all about his struggle as an artist, something I think many audience members can relate to, making him their insert. It’s not because he’s Kirito and is amazing at everything, but rather his struggles mirror our own, much more so than the larger-than-life Creations. 

(Also, I don’t stand for any BS about him being a Deus Ex Machina in the final battle. He followed Re:Creators inner world logic despite it being ‘cheating’. No foul.)

The scene in episode 9 with Sota and Magane is what I showed other people to get them into the show, to show this human character break down, hear some hard truths and get back up. Also, the fact that he was able to bring you-know-who back in the final battle shows that while he feels immense guilt, he doesn’t shy away from it. He could have very easily let his own guilt make him soften his final product, but no, he wanted something real and tangible, not something to make him feel better. To me, that shows his depth as a character.

This post here also encapsulated how I feel about Sota’s character.

Exposition: Another common critique I see is about the amount of dialogue and exposition in the series. Maybe it’s just the DM and lore-junkie in me, but I’ve never minded a lot of exposition and in Re:Creators I LOVED it. Even Meteor’s long-winded explanations. I liked them because the through them the show was promoting difficult questions, the kind that would have my old existentialism professor jumping with glee. I’ve debated sending him this series for his next film class actually, but I don’t want him to know I’m anime trash. 

I think a lot of people take issue with the exposition because of its often theoretical in nature. Naturally, the audience wants some payoff for these big ideas any rarely gets any. Unfortunately, that’s how philosophy rolls, yo. But if you’re someone like me who finds joy in pondering about multiple-world theory, film tropes and subversion and meta, this show scratches an itch you didn’t know you had.

I know that shows like this that don’t give you all the answers, that are subtle in the execution often get ragged on for their supposedly “poor writing,” often are snubbed, but that doesn’t make me appreciate them any less.

Now the things that I love unabashedly:

Music: Hiroyuki Sawano. Those no other reason I fucking need. Even though Aldanoah Zero turned out to be a big dumpster fire, you bet your ass I have the whole soundtrack on my iPod. Those OSTs are some of my main background music fodder for writing. There’s nothing quite like Sawano’s music that can convey hype with such a heroic and hopeful feeling

Theme: This is a story that touches on a lot of issues, artist block, feelings of inadequacy, working together creatively and above all, the power of imagination. I love that this series shows there is no shame in the real emotional connections we have when interacting with media. I also goes out of its way to show the power and value the audience brings to creations. It is a hopeful story that I think many of us can relate to.

I saw this line in another post, but I want to repeat it here; If you are a creator, an artist, a writer, a crafter, cosplayer, anything, this show is for you. It will show you how special and how important you are, how your contributions are valued and how you should continue to create despite hardships. It is a story that needed to be told, it is an important story. 

Thank you for reading my babble. Talk ReCre to me!