Twelve Days of Anime – Page 7

(10) PriPara Season 2 as metaphor for that Patreon mess

Published on December 16, 2017Leave a comment

I’ve been at home sick since Monday last week, just as the changes Patreon was going to make to its charges became public and while I was watching PriPara season 2 it struck me that the overall story arc that season looked remarkably similar.

PriPara: everybody is an idol, everbody is a friend

PriPara, for those who don’t know it, is an idol show aimed at younger girls that ran from 2014 until earlier this year, for three seasons and 140 total episodes. The first season was a relatively straightforward story of how Manaka Laala became an idol, formed her own group with two of her school friends and overcame the hostility of the head of school against PriPara and idols. What made it interesting is the concept of the series: “when the time is right, all girls receive a PriTicket, granting them access to the world of PriPara”, which is a sort of virtual reality but not quite, created by the Goddess Jewlie to make every girl (and the occasional boy) an idol. Later in the series you learn that PriPara has existed since at least the time of the Egyptian pharaohs.

In season 2 the old groups are broken up and new idols appear, as everybody competes for a change to take part in the PriPara Parade through a series of live concerts, with the winners of each getting the right to appear in the final to win that place in the Parade. A fairly typical idol tournament arc, which has new combinations of characters “fighting” together. Throughout Laala behaves according to her and PriPara’s motto: “everbody’s an idol, everybody’s a friend”.

PriPara: Hibiki

Enter Hibiki. Hibiki is diametrically opposed to Laala’s view of PriPara and is the closest the series comes to an out and out villain. A superstar in her own right, she’s introduced in episode 13 as a prince type character, a boy even; it’s only in episode 35 that she casually reveals the truth. Hibiki is a fascinating character and for more on her I refer to Andrea Ritsu’s excllent post on PriPara and Hibiki. What’s important here is that Hibiki doesn’t believe that everybody can be an idol, that everybody can be friends, but that idols should be only those with the talents for it and everybody else should be content to just watch.

Which brings me to Patreon. As you know, Bob, Patreon is a website that makes it easy to support your favourite artist or creator through monthly donations. By letting Patreon handle the billing, onerous credit card or Paypal charges are avoided, making it affordable to e.g. support a dozen creators with one or two dollar monthly contributions. This is of course also a boon for the creators themselves, as it’s of course easier to get a hundred fans to pitch in a dollar each each month than to get that one fan who’s willing to pay a hundred bucks. For smaller and part time creators Patreon has become indispensible, as it provides a steady income, lessening the pressure to find a “real” job or hunt for commercial assignments.

But then Patreon attempted to change this, by attempting to charge the patrons their transaction fees directly, rather than having them paid by the creator. So instead of a $1 donation, it would now cost you $1.38 to pledge a dollar. At first this change was justified as being necessary to cover costs, that it was too expensive for Patreon to continue doing business the old way (though this was its whole raison d’etre), but soon it turned out there was an ulterior motive. It wasn’t just costs, or Patreon wanting to gouge more money out of each transaction, but a fundamental change in its approach. Patreon had become big as a place where small and medium creators could make a living out of the donations from dozens to thousands of their fans each contributing a few bucks each month. What Patreon wanted instead was to be a place where Big Name Creators could get Superfans to drop hundreds or thousands of bucks each month. The changes therefore were a deliberate attempt to freeze out the smaller creators, though fortunately this failed and Patreon rolled them back.

PriPara: only celebs are idols

Which brings me back to Hibiki’s vision for PriPara. In episode 39 she gets control over it and changes it to CelebPara. In CelebPara only already famous idols get to perform, everybody else is supposed to be content just watching the best of the best perform. And with lesser idols no longer allowed to perform, they can no longer rank up either, but then Hibiki doesn’t believe it’s possible for small time idols to become top idols anyway. Hibiki’s vision is a sterile affair, with little of the liveliness of PriPara before it, but it is superficially attractive, being able to watch top concerts by top idols all the time and no longer having to struggle yourself as an amateur. There’s a certain glitz, a certain glamour to it. Watching it while seeing the Patreon mess unfold in real time I couldn’t help but see the similarities.

Hibiki’s vision of PriPara is one of idols and consumers, where the twain shall never meet, like how Patreon was determined to have a roster of top creators and a mass of fans donating to them, rather than the messy reality of fans and creators intermixing with little distinction. More generally, it reminded me of the ways in which fandom is often co-opted and commercialised, divided in stars and punters. Too often in anime we see fans only as consumers, the image of the otaku just mindlessly buying merchandise and character goods, with only the occassional nod to the creative side of fandom. PriPara as a series is all about fans as creators: everybody is an idol. In the end, Hibiki’s vision of CelebPara is rejected and she herself comes to see how wrong she was to want it. It’s a good vision to strive for in real life fandom, not get too excited by the possibilities of commercialising your hobbies.

This is the third post in this year’s twelve days of anime challenge. Tomorrow: how Little Witch Academia fanfiction kept me sane in 2017.

(11) Little Witch Academia is the most important anime of the year

Published on December 15, 2017Leave a comment

My five year old niece watches Little Witch Academia on Netflix, which makes it the most important anime series of the year.

LWA: surprise

No, seriously. Not because it’s my niece of course, but rather because having a series like Little Witch Academia available for and accessible to young children like her will build a new anime audience five-ten years down the road. Netflix made that possible, by sponsoring the series in the first place but especially by making it available alongside all their other (children’s) programming and by making it all available at the same time. Because that’s how kids watch television: through Netflix or Youtube or whatever, watching whatever is available of their favourite show all at once if they get the chance, be it Thomas the Tank Engine or LWA. So while it was frustrating not to be able to watch Little Witch Academia week by week like a “normal” anime series, I don’t mind too much knowing that having it on Netflix rather than a dedicated anime streamer like Crunchyroll meant it was available to all those little kids whose parents already had Netflix anyway.

LWA: Akko flies

But that wouldn’t matter if Little Witch Academia had been just another anime series like e.g. Seven Deadly Sins, also on Netflix. Instead Trigger took pains to make it as universal as possible, free from the usual anime cliches & tropes. There’s the setting, not just that of a witches school straight out of Harry Potter, but Akko herself: the impulsive, brash, hard working underdog from a mundane family who has to watch all the other witches being so far ahead of her just for having been born in a witches’ family, without it getting her down.

There’s a bit of the Disnesy princess in Akko too, of humble non-magical origin but with a believing heart that ultimately makes her stronger than those who never had to struggle with magic. Diana too of course is a total Disney princess: aristocratic, talented, a sense of duty that sometimes crosses over into arrogance, but with her heart in the right place. As Ticcy’s wonderful cartoon shows, she’s such a Disney princess that she can free Akko from a spell with a kiss. Both Akko and Diana than are very familiar archetypes for regular viewers of Disney and its imitators.

Akko’s story is equally universal, of struggling to become the wonderful witch you always knew you were, of having a rival who seems to effortlessly accomplish what you cannot do, but who in the end has had to go through the same hard struggle as you, as you find out you have more in common than what separates you. Combine that with how it’s told, in that most episodes are standalone stories that have her getting involved in some magical problem through her impulsiveness or recklessness, but where she usually can get herself out of as well, with a little (well, a Lotte) help from her friends. That makes it so much more easy to follow the series than if it had a more tight plot, as some fans complained it should have.

Of course, ultimately it’s the sheer quality, of animation, of character and character design, of storytelling that makes Little Witch Academia so accessible and so fun. Even if they don’t realise that Little Witch Academia is anime, kids like my niece who are growing up watching it and similar series like the latest Pokemon series will remember it when they grow up and hopefully seek out other anime series then. And that’s what makes LWA so important, as it could make anime fans out of thousands of children watching it.

This is the second post in this year’s twelve days of anime challenge. Tomorrow: PriPara season 2 as a metaphor for the commercialisation of fandom.

(12) – 2017 in numbers

Published on December 14, 2017Leave a comment

In 2017 I watched or am watching no less than 138 series, with a dozen or so more on the to be watched list — this isn’t so much a brag as a cry for help.

all the important anime girls of winter 2017

I started watching seasonal anime with the fall season of 2015, making 2017 the second full year of doing so. Of the 136 series I’ve watched that came out this year:

100 were 1 or 2 cour series, of which some 2 dozen are sequels
13 were shorts
4 were OVA series like the two Yuuka Yuuna series this season
21 were 1 or 2 episode specials, usually spinoffs from an earlier series

That’s an unhealthy amount of anime by anyone’s measure, but it helps if you’re a bit antisocial. It’s not that I watched everything with the greatest amount of attention either. The more run of the mill series were usually consumed while doing other things, like farting about on Twitter. Nor did it stop me from watching older anime either; the great thing about watching seasonal anime is that each series only takes a twenty minutes or so out of your week. Yes, you still spent the same amount of total time watching a weekly series than if you binge watched it, but the motivation for finding 20 minutes to watch one episode of some middling series is much easier to find.

what are youw atching this season?

Nevertheless the one great criticism everybody lobs at seasonal watching is still true: you’re on a treadmill and have no option but to continue to consume mass quantities if you want to keep up. Especially if you’re plugged into anitwitter. Which means it’s harder to find the space to truly digest a series, even an excellent series like Little Witch Academia or Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu, because everybody will have stopped talking about it in three months. For me personally, what I’ve also found, much more so than last year, is that the various series start to blend together. Anything that doesn’t have its own strong identity just becomes a mush of generic slice of moe, or sports, or shounen action anime. It becomes impossible to tell the difference between e.g. Schoolgirl Strikers and Battle Girl High School (There isn’t. Ed.)

And yet I am still addicted to that dopamine thrill of discovering what’s new, exciting or downright shitty each season, if only because there’s still so much good anime coming down the pipes every three months. It’s not healthy, no, but as long as I’m obsessed I’ll keep watching. I just hope I’ll get slightly more discerning in my tastes; I’ve wasted enough time on series that could only hope to strive for mediocrity.

This is the first post in this year’s twelve days of anime challenge. Tomorrow I hope to talk to you about 2017’s most important series, Little Witch Academia.)

Day 12: Watching men on stage telling stories

Published on December 25, 2016Leave a comment

The best anime of the year for me was a series in which I watched men in Shouwa Era Japan sitting on stage in a theatre telling stories in which they portray every character using nothing but a small fan or a small cloth as a prop, as animated by a studio that had become synonymous with hack work. Yet with Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu Studio Deen managed to do the impossible, to have complete rakugo performances and keep my interest for the full performance, though all you see is a man sitting on stage. I went in blind watching the first episode and only realised it was fortyeight minutes long when it was already over.

Rakugo: the core question of the show

That first episode, in which a young man just out of prison becomes the apprentice of a famous rakugo performer, gets obsessed with the rakugo of said performer’s late partner through the influence of the late partner’s daughter and has to prove the value of rakugo to his old gang boss, is actually a bit of a red herring. The rest of the series actually flashes back to the early days of his master and his late partner, in order to answer the accusation that he actually killed him. I didn’t realise this would be the case when I watched the series, so the first couple of episodes I kept expecting to pop out of the flashback; instead we’ll get a new series next season.

Rakugo: Kihuhiko performing

The series therefore only starts from episode two, in which Bon, the young son of a geisha who had become crippled in an accident, is apprenticed to Yakumo Yurakutei VII, the Seventh Generation rakugo performer to use that name — with Bon ultimately having become the Eight Generation as he is in episode one. Bon is given the name of Kikuhiko by his new master and likewise another boy who’s also apprenticed on the same day is christened Sukeroku. Whereas Kikuhiko is stiff and uptight and only coming to rakugo because he has to, Sukeroku is brash and easygoing and already loves it. They become friends and fellow performers and the series follows them until that faithful day that Sukeroku died. All of which happened some thirty-forty years before the present of episode one, which is the early seventies, starting before the war, with Sukeroku’s death some twenty years before episode one.

Rakugo: Sukeroku performing

At the heart of the second episode are the first performances of Kihuhiko and Sukeroku: the former is stiff and has memorised his performance, but brings no live to it, while the latter is funny and full of character. Much of the tension between the two friends revolves around this, about Kihuhiko’s perfectionism against Sukeroku’s much more lax but more interesting performance, with Kihuhiko at first chasing Sukeroku, groping towards finding his own style of rakugo to be able to get a similar response from the crowd as he does. Most of this is shown from Kihuhiko’s point of view, as he’s the one telling this story. It’s clear that he both envies Sukeroku and loves his rakugo.

Rakugo: Sukeroku performing

Performance is at the heart of Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu and the series is never afraid to show complete performances. There’s little of the trickery that can be done to keep an audience’s attention when you’re afraid what’s on stage isn’t that interesting. Instead it makes full use of the capabilities of anime to show exactly the right gestures, eye movements and other subtle cues to keep you on your toes; this is not a series that could be easily reproduced as live action, even if it doesn’t start giant robots. If you want to judge for yourself, the series is available at Crunchyroll.

This was day twelve, the last day of the Twelve Days of Anime.

Day 11: race war, grief and fanservice with Grimgar

Published on December 24, 2016Leave a comment

Perhaps it’s not entirely accurate to call Hai to Gensou no Grimgar overlooked, but it did sort of get snowed under by first KonoSuba and then Re:Zero in the Trapped in Fantasyland genre. I’ve talked about Grimgar before. For me it was one of the best series this year for its treatment of grief, fanservice and what it would actually be like to be transported to a fantasy world. It helps that the animation itself is gorgeous, the background scenery especially, but also the fight choreography as shown above.

Grimgar‘s plot is fairly simple: a group of people is transported to a magical world, losing most of their memories in the process and are immediately drafted to fight in a low level race war against goblins and other fantasy monster races. Most of the competent people go off on their own, leaving our group of six losers to band together to try and survive, having to kill monsters to earn money to pay the rent. And this not a sterile exercise of monster slayers: the goblins they encounter are clearly thinking, feeling creatures fully capable of feeling fear or pain when they’re chased down, as above. This theme is mostly prevelant in the first four or so episodes, before the story moves on to other matters

The death of Manato from Hai to Gensou no Grimgar #4

The reason the story moves on is the death of one of the original crew: Manato, the defacto leader who kept the team together. His death hits the team hard, as you might expect and the rest of the series, but especially episode four and five explore his death and the grief felt by his team mates. At first there’s anger and denial, a refusal to believe he really is dead and it is only after they were forced to cremate him that anger makes way for a dull acceptance. The party is splintered, robbed off its heart, each of them alone and lonely and only capable of thinking of their own grief, something the opening scenes of episode five make painfully clear. What makes Manato’s death especially hard to deal with is that it was avoidable: the party got caught up in its own hubris, became careless, took one too many risks. And thanks to pre-existing tensions in the team, they find it hard to overcome their grief and come back together.

Grimgar: fanservice

The reasons for the tensions can mostly be summed up in one word: Ranta. The redhaired, impulsive sword fighter of the team, from episode one Ranta has been sexually harassing the girls in the team, with the three other boys neither joining in but at first not stopping him either. Because these are strangers needing each other to survive rather than friends, there is this tension between wanting to shut him up and not wanting to risk his temper because they need him. That this takes its toll on the two girls is less recognised, at least at first. It needs Manato’s death to be resolved. Grimgar makes it clear that the usual anime light sexual harassment antics are actually pretty disgusting and upsetting to the people on the receiving end. Unfortunately the camera hasn’t gotten the message and the focus on the female characters far too often rests on their butts, breasts or legs, undermining its own message.

This was day eleven of the Twelve Days of Anime. Next: Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju.