Wis[s]e Words

Mellowing out with Flying Witch

Published on May 30, 2016Leave a comment

Flying Witch: petting the fox

Flying Witch airs late on Saturday night from where I live, so I’ve gotten in the habit of watching in on Sunday morning, which is rather fitting considering the show’s relaxed mood and tempo. Episode eight has Makoto and her cousins Kei and Chinatsu visit a cafe run by witches, where they meet and talk to some of its regular customers and finally learn what the fox says. And that’s the plot. Nothing happens, but it happens so charmingly. It’s the perfect anime series to watch curled up on the couch with a cup of coffee and a cat.

Flying Witch: always there are two

One of the pleasures of watching a good adaptation of a manga you’ve read. is seeing favourite scenes animated. The best joke of the episode was something that was both incredibly cringe worthy and incredibly funny in the manga, but was taking up to eleven here. Timing is the keyword here, as I’ve said before. The anime extends and lengthens the build-up to the joke in a way that the manga couldn’t, then does the same for Makoto’s reaction as she finally processes what she sees. Even if you see the joke coming from the setup earlier in the episode, it still works because it’s so well done. The same goes for the post-ending credits scene, which in the manga was only a couple pages long and here got extended for the better.

Flying Witch: hang around with witches and you stop being normal

Now the witches world is supposed to be hidden from that of normal people, but in practise they seem to be very relaxed about letting people like Kei and Chinatsu hang around all those semi-hidden places like the cafe. Hang around long enough and you become part of the scene, so it seems, even if you’re not quite supernatural yourself. Witches are mellow by nature it seems. It’s also weirdly realistic: with so many people in on the secret it’s only natural that some of their friends and relatives would be in on it as well. Having Chinatsu there, a few years younger than Kei and Makoto and naturally curious, helps a lot. She breaks the ice naturally and always is the first to talk to new supernatural beings; she’s also one of the best realised little girl/younger sister characters in anime.

How far we’ve come in seventyfive years

Published on May 27, 20161 Comment

75 years of Captain America: from anti-fash to Hydra agent

So in the latest “shocking twist” Captain America is revealed to be and always have been a Hydra agent and sympathiser. And it’s not a hoax, not a dream, not an imaginary story:

SPENCER: Issue 2 will lay a lot of our cards on the table in terms of what the new status quo is, but the one thing we can say unequivocally is: This is not a clone, not an imposter, not mind control, not someone else acting through Steve. This really is Steve Rogers, Captain America himself.

And of course, this being comics, there’s a zillion ways all of this could be true yet the status quo restored inside of a year or whenever the twist loses its novelty. Everybody knows this is a ratings stunt with no real meaning behind it, just like when Sam Wilson got to be Cap for a while. But, you know, having Cap die for a while or having a different person behind the mask for a while or whatever other stunt you could think of is completely different from turning him into a goddamn nazi. A hero created by two Jewish kids from New York, who punched out Hitler in his very first appearance, a full year before America would join the war against the nazis. Even in an industry rife with shitty stunts, this is a particularly shitty stunt. It’s also exactly the sort of stunt you’d expect from a penny ante industry like comics, but you’d think Disney would be a bit more sensitive about such a stunt reflecting badly on the movies if too much mainstream media pay attention to it…

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.