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She-Ra is a magical girl

Published on November 16, 2018Leave a comment

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is a maho shoujo show. Discuss.

And no, it’s of course not just because of its transformation scene, though it is very much a magical girl transformation, but everything around it. It’s rooted in friendship and optimism and rock solid belief in the idea that nobody is wholly evil in the same way that Precure is. It centers female characters in the same way maho shoujo series do; there’s fighting and defeating the bad guys but there’s also balls and being jealous because your friend is hanging out with somebody else and other such traditionally feminine coded concerns. No wonder all the sad cat piss men and fanboy fascists hate it.

It’s not like they’re actual fans of the original series. The sort of crybaby fake fan who throws temper tantrums about “SJWs ruining animation” wouldn’t have been caught dead watching something so covered in girl cooties as the eighties She-Ra. Commercials don’t lie: this was always aimed at girls and Noelle Stevenson and her team just revamped it for 21st century girls. In other words: queering it the hell up, which a certain kind of narrowminded fanboy always has troubles with. To be honest, I can’t actually remember all that much about the original She-ra or He-man, but I certainly got the impression that especially the latter was never 100% straight anyway. It’s all so tedious and boring to whine about it now it’s a bit more explicit. Have to hand it to the crybabies though, without their tantrum I might have missed this and that would’ve been a shame.

Because the truth is that the new She-ra is really great, taking something that was meant to sell toys and lavishing the same care and attention on it that e.g. Toei does on Precure. The story sparkles and has genuine wit, the characters are great and it’s such a pleasure to see body types other than teenage supermodel: all the characters look like people you could see walking around town. Even Scorpio. What’s more, while the Horde is evil and the princesses are the force of good, all of the individual Horde members who have gotten screen time are more than just evil for the sake of evil. More than a few actually seem rather …nice? It helps of course that most of their evil is rather abstract after the first two episodes: it would be bad if they won but the status quo isn’t all that bad. It’s a kids show after all.

Sometimes anime can do subtle

Published on October 22, 2018Leave a comment

Anima Yell is this season’s obligatory low calorie slice of moe series, but then it did this:

It’s not often you have a proper coming out scene in an anime series at all, let alone one not directly aimed at an LGBT audience. And though you could quibble over the fact that the high school girl coming out here is in love with a woman who’s a second year college student, this is still a step forward for LGBT representation in anime. Not treated as a joke, not done as subtext, no tittelation, just a girl gently correcting her classmates’ assumption that she’s in love with a boy. And slightly worried doing so. A nice moment of seriousness in a series that so far has been almost exclusively gag orientated, especially managing to do this without over dramatising it.

Zombieland Saga is good, confirmed

Published on October 17, 2018Leave a comment

Epic Zombie rap battles of history:

Anime does have a tendency to mock hip-hop, that fake sort of yo yo bad rhyming your elderly relatives might also do when talking about *condescending sneer* rap music, but this was rather good.

Not Heinlein, not Asimov, certainly not Vox Day

Published on August 22, 2018Leave a comment

N. K. Jemisin is the first author to win three back to back to back Hugo Awards for best novel:

This is the year in which I get to smile at all of those naysayers — every single mediocre insecure wanna-be who fixes their mouth to suggest that I do not belong on this stage, that people like me cannot possibly have earned such an honor, and that when they win it’s meritocracy but when we win it’s identity politics. I get to smile at those people and lift a massive shining rocket-shaped finger in their direction.

Legend of Galactic Heroes: tell, don’t show

Published on May 29, 20181 Comment

Even if its opening every time reminds me of certain theme song to a magical mannequin movie, I have to be grateful to Legend Of The Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These, if only because it got me off my butt and watching the original series, which I’m currently twothirds through.

Legend Of The Galactic Heroes has a reputation for being difficult, unforgiven even: its first episode drops you almoat straight into a huge space battle while only understanding the barest outline of who is fighting who. And instead of exciting ship to ship combat, it’s mostly serious senior officers staring at electronic maps with the thousands of ships involved reduced to small blips. Seemingly dozens of characters — all men, all in uniform– are introduced and you need to keep your wits about you to follow what’s happening. It sets the pattern for the rest of the series.

Let’s stop a moment to admire just how big an accomplishment Legend Of The Galactic Heroes is. A story that took ten novels to tell was adapted in 110 episodes, one continuous story taking almost a decade, from late 1988 to 1997 to be completed, released not as a television series, but as original video animations for the home video market, on VHS. When it started the Japanese bubble economy was in full swing, when it was finished, it had survived the crash that followed it. And that for a series that relied on none of the traditional selling points of other anime OVA series. No sex, no fanservice, no glamourised violence, just blips on radar screens being extinguished with the occassional reminder of the brutal deaths that accompany it.

Legend Of The Galactic Heroes is a masterpiece of tell, not show. Much of the action consists of various men holding meetings in which they explain the geopolitical and military situation to each other, followed by more meetings determining strategy and tactics for the latest battle. When there are no meetings, the narrator returns, to explain what’s happening. Several times the entire story is interrupted in favour of our heroes watching video documentaries about the rise of the empire or the fall of Earth. There’s a lot of information to ingest, at times it can get a bit dry. Nevertheless, it’s fascinating. There’s a density there, a complexity that you can only get by not being afraid to tell, rather than show.

In many ways, it’s the anti-Weber. David Weber’s Honor Harrington series of space opera has a similar grandiose sweep of history as LOGH, but its politics are barely sketched out while its battles have the flight path of every missile described in loving detail. Legend Of The Galactic Heroes on the other hand goes in depth on the geopolitics, but couldn’t be bothered much with battle scenes. It’s enough to know that the 20,000 of the Galactic Empire are surprisingly defeated by the 13,000 of the Alliance of Free Planets, thanks to an brilliant tactic insight from Yang Wenli.

Watching Legend Of The Galactic Heroes therefore demands concentration. This isn’t a series you can just watch in the background while checking Twitter. Especially if you have to read the subtitles to follow the conversations. I notice that while I can easily marathon a regular anime series 10-20 episodes a day if I got the time, my concentration lapses after only a few episodes. LOGH is hard work, but it’s worth it.

Especially the shipping.