Anime – Page 39 – Wis[s]e Words

Execution matters more — First Impressions

Published on October 13, 2018Leave a comment

This is about the only moment in either Conception or Ore ga Suki nano wa Imouto dakedo Imouto ja Nai that came even close to impressing or even interesting me:

Conception: Mahiru wants you to stop

Concern for consent? In my ecchi anime? Well, it’s only an isolated moment but it’s there. And now you’ve seen it, so there’s no need to waste any of your time watching either Conception or Ore ga Suki nano wa Imouto dakedo Imouto ja Nai. Because these are ecchi anime that fail at everything, too dull to be offensive even though the latter one is yet another sister fucker series. Look, you can say what you want about Eromanga-sensei, last year’s most noticable sister fucker anime, but at least it had a cute ending theme and animation by people who actually seemed to take enough pride in their work to make it fun rather than a slog.

And a slog it was. I didn’t even manage to get to the true fan service in the sister fucker anime it was so dull. A sadsack protagonist, the obligatory otaku useless older brother who wants to write light novels but gets rejected because they don’t have little sister characters and his perfect student president good at sports good at learning good at housework little sister who does win the light novel competition he was rejected for and who –surprise surprise– wrote a story about how this little sister was in love with her perfect older brother and I get tired just writing this. No sense of humour here whatsoever, nothing to leave this deadly dull mashup of cliches. I noped out not long after the scene in which she confessed her win to her brother and asked him to pretend to have written her novel, so apparantly missed the scene in which the adult editor asked him to grope her to learn more about women.

Conception: oversexed mascot

Conception isn’t quite as dull and I actually managed to finish the episode, but I can’t say I paid that much attention to the later scenes either, as this too was shoddily made and cheap, with limited animation and no attempt made to do anything interesting with it. The core idea — dude and his not quite girlfriend/relative get summoned to another world just after she confesses she’s pregnant where he has to fight monsters by making babies with her and a dozen other girls — is roughly as offensive as the sister fucker anime, but worse is how it’s executed. The pregnancy? It’s not his baby, nor actually hers and she never did have sex, it was just a demon who had possessed her or something. So instead of providing any challenge, any plot revelance, it’s just something that happens and can immediately be forgotten and I was a fool to get my hopes up that an ecchi anime would be brave enough to have real teenagers fucking.

Conception: censorship tanukis

Instead they have to be coerced into it to save another world, which is just dodgy even without the cute oversexed mascot thrown in for no purpose other than to be used as censor material when the nookie finally happens. Furthermore, it helpfully explains that the pregnancy will not actually be a real pregnancy: they just need to have sex and the Star child they need to (pro)create will just pop up. Now our hero, slightly less of a sad sack than the sister fucker, just has to get it on with eleven or twelve other girls and they can go home. Not helping the overal dogdy consent issues at play here is that he is shackled and tied to a bed for his physical examination, his *ahem* manly bulge filling about a third of the screen, while some doctor fetish type looks him over. Even that is more dull than it sounds.

Conception is based on a game of the same name, but the sex being necesssary to make star babies is anime original. That they manage to make this dull, lifeless and not at all sexy is an achievement in its own right.

Zombieland Saga — First Impressions

Published on October 10, 2018Leave a comment

The main concern Zombieland Saga‘s first episode raises:

Zombieland Saga: is this making fun of death metal?

Rest assured, it doesn’t. Rather, it takes the mickey out of idols shows, in a more teasing than bullying matter. We get introduced to our heroine Minamoto Sakura as this happy go lucky school girl who is going to apply to an idol competition — then gets run over by the ever dependable truck-kun. Cue opening credits as she’s tossed up in the air. It’s a sequence that’s just on the right side of funny and offensive, neither gross for the saking of being gross nor going for fan service. A good sign.

Zombieland Saga: this girl has been biting me thirteen times already this morning

When Sakura wakes up, it’s dark and stormy and she’s in a classic horror house surrounded by …ZOMBIES! It’s only once she escapes and runs into a police officer and he shoots her that she realises she herself is a zombie too. She’s rescued by her ‘creator’ who introduces her to the other girls and tells her that they’re going to save Saga through the power of local idols. So we got half a dozen or so still brain dead zombie girls as idols, a megalomanical mad scientist as their manager and poor old Sakura as the only sane person in the middle. And their first gig is at a death metal club…

Zombieland Saga: head banging is much easier if your neck is broken

And it actually goes better than expected, as the girls’ zombie screams are close enough to death metal grunts to pass muster and headbanging goes a lot smoother if your neck is already broken… All in all this was an enjoyable first episode, though with the developments at the end it will be interesting to see if the series can keep this up and doesn’t degenerate into a more typical idol show, with the zombie thing just adding a little bit of flavour. Either case, I’ll keep watching, if only for Sakura’s reactions to things.

Sexual harassment is always funny — First Impressions

Published on October 7, 2018Leave a comment

It’s refreshing to see an anime series being very very clear about how awful it’s going to be:

Uchi no Maid: no interested in girls who menstruate

Though by this time you already should have a good idea how much of a pedoshit show this is because Uchi no Maid ga Uzasugiru! is not shy in showing how much the titular maid, really, really loves little girls. So much so she goes into the job agency wanting a job where she gets to dress up a little white girl in clothes she makes herself. And whaddaya know, by some miraculous coincidence she gets a job doing exactly that, as the maid to a little blonde half Russian girl whose mother died and whose father is too feckless to care for her himself. The rest of the first episode is basically this girl trying to escape her sexual harassment while her father remains oblivious. There’s a hint of a decent show in here, where a lonely, embittered little girl is drawn out of her shell by her cheerful, kooky housekeeper, but since every other shot is the maid lusting after her, it isn’t this show. The only unalloyed good thing about this is the workout ending theme which is cute and adorable.

Uchi no Maid: the right idea

In everything else, our blonde protagonist has the right idea. Blow it all up. As should be done with Goblin Slayer, the other show this season with a heaping big chunk of rape in it. But here it’s meant to show how Serious and Dark and Gritty the show is and how goblins are irreemable villains whom it’s okay to ethnically cleanse. No, really:

Goblin Slayer: ethnic cleansing is okay

You know how sometimes people hold up frex X-Men as a metaphor for the American civil rights struggle of the sixties? Well, it works the other way around too. Genocide is fine when it’s fantasy genocide, when you can just create a race that’s inherently evil. It’s something that has haunted fantasy and science fiction for a long time, all the way back to Wells’ Morlocks if not earlier, because there’s always a desire for guilt free genocide. The whole idea of an inherently evil race is of course pure fascism, but it remains surprisingly popular even with people who should know better. Using rape as your way to sell the evilness, with all the shitty tropes that come with it, is the icing on this shit cake.

Goblin Slayer: still innocent

Let’s look a bit closer at what this first episode did. We start off with the girl above, wounded and stranded in a dungeon before we go into a flashback where she gets her adventurer card and she meets up with the three other members of her party as they decide to go for a dungeon raid to rescue some girls kidnapped by goblins. You know they’re going to get slaughtered within five minutes, which is exactly what happens. The sole bloke in the party gets killed off screen, the magician with the glasses loses them, then gets stabbed in the stomach with a poisoned blade. The healer girl tries to fix her but fails, as their fighter is overpowered, stripped and raped (offscreen fortunately). Healer girl escapes with the mage, they get cornered and then the goblin slayer rescues her before slaughtering every goblin in the cave, including the children as mentioned above.

Getting a bunch of mooks slaughtered to prove how dangerous and evil the villains are is a bog standard plot device. It’s the way it’s done here that’s the problem, especially the way the camera lingers on that one woman being stripped before being raped. What’s more, it’s deliberately made worse to drive home the point that goblins are inherently evil, to justify the slaughter of them. It’s not unlike how in real life horrible crimes are used to paint entire groups of people as inherently evil (frex the attempt to portray trans people as predators just because they want to pee in the right bathroom). That’s what makes this such a repellent series, even setting aside the rape (if you can).

Pretty boys gone bad — First Impressions

Published on October 6, 2018Leave a comment

So I’m not exactly the target audience for pretty boy shows but the past few seasons there have been a couple I’ve enjoyed, so I try to take a punt on any of the new ones that come out this season, but it has been hard. The crop this time is godawful.

Bakumatsu: for nippleless chest lovers

According to the description at MAL Bakumatsu is supposed to be the following:

Kyoto, Japan. The heroine meets a man who gives her a pocket watch somehow leading to a Torii in a shrine, and suddenly it warps her into the Bakumatsu period. In the world of where there is such a difference in importance of value, she tries to find a way to go back. When she meets a man who has crossed time and says, “I will live for you,” a love story between the two blossoms.

Nothing of that is true for at least the first episode, which follows nippleless-chan above and his friend as they steal a treasure from their enemies and somehow end up in an alternate Japan. As the title indicates, it’s all set in the Bakumatsu period and no time lost school girls have been sighted so far. It’s actually an interesting concept, to have two actual historical figures from the period slide into a steampunk version of Japan, if the execution wasn’t so boring. The animation is dull, the character design rather ugly and it all looks and feels flat and cheap.

Gakuen Basara: where teachers go topless

Staying with the theme of historical figures transplanted to a different setting, Gakuen Basara takes the Warring States/Sengoku period and puts it in a modern high school, complete with headmaster Oda Nobunaga and with the struggle for mastery of Japan replaced with the struggle to win the student council elections. Again, an interesting idea handled crappily, with the first episode introducing a zillion characters. The animation and character design are just as lifeless and the humour is of the “let’s shout more that surely is funny” type. The only advantage it has above Bakumatsu is that there are actual female characters. I always like yankee characters and this teacher qualifies, but she isn’t good enough to keep watching various dullards with famous names slug it out to become student council president.

Dakaichi: yaoi face

Finally, I noped out of Dakaretai Otoko 1 I Ni Odosarete Imasu about a minute in, when I saw the yaoi face of our protagonist and having listened to the exposition couple prattle on how he has been the most huggable man in Japan for five years running and I was noo… He’s not even particularly huggable. Reading Vrai Kaiser’s review of the first episode it seems I made the right decision as there was apparantly a spot of light sexual assault thrown in to liven things up. Nope, not for me.

High Guardian Spice looks good actually

Published on August 25, 2018Leave a comment

People just don’t understand why Crunchyroll is going to produce original animation series, which is why you get shit like this from people who should know better.

Basically, Crunchyroll, or rather its parent company Ellation, is going to produce new animation series because original content pays more than just streaming anime does and they’ve felt the hot breath of Netflix and Amazon in their neck.

Let’s recap. Crunchyroll started off by doing an Uber, just streaming anime they didn’t actually have the license for, not unlike the evil pirate Kissanime does currently, then went legal when the Japanese anime companies went after them, essentially forcing them to sell streaming licences. This was at a time when this just didn’t happen: thanks to them we now have proper streaming anime in the west. For the most part, they haven’t had much competition either, save from Funimation, which specialises in dubbed rather than subbed anime anyway.

But this changed a year or two ago, when Netflix started to get a bit more serious about anime. They’ve always had a bit of anime, but they started to get more licenses, for example tying up the rights to all new Noitamina series. Netflix of course isn’t as interested in being an anime streaming service like Crunchyroll, but rather wants more, preferably cheap content to provide for its existing audience to keep them happy and if that nets a few otakus, then that’s a bonus. You can tell they don’t really care because they don’t simulcast, but rather treat their anime series like any other “original” content, dumping it in one or two batches once they’re completed.

For Crunchyroll this meant that getting licenses would probably be getting more expensive, especially for the more popular or prestige series. And then the other shoe dropped when Amazon started their Anime Strike service. Amazon was a lot more aggressive than Netflix, teaming up with Sentai –who were already involved with the Anime Network– to get a lot of series available quickly. Cue lots of chin stroking on how this was an existential threat to Crunchyroll, if Amazon is starting a similar service: with the money it has it can always outbid Crunchyroll to get a monopoly in yet another market.

Luckily they fucked up. Anime strike is gone, Sentai has moved on and created Hi-Dive, which is a proper Crunchy competitor and is splitting the market, but which will never be able to crush it like Amazon might’ve. Nevertheless, this whole fiasco served as a warning to Crunchyroll that they couldn’t depend on being the only or even the biggest player in the market anymore. So they pulled a Netflix.

The problem with making money off of other people’s content after all is that you’re just a replacable middleman, that you will lose your license eventually, that there’s always the danger that either those content creators might do it themselves or a new competitor shows up. Netflix has known this for a long time, which is why it’s has been investing a lot in creating original content, either by creating it directly or just throwing money at people to buy their way into it. Crunchyroll was already doing the same, financing new anime by being on the production committee.

Because as you know, Bob, most anime series are produced through socalled production committees, groups of companies that finance a series, with the actual anime studio often being the least important member or even just a sub contractor. The real money in Japan isn’t in anime: it’s in selling the manga, light novels, statues and other merchandise the anime is an advert for. This is why there are so many shitty 13 episode trapped in fantasyland series. If Crunchyroll can get on the production committee, it means it has a stake in a series it cannot have as just a streaming company.

Creating an original series entirely in house is the next logical step, just like Netflix and even Amazon have been doing for years. If High Guardian Spice is a success, the blueray, dvd, manga and merch sales will all be kept by Crunchy, or rather Ellation. It offers a security you can’t get with licensed material. It’s not in competition with the anime series Crunchy licenses, but rather an addition to it. Granted, there is the danger that, like Netflix, CR gets less …completist… about getting anime licenses if their original series take off, but for the moment that’s a low risk.

All the other complains, that it takes money away from improving CR as a service, or that this is just social justice warrior pandering is nonsense, people judging a series by a one and a half minute long promo video coming out a year before the series is due to air. How much can you tell about it this far out after all. As for the SWJ stuff, yes, Crunchy is hyping that this series has a lot of women working on it because that’s what sells instead of creepy lolicon material for skeevy dudes. (Though it has plenty of that as well.) Nobody wants to be associated with the kind of loser ranting about the females destroying anime from their parents’ basements.