We’ve been hearing a lot of it lately, at least from the more gurgly and questionable-smelling corners of the internet – a demand for “objective reviews.” Reviews that leave politics at the door, and simply give audiences an untainted appraisal of some media property. If you read my stuff at all regularly, I’m sure you can take a guess as to my thoughts on the validity of this request – given how often I stress the variability of personal experience, art experience, and critical evaluation, it should come as no surprise that I find this demand pretty misguided. But it keeps coming up, and it actually reflects on a number of more interesting elements of both how we parse media and how media is constructed, and so I figured I’d take my own shot at the topic. So let’s get down and dirty with objectivity in criticism!
Category Archives: Essay
Fullmetal Alchemist and the Promise of Power
Management: This piece is about the 2003 series. Please refrain from or at least clearly mark spoilers regarding Brotherhood in the comments!
Alchemy is the promise of power.
That doesn’t sound particularly profound – it sounds obvious, actually. Clearly stories of alchemy are stories of men of science attempting to harness the unharnessable, to make the laws of the universe bend to their will, to achieve great things. But in the case of Fullmetal Alchemist, “power” doesn’t necessarily mean “strength” or “possibility.” Power can simply mean knowing your strength exists, and the world is a place you have the chance to affect.
Alchemy is the promise of control.
Cross Game and My Father
I’ve never been much of a sports guy.
Shocking, I know. Somehow, my appreciation of boys kicking or throwing various projectiles could never quite match my love of writing, videogames, and Japanese cartoons. I stayed inside, I played Zelda, I chortled while talking about the “jocks” playing sportball. I was above all that.
The Flowers of Evil – Review
Oh man, this was something. This was actually the first work I was assigned to review on ANN, but it took me a while to get around to it and a while to get through it. Flowers of Evil is a heavy, oppressive thing, but it’s so, sooo good. I did my best to capture what makes it such a rich experience in my review, and would recommend anyone who’s heard mixed things to at least give it a shot. It’s a pretty tremendous show.
Here’s my full ANN review. My copious episodic notes are below!
Plots Twists and Other Parlor Tricks
Look at this rabbit in my hand. See the rabbit? Surprise! It’s actually a turtle.
Pretty impressive, huh?
Alright, maybe that one didn’t work on you. How about this one. Look at this character – she’s just a mild-mannered high school student, right? Surprise! She’s actually an evil wizard.
Still nothing? Hm.
Okay, one more. Look at this upbeat, slice of life story. Got a good picture of it? Surprise! It’s actually a dystopian sci-fi drama.
Alright, you get the picture. Let’s talk about plot twists.
Terror in Resonance and the Shadow Children
“When heaven has a line around the corner,
we shouldn’t have to wait around and hope to get in
if we can carpenter a home in our heart right now
and carve a palace from within.”
– The Antlers“Tramps like us, baby we were born to run.”
– Bruce Springsteen
The world is against us, but the world is at our backs. The future could be ours, or there might just not be a future. There’s no “outside” of what we’re escaping, but we move forward anyway. Our only certainties are the wind, the darkness, and the distant horizon.
We live in the shadow of a great and terrible machine. That’s Terror in Resonance’s opening assumption; an assumption the show often takes very literally. Its characters weave in and out of society’s sunlit face and shadowed reality, and the rigidity of our modern social order is perhaps the show’s single constant antagonist. Whether they struggle against it or accept its presence, it is always there, always dictating the lives they may live. Terror in Resonance is a story of adolescent rebellion and societal alienation. It is a story of what the world demands of us, and what we become in its eyes. It is a story of anyone who is cast as a child by the world, and of the things only children can do.
Hanamonogatari and the Crossroads
“When they love you, and they will
Tell ‘em all they’ll love in my shadow.
And if they try to slow you down
Tell ‘em all to go to hell.”
– Japandroids
Kanbaru knew who she was, once. She was a runner. A basketball star. A girl in love. She was somebody, at least – a specific person. There were things typical of her; she knew where she stood and where she was running to. But at the beginning of Hanamonogatari, her path has shifted from a fixed track to an open field – her past offers no clues, her future holds no direction. She’s not a basketball star anymore. Her schoolgirl crush has shifted to respect for an absent friend. All that’s left now are hard choices, and a heavy rain of insistent, contradictory advice.
Your Taste is Bad and So Are You
“Some nights it’s just entertainment, and some other nights it’s real.”
– The Hold Steady“Your favorite anime is SHIT. SHIIIIIIIT.”
– The Internet
“Do you think that, when making an evaluation on a piece of media, you are in part making some statement about those who enjoy that media?”
That was the question that prompted this post, and it really stumped me for a long, long time. The knee-jerk reaction is “no, that’s not true – people all like different things, and they have the right to like whatever they want.” But that’s really just avoiding the question, right? Yes, people have the right to like, say, an incredibly racist fantasy about how Hitler was right. But when I say “agree to disagree” to a fan, aren’t I silently adding “you crazy racist fucker”?
Sort of. Maybe? It’s not that simple.
“It’s not that simple” was my answer at the time. “This deserves a whole essay’s worth of elaboration.” And it’s true! Both of those things are true. Our relationship with media is complex – what we like doesn’t wholly define us, but it also isn’t completely apart from who we are. It says something. It means something. But it doesn’t have to mean that much, and we don’t have to take these criticisms personally. Or maybe we should take them a little personally, and that’s actually kind of important. Maybe we should learn to think a little less of ourselves than we do.
Here’s what I think.
Imperfect Beings: Hunter x Hunter and the Chimera Ant
Humanity is an imperfect species. Actually, that’s putting it very generously – humanity is a deeply flawed species. We’re selfish and self-destructive, ignorant to the point of blindness, arrogant to the point of madness. It’s almost a wonder we’ve come so far, or at least that we haven’t destroyed ourselves along the way. For all our triumphs, every advantage of our intelligence and self-awareness is also reflected countless times in insane invention, in total megalomania. We are our own worst enemy.
In light of this, it seems somewhat reasonable to consider the possibility of a do-over. Perhaps another species could do better than us – perhaps a species more interested in its own collective survival, and more able to coherently absorb the lessons of its forebearers. Perhaps a species somewhat more animal, more willing to be part of a grand organism than a wild, unpredictable individual. Perhaps such a species deserves that chance. Or perhaps such a species doesn’t even need to be offered a chance – if we were ever put against a creation that combined humanity’s intelligence and strength with an animalistic unity of purpose, would we even stand a chance?
Chimera Ant is a story about that question – or at least, about that question and a number of others. It catalogs the rise of the (surprise) Chimera Ants, a species that continuously evolves, absorbing the quirks and powers of any species it consumes. The queen of the Ants wishes to build a Perfect Being – the ultimate animal, destined to rule over all others. In order to do that, she constructs her child out of the best pieces available – and in the first of Chimera Ant’s many strange reflections, the construction of a Perfect Being end up requiring a great deal of flawed, self-involved, self-destructive human beings. As her army of Ants grows, their human DNA becomes more and more prominent, and the “imperfections” of human nature become more and more apparent in their behavior. “Fortunately,” this intermingling of human and ant instincts isn’t restricted solely to one side – as Chimera Ant unfolds, even the humans begin to demonstrate that ant nature isn’t perhaps quite so inhuman as it seems. And by the end…
Well, I’ll get to that. For now, let’s start by setting the stage.
The Rising Tide: Madoka Rebellion and Communal Culture
“And I / I disowned my / own family
All for love / All for love.”
The Lake – Typhoon
I’ve been planning on writing about Madoka Rebellion for a long time now, but Rebellion really hasn’t made it easy for me. It’s a strange beast – both reflective of Madoka Magica and totally apart from it, a continuation in some ways, a betrayal in others. Though you can certainly critique it as a film in its own right, it only really unfolds when you put it in context – and when a film’s context is “an emerging sea change in the process of media engagement,” it can be kinda hard to sum up the film as Good or Bad! If you’re looking for a simple takeaway, I believe Rebellion is a beautiful film and a terrible sequel – but why that is, and what its existence actually reflects, will take a little unpacking to explain. To understand Rebellion, you really have to understand Madoka Magica – so let’s begin there, with the series that started it all.