Anime – Page 73 – Wis[s]e Words

Infinite Suckos

Published on May 25, 2016Leave a comment

Watching this review of Infinite Stratos is infinitely more fun than actually watching the series, yet I still found myself watching twothirds of it last night. Mostly because it was the perfect sort of series to put on in the background while doing something else. For the most part this is a bog standard “only boy in magic school” harem series, with an uberdense protagonist blind to the very obvious advantages of the girls around them, notable mainly because it was one of the first and most popular of such series and paved the way for a veritable flood of such series. To be honest, what annoys me about this series is not the harem antics or fan service, but the world building, which is just ramshackle at best.

And I’m not talking about the show’s core premisse, of having mini mecha suits — Infinite Stratos — that only girls can pilot except for one man, our hero or that for some reason there’s only one school in which all IS wearers are trained. It’s a stupid premisse but there have been good series with dumber core ideas. No, what gets me is the sloppiness. in the first episode Ichiga, our protagonist, is introduced to his class and meets his childhood friend again, who he hasn’t seen in six years. A bit later we learn that the reason she hasn’t seen him in so long was because her sister was the inventor of IS and that on that day he saw her last, her sister revealed the IS suits to the world and she and her family were taken into protective custody and moved around Japan ever since. Then in episode ten the sister shows up and reminices with Ichiga’s sister about that time ten years ago, a month after she’d revealed IS to the world, when Japan was treathened by a spam missile attack and a single woman in an IS suit destroyed them all. Consistency? What’s that?

Worse, when Ichiga first arrives at magic school, in episode one, he has to be told everything about Infinite Stratos that everybody else already knows, yet he was friends with the inventor’s kid sister, his own sister is a famous IS champion, his childhood friend is in the same class as him, his other childhood friend is the cadet representative of China, his sister used to advice the German special forces on IS use, then became a teacher at the IS school and finally, just being the brother of the reigning IS champion got him kidnapped a few years ago. So why is he so ignorant? Not to mention, why didn’t he know his sister was a teacher there or that his second childhood friend was going to become the champion of China? Is it just Ichiga himself, too dull and uninterested to know much about the IS world and how his friends and family fit there, or is the series just making it up as it goes along?

I guess it’s the latter, as it’s ultimately more interested in tired harem antics than providing a consistent world. This is visible just in the way the Infinite Stratos itself keeps shifting in importance during the series. Is it the world’s most powerful weapon, keeping a balance of power between nations, or just used in a glorified form of jousting? The latter would explain why the series refused to provide any sort of real menace for Ichiga and his harem to overcome, even the final threat of the last three episodes turning out to have been engineered by the childhood friend’s sister to spice up the debut of said childhood friend’s personal IS suit.

And that’s what annoys me, this sloppiness, this almost disdain for anything that isn’t harem related. Adding insult to injury, isn’t not even a good harem show either.

Assimilating Our Culture, That’s What They’re Doing!

Published on May 24, 20161 Comment

This particular post was inspired by the following passage from a post on Ideas without End:

Indeed, Bogue and Keith’s quarrel with Freyja is that she is a cultural traitor, someone who abandoned the protected national identity of Windermere to side with the “enemy,” a multicultural force that uses soft power (rather than the most absolute strong power of removing free will) to form an alliance. One can imply the perverse logic behind this; assimilation is the opposite of tolerance, and almost works as a kind of revenge. Windermere would not lose its culture to a human empire that simply absorbed alien races and exported stuff to them, so it turned its culture (right down to its national foodstuffs) into a way of war. It is a Zentradi culture that bothered to have civilians, in a way; a single-minded dedication to the preservation of a culture and the subjugation of enemies, albeit without the “race bred only to fight” aspect.

Because it got me thinking more about Windermere and where they come from in their quest to conquer their part of the galaxy and “free” it from NUNS domination. First, we need some deep background.

Macross Delta: protoculture seeded the Galaxy

We knew from all the way back in the original Macross series that half a million years ago there was a powerful alien civilisation called the Protoculture, who more or less ruled the whole Galaxy, who ended up creating a warrior race, the Zentradi, to wage their wars for them which ultimately got them killed off by the Zentradi. We also got hints that humanity was also either descended from or uplifted by the Protoculture. Now in Macross Delta we’ve learned that they actually seeded a hell of a lot more humanoid races throughout, as explained in the intro to episode seven. Humans, Zentradi, Windermerians, those Voldor cat people from the last two episodes as well as the original inhabitants of Ragna are all Protoculture creations, which explains why everybody more or less looks the same and they can all fuck and interbreed with no difficulties even if their partner was originally a twenty metre high giant before they got miniaturised. It’s an old, old science fiction trope, still used occasionally despite that everybody should know better by now.

Macross Delta: Windermere was the last race uplifted therefore the true heirs of Protoculture

It’s this background that provides part of the Windermerean justification for waging war agains the New United Government. The races in the Brisingr Cluster were the last upraised, so that makes them the natural heirs to the Protoculture and Windermere believes itself to be the natural leader to lead the other races in the Cluster to their natural place at the top of the Galaxy. From everything we’ve seen about Windermere so far we know they’re a proud, aristocratic warrior culture and you can sort of guess about why they rebelled agains the NUG in the first place. They went from isolation to being forcibly introduced to the rest of the Galaxy and Galactic culture in an eyeblink and they couldn’t take it.

Macross Delta: proud warriors but not above proposing warcrimes

Proud warrior races like this tend to be rather doctrinaire in their warfare, prefering honest fighting to the sort of stuff Windermere pulls off: biological warfare and mind control doesn’t really fit with that, even if the mind control is done through their ancient art of wind singing. They’re not just using these methods because they offer the only possible way to defeat the NUG, there also seems to be a disdain for anybody not like them from at least some of the Aerial Knights, which leads to things like the screencap above. Which all sounds more and more familiar the longer I think about it.

A proud warrior people, pulled out of isolation by a technologically far superior civilisation, trust into a modernity it mistrusts, using underhanded ways to gain the first advantage in a war against said civilisation and cloaking its own empire building in terms of liberation their fellow cultures from foreign oppression and leading them into a new dawn? Hmm, what does that remind me off?

Macross Delta 8: biological warfare is freedom

Published on May 23, 2016Leave a comment

Macross Delta: the villains offer their justifications

So in this episode Walkure and the Windermere Aerial Knights meet for the first time and it’s not a happy meeting, especially for the main trio. Hayate and Mirage get beaten up, Freyja almost is executed on the spot and worse they have to listen to Bogue –the red haired short tempered one– monologuing. Whether or not Windermere is justified in its actions, it’s clear that he at least has swallowed the justificatiosn hook, line and sinker. One does wonder about liberation needing biological warfare and permanent mind control though.

Macross Delta: Freyja does not understand

Certainly Freyja isn’t convinced. Anybody who can abuse her precious apples to wage war is by definition wrong. She got a lot of abuse these past three episodes from the Windermerians for her supposed treason but in the end none of it stuck. And why should it? She hasn’t done anything wrong, she just wanted to sing and help rid the galaxy from a dreadful disease. A disease that turned out to be engineered by her own people in order to subjugate other planets. To be honest, so far Windermere hasn’t really managed to give any convincing explanation as to why they shouldn’t be seen as pure villains, the individual nobility of some of the Knights notwithstanding — I hope they get at least a little bit more real justification later on.

Macross Delta: Mirage to the rescue

This was once again a Freyja/Hayate centered episode, with Mirage reduced to a bystander for most of it, though she did get her one moment to shine early on. She’d managed to hang on to a flash bang grenade as they’d been disarmed by the red haired idiot and as Hayate deliberately taunts him to get him to overreact, she quickly throws it but as they attempt to escape they’re as quickly beaten down by the other Aerial Knights. It’s a remarkable effective scene for showing how far Hayate and Mirage have come to understand and trust each other. Rather unfortunate that like so much else Mirage tries, it doesn’t work.

Macross Delta: of course Hayate and Freyja synchronise

Best couple is not surprised to see Hayate synchronise with Freyja during the end of the episode fight against the Aerial Knights as she sings to free a brain washed pilot from his enslavement and he duels with Bogue — poor old Mirage again reduced to bystander. Hayate and Freyja fit together well because their philsophy is so similar: she sings to save people and he is careful to shoot enemy Valkyries in the legs rather than kill them. Macross in general has always been wary of seeking military solutions in conflict and this fits in well with that philosophy of looking for alternate ways to resolve conflicts.

Macross Delta: have a care for your poor fansubbers

Finally, spare a thought for the hardworking people who bring you fansubs and how difficult it is to translate songs being sung on a battlefield — even if much of the first new song was in English. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to enjoy Macross Delta at all as the licensing rights are still fscked up thanks to the whole Robotech fiasco. However, the Japanese Bluerays come with English subs so if you want the option to directly support the series, it’ll be there.

Spring 2016: the healing power of moe

Published on May 22, 2016Leave a comment

The cute girls doing cute things (and occassional cute boys doing cute things) show is one of the staples of anime and this season is particularly rife with them. These slice of moe shows may all look alike, starring a bunch of high school girls going through their everyday lives having mild adventures, sometimes centered about school club activities, but as Digibro shows in the video above, there are clear differences in quality and aim between them.

When I started getting back into anime properly last year this sort of show wasn’t on my radar, but as I got in the habit of watching anime seasonally, I found myself watching them more and more. Not just cute girls doing cute things, but slice of life shows in general. This season about a third of the shows I follow are slice of life, not counting a show like Haifuri which is also cute things doing cute things, but with a bit of action thrown in. If I put them in order of how much I like them and how well they were made, this is the order I’d come up with.

Flying Witch: a cat riding the bus

Flying Witch
This comes out late enough on Saturday night that I end up watching it on Sunday mornings and it’s perfectly fitted for that: calming and soothing, about the small trials and triumphs of an apprentice witch living with her non-witchy cousins in the countryside. The Japanese call this sort of show an Iyashikei or healing show, meant to calm you the fuck down and it certainly does for me. What I especially like about it is the natural way in which the various characters interact with each other, how much Chinatsu actually looks and acts like a young girl rather than an anime stereotype of a little girl.

Tanaku and Ohta late for school

Tanaka-kun wa Itsumo Kedaruge
Tanaka-kun is a lazy sod; Ohta-kun is his enabling friend ~~together they fight crime~~. The consistently most funny show this season, with great sense of timing, a lot of excellent supporting characters and nice twists on anime cliches. (Case above).

Nijiro Days is romantic

Nijiro Days
This actually started last season and at first I thought it would just be another obnoxious anime romcom, but turned out to be much better than its first episode would suggest. Centered around four high school boys and their romantic interests, each episode is only fifteen minutes long, which might be the ideal length for a show like this. It keeps things tight and moving fast, while still having room to flesh out the characters. One of those shows where each episode builds on the previous ones and is stronger for it. Each of the characters is also well rounded enough that you can see why they’d fall for each other, rather than have the series tell you that they did.

Chihiro and Madoka

Shounen Maid
When his mother dies, a young boy is taken in by his uncle and works for him as a housekeeper because his mother taught him that he shouldn’t be dependent on charity. That description was enough to kept me from trying the series, but after hearing somebody rave about it I gave it a second chance. I expected age inappropriate sexual tension between the primary school protagonist and his uncle, what I got was a show about family and grief. There’s an undertone of melancholy as Chihiro and his uncle learn to live with each other as a family, while each learns new things about their mother/sister; an undertone of regret at how things could’ve been.

Sansha Sanyou: former rich girl, evil class rep, food hog

Sansha Sanyou
A show about “the black-hearted class representative, the poor girl on a daily bread-crust diet and the wlaking black hole” as the ending theme has it, this is the quintessential cute girls doing cute things show. Three main characters who are somewhat more fleshed out than needed, a host of slightly less rounded supporting characters going through daily life and familiar anime situations. It has a good sense of humour and some character growth which sets it apart from similar shows.
Bakuon!!
Cute girls riding big motor bikes. What sets it apart is that it gets rather deep into bike culture and doesn’t use it as just an excuse to have a group of cute girls hang around together. I know little about bikes, but the good natured trash talking between Onsa Amano, the Kawasaki fangirl and Rin Suzunoki, the Suzuki fanatic is very recognisable.
Anne Happy
Five girls each with their own particular unhappiness/misfortune hanging over them, are put in a special class to learn to overcome them and become happy. They mostly stick rigidly to their roles and there really isn’t any character development, but it’s funny and not a bad way to spend twenty minutes.
12-sai – Chicchana Mune no Tokimeki
Twelve year olds in the last year of primary school learn to struggle with romance and friendship. This would be higher if not for the unconscious sexism on display in it. At one time the main protagonist is the love interest of two boys and then gets blamed for it as two timing by the rest of the class. This may be realistic, but missing is some pushback against this idea; instead the show seems to tacitly agree with this. In general, also the idea that you can’t be friends with boys if you’re in a relationship.
Sakamoto desu ga
Sakamoto is the perfect high school boy: cool, cooler, coolest, able to turn every situation to his advantage. All the girls want him, all the boys …find him somewhat of a prick until they’re won over by his perfection. This is humour so deadpan, so dry the Atacama Desert feels oppressively humid in comparison. When it works, it’s great, but it misses more often than not.
Kuma Miko
A slice of life comedy about a middle school priestess and her bear god living out in the boonies. She wants to go to high school in the big city, he continuously challenges her on that because she’s patently unsuitable for it. Hilarity ensues. Somewhat.
Pan de Peace!
As Digibro shows in the video, this is bargain basement moe stuff, with no depth to it and arguably made just to fill three minutes of dead air. But because it’s this short, I still end up watching it.

Re Zero: torturing the otaku hero

Published on May 20, 2016Leave a comment

Re-Zero: Subaru strikes a pose

As you can tell by the way he walks, Natsuki Subaru is an otaku shut-in transported to a fantasy world, no time to talk. He takes it all in stride, sure he knows how the story will go as somebody will be there to give him an origin and magical powers. That doesn’t quite happen, but he does get involved with a silver haired sorceress who saves him from some robbers and who in return starts helping looking for her stolen badge. Genre savy and cocky, Subaru is a smart aleck and snarker, a familiar sort of hero, even his track suit is shared with KonoSuba’s protagonist. An otaku stand in, we’ve seen him before in other anime series where video game knowledge means the chance to become a badass in another world — though it takes Subaru far longer than it should to realise that every time he’s killed, he resets back to his starting point, “his last save game”.

Re-Zero: death hurts. A lot

Pure wish fulfilment of course, that idea of being able to reset and replay your life to make all the right choices the second time around and this time save everybody, getting to be the hero in your own private fantasy game. What makes Re:Zero interesting is that the series is aware that this ability isn’t cost free. For a start, there’s the act of dying itself, with Subaru coming to a gruesome end multiple times even in the first (double length) episode: even if he is good as new the moment he wakes up, the trauma and remembered pain is still there.

Re-Zero: death means being left behind

But that’s only part of it. The far worse part of it is what it does to his relationship with the people around him, after a few times being killed and resurrected. Because he becomes understandably focused on his goal of not dying, over time and a few cycles he starts behaving increasingly like a save scummer playing Dragon Age focusing on the most efficient path through the cycle, losing the emotional connection with what he’s doing. At the same time, all the history he builds up with his friends is lost after every reset, with only Subaru remembering it, having to rebuild it from scratch each time. Finally, from their view his actions must seem more and more irrational with each cycle, making him look more suspicious in a climate in which they’re already somewhat paranoid, making it more difficult for him to reconnect with them. No wonder he has a breakdown by episode seven.

There was a lot of criticism of Re:Zero precisely because Subaru was such a perfect cliché of the otaku wish fulfilment hero at first. Seven episodes in, it’s clear why this was necessary for the story Re:Zero wanted to tell. What it does is pulling the rug from under that fantasy of the otaku hero, by showing the cost hiding behind it. It’s an interesting subversion of the trapped in a fantasy game story, coming at it from yet another angle than KonoSuba or Grimgar did last season. This emotional journey is why I kept watching the series, even as some of the surface elements repelled me at first.