Actual animation in anime is overrated

Back in January with the sole purpose of expressing just how much I did not like the first episode of Space Dandy, I thought it would be funny if I could go through the entire calendar year with that being the only show I dropped. That was a terrible idea, and as one who tends to lack perspective on most things I needed a reminder. Fortunately, Freakonomics Radio chose to re-broadcast their episode on quitting. Which reminded me of how I made this terrible mistake to begin with. I got caught up in trying to make a dumb point about a show I didn’t like.

The name of this post (minus the Pointless Debate portion obviously) was derived from an idea for a panel I had for conventions. Now, the whole idea of me standing in front of a bunch of people telling them to not watch something in the middle of a commercial event devoted to people who watch it seemed rather absurd. Also, knowing how Baka-Raptor’s attempt at stand-up comedy at the closest thing to a local convention for me went, I just couldn’t pull the trigger. So instead, you get a blog post with a sample of some things I would have hypothetically said in front of the 3 people who went to my panel so they could use a room to eat on a Sunday afternoon before the organizers pulled the plug on me for spreading propaganda.

There comes a time with anything where the entire experience comes to an end. Either the project itself has come to an end, or the participant in question is no longer involved with it. When it comes to anime, that’s usually one of two things happening. The first: the show ends, the viewer is either happy or unhappy with the outcome, but they can just move on after that. The other is the viewer chooses to stop watching, which is commonly known as dropping it.

This post is about the latter and the goal of finding the point where you as the viewer should simply walk away for your own good.

So let’s start by putting things in grand perspective. Despite the attributes the characters you see on screen may have, you personally have only a finite amount of time left on Earth. If you choose to spend literally years in the act watching anime and you find it enjoyable, that’s perfectly fine. The important thing is to get something of value from the experience of watching. Plus, it needs to be worth more than the time put in to watching it.

A good example of this is the credits at the end of the recent Marvel movies. If you knew there wasn’t going to be something after the credits, would you stick around for them? I know I certainly wouldn’t since I think I have better uses of my time than watching names in white scroll on a black background. Other people may feel that the respect afforded to watching the credits is worth more than leaving.

So to make this more of a guide, here are a few common reasons one drops an anime and why you may be compelled to do so at some future date.

When you have an episode with a guy riding a lawnmower as the exciting moment, maybe it’s time to move on.

1. There Are Too Many Episodes

This is a typical problem with shounen shows, but can also be the case for anything that runs for a decent number of episodes. With the former group, the incentive is to simply have something continue to run for a long period of time so they can serve as advertising for various product tie-ins. The downside to all of this is that there are many filler episodes that do little more than exist.

With the latter group, the most common thing that I’ve seen is that there was not enough material to adapt from either a light novel or manga. So the production company bought time for 12 episodes when there’s really just enough to do maybe 9 or 10. So why not throw in a beach episode and maybe a recap episode as well?

If the production team is willing to throw entire episodes away just for filler, should you still watch? It’s not impossible to do something interesting with filler episodes, but it’s hard to do since they tend to be stand alone episodes rather than be incorporated into the plot of a series.

Seriously, fuck this show.

2. This Show Upsets Me

As much as it is good to keep an open mind on things, there does reach a point where it becomes a little much to be offended. Let’s just take the opening minutes of Elfen Lied as an example. If you are one who is squeamish, the level of violence will get you here. There are other things like my own dislike for how women are treated in Urobuchi’s shows that made me drop Psycho-Pass, as an example.

While I do prefer shows that are willing to challenge the viewer, there are times when I think there could be nothing of value added by continuing to watch a certain show that has ideas that offend one’s own beliefs. I’m not saying that it is perfectly okay to drop at this point (yes, I realize this opens me up to accusations of hypocrisy), but what’s the point in watching something that does little more than upset you? Just find another show or do something else with your time instead.

Something, something. Lame setup, something, guy inexplicably has harem, something.

3. This Show Is Boring

This is a rather simple one and the most common reason why I drop anime. I don’t think any show is really meant to be a cure for insomnia (unless it actually does cure your insomnia, then continue). I want to watch to be entertained or made to think about things in new ways. Boredom is neither of those things. Go ahead and find another show if you haven’t already done so.

Of course being able to split yourself into multiple entities makes time management less of an issue.

4. I Don’t Have Enough Time to Watch All of My Shows

Now this is an area where things start to get interesting. This isn’t so much about the quality of the anime, but rather about one’s own ability to prioritize things in their life. As much as I would like to watch anime, play some games, write more regularly on my blog, watch some sports on TV, go on dates every night, and keep up with all of the shows normal people are watching; I simply don’t have the time to do that and still have a job that pays me money so I can do some of those things.

I already tried watching all of the shows from one season and my free time disappeared in the wake of all these shows I really would have normally dropped. It wasn’t a good experience for me, nor did I really enjoy any of the shows. I simply began to associate any anime I was watching with being a waste of time. Quantity just doesn’t trump quality for me personally. There are other people out there who can soak up everything and think it is worthwhile. I discovered I wasn’t one of them.

I’m of the opinion that it’s best to not make anime a central component of how you plan your life. Unless you happen to be one of the people who has a job in the industry, it doesn’t make much sense. Go find something in your life you can be passionate about and try to make a living that way if you can. Otherwise keep searching for new experiences that will make you a better person even if it means you ultimately have to quit watching anime. Finally, to wrap things up here, the act of dropping a show has a poor reputation, but it will make you a better person in the long run.

Because this show is so surprisingly fun.

Now as to why exactly this post was written, it was basically to tell the people who read this blog’s text (probably a number that can be rounded to 0) that I’ve made some changes on what I’m watching this season:

• While writing the act of writing Mahouka posts was fun, having to actually watch the show was beginning to become a waste of my time and yours as well. Consider it dropped.
• The two other shows I’m dropping are Nobunaga the Fool because I was pretty much fast-forwarding through the episodes to avoid falling asleep. Also being dropped is The World is Still Beautiful because I can’t for the life of me understand how the king suddenly turned into an MRA.
• In the meantime, I’ve just decided to pick up Chaika on a bit of a whim. It’s filled with cliche, but still fun. I’m also a fan of the way it doesn’t even attempt to do “world building.”
• Also, if you are keeping track of the numbers next to the Pointless Debate number, you noticed I skipped 40. That is coming soon. I hope.

In watching recent episodes of No Game No Life, I’ve come to understand a component of the series as a different sort of thought exercise than I imagined it could possibly present going in. In my mind, the series has become a much bigger social commentary than one would expect about a pair of NEET siblings who happen to be unstoppable at any sort of game. At the center is one basic question: how much should the social contract that holds society together be valued?

In the alternate world the protagonists Shiro and Sora find themselves transported to, disputes are settled by games that are organized under a set of rules. Those rules happen to form an explicit social contract that binds all people in the alternative world.

Now for the boring bit where I have to explain what I mean by that. Social contract theory is born out of a thought experiment for how people became organized into civilizations from where they were prior. So it starts with people being unorganized doing whatever they wanted and concludes with an agreement among people that in exchange for some freedoms its best for everyone not to engage in actions that would harm other people or themselves.

A lot of this is old thinking since the popularity of this topic peaked prior to the 19th century, but the main guy we want to focus on is Thomas Hobbes a 17th-century Englishman who thought that prior to the social contract,  “the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”^[1] If you also happen to know about Bill Watterson’s comic Calvin and Hobbes, there is a game in the comic called Calvinball which is an unorganized game with no rules and is different each time it is played. Think of that, but with people.

Back to No Game No Life, the audience does get perspective on what life was like before it became organized under the game rules. The character Jibril, a Flugel who was around back then, looks back fondly on a time where there was much death; glorious, superfluous death. Needless to say, she is extremely pleased that a character that is willing to throw the world’s social contract away for the sake of winning a game has appeared in the shape of one of Imanity’s new rulers, Sora.

The role of the two siblings in how this story plays out is also interesting from this perspective. I think anyone who watches the show can agree that they do not follow the existing rules of normal society. With only games as a way of interacting with the rest of the world, they contribute nothing. The social contract has no value to them because they do not interact with other people.

Given this distance and a device through which people in the new world can be torn from their social contract, it’s little surprise that Sora uses it as a tool to try to win a game. What is the worst that can happen from their perspective? They just get thrown back into the same situation they were in back on Earth. By the same token, the rest of Imanity sees the potential outcome as turning into a race of lawless bandits who spend their time between raping and pillaging the land with murder.

Ultimately, it would be interesting to see what would happen if they just stripped the game rules away from one of the races in the show. I doubt it would lead to anything in a realistic portrayal, which would be interesting in and of itself. I think ultimately that will not be the case simply because the protagonists are not allowed to lose at all. Perhaps that is why Sora is willing to take the risk of losing it. If people were able to organize without explicit rules before, why wouldn’t they organize under implicit rules in this new one? That of itself is show of faith in humanity by someone who is seen as discarded by society back home.

Now having written this post, I eagerly await the point being rendered meaningless in the coming weeks as the show turns out to be terribad.

This guy also saw the Summer anime lineup.

I’m about finished with all of the spring shows and I can’t help but feel I’m witnessing the slow death of the medium. Maybe I’m just getting to familiar with shows doing the same stuff over and over again. Then I finally got around to glancing at the shows that will be airing in the summer. I now believe there is no intrinsic value in the modern world.

I actually reached that thought calmly instead of just denouncing the entire block of shows as shit. So let me tell you how I rank the likelihood I will want to watch any of these shows in the coming months from most to least likely.

1. Momo Kyun Sword
2. Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun
3. Barakamon
4. Minarai Diva
5. Love Stage
6. Ai Mai Mi
7. Akame ga Kill
8. Tokyo ESP
9. Jinsei
10. Tokyo Ghoul
11. Rokojyouma no Shintrykusha!
12. Futsuu no Joshikousei ga [Locodol] Yatte Mita.
13. Zankyou no Terror
14. Sabagebu
15. Shounen Hollywood
16. Dramatical Murder
17. Himegoto
18. Magimoji Rurumo
19. Hanayamata
20. Ao Haru Ride
21. Bakumatsu Rock
22. PuriPara
23. Free! Eternal Summer
24. Hanamonogatari
25. Rail Wars
26. Persona 4 the Golden Animation
27. Sailor Moon Crystal
28. Francesca
29. Shirogane no Ishi Argevollen
30. Strange+ Season 2
31. Sengoku Basara Judge End
32. Prisma Ilya Season 2
33. Glasslip
34. Kuroshitsuji Circus
35. Seirei Tsukai no Blade Dance
36. Nobunaga Concerto
37. Sword Art Online II
38. Re: Hamatora
39. Aldnoah.Zero
40. Space Dandy Season 2
41. Psycho-Pass

So let’s just get the first entry out of the way. I’m betting the Classiest Anime group will want to watch a classy retelling of Momotaro. I like those guys so I am looking forward to it. But when I mention that I disliked the Akame ga Kill manga, and it’s that high, we have a major issue.

Rather than going on amidst the increasing reliance on sequels, remakes, prequels and flavor of the week light novel adaptations and Urobuchi’s improbable continued employment as bad things I’m going to spend the coming season doing something entirely different. I’m actually going to go about creating a backlog of shows for me to watch instead this summer.

About a month ago, I turned to Twitter to find suggestions for shows and immediately got Psycho-Pass so that was out the window. So I will turn to the random number generator to finish off shows. If it goes as bad as last time… The shows have already been drawn and I will try not to rage over the random selection of shows I previously dropped, shows rated 10 by my MAL friends and from the top 1000 on MAL. Of course, I will be more that willing to swap stuff out for suggestions in the comments.

Most of you just come here for the silly drawn on chart for the preview anyway. So I conclude by giving you exactly what you want.

Sorry Neregate.com people. I ruined your chart again.

Seeing as I had no confidence in the summer season, I decided to invent a backlog of shows to watch from one of three different areas. First up is Simoun, a series that aired back in the spring and summer of 2006, and was a show that I had previously dropped. I went back and marathoned it, and these are my thoughts on it.

When Simoun began airing in the spring of 2006, I was at an interesting point in my life. I was a month off from graduating from college, and part of my attention lay at finding a job and the upcoming World Cup to be held in Germany. I was also trying to do well in my classes so I could graduate with just a little confirmation that I wasn’t totally average at this.

As far as the anime scene was concerned, this was the beginning of an explosion in the amount of anime that would be broadcast. Satellite broadcasters made it possible to get more than just a few shows on air at a time, and they were not restrained by the regional nature of releases in the past. One could say this was the start of a Golden Age that ended as soon as the Onii-chan incest shows began populating the schedule.

With those two things in mind, I went into the season wondering how I could watch so much. I think I dropped the first episode of this show on the basis that it seemed like too much fanservice (ironic since I watched Haruhi at the time), and that I didn’t have enough time to watch more than just a few shows.

So I went back and revisited this thanks to the random number draw and came back with mixed feelings. Simoun is really a show that takes place in two different times, but it takes a long time to get to that understanding and it simply would not have worked if this show was compressed into 13 episode chunk(s). Along the way, the one thing I can definitely say is that it never got to grips with the ambiguity of war, but I don’t think that’s a major flaw in any case.

I have to start with the one big contrivance this show makes in developing it’s characters. All people born in this universe are female until they head to the Spring after age 17 to choose which gender they really want to be, or it can be chosen for them. Adulthood effectively becomes an instant event that never seems to be anything other than sad. However, there are groups of girls that do not have to make this choice immediately while they pilot mysterious flying machines called Simouns. The series focuses on one group, Chor Tempest, and their battles against the enemy.

The key theme running through Simoun is the idea of making the ultimate decision. New characters come in to Chor Tempest early and want to choose the head priestess Neviril as their pair to pilot a Simoun, but she doesn’t want to pilot again until she is ready. Then there are the frequent decisions of characters to go off on missions on their own like it’s Star Trek with mysterious priestesses.

There are also a few ideas which seem to get dropped throughout the series. There are a couple of “horrors of war” moments; the protagonis Aaeru having to cut a dead man’s hands from the controls of her Simoun, and Floe making friends with someone who would come to see her as a tool of mass destruction being the ones to come to mind, but those are quickly dropped in the 2nd half of the show. By that point, it turns into a dead character of the week series and then a time-travel show.

Although it becomes a bit of a narrative mess at the end, I think the main theme of the show shines through in the final acts of the series which really starts to take off once the youngest character Limone and Dominura make a decision that takes them out of the story. From that point, it becomes about each character making decisions that will most make them happy. By that point I felt that the show had done enough to earn the right to downplay the major diplomacy failures that were going on in the background.

So to sum up my thoughts on the series, I think it actually turns out to be a great companion piece to a show like RahXephon as the mood is similar in the end. The characters are well-developed to the point where it is depressing when any of them are killed after appearing in even just a single episode. The major failings have to do with the war aspects that keep them fighting, and I think they were too quick to abandon making the girls into villains to some in favor of half-baked background politics. Plus, don’t get me started on the captain joining the final battle.

Overall, it’s well worth watching and I’d strongly recommend it to anyone, even if they are not fans of the necessary yuri overtones this series requires in its concept. I’d even go as far as to say its the best show I’ve seen to date this year.

Next Week: Franz Ferdinand, a look at the fashion industry and the early days of noitaminA

Seeing as I had no confidence in the summer season, I decided to invent a backlog of shows to watch from one of three different areas. Second on this list was Paradise Kiss a show that aired in the fall of 2005 on Noitamina, and was a show that I had previously dropped. I went back and marathoned it, and these are my thoughts on it.

Paradise Kiss was never a show I intended to drop initially. Over 3 years ago, I had begun to watch it because I saw the ending was “Do You Want To” by Franz Ferdinand. It didn’t matter what the show was even about, I was sold on a Glaswegian band being included as part of an anime production. After watching a few episodes, up to about when the protagonist Yukari really fell for George, my PC decided I shouldn’t watch anymore. By that, I mean the processor decided it wanted to become one with the motherboard in the melting to it sense of the phrase.

After building my own PC and getting everything back up and running (during which I missed a LoGH post, grrr), watching this show about a girl who was helping out as a fashion model in some downstairs bar didn’t seem so important. I just never went back and revisited it. So it wasn’t as though I had some dislike for it when I dropped it, the drop just kind of happened.

Onto the series itself now. Paradise Kiss did an excellent job in changing my opinion of it just from the final episode. It goes about things in a very nihilistic fashion, though the seeds had been sown in earlier episodes. It almost felt as though the creators wanted to make sure there was no way there could be a sequel. The fact that I cared so much about this requires going back to the beginning of the series.

The protagonist Yukari just goes through life in high school barely doing well enough to get by. Fate would intervene and she would meet a group of 4 students from a fashion school and made their own fashion label, Paradise Kiss. They befriend her and convince her to become their model for the big school fashion show. She falls for their leader George and effectively stops caring about trying to do well in school.

This was as far as I got last time, so it was interesting to find out that there were a couple of larger themes at play here. The first is the question of what goes into determining making one’s own decisions, which is key to the series through the climax. At one point, George tells Yukari that he doesn’t like people who do not make their own decisions. Yukari reacts by completely breaking away from her old life and dropping out of school and running away from home during exam time at school. She lives at the apartment of the rock star hopeful Arashi for a few days then moves in with George.

As she is doing this, there is a voice going on in her head that is weighing whether she is doing the right thing versus questioning how much her mother loves her since she had not attempted to contact her. As she lands a modeling job, her old classmate Tokumori continues to pursue her. They meet at a cafe where he tells her that it’s possible to make her own decisions after consulting with others. Ultimately, she decides to go back home and back to school, though after obviously pissing off her worried mother.

The ability to make one’s own decision plays a role in the conclusion as well, but it also plays in with the idea of trust. Tokumori was childhood friends with Arashi and Miwako, who are a couple. The latter pair are never able to break cleanly with their feelings about Tokumori since Arashi is never able to convince himself that Miwako isn’t cheating on him. At the same time, George’s friend from years ago, Kaori, returns from London to convince him to go abroad to become a designer. Yukari interprets a relationship between them that proves to be a hurdle too much to overcome.

Now onto the particular resolution, it felt rather abrupt but completely in line with the larger themes of the show. George is able to secure financial freedom to do what he wants to do with the help of his rich father. Wanting to design on his own terms, he goes off to America with Isabella, the last member of the group I’ve mentioned in this post, and breaks up Paradise Kiss. Everyone else goes their own ways with a flash forward to ten years in the future where Yukari’s successful modeling career is interrupted by her impending wedding to Tokumori and a trip to New York to see a show with costumes designed by George.

It felt like the ending was the right thing to happen for everyone involved, but it still seemed to feel as though everything was blown up for the sake of doing so. That no one seemed to really struggle also felt like a bit of a problem with the show. It’s nice that characters worked well together, but I still came away thinking that a couple of the characters could have been better developed. There was a considerable amount of time spent on building Miwako’s character, but it just felt shallow. Then there was Isabella, the transgender woman who got a third of an episode of back story with George as children, and that was about it.

That’s not to say there weren’t things I didn’t like it. I think my favorite moment came when Arashi referenced a magazine by saying the cover was in the 1st episode. There were other moments like a secretary in the office having a phone conversation that was the internal debate Yukari was having on her own. The boss of the modeling agency was also funny at the end of that same scene. I think many of the secondary characters were fun to watch as well.

Finally, just to wrap things up here since I’m over 1000 words, I mentioned at the top that this was a Noitamina series. It was the 2nd one that was part of the block in fact. I had a question going in as to whether this series would be part of Noitamina if it was made today. I have mixed feelings on that. The art style is rather unique, but that wasn’t enough to stop Ping Pong from airing. While the block does seem to be filled with sequels and whatever else Production I.G. or A-1 Pictures wants to sell, there are some shows that still capture the same spirit that have aired in recent years. Titles like Anohana, Kids on the Slope  and Ping Pong are ideas shows without being crafted to make money. So yes, I do think it would still air on Noitamina today and I’m glad I watched this.

Next Week: A kid who really likes to cut hair, the girl who allows him to fulfill that fetish, and all the crazy people around them.

Seeing as I had no confidence in the summer season, I decided to invent a backlog of shows to watch from one of three different areas. The third show on this list was The Severing Crime Edge a show that aired in the spring of 2013, and was a show that I had previously dropped. I went back and marathoned it, and these are my thoughts on it.

Having just completed all 13 episodes of this show, I could only really come up with one main thought on Crime Edge. Why did they make this as though they thought the audience was composed entirely of fools who can’t comprehend plot subtleties?

Crime Edge is a horror/suspense series about a cursed girl, the “Hair Queen” Mushiyanokouji Iwai, doomed forever to have constantly growing hair and Haimura Kiri, a boy with a fetish for long hair and a desire to cut it. They have to deal constantly with enemies who are trying to kill Iwai because her death will grant the murderer any wish they want. Kiri and the people after Iwai all have “Killing Goods” which are enchanted tools that grant powers to their owner and also drive them insane with the urge to kill as they have been passed down through generations of murderers.

With that explanation out of the way, the first thing I noticed about Crime Edge was that for a show about murderers and people being driven insane by an urge to kill, the actual on-screen death count was a mere 3. Not even enough to make the vidiprinter spell out the number of deaths, but I digress. There’s an attempt to explain this early on by saying that the Killing Goods owners, known as Authors, have partners to act out against, called Insteads, so that they don’t go around committing acts of murder all the time. It still didn’t get away from the fact there was a constant push to hold back on the violence inherent in the premise of the show.

I watched this on a certain popular legal streaming site, and the need to censor parts of the action was constant. So blackness covering 80% of the screen, black instead of red blood, freeze frames that do nothing to hide the sound of what was happening and random beams of light to…cover up an improvised blood transfusion?! were just part of what was blocking the action. The sound engineers at work on this show definitely earned their pay in the process of having to convey what was happening.

As far as the execution and flow of the series, I thought it was very poor. It felt insulting to my intelligence in the way that most mass-produced Hollywood blockbusters are these days. They introduce a new enemy, run around for a bit explaining the plot to each other, there’s a fight and then they become friends. Rinse and repeat that a few more times and that’s the plot progression up to the final episode. That’s when Kiri goes through a “training montage” of watching a guy cut open some bodies from a first-person view and them has super-berserker powers against the final loli boss.

The sad thing is I was actually beginning to find a groove with this show and sort of beginning to enjoy it when Emily was introduced for the final arc. It ended up turning way too much on its head where Iwai’s father became the nicest man in the world to hang around with shady people and also made Kiri’s victories against earlier opponents appear utterly improbable. They only had to turn to his meeting the original holder of the Crime Edge and transforming to overcome a skilled assassin character with years of training in many martial arts.

Also in another bit of the show’s decline, the guardian of Emily, Violet Witchy, who really should be considered an antagonist, just turns into a pure fanservice flirty character with Kiri at the end. Her first appearance was wearing a formal gown at a ball, and by the end, she was wearing clothes that left little to the imagination.

Finally, I’ll wrap this up by talking about the most interesting aspect I found in this show. There is a filler episode that is only meant to introduce the Author Nakajima Seigi (this show has a thing for catastrophic puns for names). In it, the cast of characters go into a small lounge just off of an alley which is run by a couple that happen to be Author and Instead. The former Karuko, is a blind woman that plays a piano that kills anyone who hears a complete song played on it. It just struck me that it was sort of romantic that she ended up together with a deaf man. The two playfully enjoying their lives and still murdering people with sound and disposing of the bodies together. Ah. Also, the episode introduced a police officer named Zenigata. Such is the influence of Lupin III that even 4 decades later it feels necessary to pay homage.

Next Week: Severely dating myself as I dive into the original Bee Train “Girls With Guns” series

P.S. This show wraps up with a preview of a 2nd season that will probably never happen.

Seeing as I had no confidence in the summer season, I decided to invent a backlog of shows to watch from one of three different areas. The fourth show on this list was Noir a show that aired in the spring of 2001 and which I had never started or even had an inkling to watch before. I marathoned it, and these are my thoughts on the series.

As I was watching the conclusion of Noir, there were quite a few thoughts that came to mind. Why did this have to be the 800th anime I completed according to MAL? Had watching procedurally-generated anime the night before raised my expectations as far as writing is concerned? Finally, wasn’t the whole evil villain having a pit of lava as a trap cliche to the point of parody by 2001?

Unlike the previous posts in this series, I don’t have a personal history with this show going in. I can, however, talk about this particular period in the context of my watching anime. I think back when this show aired I was under 10 completed anime. It was just the nature of anime availability for a high school student who couldn’t get a job beyond punching a touchscreen as people ordered terrible fast food. As far as anime production was concerned at this point, almost nothing from this period has aged well. It was a money pit that few people would throw money at to get a series produced, unlike now where many people throw money into the pit and don’t realize that lottery tickets are a better investment.

It’s that theme that I’m going to focus on for most of the rest of this post. The first few episodes aren’t terrible looking visually, but the dialogue sounded like it was recorded in someone’s bathroom. This seemed a bit of an oversight as the director Mashimo Koichi was also the sound director on the project. That was simple enough to adjust to, since the music was done by Kajiura Yuki in the show that brought her attention. The problem with that is that it feels like she was only paid enough to make as much as she could in just a couple of days so within 3 episodes you’ve heard 90% of the whole soundtrack.

So, the sound isn’t exactly the strong point of Noir, but what about the visuals? The version I was watching looked rather faded in quality, but that was a common issue with shows from that period. A decent amount of effort was spent in trying to recreate the exotic locales where the events of the series take place. However, since this is classic “girls with guns”, the action scenes are important and that is probably the biggest shortcoming I had with it in an entertainment sense. The animation is low budget to the point where very little looks fluid. Also, it goes without saying that the body count of the show is in triple-figures, but there’s more blood in a single action scene in Crime Edge than there is in the entire 26 episode run.

Alright, so what about the story? To give a brief summary, two assassins Mireille Bouquet and Kirika Yumura team up as Noir to try to find clues about the latter’s past. They then end up involved with a secret society called the Soldats who have been playing a long game with their entire lives and put them through a series of ever stronger trials.

The character development is a weak point when it comes to Noir. Mireille starts out as the strong assassin who knows how to do her job smoothly and efficiently while Kirika is just a killing machine. That changes when a character that Mireille met exactly once in her past reappears in her life and she becomes crippled by fear at the prospect of facing a mafia boss. Meanwhile, Kirika develops into a more complete person for a while; even taking up art for a filler episode, but that changes when a Czech/Slovakian (it’s never made clear which one) ex-Foreign Legion officer is offed for the sake of plot. She then goes down the path of indiscriminate killing machine again. Admittedly, it does add a bit of drama when Mireille is no longer 100% confident of situations, but then she has Kirika and another girl Chloe to bail her out. It’s just a bit of a shame that the end sort of turns into jealousy over who Kirika’s friend is, though it’s a bit more complicated by that.

There are a couple of other things I wanted to talk about with this show before I wrap this up. As the show kicks into gear early on and the main pair travel from place to place, they go to different places around the world. The shame of it is that it feels like there was little research into what those places are like, and they feel like some outsider imagining what a place is like. So in Paris, everyone goes to the cafe and Mireille gets on her moped to buy baguettes from the bakery. They go to a New York which is being run over by Mexican gangs and find a building that has a 13th floor. Italy is portrayed with Roman ruins all over the place. It’s like the writer just looked at a travel guide and watched a few 80s movies to determine what each place was like.

There are also absurd moments that are completely out of place which is how I’m going to wrap this up. There’s a moment in the middle of the series where Chloe opens her closet and it pans through her selection of frilly dresses until it gets to the assassin shroud at the end. It would have worked brilliantly in a comedy, but this was definitely not. Finally, there was a confirmation that this was a show for the children:

Favorite Tweet About Noir From My Followers:

@emperorj Take one every time someone gets shot with no external signs of injury. Try not to die.—
  (@lvlln) July 19, 2014

Next Time: A scrawny middle school boy transforms into all-powerful youkai by night. Gets all the women.

Seeing as I had no confidence in the summer season, I decided to invent a backlog of shows to watch from one of three different areas. The fifth show on this list was Nurarihyon no Mago (or given the terribad licensed title of Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan…really?!) a show that aired in the summer of 2010 and dropped after viewing all of one episode of the series. I marathoned it, and these are my thoughts on the series.

I will be the first to admit that there really wasn’t much going on to keep me engaged with this particular show. That’s usually the case with harem shows that refuse to acknowledge that they are harem shows and try to do pretentious bullshit that doesn’t work. That was especially the case here. So rather than fall asleep and spend time having to rewatch episodes all over again, I was inspired to do something else by this tweet:

Alright. Installing Football Manager 2014. Now I can finally be cool around @emperorj and @processr—
kevo (@kevo31415) July 26, 2014

So as Nurarihyon, the protagonist Rikuo’s grandfather, decided to take the final 40% of the series off, I was trying to determine if it really was possible to create a strong attacking side with wingbacks to take on the challengers of the Portuguese Segunda Liga. I can answer that by saying meu time joga futebol bonito. Anyway, none of you care about that sort of stuff, you care about this dishonest harem show.

The show’s plot revolves around whether Rikuo, having 25% youkai blood, will take over as the next head of the Nura clan. He tries to put off the decision as long as possible, but other clans simply won’t let him do that. So he has to rescue his dumbass friends over and over and transform into his other form where he is as overpowered as John Cena when ODDS MUST BE OVERCOME.

Accompanying him on his quest to rule over a family of demons while still staying in middle school is his childhood friend Kana (with a mailed-in performance by Hirano Aya) who falls for his other form; Tsurara, a Yuki Onna/Ice Girl who happens to be fiercely jealous of other women doing things with Riku; Yura, an onmyouji who doesn’t really do much other than contrive ways to lose to demons; and there are four other classmates who don’t really do much. This group tries to investigate paranormal activities which are all completely under their noses. That is until the plot demands that Rikuo and the three main girls do something.

That’s where the show’s villains would play the part of adding some character to a bland protagonist lineup. For the most part, however, they only put up a couple episodes worth of fighting and were really only trying to help Rikuo realize his potential and they join him anyway. That’s excluding the rat people who prove nothing more than fodder.So it’s only that last long, drawn out arc that really has a great deal of conflict.

So the final boss is a tanuki who acquired a demon sword that takes power from all that are slayed by it. Nurarihyon pretty much has the whole plot figured out so he leaves to take care of business outside of the story like a boss. Like any good mafia boss, he leaves matters in the hands of emotionally unstable 13-year-old grandson who does things that he isn’t proud of at night.

Tamazuki sends the hoards of demons he brought over from Shikoku and houses in an incomplete office building to go wreak havoc on Rikuo and society in general. His plans all fail as soon as Rikuo transforms, does the big boot then lands the leg drop for the nth time in the series*. His main allies consist of Immobile Welshman, a Flaming Rooster, Terrible Stereotype of a Japanese Sex-Worker and Dog Demon With a Long Tongue Who Thinks He’s People.

I can definitely see why this series is pretty popular and earned a sequel though. Rikuo is going through the process of growing up, and a teenage audience can probably identify with all of the strange things he now has to deal with. It helps to have interesting girls around him that for the most part aren’t completely one-dimensional lists of physical assets. The ending was also open-ended enough to where the second season could kick off at exactly where things were at the beginning of the final arc. It’s just a little too meh for my taste.
^{*-This is not true}

Next Week: A Prematurely Grey One-Eyed Man Takes Up Entomology

Seeing as I had no confidence in the summer season, I decided to invent a backlog of shows to watch from one of three different areas. The sixth show on this list was Mushishi a show that began airing in the fall of 2005 and that I had never attempted to watch. I marathoned it, and these are my thoughts on the series.

I was very hesitant about watching Mushishi going into this particular watch. This is a show that is the 21st-highest rated on MAL, but really 7th when discounting any shows that suffer from incredible survivorship bias. All I really knew about it going in was that it was a show where the protagonist Ginko just traveled around and got involved with spirits called ‘Mushi,’ and that there was no over-arching plot involved. It seemed kind of ridiculous to me that an episodic show where not a lot happens would be so incredibly well-received. Hell, there weren’t even recurring cute girls like in some of the higher rated shows.

So how can I best describe Mushishi in my own words? I would say that it is an anthology of stories about people in the old Japanese countryside and how they deal with strange situations created by the Mushi. Ginko’s role in all of this is to be more of an historian when dealing with the people in these situations. He has expertise, so he can get involved in a problem as much as he does or does not want to. As a result, and in much the same sense as a good science fiction story does, the viewer is able to get deeper into the behavior of other people than they did before the episode.

Honestly, it took a lot of episodes before I finally started to understand what this show was doing so well. Early on it felt as though Ginko in his modern clothes (more on that later), would show up, and then either save the day or at least get the people involved to stop messing about with nature and the supernatural. I think the moment when I finally got it was an episode where Ginko runs into a man and his family that are trapped in the forest. Ginko does little more than mention that there is a horrible way to get the man out and back to his original village, but his half-mushi wife commits that act since she thinks her husband will be happier if he can return home. Unfortunately, that turns out not to be the case.

The episode did illustrate what Mushishi is in a nutshell, though. In just 20 minutes, it can tell a story about the follies of humanity and elicit sympathy for characters without feeling that it is forced by a protagonist’s actions. Ginko was merely a passenger to the experience in this case.

There was also another episode further in the series that I liked. The character of Karibusa Tanyuu is introduced, and she happens to be the fourth Recorder. Cursed with having a forbidden mushi sealed in her unusable leg, she has to spend her days training to seal mushi by writing the about the stories behind them. The nice moment came when Tanyuu as a child wanted to go out and play instead of training. So Tama, her caretaker and former Mushishi says she is going to invite a bunch of her former colleagues over to tell her about their adventures with the Mushi. It seemed like an oddly kind thing even if it was part of her training. Yeah, of course, Ginko shows up and by showing willingness not to kill all the Mushi, Tanyuu basically falls for him, but that’s a topic for another day.

For all that Mushishi excels at in portraying humanity, there was one small detail that I could not get over. The series is set in the distant past as Ginko travels from place to place where there is no sign of modern convenience. However, Ginko’s attire can really be described as modern business-casual while he chain-smoked cigarettes like mad. So to get an answer as to this discrepancy, I went to the wise people of twitter. They told me that it was to further emphasize Ginko’s position as an outsider, and also that the series was originally going to be set in the modern day, but they left his character design the same because they thought it still worked. I’m a fan of leaving artifacts like that behind, so I really stopped complaining about it at that point.

In the end, I realized that this truly is a classic anime. It accomplished all that it set out to do and made me think more about people in general. There are very few shows that are able to do that with subtlety. The modern trend in that regard is to simply have a character say the name of a book and then make an episode revolve around the themes of that particular book. It’s a show that I’m more than willing to recommend to other people now, though I still don’t think it would qualify as one of my personal favorites. It’s probably the best purely episodic anime I’ve ever seen, but not a show I would leap at to watch again. That takes nothing away from the fact that I’m pleased that I’ve managed to get one truly excellent show out of this particular series.

Next Week: The one anime the guy at Kotaku didn’t like.

Seeing as I had no confidence in the summer season, I decided to invent a backlog of shows to watch from one of three different areas. The seventh show on this list was Black Bullet a show that began airing this past spring and that I had never attempted to watch because I thought I would drop it. I marathoned it, and these are my thoughts on the series.

I had pretty much cut down the amount of shows I was watching by the time the spring started. As far as Black Bullet was concerned, all I knew about it was from the first chapter of the manga. Actually, check that, I think it was just as far as Rentarou being woken in the typical little sister style typical of the harem genre that I checked out. I later added a bit more information with this review I glazed over since the reviewer called that one show the smartest anime in years.

Black Bullet is definitely not the most intelligent anime in any number of years, though perhaps it holds the edge over the much-maligned Sword Art Online. However, this is a show about ideas; badly and laughably executed ideas, but ideas nonetheless. That gives it an edge in my book, and that’s probably why I enjoyed this show much more than I really should have.

The story centers on a group of girls born around ten years prior to the start of the series. That was when giant insects began ravishing the Earth and infecting people as hosts to further spread the havoc the brought upon humanity. These girls happen to be born as carriers of whatever infects the rest of the people, but it gives them super abilities as long as they are able to maintain over half their humanity. Unfortunately, they are viewed as cursed so aren’t very popular with the local people. A few of these young girls are able to partner with a so-called civil servant to really just battle with whatever the evil entity of the particular arc is.

The story in Black Bullet progresses in a way that is similar to Index, though with significantly less punching of women in the face. Rentarou, using the replacement body parts grafted onto him by mad-scientist Muroto Sumire, manages to win a number of improbable battles and brings the defeated to his side; provided they don’t die first. Along the way, he also happens to pick up a harem of 10-year-old girls with super strength and high rank along with batshit crazy high school girls.

Besides that, what actually makes this show work are the moments of shock and absurdity that seem to happen at least once an episode. It leads to legendary moments like a railgun that can destroy a giant monster not having any ammunition loaded. Then, that same railgun can be destroyed by Rentarou because future consequences, then not being made a pariah. There’s the first villain, Hiruko Kagetane, who decides to help Rentarou because plot. How about also having a class of small girls express their desire to marry Rentarou, then have them blown up by terrorists? In addition, there are numerous Rentarou Jesus moments where he starts crying at how terrible the world is. Yet, he continues to fight for the same people who bring injustice to the whole world. Then, there’s the final absurdity where he finds out that his boss, Vague Kidney Disease’s Tendou Kisara, is just a more brutal version of Charles Bronson in the Death Wish films. Sequel hook, my friend; sequel hook.

Through it all, there are only two pillars of consistency as far as the characters are concerned. Saitenshi, the 16-year-old girl (because non-violent girl needed for light novel sales) who rules the Tokyo area, acts like she has her own death wish or a messianic complex. At least she’s consistently like that. Then there’s the female lead, Aihara Enju, the cursed child that works under Rentarou. When she’s not trying to convince Rentarou to be her future husband, she’s actually a consistent and hard worker. That’s why it’s not really a surprise when she plays second fiddle come the latter stages of the series. I think Enju’s character development is one of the few bright spots with the characters in this series. She starts as a little sister character that is a bit annoying, and she becomes a support figure to everyone.

So as to the question of how I managed to enjoy the show to some degree despite what was written above. I’ve emphasized a number of times that I am a fan of shows that are willing to embrace ideas even if they fail in the most comical fashion. Black Bullet fits that case by trying to take on issues like racism, post-war militarization, crony capitalism, PTSD and enforced social hierarchy. It manages to fail at addressing all of these. The act of simply trying is better than staying in a safe area and just accepting being an action harem show.

Ultimately, that is what drove my enjoyment. It was like seeing a late-80s or early-90s action movie with all the ham-fisted writing and attempts to make the stars more sensitive, but unbelievable. The action was still fun to watch as the body count in this show was much higher than I expected. I think I have come to the conclusion that I did enjoy this show unironically, even if it’s filled with characters that have no basis in reality, a plot that is not exceptional in anyway, fails to execute its ideas and makes Rentarou the most attractive man in the world to all under-18 women. I’m not embarrassed to admit I liked it, but would I recommend it to anyone else? Oh hell no.

Next Week: Shipping and a card game, but mostly shipping.

Seeing as I had no confidence in the summer season, I decided to invent a backlog of shows to watch from one of three different areas. The eighth show on this list was Chihayafuru, a show that aired in the fall of 2011 and I dropped after viewing all of one episode of the series. I marathoned it, and these are my thoughts on the series.

There’s a moment in the first episode which was both the initial reason why I dropped the show and also one of the foundations of my opinions on the series. Having brought Chihaya into the apartment he lived in and beginning to play a game of karuta, Arata explains that becoming the best player of the game in Japan also means being the best in the world at it. At the time I dropped it, I think my thought on that line was that it was because no one else in the world cared about it. After watching the rest of the series, I should have also added that they really needed to lay off the cheerleading for their niche event.

Yes, I came out of a show like Chihayafuru thinking that it did little more than attempt to promote karuta while doing minimal character development. In seemingly every scene, the show’s attempt to bring karuta to a wider audience seemed to be making the gap wider. The characters on screen devoted their lives to the game and little else with little else to make them seem like rounder characters.

About that story, Chihayafuru starts in the present with Chihaya trying to create a competitive karuta club at her high school with little success. Her friend Taichi tries to dissuade her with little success. Then we go back several years where the two of them and Arata, the outsider from another part of the country form a friendship all based around karuta. These are actually some of the best scenes in the series as it does show character development that goes beyond the results of a contest. Fast forward back to the present and Arata has quit playing due to a tragic event while Chihaya and Taichi gather a group of misfits to take on the karuta world.

The problem with the characters is that they pretty much come in to the series missing just one element to complete them. Obviously, all they had to do is have faith and accept Karuta into their lives. They still show a range of emotions, but it seems all programmed around what is happening in a game. In addition to Taichi and Chihaya, joining them are Kana, a girl who loves ancient poetry but lacked an outlet to express it; Desk-kun, the 2nd smartest kid in the class (behind Taichi), but needing an outlet to express his own intelligence; and Nishida, a player in his younger days who returned because it stoked his own competitive spirit. Once this group gets together and starts to compete in tournaments, the show becomes about promoting karuta and little else.

Chihayafuru gets caught up in this desire to promote karuta a little too much for its own good. There’s discussion of tactics and card placement analytics sprinkled throughout the second half of the show. Above all, there was an inferiority complex about karuta that always seemed to come up when characters outside the bubble of game were used. The idea that karuta is this impressive sport that would be on par or better than more popular sports if more people would watch just a little bit of it. They sprinkle in training montages and flashbacks to eureka moments other players have had throughout learning karuta from coaches. Yet at the end of the day, the series concludes with the two best players in the country having no coaching at all and winning purely on experience and natural talent with techniques they refined themselves.

The show never goes as far as raging against the larger culture as to why karuta isn’t as popular as it is. I can perfectly understand what it’s like to be fond of something niche and isn’t viewed as normal by popular culture. This is an anime blog, written by an American, in an online community that is associated with being introverts, while being a fan of association football, which is even less popular to watch in this country.

Actually there was one nice episode that took place at a tournament that I did like and I wish it would have had the attitude present in this episode more. In the 18th episode, Chihaya is playing a match against a woman twice her age called Kanai Sakura. She loses to her, but in the process realizes that the opponent matters in karuta. That wasn’t the most important thing I got out of it though. After the match, Sakura is with her family and pretty much says she plays because she enjoys it and that’s what she wants to do. For one brief moment, Chihayafuru provides a life lesson to those out there who like doing an activity, but either through lack of talent or opportunity will never get to the pinnacle of their craft. Just do what you enjoy, that could have made this show a much better experience if they kept that at heart.

Next Week: A movie about the militarization of the police in response to a terrorist threat.

Seeing as I had no confidence in the summer season, I decided to invent a backlog of shows to watch from one of three different areas. The ninth anime on this list was the second Patlabor movie, which premiered in August 1993. I sat down an watched it in a single sitting, and these are my thoughts on it.

Before you come in and say that seeing as I haven’t watched the TV series this came from nor the first movie, just here me out for a minute. My only experience with the franchise was about 9 years ago. It was a particularly dark period in my life which is way too depressing to even talk about here, but the place I was staying at had video on demand and one of the movies was the English dub of the third Patlabor movie, though I believe it was just called WXIII on the screen. I briefly thought it was going to be Wrestlemania 13 with a description of Bret Hart’s match against Steve Austin, but it was actually a mecha film. It kept me away from my own dangerous thoughts at the time, at least give me that. But I digress…

The real reason I mention that is I made a bit of an exception in going for a series sequel because it is a highly rated movie and a few of the “friends” on my MAL really liked it to the tune of 9s and 10s. Also a two hour movie makes a nice break from the 25-26 episode weekend marathons that have gone on throughout this summer feature series.

Set in 2002, Patlabor 2 can be summed up as a film about the impact of decisions made by those in power who are unsure of Japan’s role in the world, but are too distant to be informed about reality. It’s really a complicated plot the more that I think of it. Also, the timing of the release coming just after the dissolution of the Soviet Union also brought the argument of the role of the Self-Defense Forces in a post-Cold War world. The method the film goes about portraying this is by featuring Tokyo being brought to its knees by a former police officer that had experienced the horrors of war while working on a UN peacekeeping mission.

Mainly by deceptive tactics and distractions, Tsuge, the mastermind of the plot, forces the government to bring in the Self-Defense Forces to deal with the chaos in Tokyo. I don’t want to use the term antagonist to describe him because apart from property damage, I think they didn’t kill anyone. At the same time, two captains of the police, Tsuge’s ex-lover Nagumo Shinobu, and the laid back Goto try to stop him while dealing with all of the ignorant political bullshit coming from the heads of the police and government agencies.

While Patlabor is a mecha series, the Labors don’t come into play until the climax as they try to capture Tsuge. It actually means that most of the rest of the film plays like a political thriller maybe pushing into neo-noir territory. Goto spends much of the movie talking to an informant named Arakawa, that also happens to be much further involved in events than it seems.

Stylistically, I was pretty impressed by the film. It’s Oshii through and through in that there are tons of shots that are completely immersive. It’s a feeling that few anime in the present day have. There are a couple of scenes that use birds to make things feel more real. A blimp flying around without a pilot jamming communications is one thing, but to have a flock of birds following it around just adds to the feeling that something is wrong with the world at that point. Also, as the SDF tanks roll into Tokyo it begins to snow. Nature is simply going to keep going regardless of what people are doing.

As for the story, I’m still not sure what to make of it. There’s a sense I got from this film that it was advocating against the government’s preparedness against terrorism. The plot itself seems like a bit of a playbook on how to cripple a city. At the same time, the national government and military are completely useless and a burden on the locals while the police get the job done. It might just be better to say that the film is against ever greater layers of bureaucracy.

In the end, this proved to be one of the better things I’ve watched this year and I’d recommend it to almost anyone. I also don’t think it’s necessary to have watched the series or first movie to understand this film, but I imagine it would help in some scenes.

Next week: A guy who can see spirits travels around…didn’t I do this already?

By request, this week’s post will feature GIFs

Seeing as I had no confidence in the summer season, I decided to invent a backlog of shows to watch from one of three different areas. The tenth anime on this list was Natsume Yuujinchou, which aired in the summer of 2008. I had previously watched the first episode during last year’s random show watch. I marathoned the first season of the show, and these are my thoughts on it.

Last year’s watch was one of just many random episodes so I couldn’t really take in entirely what I was watching since it was just one part of a journey toward ending my day. At least this time I could pay attention without regretting my decision to leave things up to a random number generator. After Mushishi, this happened to be another episodic show that featured a protagonist that could see mysterious creatures. That’s really where the comparison between the two ends.

Natsume is the story of a high school student, Natsume Takashi, that can see and interact with spirits in the same way his grandmother Reiko did. He inherits the Book of Friends from her and sets about on a mission to free all the spirits from the book that were captured by Reiko. He does this with the assistance of a bodyguard spirit named Madara that most often takes the form of a cat.

That’s really about as far as the plot of the first season of the series goes. Like I said, it’s fairly episodic, so each episode has it’s own individual plot, but I don’t think that’s where this particular show shines. I think the bright spot is actually in how the characters are able to grow over the course of the series and the Book of Friends actually works as a great analogy. Since Reiko had taken their names to make them slaves at her command, it wasn’t very much about Friends at all. What Natsume does over the course of the show is to use the book to make friends of his own. It’s not so much a terrible book that enslaves those inside, but a coffee table book that is used to start conversations.

That’s not to mean there’s no consequence to his being in possession of it. Madara and Natsume work out a deal to have the book passed onto when Natsume dies because it is still a very powerful item. It just becomes less so as more names come out of it. So that means the other spirits with not so great intentions are after it. Fortunately, he’s able to build a solid stable of allies to help him through any problems. The most exceptional of these was with the young kitsune boy named Kogitsune who was being bullied and they do genuinely form a friendship from that point.

It’s also worth mentioning the development of the group he hangs out with in high school. He starts out mainly as the guy who occasionally sees weird things and by the end of the series, he had a few friends who just accepted it as part of who he was. There was also a slightly muted angle where a girl named Jun at least seems interested in Natsume insofar as to where he was traveling on one of his personal missions, but that seems to go nowhere for the rest of the season.

My overall impression of Natsume ultimately ended up being that it is a good show to pass the time, but I didn’t find it particularly exceptional. It might be a show that improves with time and additional episodes, though I’m not going to continue with it further at this time. So really, it’s an incomplete impression that I don’t think is going to be resolved anytime soon. I think as far as a recommendation on whether to watch this depends on how someone wants to go into it. If they were to care about Natsume’s long term character development with his new friends, then I’d say they would need to commit some time to watching probably all of the episodes from all of the seasons. Otherwise, I think this is a show that can be dropped into, which doesn’t make it bad, but it becomes a different kind of show.

Next Week: It looks like I will be initiating some survival strategies.

Seeing as I had no confidence in the summer season, I decided to invent a backlog of shows to watch from one of three different areas. The eleventh anime on this list was Mawaru Penguindrum, which aired in the summer of 2011. I had previously watched the only the last episode back in a strange period for this blog. I watched the show over a period of a few days, and these are my thoughts on it.

Like many people who have watched Penguindrum, I was a little confused by what exactly it was trying to be. This show happens to be the first one I’ve completed that was directed by Ikuhara Kunihiko, so I went in with the little knowledge of how his directorial style was though through the grapevine and that last episode, I knew it was full of symbolism. I think I ultimately came out of it thinking that this was a show that was ultimately torn between trying to be fun to watch and taking on deep issues. I’m not at all convinced it succeeded at either.

So the story itself revolves around the brothers Takakura, Shouma and Kanba, who one afternoon take their terminally ill younger sister Himari out to the aquarium one day. They watch the penguins, Shouma buys her a funny looking hat, then she collapses and dies in front of the penguins. Then at the hospital, the hat finds its way onto her and she’s alive again under mysterious circumstances. Under the control of the hat, Himari transforms into a different person and whisks whoever is around to another world where she orders them to do her bidding. Of particular interest to her is the Penguindrum.

At this point, the cast of characters starts to get a little crazy. There’s the three penguins that are invisible to everyone else that provide much of the comedy. Oginome Ringo, is an occult girl with an important object in her possession. She’s madly in love with a teacher at the brothers’ school, Takara Keiju, who is in a relationship with the stage actress Tokikago Yuri. There’s also Natsume Masako, a girl who is trying to crush something at all times if it has to do with Kanba. These characters are progressively crazier than the previous ones, but they play important roles in the story.

That story can really be broken into 2 parts. The first is really the most heavily comedic section and it lasts until roughly the end of the 11th episode. It’s mainly Shouma doing things with Ringo to try to get the diary that she possesses that he thinks is the Penguindrum, while she’s trying to get with his teacher. Kanba, on the other hand, is making money in mysterious unspecified ways while being a ladykiller until Masako goes after him since they have a long-running history. I actually liked Penguindrum the most at this part, but it wasn’t really trying to achieve anything by simply being fun.

So with that in mind, the 12th episode began with the story of what happened to the Takakura’s mysteriously absent parents. I can’t put this a better way than to say that it’s a thinly-veiled re-enactment of the 1995 terrorist attack on the Tokyo subway with bombs instead of sarin gas. I think the best way to describe the rest of the show is with the following sentence: Life is unbelievably cruel to those who do not deserve cruelty and the best thing that people can do is to do whatever it takes to ensure the survival of those they love even at the cost of their own existence.

Kanba and Shouma spare no effort in trying to save Himari’s life throughout the show. The former even turns to the remnants of their parents’ organization for money to pay for treatment. Shouma, on the other hand, is caught in the terrible position of trying to save everyone but doing a terrible job at it until the very end. However, through all of this the show continues to try to be funny. I think it became a little too much as Masako was trying to tell Himari her true past while the pair of them exchanged forehead lens flare with each passing shot. And that last episode proved to be ultimately quite depressing with a second viewing as well.

What did I get out of really watching Penguindrum for the first time? It is completely possible to symbolize the larger meaning of a story out of existence. Simply layering symbol on top of symbol to try to disguise that you really want to have a story about the children of those who commit terrible acts means that the symbols themselves become more important than the story. The giant statue that was symbolic of Yuri’s father’s power doesn’t matter once it’s actually Tokyo Tower. “How did it become that?,” is not the question I should be asking after seeing that scene. Then there’s the Child Broiler portions which was about the children in society with no hope, yet is portrayed in such a childish way that it’s pretty dumb now that I think about it.

That’s not to say that I think Penguindrum is a bad show. I think it just got caught in the trap of telling a story with the wrong tone and set of characters. It’s as though Schindler’s List had Liam Neeson randomly punching people like he does in films nowadays, and with a laugh track at times. I think it should still be applauded for the concepts it tries to tackle despite that. I would still recommend this show to some people depending on the types of shows that they do watch, but with the caveats that I’ve stated before. Finally, there’s the one measure that really counts. After watching this, I’m less likely than I was before to try to watch Utena.

Next Week: A group of bespectacled young men form a social organization for the purpose of achieving their shared dream.

Seeing as I had no confidence in the summer season, I decided to invent a backlog of shows to watch from one of three different areas. The twelfth anime on this list was Meganebu!, which aired in the fall of 2013. I had previously watched the first two episodes of this anime before dropping it. I watched the show over a period of a two days, and these are my thoughts on it.As I was nearing the end of watching this high school comedy, I came to realize that I wasn’t remembering all that much about what I was watching. For a 12 episode series, I think it is pretty incredible that it could achieve such an amount of monotony in a short amount of time. So I came out of it with about 3 moments that I could really remember. Since this will also become a point of the conversation on this show, no, I was not playing Football Manager or doing anything else distracting.

There is one overarching plot in Meganebu! The group of four/five (depending on whether you count no-lens hipster Hayato as a member, I don’t), are part of a club at their high school and they are hoping to build a pair of functional X-ray glasses, so they can look at the women who aren’t really a part of the show. Along the way they get into all sorts of mishaps and run into problems with teachers and fellow students. The other notable feature of this show is the color palette. There is so much neon that I was wondering if I was watching the Wachowski brothers take on Speed Racer.

As far as the characters are concerned, Hayato is a terrible person as highlighted above, but there’s little depth to any of the other characters. Akira is the leader of the group and he’s really just an idiot. Mitsuki is the youngest member of the group, but all he does is try to get noticed by senpai. Yukiya and Takuma are the other members and even after watching the show all I can say about them is that they exist. I think I noticed the student council members more since Tooru was tsundere for the club. The others have weird names that made them stand out like Lorenzo, Antonio and Maximilian.

Now as far as the stuff that I did appreciate from this series; there were all of two of those. The first was in the sixth episode when the group is riding a train over to the next town and they decide to compete on who can hold a ridiculous pose the longest as they ride. It’s probably the most silly moment in the show. The other is the rather left field Jumanji parody because it was not as though that was something recent to reference.

I guess in the end I can’t really recommend this to anyone other than those who want to watch silly forgettable comedy that just passes one by. I think this show could have worked as one of those 5 minute short shows as that would have allowed them to showcase the best jokes in the series, but this is far too dragged out.

Next Week: This feature wraps up with…color-coordinated middle school butts. Really Random Number Generator!? (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)

Seeing as I had no confidence in the summer season, I decided to invent a backlog of shows to watch from one of three different areas. The thirteenth and final anime on this list was Vividred Operation, which aired in the winter of 2013. I had previously watched the first and sixth episodes of this anime before in the course of dropping it twice. I watched the show over a period of a week, and these are my thoughts on it.

When one thinks about the director of something, whether that’s a film, TV series or in this case Vividred Operation; there are a few out there that have directorial trademarks. That could be something like using certain actors, or dutch angling the hell out of a scene or neck breaking character expressions. For Takamura Kazuhiro, the director of Vividred Operation (and coincidentally the record holder for my fastest ever drop Strike Witches), that happens to be low-angle shots of middle school girls. If ever there was an advanced statistic of Directorial Value over Replacement, Takamura would surely finish in the negative after this effort.

I’m going to just quickly go over what anyone really needs to know about Vividred Operation from a serious perspective. The series is set in a world where a new power source has solved all energy problems on Earth and it is housed in a place called Blue Island. Akane is one of the inhabitants there and her eccentric grandfather created this magnificent device. However, all is not well as mysterious creatures called the Alone try to attack. So using another of her grandfather’s inventions, she fights them along with a few friends that she finds along the way. All the while, she tries to make friends with a mysterious girl that happens to be serving a talking crow that is behind everything.

As far as what Vividred Operation does well, it does a pretty good job to sticking to a villain of the week approach, even in the middle filler episodes. It all builds up to a nice crescendo at the end when the entire universe is threatened by the final boss villain. The characters themselves aren’t intentionally pandering to the audience with the exception of the beach episode. Also, I can safely say that I was never bored while watching the show, even though I did not really marathon this.

On the downside as far as the story is concerned is really just the conclusion and how it is set up. The main villain throughout the show was telling Rei, the mysterious girl who gets close to the rest of the group, that she needed to fire these arrows that strengthened the Alone so that she could have her own world restored. She gets down to three arrows remaining when the villain consumes Rei and takes on final boss form. When one really thinks about it, why the hell didn’t they just do that from the start? Also, why is that damn crow such a troll by saying they were judging Earth on not killing Rei because she is a threat, then saying they weren’t allowed to pass anyway? It’s also worth asking why the Vividred transformation is only present for about 2 minutes the whole series.

So back to Takamura and what he takes away from this series. I don’t think there were the materials to make this any more than a solid, above average show about friendship between girls with plenty of light moments. Yet, at the end of it, I couldn’t help but feel a little dirty for having enjoyed it because of his heavy use of low-angle shot behind middle school girls. Like the kendo girl Wakaba is just having a normal conversation with the otaku of the group Himawari. No boys involved in this conversation that makes Vividred Operation a show that complies with the Bechdel test. So I don’t know if he got bored at all or thought his audience is entirely hormonally out of control 13 year old boys, but he decided that this conversation had to take place as viewed from a low angle from behind one of the girls.

I guess that’s really all I have to say about Vividred Operation. It’s a show that can be funny to watch at times. It’s fairly solid as long as one doesn’t think about the plot too deeply in depth at the end. Yet, the director is willing to sacrifice the quality of the work because he thinks his own show is boring and needs middle school girls’ asses on screen as much as possible. It’s only for that last sentence alone that I wouldn’t recommend this show to anyone who should be part of the target audience of this show.

I’ve run into a little problem with the current slate of shows and I can only really briefly describe it in this one sentence: Despite the crop of shows this season being considered to be solid by the vast majority of people I talk to, I cannot bring myself to say anything other than “meh” about this season. I’m well aware that it is early days yet, but having casually dismissed the most popular and well-received of this season’s shows has only led to yet another bout of questioning exactly where I am in terms of the medium.

I don’t think I missed out from not writing about the slate of shows that aired in the summer since I don’t think anyone really talks about them anymore. So I dived straight back into the pool this season and I wasn’t really excited to be there. Maybe if I do this show-by-show it will make more sense:

Akatsuki no Yona – The protagonist seemed to flawed from the start to make the transformation into battle-hardened warrior princess believable.
Cross Ange – So much glee taken in the female protagonist’s downfall that I was shocked Urobuchi had nothing to do with this.
Donten ni Warau – That scene in the market, no, just no.
Garo – Exposition in the middle of sex was an interesting gambit, though it didn’t really pay off.
G-Reco and Build Fighters – I think I’m afraid to go back to this franchise now since I’ve really gone off the path of mecha.
Parasyte – It was kind of boring throughout with it seeming to Horror Pokemon with the protagonist drawing the desperately unlucky Midori Days inspired monster.
Wolf Girl – Every character in this show is bad and should be ashamed to be so bad.
Bahamut – I just felt like it was pandering and not in an interesting way.
World Trigger – Again, this was boring, but I don’t think I’m in the target demographic here.

Like this, only less eye candy.

Most of these shows have devout followings on social media, and I’ve basically gone and told them that their favorites of the season are so bad that they aren’t worth fully explaining why they are so bad. I simply can’t muster the enthusiasm about shows I do like because I don’t think there’s really a 9/10 show this season. I don’t think there are any 8/10 shows this season for that matter too. So if I do the same thing for shows I do think positively of:

Amagi Brilliant Park – I think I may like this show as it is kind of fun.
Daitoshokan – This feels like a harem show with a heart of gold, unironically.
Inou-Battle – I’m pretty sure this is the longest I’ve watched a Trigger show without reaching to close the browser window.
Grisaia – It’s painful to watch at times, but it seems like interesting things will happen eventually.
Madan – Aren’t shows like this supposed to be terrible?
Trinity Seven – I like it, but do I really like it?

I have other shows in the middle of this divide this season, but I don’t think any show wants to be the most ‘meh’ of my selection of ‘meh’. It’s just better to be terrible than to be ordinary and forgettable. Maybe that should be the new tagline for this site…

I think ultimately, the biggest problem I have is when it comes to my attitude to a show like Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso. I haven’t actually watched it. I haven’t watched it because I can’t hate a show that I haven’t watched. That in itself is my biggest problem. I think when I’ve put myself in positions where I’ve really disliked or liked shows I’ve generally been met with the equivalent of blank stares. It’s fully deserved and now I’m afraid to even put myself in a position beyond saying “it was okay” or “I guess I didn’t it like it so much” to even “no comment” when I really want to say some really bad things.

I conclude this particular post by saying that it may take a long time before I’m actually truly confident in expressing how I feel about certain things. It could be a few weeks, months, years or even never, but I have to at least attempt to get back to that place again.

There haven’t been many posts by me recently. The main reason for that comes down to the whole idea of having fun. If I’m not having fun with whatever I’m watching it will definitely come through like that on the post. I will be perfectly honest in saying that I’m not having very much fun recently. This particular blog, like almost all of the things I am involved with in my everyday life has always been a solo project. I think all of that has really started to take a toll on me recently. Work hasn’t been fun¹ and everything else has sort of felt like work. I keep telling myself “just get to the end of November and everything will be fine,” but will it?

Rather than wasting more of your time on personal issues that none of you care about², I’m going to go the anime contrarian/hipster³ route and talk about some of the shows this season that you are not watching.

Bonjour♪Sweet Love Patisserie⁴ is the first show I want to talk about. Now you may be asking yourself, “Why is Emperor J watching a shoujo harem short series?” and that would be a perfectly valid question. I really want to say it was because I was looking for a show that featured a strong female character able to be herself while attracting suitors because so-called “reverse harem”⁵ series tend to give more life to their lead characters. Actually, it’s because I just wanted a nice looking show that I could knock out in 5 minutes.

To give a brief feel for how this show works, all you need to know is that Sayuri is enrolled in a culinary school as a scholarship student where illicit relationships are banned. She’s taunted and feels inferior to the rest of the students for being the only member of the poors at the school. Fortunately, she has the attention of the attractive teachers who seem to be attracted to her because audience demands.

The reason I bring this up is because the recent 5th episode finally got away from that. She just has a fun day with token Frenchman and doesn’t worry about her own status at the school. It served as an escape from the dumb seriousness that made up the previous 4 episodes. The whole watching as a means of escapism was fulfilled by this episode.

Then there’s fun escapism through absurdity and you get tons of that through The Fruit of Grisaia. The recent sixth episode of the series was filled with plenty of that in the resolution. The best part was how deadly serious the characters were as the episode escalated with almost Too Many Cooks⁶ efficiency.

So the short story about this particular harem series is that the protagonist Yuuji with professional hitman levels of resources goes through each of the troubled girl’s routes to resolution. This week it was Senjougahara clone Yumiko whose father wants her to be groomed to take over the family enterprise. However, she spent most of her youth haunted by the fact her father desperately wanted a male heir and didn’t care about her mother’s health in the process. The final straw before she turned ultraviolent with a box cutter was her mother wishing she was a boy instead.

The progression of the episode pretty much plays out like stabbing, horrible family situation, pulling a gun, then a grenade, an explosion with a fake body and Yuuji manufacturing a new life for her out of nowhere. It’s just all so fast, especially with the fake dead body reveal that it’s comical. Something so horrifying should not be so funny, but that’s why I like Grisaia after all.

Because the Sega Hard Girls are quite funny at times, I’m also watching Hi-sCool! Seha Girls. I actually think that the Virtua Fighter episode will end up being one of my favorite episodes of the 2nd half of the year. I’m also a fan of how self-aware the whole show is when they are in one of the games. On the downside, there’s the 25% of the time that they are not in a game and that’s usually quite dreadful in as far as making fun of Sega Saturn’s taste in men. What can I say, you take the bad with the good.

Finally I’m going to wrap this up with some Twintail. The final member finally joined this ridiculous team of people who having fun while sporting twin tails and powered armored suits. Honestly, I would be watching it if it was simply the protagonist Souji and Thuearle⁷ messing around with everyone else and there was no plot. The story itself is just monster of the week who has a particular attribute they like in girls in addition to twin tails. Honestly, no one really watches Twintail for the plot. They watch it for the fun that comes with each passing episode. May it continue for the rest of the series.

I’m going to wrap all of this up by saying that I really do hope things will get better by the end of the month⁸. At that point, I can finally get the Favorite Anime post that has been sitting around for almost 5 months done and I can get you guys some different posts for 12 Days and Secret Santa seasons. Also, be sure to check out some of my recent appearances on the Friday Anime Podcast. For everyone else out there who doesn’t care about anything I’ve written about today, just have fun out there.

^{1 – Having fun is part of my employer’s mission statement.
2 – I would go for a lower number than zero, but I’m pretty sure this is impossible.
3 – I try not to be, honestly, but I like what I like.
4 – I am not a fan of trying to put weird characters in titles.
5 – There is no such thing as a “reverse harem” because they are all harems to begin with.
6 – There’s too much potential for overanalyzing this particular video. It’s probably best just to leave it alone in its crazy place.
7 – The Licensing Company That Shall Not Be Named prefers a different spelling of this character’s name. Fuck them I’m going with this out of spite.
8 – It isn’t.}

This was a long time ago and I once thought it could be a regular fixture.

I’m a person who is generally in two different camps of fandom. For most people in the anime group, I think that ends up being anime and some form of gaming. For me seeing as the title of this blog is Lower Mid-Table, that has always been anime and football of the association variety. (Note: I generally just call it football on my own, but I let context of conversation determine whether I go for soccer or not. I’m not against calling it soccer by any means.) I’m going to date myself very heavily here and say that I really started getting into it around the turn of the millennium.

One of the things that really makes someone get into this particular sport is to pick a team. The English Premier League was about the only league that even had a highlights package airing in the US at the time, while MLS games at the time were played in sparsely attended giant stadiums with the exception of Columbus. With newly-promoted Ipswich Town  putting up a challenge for a Champions League place in 2000-01, they seemed like a fun team to choose. How I sometimes wish I had chosen differently!

What followed the next season was a few rounds in the then UEFA Cup, getting knocked out by Inter Milan, and ending the season in the bottom three. But you know what, I was invested in this fandom enough to want to really be involved anyway. Reading about winning the title in the club’s first ever season in the top flight, the FA and UEFA Cup wins, even being on the wrong end of the biggest defeat in the Premier League were facts I had to absorb.

All in all, it’s proven to be a decent conversation starter with people I’ve met from or in the UK, or why there would be a person at an anime convention wearing an Ipswich Town shirt. As the sport has become more popular over here, it’s become much easier to talk about with every day people. Being supported by major broadcasters at times of the day when people are normally wake helps with that thing. The only point of embarrassment that comes from talking about my own fandom is mentioning that the club I support has been stuck in the second tier for 13 years and having to explain promotion and relegation to some groups of new American supporters of clubs that will never be in danger of not playing in the Premier League.

In contrast, there’s anime fandom. One must always suppress power levels or whatever that bullshit is called. At least in the US, I would safely say that more people watch some anime than watch any soccer. Yet, the idea of liking it has this perception that it must be carefully revealed only to other fans. There’s at least 2.5% of the population here that is staying up late on Saturday nights to watch, but it seems to be stuck in only willing to be underground.

I say all of this because I really just want to be able to express who I really am in public. I don’t think the consequences of doing so will be terrible other than possibly losing my job, but even if that wasn’t a problem I probably would keep it hidden. It shouldn’t just be a realm of socially isolated college students and dicks who harass people on Twitter. I would like it more mainstream, that’s all.

This is how at least 80% of anime bloggers manage to make it through the shows they write about.

There’s a stereotype out there that if one blogs about anime they will eventually come to hate that which they watch. Paradoxically, this also makes them more popular with readers. Now I have been doing this blogging thing off-and-on for more than six years now and I can’t really say I’ve come to hate it any more than I did at the start. Does that also explain my perpetual lack of readership to this blog more than anything else?

Writing about any sort of visual medium tends to break down into three different types in my opinion. First is the completely neutral factual approach. That would be taking the Wikipedia approach and saying something like “Sora no Method was created and written by Hisaya Naoki who also worked on Kanon while at Key.” Nothing controversial about that style, but it’s probably the most useful in general. Second is more of a constructive criticism approach along the lines of “Sora no Method is written by Hisaya Naoki and while promising at the beginning fails to live up to the standard of his past works.” That’s pretty straightforward as well, but it can seem a little too forgiving of a series where a reader might be looking for a black or white opinion. Finally, there’s the full on advocacy/hatred angle which would look like “Sora no Method is yet another fantastic show from former Key writer Hisaya Naoki that will appeal to everyone who has taste/Sora no Method is yet another crap work written by Hisaya Naoki since he learned from Satan incarnate Maeda Jun.” That last approach will appeal to a larger audience than any of the others for the simplicity. It also does not make it any less valid a way of making a point either. If a writer loves/hates/is mixed about a show, they can go whatever direction they want.

So when it comes to shows that have been covered by myself over the years, I’ve been largely neutral with a few exceptions. For instance, when I wrote about Koichoco a few years back, I really did not like the show by the end of it. I really wanted it to be better the whole time, but it let me down. I still felt that the experience of watching it and the fun challenge I had in writing one particular post left me feeling that I was a better viewer for having watched it. So I hedged a bit on the opinion and probably felt that I didn’t convey my thoughts on the whole show with a sufficient edge to reflect how much I did not like it after all.

To conclude this particular post, I will just answer my own questions. Do anime bloggers hate the anime they watch? A good number do and probably feel pressure to continue watching those shows because they get the most views/comments from readers. Does that make them more popular because they hate them? I would argue instead that they are better able to reflect an opinion that many people hold, so it draws readers to them. Does my lack of loving/hating certain anime make me less popular? It clearly does not since while I can start writing hate posts about Kill La Kill or Space Dandy all I want, my opinion does not hold much weight, nor am I really putting that much work into expressing a contrary opinion.