Fall 2013 – Week 12 in Review

Somewhat busy with family time at the moment (I got nice things!), but not so busy I can’t run down a tumultuous week in anime! Shows ending, shows immolating, some satisfying finales and some dramatic lead-ins to second cours. Presents for everyone this holiday season.

Kyousogiga 10: Kyousogiga did it. I was worried a couple episodes ago – worried the show would start focusing on its world-destroying conflicts, worried the family story would get lost in the shuffle. Well, this last episode featured a long, enlightening discussion between the parents, a heartfelt plea from sister to brother, a surprise appearance by grandpa, and a joyous reunion between three generations of gods. This finale was family as fuck. And so yeah, it worked – Koto’s definition of love ended up bringing both her brother and her father back from the brink, and the whole godhood issue ended up being a very neat metaphor for the general expectations and insecurities parents instill in their children. In retrospect, perhaps my favorite thing about the finale was how few answers it actually provided. When Myoue wishes to kill himself, he’s brought back not by a sudden infusion of purpose, but because his sister doesn’t want him to go away. When Inari asks what purpose he serves in living, his father replies “what’s wrong with just living?” The show refuses to diminish itself with optimistic platitudes – it simply says that family involves both selfish and selfless love, and displays the joy of family not through an overt declaration or character shift, but through the many beautiful moments scattered throughout.

Anyway. Wonderful show, clearly one of the best of the year, would be one of the best in any year. Happy to see it finish strong.

Kyousogiga

Kyoukai no Kanata 12: That wasn’t very kind of me, was it? Putting KnK right after Kyousogiga? Well, this finale deserves it – deserves any and all vitriol you could possibly think to spit at it. Holy shit was it a mess. A glorious, egregious, kind of insultingly manipulative and amateurish mess. A series of meaningless fight scenes with no weight or purpose whatsoever. Perhaps some of the worst-directed action sequences I’ve ever seen. Characters literally stating their motivation because they’ve been so underserved by the show so far that otherwise their presence would be meaningless. Other characters establishing meaningless reveals with no actual emotional relevance to the story, baiting a sequel the show clearly doesn’t deserve. Other characters simply not being addressed at all, and apparently forgotten by the narrative. A rapid-fire sequence desperate to add themes the show never explored, followed by a Key-level undramatic farewell. Topped off with a saccharine, insultingly contrived deus ex machina epilogue.

Frankly, I loved it. If this week had an APR, this episode would be on it – I don’t think I’ve ever laughed harder or more continuously at a work failing so consistently in such a wide variety of ways. The last couple episodes of KnK had a bunch of legitimately strong material, but this… this was a masterpiece of fail. I’m still kind of stunned it even exists. Congratulations KyoAni, after this consistently awful year, I no longer expect good things from you at all.

Kyoukai no Kanata

Samurai Flamenco 11: Screw Kickass, we Sentai now. I was just getting used to our post-Guillotine Gorilla reality, too – sure, it was no longer possible to really take the characters seriously, but it was still grounded often enough to strive at actual points about desensitization, the false simplicity of heroism, and media culture. But this episode was just a lucid fucking dream – an actual sentai reality, played entirely straight, complete with secret robots sponsored by the government and an alien menace that shoots music videos for its own villains. Personally I found this episode pretty hilarious in a “holy shit they’re really doing this” kind of way, but I can certainly see why people have been jumping ship. This episode was about nothing and featured no human beings – it was pure, unvarnished comedy. Which is fine, but the show didn’t start out that way. The show will of course return to something closer to the characters and reality it originally established, but every absurdist flourish makes anything grounded that much harder to square. I’m incredibly interested in seeing where they go from here, and that’s not all schadenfreude – I think they can write themselves out of this mess, and now I really want to see how they do it.

Samurai Flamenco

Monogatari S2 25: Another fantastic episode of one of my favorite shows featuring all my favorite characters. Hanekawa further proved how far she has come from her initial appearance, winning over Kaiki with the ease of actual self-assurance. Kaiki and Senjougahara shared another sniping conversation, with her insecurity and his general Kaiki-ness resulting in adorably hurt feelings on both sides. And Kaiki was actually (possibly) broken down by Ononoki – his current determination revealed to be an attempt to make up for past mistakes. Kaiki’s only proven more fascinating as this arc has progressed – in spite of his general deadpan swagger, he’s shown a variety of feelings towards Senjougahara, Hanekawa, Nadeko, Nadeko’s parents, and anyone else who’s crossed his path. Though he plays the callous deceiver, it seems Gaen’s view of him as the most sensitive of the professionals might be closer to the truth – if his own words can be believed, it’s the fact that someone as vulnerable as Senjougahara can make it in the world that makes it a place worth inhabiting. That kind of emotional honesty is the sort of thing you often get from characters just before they die, and Kaiki’s certainly in a tight spot at the moment – I’d really prefer to follow him on further adventures, but if he does die here, it will be the capstone of a standout arc in the Monogatari canon.

Monogatari

Log Horizon 12: Remember when I could barely remember what happened in episodes of Nagi no Asukara? Log Horizon is like that, except it’s not just that it doesn’t appeal to me, it’s just mediocre material. Surprisingly, it was the Adventurer Kids Club journey into the big cave that actually worked this time – it wasn’t great, but it actually played off MMO gameplay in ways that wrung an “I hear that” chuckle out of me (which is, admittedly, a very low form of comedy). Meanwhile, characters spent a good deal of time talking about either nothing or obvious things over at strategery central. It takes very little energy to watch this show, but I’m still feeling inclined to drop it.

White Album 2 12: After two straight episodes of heartbreaking Touma backstory, I suppose she earned this one. It was interesting to me to hear people on twitter talking about how they found all three of this show’s protagonists to be profoundly selfish people. That’s technically true, I suppose, but… well, maybe this just means I’m a bad person, but I find these characters much more realistic and human than Nagi no Asukara’s, and I actually think those are solid characters too. They’re weak, selfish, insecure teenagers – they don’t really want to hurt each other, but they’re ruled by smaller, messier things than the Grand Spirit of Friendship here. It’s their weakness that makes me like them, actually – just like how I find shows that are wholly optimistic either meaningless or overtly manipulative, I find characters that are wholly good just profoundly uninteresting. “Do your best” is a meaningless phrase outside of the context of someone who often doesn’t do their best, who often fails, through weakness or selfishness or fear. And these characters are weak and selfish and afraid, and I love all of them.

White Album 2

Kill la Kill 12: I was actually kinda underwhelmed by this episode. Yeah, we got some actual revelations about Ryuuko’s father, and yeah, the scale finally shifted from attacking the school to a broader conflict. But I expected more – either a very satisfying fight (this fight seemed too explosion-happy to me, with no real back-and-forth), or a revelation of what the actual deal is with Satsuki’s mother. Mako speeches are wonderful, and this was a great episode for Mako speeches, but I think I’m mainly tired of Ryuuko and Satsuki not being an uneasy buddy cop duo. Ryuuko, cut the belligerence for a minute. You two work together or you’re off the case.

Kill la Kill

Nagi no Asukara 12: Great, great episode of Nagi no Asukara – the best since the first Akari one, and that was one of the standout episodes of the season. The drama that’s been tightly wound for eleven straight episodes is springing free in a series of sharp revelations, and over it all hangs the threat of separation and the chilling ambiguity of the long sleep. In spite of all the tween melodrama, I actually think Hikari’s dad kind of stole the show this time – he’s a man of few words, but his expressions and actions continuously show how deeply he cares for his kids, and how hard he’s struggling to adapt to a new reality for their sake. This is turning out to be a very impressive show, and I have high hopes for the second half.

Nagi no Asukara

16 thoughts on “Fall 2013 – Week 12 in Review

  1. I liked Kyousougiga’s finale, but I’m still disappointed that a lot of the stuff that filled me with wonder for the series from the original PV way back in 2011 was cut.

    You should watch it now if you haven’t already

    • Wow, that’s fascinating. I can see why they couldn’t include the material, though – that basically PV reads as the sparknotes of an entirely different show, one more focused on mystery and action. I’m guessing they fiddled with the show’s priorities some time after that was created.

    • Oh, and I missed it the first time I watched it so I should mention it, but the gibberish in the middle of the song is actually an Engrish version of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky.

  2. ” but I think I’m mainly tired of Ryuuko and Satsuki not being an uneasy buddy cop duo.” Same here, while I never believed that Satsuki would become the protagonist of the second half I was expecting her and Ryuko to form an uneasy truce since to me it feels like Satsuki doesn’t like her parents, who were obviously going to be connected to Dr. Matoi’s death, and that the two would team up to take them down. Honestly while I like the show I think that in some ways it bills itself as having a lot more complex plot “twists” than it actually does. Curious what it’ll do in the second half but I wonder where it’ll get it’s motivation from now that Ryuko’s arc has been halted.

    And also yes, that Kyousogiga PV is AMAZING, I’ve had some fun speculating what they changed and why (fun fact, when just that and the original OVA out the character design for Inari was Koto wearing his outfit, they changed it very slyly on the website right before the ONAs came out last year and I’ve always wondered what prompted such a major change).

    • Yeah, so far the big twist with Kill la Kill has been that there is no big twist – it’s exactly what it bills itself as. But this latest episode resolved enough that I’m hopeful things will kind of necessarily move faster now.

      That detail about Inari is interesting. If I were to take a wild guess, I’d say the original PV seems almost like a mystery told from Koto’s perspective, where both Inari and Mom Koto are reflections/versions of herself, and she’s trying to discover her own identity/how she became trapped in the Mirror Capital.

  3. I think a nice way to summarize Kyousogiga is that your family is your world and if you forget that there are these people who care about you, your world will fall apart. Not sure if this helps lol, but good luck on the review.

    The best part about the KnK finale is that it makes triggering the apocalypse with a car battery not that ridiculous in comparison.

    • Or perhaps that you shouldn’t rely on the world to be stable for your sake – you need to be strong to keep the world you care about stable. Really nice messages in that show.

      Yeah, the car battery was pretty great. At that point, I was pretty far beyond letting any random choice surprise me.

  4. I’m sorry, but Valvrave still beats KnK as a gloriously hilarious mess.
    Haruto’s father is the best :piece of (unintentionnnal ?) comedy of this year.

    • I disagree, while III wasn’t shocked by Haruto’s father, it also didn’t strike me as either funny or ridiculous, the moments he was in.

      Bob is also unable to comment on where Valvrave is, he never watched episode 10 and beyond.

  5. Pretty much my feelings exactly. I loved loved loved Kyousougiga’s finale and just the show in general (your writeups were a joy to read btw) and KnK’s finale was wonderful in all the wrong ways. I’m with you on KlK, kinda wish something major would have happened with either Satsuki’s mom or her relationship with Ryuuko. I haven’t been able to comment on Samurai Flamenco in a while, at this point I’m just tagging along for the ride. I’m not watching Log Horizon or Nagi, but I think I might pick White Album 2 up once it finishes…

    • I am very happy to not be actively blogging Samurai Flamenco – I can’t trust that show to be the same thing from one minute to the next, much less one EPISODE to the next.

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