Well, this one was definitely simpler than Nise. Simple enough that I figured this writeup would be redundant – but I looked around online and, surprisingly, I couldn’t find a piece that really dove into the central theme. I’d planned on working on my backlog, but…
Alright. Fine. Hey guys. It’s Bobduh. Let’s talk Nekomonogatari.
Question:
Many people seem extremely dismissive of otaku culture and anime in particular, claiming anime is an inferior cultural medium to books, movies, etc. How would you go about refuting this argument?
Management: As per usual, questions rewritten to better map to responses.
Question:
Why do all harem anime contain casts of unbelievable characters and avoid all long-lasting drama or relationship changes like the plague? Do we need a deconstruction of this genre to make it worth anything?
Someone Else’s Answer:
We had a deconstruction. It was called School Days.
Question:
From what I’ve heard, School Days doesn’t make the harem genre make sense in the way Madoka and Evangelion do – those shows make their genre elements make sense in the context of a specific world. Couldn’t there be a harem where the characters actually make sense as people in the same way?
Bobduh:
Evangelion and Madoka work not because they’re deconstructions, but because they’re good stories that happen to have the aesthetic trappings of certain genres. The fundamental nature of harems is to be unrealistic power fantasies, making good storytelling pretty close to impossible – if you make a harem with well-written, realistic characters and relationships, it generally ceases to be a harem and becomes a romance instead
Question:
But most anime romances seem to just be love triangles, where in the end the main character abandons the actually complementary romantic choice to stick with the weird/sickly/frail girl. I haven’t seen a single romance where the main character actively pursues both girls. What makes the “fundamental nature” of this genre less storytelling-friendly than magical girls or mecha? And how about The World God Only Knows, doesn’t that kind of work in this territory already?
Bobduh:
There are a few elements to discuss here, so I’ll take them one at a time.
First, you’re making some pretty broad assumptions about romance there. They’re not all about love triangles, and the nature of the characters involved is a lot more diverse than the setup you’ve outlined.
A romance anime where the MC actively courts both females
School Days probably is what you’re looking for – it’s pretty hard to have a protagonist remain sympathetic while willfully courting multiple women. School Days plays this straight; most harems play it for laughs, because in a realistic situation it comes off the way it actually is – dickish and narcissistic. The World God Only Knows only maintains sympathy for its protagonist and works on a narrative level by combining comedy, amnesia, and the fact that his harem-acquiring is based on an unrealistic, fantastical plot contrivance that forces him to act this way. It’s also self-aware and constantly draws attention to the tropey nature of anime characters, further distancing itself from reality. This is necessary; the closer this situation veers to reality, the closer it veers towards the MC being an asshole.
Fundamental nature of genres
The way I see this is that for magical girl shows it’s “girl transforms into frilly version of self with powers to fight evil.” With mechas, it’s “boy pilots giant robot.” Both these core concepts are silly, but they don’t inherently fight against good storytelling or characterization. Meanwhile, harems are fundamentally “boy/girl is surrounded by lovers who fight for their affection.” There are a lot more hoops you have to jump through to make a premise like that valid for a meaningful story – it’s not impossible, but it’s more of an inherently problematic premise than either of the other two, and seems very difficult to justify in a way that respects all of its characters and works towards a coherent and worthwhile point. I think School Days actually does this, but it does it by saying “all these characters are insecure and dependent, the MC is emotionally dead, and this genre is a rancid pit” – it doesn’t create a distinct story using the trappings, it just attacks its own genre.
Deconstructions
I honestly just don’t find deconstructions that interesting in the abstract. I don’t need a deconstruction to tell me that boys riding giant mechs is a silly idea – like I said originally, Evangelion and Madoka work because they are less interested in tearing down their genre than they are in telling great stories and saying meaningful things using some of the tools of those genres. To me, this is less deconstructing the genre than redeeming it – finding something meaningful to say with traditionally meaningless tools. I find School Days a lot less impressive than those works because (along with it having a much lower standard of aesthetic craft and storytelling) it never goes any further than tearing down its genre – but like I said, the harem genre is a very hard one to tell a great or meaningful story within, so perhaps that’s just the best a show can do with those raw materials.
Management: I’m aware I basically plot out the most standard possible genre piece here. The point was not to outline something potentially groundbreaking, it was to illustrate the amount of work a first episode generally has to do regarding narrative structure. A really great first episode would require a much larger infusion of creativity than the structural hack job I perform here.
Question:
Little Witch Academia was awesome! Do you think it could be turned into a full series?
Bobduh:
It was great, but it was also solidly self-contained – it told a fun, breezy story that doubled as a metaphor for that “showy entertainment is needed to inspire the young” theme (words on that if you’re interested), and everything was written/characterized to the extent needed for this one thing. It answered all narrative questions it raised and fully articulated its thematic intent – I think it’d have to be quite different to work as a series.
Question:
Can you elaborate on that? What made the OVA unsuitable as a first episode, and what would have to be changed to make it work?
Bobduh:
Well, the main problem is that like I said, it basically answered all of its own questions, which is something a first episode generally doesn’t do (though this obviously isn’t a rule, and I’m not the story police – for instance, Cowboy Bebop’s first episode is virtually entirely self-contained, though it does actually raise the core theme of the difficulty of escaping your past identity and choices). Anyway! The conflicts Little Witch Academia raised were:
Additionally, the thematic point that I’m fairly sure this show as trying to make was:
“Ostensibly low-art popular entertainment like the flashy shows of this protagonist’s idol are actually not just entertaining, they are incredibly important as inspiration for the next generation – as an example, here is a story of that actually occurring within a piece of this kind of entertainment created by a group of people who were in this way inspired.”
The OVA resolves every one of those conflicts entirely (she saves the school, thus resolving 1 and 4 – she does it by using the wand of her idol, thus resolving 2 – she ends the series by being rescued by and bonding with her rival, thus resolving 3). While doing these things, it acts in its entirety as the thematic argument I outlined. This is all great storytelling, and I think the piece totally works on a surface and thematic level because of it.
However, if I were to make a full series of this, I feel something like this would act more as “proof of concept” than a first episode – you can’t really have the first episode of your show not leave any suspense, or unanswered questions, or possible new avenues for conflict, or not-fully-explored themes.
How would I go about fixing this?
The world would certainly have to be a bit broader – the current cast/characterization would possibly work for a very simple monster-of-the-week thing, but seeing as how we’re trying to make a good series here and the OVA has already displayed the creator’s interest in actually raising interesting thematic arguments, I’d like to aim a bit higher than that.
Currently, a decent bit of runtime in this OVA is dedicated to articulating the various beats of the thematic argument (the initial performance, arguments both with her rival and with her friends about her validity, all the business with the wand, the final reconciliation) – in a full series, I wouldn’t recommend this, and would probably just have a hint or two of this thematic concern.
The surface conflict would probably have to be shaved a bit and tuned down as well – having our hero save the school from a dragon probably works better for a one-episode OVA than a series that’s supposed to rise in tension throughout, plus having her save the school immediately too easily resolves the conflict of her finding her place at the school as someone who hasn’t come from a classic wizarding background.
Instead, we’d probably want a little more runtime dedicated both to characterizing her friends and rival a little more deeply, perhaps providing first glimpses of a couple more secondary characters for future conflicts, and probably providing a more full picture of daily life at the school. I feel one of the main strengths of this material is “Harry Potter but as an anime with vivid, humorous animation,” and one of the main strengths of Harry Potter was, in my opinion, how entertaining they made life at the school seem even in the absence of any crazy tension or dark forces. Again, since we’re stretching the darker stuff across a greater number of episodes here, I feel the first episode would probably be lighter in tone in general, and ride more on its humor than its adventure-adrenaline rush, as more pieces of the starting template are set in place.
That’s not to say there wouldn’t be a conflict, though – my first instinct would be to have our Protagonist’s desire to prove herself result in some disastrous consequences, with some theatrical conflict that would hopefully complicate the rivalry between her and Rival, possibly accidentally unveil a hint (perhaps only to the audience) of some larger, darker conflict to come, and likely clue the Protagonist in to the possibility that her Idol exists somewhere at the school. This would hopefully offer plenty of opportunity for the story to go in a variety of directions and hints of things to come while still offering immediate entertainment through humor, likable characters, immediately understandable rivalry, the first steps in exploring a very imaginative world, and a fun, brief dose of action to top it off.
Anyway. Those are my first thoughts on how I’d go about converting this to a series.
So, now that the viewing club has actually moved on to a show I both haven’t seen and am very interested in watching, I suddenly realize I’ve successfully doubled the number of episodes I’ve assigned myself to commit serious thought to every week. And I was already barely hanging on in the first place. So we’ll see how this goes – I might keep this looser and more brief throughout, and then try to collect my thoughts at the end, or something. Anyway. Roll tape.
Actually, one more thing. It occurs to me, upon beginning yet another series that I’m going to talk about for likely far too long, that someone might very well ask, “Why are you wasting your time with this?” And that’s a fine question! So gimme a second here.
Brief, Optional Tangent on Media Appreciation/Analysis
First, this is how I enjoy media, and this is also how I enjoy conversation. I like the craft, power, and potential of art, and I like discussing these things with other interested people, and these writeups are the best way I’ve found to have my cake and dissect it too.
Secondly, and this is purely personal, I really like that some people seem to appreciate my doing this. It’s a lot of work, and it eats a good number of free hours, but unless I’m working on my own creative projects, one of the best ways I can think of to spend my free time is in doing something that other people find worthwhile and meaningful. So that helps a lot.
Finally, I really do think there is something to this kind of stuff. I don’t think analysis kills art, or kills enjoyment – I think it deepens and broadens it, and gives it both personal resonance and larger context. I’ll close this little prologue with a quotation I just read in Italo Calvino’s “If on a winter’s night a traveler,” which, while ostensibly about the process of translation, I think also digs pretty well at what I and hopefully other people out there get out of the process of continuous reflection and unpacking.
“Furthermore, Professor Uzzi-Tuzii had begun his oral translation as if he were not quite sure he could make his words hang together, going back over every sentence to iron out the syntactical creases, manipulating the phrases until they were not completely rumpled, smoothing them, clipping them, stopping at every word to illustrate its idiomatic uses and its connotations, accompanying himself with inclusive gestures as if inviting you to be content with approximate equivalents, breaking off to state grammatical rules, etymological derivations, quoting the classics. But just when you are convinced that for the professor philology and erudition mean more than what the story is telling, you realize the opposite is true: that academic envelope serves only to protect everything the story says and does not say, an inner afflatus always on the verge of being dispersed at contact with the air, the echo of a vanished knowledge revealed in the penumbra and in tacit illusions.”
End Tangent
Sorry. I’ll stop now. Let’s watch some cartoons.
Episode 1
0:50 – I already like this sketchy, angular, un-idealized art style.
2:00 – Wow, I know I’m in for a good ride when even the OP seems heavy with thematic weight. These images of Lain observing life going on as mediated through a variety of screens makes me think this’ll be about some extremely relevant themes; the stuff writers like Anno and Urobuchi have yet to convince their audiences to believe in
3:19 – Okay, so it seems likely this show will have a lot of scattered thematic puzzle pieces, making a play-by-play a kind of tricky proposition. But I’ll bite! First three puzzle pieces: Lain in the screens [a pretty obvious-seeming metaphor], “Why won’t you come? I wish you could come here” [here as in outside?] and “Why you should do that is something you should discover for yourself” [these messages seem like meta-comments to the reader, which means that whether they’re meant to scream the themes or mislead, they’re not part of the narrative]. The puzzle I currently see is one about guiding people trapped in mediated lives to experience the real world. Let’s see what else we got
4:34 – More hints, and a clarification. The “I don’t need to stay in a place like this” seems to represent her final whisper or final thoughts – so perhaps those block texts are actually within the narrative, at least mentally. Also, both in the OP and contrasted against her death we have the figures kissing in very un-romanticized ways. My first thought there is that “honesty/dishonesty of human connection” is also key
5:05 – “If you stay in a place like this, you might not be able to connect.” Okay, so that one’s already been made overt.
Unrelated, I really, really like this visual design. The darker scenes with neon highlights reminded me of Blade Runner, and now this incredibly high-contrast daytime creates a whole different kind of stylized dream world. Very distinctive choice, and appropriate for a show that I assume will be handling the validity of various realities
8:18 – “She killed herself last week – come on, the teacher told everybody!” Tidy bit of storytelling there, with a line that both establishes the prologue for our protagonist while also revealing more about her disconnection and lack of engagement with the world around her
9:01 – Wait, is their lesson all code in some programming language?
9:39 – “What’s it like when you die?” Ooh, so perhaps all that text represents the emails
10:00 – Those constant phone lines, connecting everyone. Also, the soundtrack being just a mechanical hum both increases the fuzziness of her worldview and simulates the hum of a computer
12:46 – “I’ve only given up my body.” Okay, now the actual plot is starting to catch up to the themes that every other element of the show is articulating. Here we go!
13:46 – “Why did you die?” “God is here.” Man, was instrumentality/singularity such a big concern in the late 90s/onset of the internet age? Does this relate to all that Bowling Alone stuff about the loss of communal societies, a concern that I think was pretty much swept away by the supremacy of internet community/culture? It’s weird to try and think about what poignancy these ideas might have had in their own moment in history
14:30 – That bearsuit’s adorable. Also, that dinner conversation kept up the Bowling Alone view of community, even within the family unit
17:04 – Her father only speaks to her from behind a wall of computers, his face always obscured from her view
18:10 – What are these visions she keeps seeing? Her classmates blurred, her fingers emitting steam, the wires dripping blood… oh, goddamnit, I was about to say “I see no connection between them,” and then I realized all three of them work as separate visual metaphors – she can’t fully interact with her classmates, her fingers will be the keys to her new reality, the wires contain the life of her dead friend.
Still don’t know if they’re meant to just mean she has an overactive imagination or something more fantastical, though
20:36 – Not sure what to make of that train vision/nightmare yet. Not enough information. The train is key, though, we’ve had too many scenes of Lain on the train, standing at the door, staring out at the wires
21:00 – Again, I’m still not sure how sane we’re supposed to believe Lain is, and whether things are actually crazy or she’s just really good at day-visions and conflating memories with reality
22:36 – Her friend smiles and disappears, leaving her alone on the street, stranded between the endless wires
And Done
Oof! Great first episode, rich in thematic imagery, riding a fun, ambiguous line between fantasy and reality, and maintaining a great, creepy mood throughout. I can’t wait till next… oh wait.
…this is gonna be a long night.
By the way, I’m sticking with my writeup structure for now purely because it’s easier for me than first noting all my thoughts, and then straightening them into a paragraph-based impression at the end. I just don’t have enough time to do the full essay routine – hopefully nobody minds too much. Anyway.
Episode 2
0:31 – So I assume there’s a dialogue to be constructed of all these prologue lines. “I want you to come out here.” “What are you scared of, I just want you to try it for a bit.”
3:25 – Well! A lot happened in that club, but I don’t think I have quite enough fragments of chaos to see where that end of the plot is going yet. But that was supposed to be Lain at the end there, right?
4:22 – And her sister looks at the ceiling when talking with her. Man, connecting is hard!
5:15 – But this man, almost merged with the telephone pole, makes direct eye contact as she passes
8:02 – Jeez, remember when characters actually had personalities, and weren’t just tired tropes? Yeah, I got a pretty distinct and separate impression of all three of these girls here, and then of course there’s a bit of “identity is something you can construct” going on, but it’s basically just a hint
8:48 – Wait, so that lecture on the drug was just the show itself telling us, the audience, about it? That’s kind of weird. I do like the idea of a drug that accelerates your perception of experience in the context of a show that’ll clearly be about the internet age, though
9:35 – Again, the storytelling is understated and great. Lain gets excited when she receives a text, which I assume is because her lack of friends makes her assume it’s from her internet friend – but it’s actually the girl who befriended her that morning, which disappoints her, so she cancels the trip so she can wait for her “real” friend instead
13:02 – Another one of those awkward kissing embraces, this time beside Lain’s new computer. Still not sure what they represent, I’m just noting them for now
14:54 – Hm. Her sister waiting at the door. Another piece… goddamnit, there’s a lot of chaos to sift through here
16:01 – Aw yeah, all dolled up for clubbin’ in my little felt hat
19:00 – “You’re that scattered god’s…” Big clue here.
And Done
What the hell? Did he imagine her saying that? Lain definitely looks like someone at the club – both he and the other girls saw that person. But he seems to think she’s some harbinger of the internet leaking into the real world, which is something foretold by Lain’s own maybe-visions, maybe-delusions. Is this other Lain only relevant in his mind? And did she actually say those things, in that voice – was that also in his mind, or is she really more than she herself realizes? I guess until I definitely know whether this show’s primarily interested in sci-fi, psychological horror, allegory, or some/all of these things, I can’t make any definitive calls here. The themes are still consistent, but what their delivery vehicle actually consists of… very ambiguous
Okay. Gah. Once more into the breach
Episode 3
0:14 – Once again starting with those same city shots. There’s actually a lot that reminds me of Aku no Hana here – the repeated visual markers, the menacing, droning soundtrack, the long periods of silence, the unreliability of the narrator, the jagged, kind of unsettling character designs, the general claustrophobic tone. It’s intriguing to see these various tangible markers of this slow-building psychological horror style of storytelling be used for such different purposes
1:00 – “I called your house, but no-one picked up.” How unreliable is this narrator?
2:05 – Lain’s such a mentally removed character that it’s hard to tell where the post-traumatic stress ends and the personality begins
2:23 – God, I’m so loving the stark color contrasts and angles of this visual design. Shades of Bakemonogatari here, and that’s a good thing for your show to be reminding me of
3:12 – Her parents sleep in separate beds, her family is completely silent at dinner, and her sister can’t make eye contact with her. If connecting with people in the real world is this hard, why bother?
6:59 – Alright, so all this “Lain is some strange bringer of a new integrated reality” stuff seems to indicate this series doesn’t entirely take place in her crazy headspace. There’s the creepy G-Men following her, her doppelganger, the drugged-up dude who “recognized” her, her own alter-ego response to that guy, her consistent visions of a world verging on her own… my current assumption is “actually a sci-fi story, but thematically relevant to our impersonal real-world order”
9:56 – “I’m saying it’s strange we can’t take his death serious- IS THAT A LOVE LETTER???”
Also, I guess they’re implying that Lain is herself becoming a receiver for signals from the internet?
13:22 – “Do you know what this is?” She extends the gift to her father, who stands distant in the doorway. He leans slightly forward, barely closing the gap between them, and then turns away
14:18 – What is with this embrace/kissing motif? I’m sure it’ll make sense eventually, but they’re really laying it on thick
15:05 – Okay, so now the associates of her doppelganger are actually referring to her as Lain. Multiple personalities? Memory issues? Versions of herself are the first net intruders into actual reality?
Goddamnit, I’m feeling really stupid here… it normally doesn’t take this long for me to figure out a plot. Let me…
Hm…
Okay, if I’m going to draw any conclusions, I can’t assume everything is ambiguous. So for this conjecture, I’ll just assume that Lain’s reality is at least real according to her. Then…
Alright, she’s already under guard by the G-Men. This implies she has either always been important, has recently become important, or was important at some point in the past, and they’re making sure she doesn’t become that important person again. Her family seems incredibly distant, and barely treats her like a human being, outside of her father’s assistance in getting her Wired. She’s distant from everyone at school, though Arisa is making efforts to be her friend. We have seen no other hobbies, and she expressed no interest in technology prior to this point.
Recently, due the encouragement of a dead girl who’s apparently both real (she remembered walking home with Lain once, though that could have been observed) and alive within the internet, she has begun ingratiating herself into internet culture. Concurrently with this, she has begun seeing visions of internet wraiths, as well as hearing voices that seem to come from the internet.
Very recently, a version of her with an entirely separate persona was observed at a club, and various people at that club seem to know her by name. In fact, one man was incredibly distressed by her presence, saying she’s related to a “scattered god” – which is relevant to her dead friend, who said that “god is here” within the internet. When confronting this man, her voice changed, and she authoritatively told the man that we are all always connected, which caused him to commit suicide.
So what do we have here? Internet-based singularity story, with Lain as the fulcrum, for some reason? Seems likely. I can’t think of any clues that hint at how she’s already known, why she’s receiving these visions, or why she’s being watched. Perhaps we’re actually only seeing the second half of a story… but it’s too early to know. We’re not there yet.
19:02 – “You never saw us. We’re not here, you see.” Here’s another big clue. Now we know for sure they’re real, and also they seem to be hinting that projection from the net is already possible, which might explain alternate-Lain as well. Still not there yet.
Also, I’m not really commenting on thematic/imagery stuff any more because it’s all pretty damn consistent throughout the show (eye contact, the wires, etc), and it all seems to point towards the same themes. This mystery’s interesting, so I’ma figure it out
19:24 – “Are you listening, Mom?” Their mother is completely emotionally absent – she avoids all interaction with her daughters whenever possible, and never seems to address them directly. Again, another file for the drawer
20:15 – And now we have another new Lain saying welcome home to her sister. This is also the second time her sister has tried to connect with her – her success or failure in this will probably continue to gain relevance
And Done
Interesting stuff so far. The thematic concerns seem pretty obvious, but I’m enjoying figuring out exactly how this world works, and the aesthetics are great. This is a very entertaining show
…“Looser and more brief.” Good joke.
…damnit. That actually got so long that now I feel obligated to coherently format it. Alright, screw you all. Summary time.
TL;DR:
I’m very much enjoying it so far, and it simultaneously feels like a very carefully and wildly written series – in that there are a lot of ideas at the same time, but the direction and visual storytelling is always very sharp.
Visually, I’m greatly enjoying it. The visual aesthetic is very distinctive; the blurred, neon cityscapes remind me of Blade Runner, and the stark, angular, high-contrast, nearly abandoned suburbs remind me of a cross between Bakemonogatari’s visual design and Aku no Hana’s mood. The constant blurring and repeated visual motifs (the telephone wires, two figures embracing in a kiss, the various repeated backgrounds of Lain’s world) all contribute to the dreamlike atmosphere and question of how much we can trust this reality – which is perfect, because this seems to be a show specifically about the validity of identities and realities.
I love the sound design, which is another of the many elements that reminds me of Aku no Hana. The droning sound sets an uncomfortable, creepy tone, further contributes to the hazy, distorted reality, and mimics the sound of a computer’s hum. All relevant things.
The writing is generally solid and the dialogue is great, though I’m not sold on the way the show seems to sometimes directly tell the viewer things without associating that knowledge with any specific character – the biggest specific example of this is when the show explained that drug to us. Maybe there’s another layer there in that our perception is more full than Lain’s, but stuff like that tends to remove me from the story as it’s happening.
Thematically, it seems pretty obviously to be about the ways our society has begun to disconnect physically, the replacement of that connection with connections of the online variety, and whether these new realities are as legitimate or “real” as the original one. It attacks this theme from a variety of angles – first, there’s all the visual stuff drawing attention to the dreamlike world, as well as Lain continuously observing the world through a variety of frames, as well as that motif of the telephone wires outlining her world. Secondly, there’s Lain’s actual relationship to the world around her; she seems disconnected even before being contacted by the dead girl, and the scenes with her family constantly emphasize the distance and lack of connection between them. Finally, there’s the central mystery of the show, wherein it seems that Lain’s own personal reality is being invaded by elements of the internet, and that this connection has also spread to the point where alternate, potentially fabricated personas of Lain are being witnessed by other people in the real world. This idea of the relative validity of realities is transposed against ideas of the subjective and potentially self-created nature of identity, or at least persona. It hasn’t been fully explored yet, but the show seems to be trending towards that idea.
…as a side note, it always bears mentioning that this show came out in freaking 1998. So, even if its themes don’t really come across as revelatory to us, I’m guessing they were pretty damn prescient at the time. No piece of art exists outside of a larger context.
Finally, the actual plot of the show is pretty interesting too. It’s been keeping things pretty ambiguous so far, though Lain’s sister’s interaction with the G-Men seems to indicate that a lot of Lain’s reality isn’t actually just in her head. Her visions and sudden, random leaps into other personas (in the club, greeting her sister) are clearly linked to the creation of online identities in some way, and her relationship to this “scattered god” is likely the reason the G-Men are so interested in her, but it’s all very ambiguous still. I think they’re spacing out hints very well so far, and I’m certainly interested in whatever happens next.
TL;DR to the TL;DR:
Bob like Lain.
Question:
Which work from another medium would you like to see animated?
Bobduh:
People ask this question pretty regularly, enough so that I eventually decided to do a little thought experiment for whenever it came up again. So here’s my unrealistic, fantasy-world proposal. I guess there’s light spoilers regarding dramatic structure? Anyway.
Design Proposal for a Katawa Shoujo Adaptation by Kyoto Animation
Pitch:
Katawa Shoujo, the recent English-language visual novel, has managed to develop a substantial and passionate fan base in the Western world. It’s distinctive in the thoughtful treatment of its concept, the acuity of its writing, and the diverse and relevant themes presented throughout. Though there are significant hurdles presented in successfully adapting this work, I believe an adaptation which captures the spirit of the visual novel would further bolster KyoAni’s reputation as a creator of emotionally resonant and deeply personal young adult stories.
Immediate thoughts:
The title would obviously have to be changed, as it’s by its nature offensive in the original Japanese. More critically, I believe an adaptation of this title would have to address the fundamental narrative failing of most visual novel adaptations – the consolidation of multiple storylines into a single linear narrative. In order to maintain romantic pacing and integrity of character writing, I propose a new solution – separate the central protagonist, Hisao, into five separate characters to reflect the five separate routes, and reorganize the five narratives so they interweave with each other while all progressing as separate love stories.
I believe there are generally two hurdles that prevent this approach. First, the tendency to characterize visual novel protagonists as blank slates, in order to aid audience surrogacy. I believe Katawa Shoujo lacks this problem – in fact, in my experience, the five routes each make use of a substantially different Hisao, with different desires, hangups, and personalities.
Secondly, it requires substantial rewriting and reorganizing of the visual novel content. This cannot be avoided – I believe it is the necessary price to pay if we wish to make a show that will stand the test of time.
One last thought – the broadening of the story into one larger narrative presents a few opportunities of perspective, with the largest being the potential to shift the Shizune narrative closer to Misha’s perspective. Considering her emotional arc is already the key conflict of the route, I believe holding closer to her perspective would improve the dramatic consistency of that line, along with offering the opportunity for a more meaningful exploration of gender identity. Something to consider.
Further planning:
As a strict adaptation is not advisable for this work, further thought must be put into the successful transfer of the original’s strength to the animated medium. A brief outline of those strengths might contain:
Organic Writing: Perhaps more than anything else, the core emotional resonance of Katawa Shoujo is derived from the utterly believable and naturalistic dialogue of the protagonists. Not all this writing can be conserved, nor should it – but the need for subtle and naturalistic pacing to match this dialogue’s emotional rhythm necessitates adapting this work as a two-season show. Consider the pace as slightly more propulsive than Hyouka, but applied to a work that’s attempting to fully execute five separate love stories.
Thematic Resonance and Acuity: The deft treatment of disabilities, as well as the way the source moves beyond that to actually be more concerned with themes of human connection, power structures in relationships, our various ways of dealing with our pasts, and emotional honesty, is another remarkable strength of the source. Here, we simply should adapt the best we can – these strengths underline the core conflicts of the narrative, and are virtually impossible to lose in translation.
Frank and Empathetic Depictions of Relationships in All Stages: Here we run into a more difficult question. Can the adult content be excised from the text without diminishing it? My response is a resounding no – not only are the game’s frank treatments of sexuality one of its greatest strengths, but the ways these events are woven into the narrative make them virtually unavoidable in the majority of the storylines. Only Shizune’s route contains adult content that seems to veer into titillation – all other such scenes further our understanding of the characters, provide crucial narrative turns, and exist as some of the most honest and touching moments of the narrative. They will be handled tastefully, and with much greater restraint than the game, but they will stay.
Regarding “depictions of relationships in all stages,” the game’s narrative actually provides some assistance here. Not all the stories operate on the same timeline – for instance, the narrative arc of Hanako’s route concludes in the interim between acts two and three of Lilly’s, and the scattered events of Shizune’s route could be rearranged virtually at will to better enable a steady rise and fall of the various dramas throughout. The various narrative experiments of the text (the even-handed positivity and maturity of Lilly’s route that is only rarely interrupted by narrative conflict, the continuous rise of narrative tension in Hanako’s route to one single emotional peak) will hopefully lend themselves well to the intermingling of narrative arcs this adaptation will require.
As a brief initial proposal, Emi and Hanako’s storylines might possibly hit more of their narrative beats in the first season, with Lilly’s and Shizune’s stretching from this period throughout the second season (though obviously not removing Emi and Hanako’s arcs – as I said, a positive portrayal of already-existing relationships is one of the great strengths of this work, and the anime adaptation offers further opportunity to explore a romantically healthy slice-of-life emotional space), with Rin’s progressing the slowest and her art exhibition and the aftermath perhaps offering a final gathering of the characters and last dramatic resolution.
Final Thoughts:
Obviously, successfully adapting such a sensitive text is always a risky proposition, and both the changes necessary and the changes that can’t be made further complicate this adaptation. However, I believe that in light of the source material, the final result could easily stand as an artistic pillar of both our studio and the medium itself. This challenge is a risk worth taking.
Question:
In discussing Maoyuu Maou Yuusha, you talk a lot about whether a show’s ideas or themes are well-articulated. However, I consider myself a person who watches shows for characters, and want my media to be worth empathizing with on a human level. Is there room for this instinct in your cold, blackened critic’s heart?
Bobduh:
Haha, I actually consider myself the same way – most of the stories that effortlessly connect to me are the ones primarily interested in characters and relationships. For instance, Toradora and Chuunibyou are two of my very favorite shows, and they’re far more thematically simplistic than Maoyuu or Penguindrum – they’re just character stories told well. And Evangelion is my actual favorite show, because I think it explores characters more fully than anything else I’ve seen.
But I also find both the craft of storytelling and human nature in general fascinating, and this show is just very unique in its purpose and methods. For instance, in episode 8 of Maoyuu, I loved that the characters’ response to the church condemning the scholar wasn’t something like, “damn the church! How could we have foreseen this?!” or “we have to fight them,” it was: “Unfortunate. If we fight the church, we lose the people. How can we minimize the fallout of this attack?” It’s willing to make a lot of smart assumptions about human nature, and then build on those assumptions to find some really compelling truths.
Question:
Can you explain your scoring/evaluation system a bit? The numbers as they stand just don’t make sense to me – Chuunibyou a 10, CLANNAD a 3, After Story an 8, Nisemonogatari a 9, Nozo no Kanojo X a 4. What’s the system here?
Bobduh:
I actually recently changed my scoring system to make use of the numbers more effectively – anything six and up is “solid” for me, and it’s only 3 and down that I consider “bad”. You can see my current grading system in the About[1]section.
The three main things I look for in a show are: Does this show convey what it wants to in an effective way? Is what it is trying to convey meaningful or distinctive? Does the experience of this show resonate with me emotionally?
So, regarding the shows you listed…
I think Chuunibyou is not terribly ambitious, but it is very, very close to perfect in conveying its characters and story, and it struck me very strongly emotionally. It is, outside of exactly one scene in the first 11 episodes and some extremely slight pacing issues in the finale, what I’d consider a “Perfect Romantic Comedy.”
Clannad, on the other hand, I felt was incredibly ineffective as a comedy, slice of life, or romance – the side arcs murdered the pacing, the characters on the whole were thinly developed, and Jun Maeda has no subtlety in his writing, making the show veer constantly between repetitive slapstick and unearned melodrama. Plus, I found characters like Fuko and Kotomi extraordinarily problematic in their design – perhaps the VN developed them as people, but in anime format they came across as vehicles for viewer’s broken bird fantasies, which I consider one of the very worst things about anime.
In contrast to this, once After Story escapes from the side arcs, it becomes an incredibly effective and very unique look at life after education, something that is both woefully underrepresented in anime and very resonant for me personally. The episode where Tomoya is first forced to semi-interact with his abandoned daughter is honestly one of the most distinctive, effectively directed, and powerful episodes of television I’ve ever seen. But because that is just a subsection of the show (and because I feel the ending undercuts most of the drama the show has earned), it only averages out to an 8.
Nise I already posted that huge-ass analysis of[2] , but in short I think it approaches issues of perspective, self-representation, and the male gaze with incredible intelligence, and while uneven, is such a necessary art experiment that I have to strongly respect it.
Finally, I just thought Nozo no Kanojo was incredibly uneven, and while it had some very interesting ideas (particularly the rare and noteworthy focus on how weird and uncomfortable adolescent intimacy can be), it too often fell into the routines of its genre to be considered a solid work.
I’d actually love to keep talking about any of those shows, since you picked a set of examples that I find extremely interesting as artistic works, even though I personally enjoyed or respected some more than others. There’s something interesting in virtually every show – I pretty much never regret having watched something.
Question:
In that case, would you agree that there’s a fair amount of personal passion in your rating system? Also, would you say the quite harsh scores you give to certain shows (Another, OreImo) is more reflective on your selective process of watching anime than their objective quality?
Bobduh:
I actually do try to keep the passion to a minimum, and restrict it to corner cases like the one you mentioned. For instance, I really do think Chuunibyou is more or less a flawless execution of a classic concept, but I’d have to admit that my own preference for romance and character-based shows might knock that one to a 10 over something like, say, Baccano. But I don’t think it’s all that unfair to say shows that strive for deeper meanings or strong emotional resonance are “aiming higher” than pure adventures or comedies – and normally, adventures and comedies are largely improved by the addition of these elements.
I also sometimes use my emotional reaction as a counterweight to my critical assessment of a show – for instance, logically I considered Ano Hana emotionally manipulative and awkwardly constructed, but because I actually did have an emotional reaction to the finale, I figured it was at least partially effective. Obviously the distance between my personal preferences/emotional touchstones and my critical assessments will always result in disconnects, but I try to be aware of it and only use the emotional response as a tool and sounding board, not a general metric.
My previous scoring system was a lot closer to the classic “5 is a failing grade” system – almost everything on my list was 7 or higher, and my grading system was basically 7 = decently flawed but I enjoyed it more than I didn’t, 8 and up are things I’d actively recommend. But I figured copying the classic grading system wasn’t really that valuable – if everything below 6 is just “so bad it’s not worth watching,” why shouldn’t I condense that category? It seemed more useful to stratify degrees of flawed but interesting shows than degrees of terribleness – for the lower shows, I figure “Just plain bad,” “Tooth-grindingly terrible,” and “Literally offensive to my values as a human being” should suffice.
The shows you mentioned kind of betray my own view of the anime medium – that is, I appreciate it and critique it primarily as a narrative, message-based, or character-focused art form, and not a visual one. I mean, I do love great visuals, and when they work in service of a show it’s incredible (Madoka and Hyouka represent two ways visuals can really contribute to themes, characters, and narrative, for example, and Redline works so well because all the narrative elements work in service of the fantastic visuals), but I won’t have mercy on a show just because it has polished production. OreImo might be very competent in its design and animation, but because I find its messages actually offensive and likely developmentally hurtful to its intended audience, I probably couldn’t personally like or critically respect it any less even if it were less competently produced.
Question:
What’s your problem with Clannad? Have you no soul?!?
Bobduh:
Quite likely. However, my main problems are that up until halfway through Afterstory, it’s a combination of cliched, one-note characters, repetitive slapstick, and maudlin sub-Angel Beats melodrama. Then it gets very interesting and unique for about ten episodes, then it flips the audience off with an ending that invalidates all the good parts.
Question:
But isn’t that just, like, your opinion, man?
Bobduh:
Let’s take this one item at a time.
Cliched one-note characters and repetitive slapstick, I don’t think you can really defend against. It’s hard to dispute that for the greater part of the series, most of the characters are defined by one core attribute – Kyou is a tsundere, Kotomi is the Rei-clone, Nagisa is straight moe, etc. The “repetitive slapstick” is even less arguable, since that just is true – some people find this more funny than others, but the fact is this show repeats its jokes constantly, and most of them are of the broad physical comedy variety. Easy, broad humor is a problem common to a lot of anime, but that doesn’t make it less of an issue.
The problem with the drama is that the show doesn’t give you a reason to care about the characters before telling a sad story – it introduces them as their character type, and they remain that type, but sad things happen around them. Fuko is only ever “ditzy girl who likes starfish”, but we are expected to feel sorry for her because life is sad. That’s not really how characterization and empathy work in storytelling – this is clearly subjective (I mean, a lot of people think Angel Beats is good), but I can pretty confidently say this show hasn’t learned the give and take of characterization and drama that Disappearance of Haruhi or Toradora have a mastery of. A tragic backstory doesn’t create character depth unless you see that depth in the characters themselves, and the side-arc characters are pretty uniformly shallow.
Then there’s Afterstory. For the second half of this season, I was actually extremely impressed with the show. It went beyond the usual high school daily life experience, showing things like the pressure/pride of personal responsibility and the tiring but satisfying honor of a manual blue-collar job. What other anime covers this stuff? It was also handled with much more grace and subtlety than the prior arcs – it felt like the show had an entirely new, much more talented director. The death of Nagisa actually struck me, since the second half had been full of great character-building moments between her and Tomoya, and the episode where Tomoya doesn’t know what to do with the daughter he’s abandoned is in my mind one of the strongest episodes of any anime. Even the stuff with his father is deftly done.
When Ushio became sick, I figured the show was finally pulling its strands together – the themes of nostalgia, of embracing the past while accepting sadness and moving forward, and the recurring references to the hospital/hill that saved Nagisa were all going to come together, and Tomoya would just barely save Ushio by getting her to the hospital, the “place where dreams come true” – this would be Nagisa’s last gift to him. It would be bittersweet, since Nagisa would still be gone, but life is full of sadness, and you have to learn to cherish your past without being captured by it.
Instead, all of that raw character building and sharp reflection on the earlier themes of the show turns out to be a dream because magic, and everyone lives happily ever after. Not only is this literally deus ex machina (god just decides to save them because they’ve been good all year), which is never good storytelling, but it also undercuts the themes of the show. The entire strength of the last act had been built on mono no aware and the idea that unlike high school, life doesn’t have any easy answers… and then it concludes with an incredibly easy answer. Not cool.
I think there are many moments of this show that are well-directed, and I think when it’s working on the main Tomoya/Nagisa plot, it’s actually a pretty good and sometimes extremely good show, minus that ending. But I also think it’s a very flawed show, that it makes a lot of too-easy narrative and character choices, and that many parts of it simply don’t work storytelling-wise.
Question:
So basically you’re a heartless monster. But adapting Visual Novels is really tough, as you’ve discussed in the past. Are Clannad’s problems even solvable?
Bobduh:
The answer here is, “yes, but not easily.” Still, let’s see what we can do.
The main, huge problem is that by adopting all the paths of a Visual Novel, they destroyed the pacing of the storyline and added a huge amount of superfluous plot and very poor melodrama. From the first season, I would cut all episodes from the Fuko storyline up through the end of the Kotomi storyline. I would also cut those two characters entirely, since they’re the worst offenders on the “just exist to be moe” scale and add nothing to any other part of the series. I’d perform the same surgery on the second season, cutting out all the episodes from the second until when they finish the superfluous side arcs.
This would condense the series to roughly one 26 episode season, and do wonders for the pacing already. This would also indirectly help Nagisa’s character a great deal, as her character development would now be continuous, as opposed to randomly stopping for 10-12 episode stretches. Tomoya would also lose a lot of his generic VN protagonist Woman Fixer absurdity. There’s still work to be done, though.
Sunohara would have to be fixed. His character is two jokes repeated over and over (Sunohara likes girls LOL, Sunohara gets hit LOL), and his character development arc requires him to randomly become an asshole for several episodes and then be “fixed” by Tomoya. Cut his sister, give him one or two actually good traits, and set his motivation arc in place from the first couple episodes. The resolution of the baseball team storyline was actually one of the better moments of the early stuff, so focus on what made this strong – his temper, his convictions, his bond with Tomoya.
Nagisa also needs work – she eventually comes into her own as a character, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a couple more defining traits than “cute, helpless moeblob” for the first half of the series. No, liking the dango family is not a personality – but it might be the lead-in to one. Find something to make her stand out and have a better-defined character arc of her own – right now, character arcs happen around her, but her own agency is very minimal.
Tomoyo is fine. Kyou is a generic tsundere, but she also gets some of the most honest conversations with Tomoya, so she’s also probably fine. Ryou probably doesn’t need to exist… no, actually, it would probably be better if Ryou were Kyou’s male twin. This would kill any last vestiges of haremness, and delete the last unnecessary moeblob. I’d suggest something even more drastic, like give male Ryou a crush on Sunohara, but anime writers apparently can’t handle gay characters without making them into tasteless jokes, so I’ll just leave that alone.
Finally, we’d have to fix the ending. Adding a “magic fixes everything” ending cheapens the themes of honest work, perseverance, and helping to hold each other up that are present all throughout After Story. Bringing Nagisa back to life destroys the significance of Tomoya’s character growth in the last, best act of the show. Instead, have that scene where Tomoya questions if he should have met Nagisa at all simply inspire him to get back up. Tomoya runs to the hospital on the hill, cradling his (unconscious, but not dead) daughter as he reflects on his time with Nagisa and all the people he’s met in this city. He wants to hate this place, but he can’t; like Nagisa said, this is where they were born, and there’s too much of him, too much of Nagisa in this place. He reaches the hospital where Nagisa was saved and begs them to save Ushio; she just barely pulls through. Nagisa is still gone, but his memories of her helped him save the daughter they were meant to raise together, in the city he’s come to love.
This maintains the strength of the last act while actually tying together the earlier themes and foreshadowing. Plus, by cutting the magical glowing balls, Tomoya’s early helpfulness can be resolved by something that actually helps the story – have it be his way of attempting to be the opposite of his father. If Nagisa makes him realize this, it would even help her character, too.
There’s an incredible show hiding somewhere in Clannad, but the humor, pacing, and early melodrama make it very hard to find. I think as a one season show that abandoned directly adopting the VN and instead attempted to tell a single story well, it could be something truly great.
Management: This discussion was prompted by the creator of this blog post reflecting on the role repetition plays in enabling climactic and satisfying reversals in storytelling, and how our repetition-bred expectations can lead to more resonant moments in media. It’s a great article and a fascinating subject, and I only begin to explore the artistic implications here.
Question:
Do you consider the formulaic structure so much anime adopts a problem for you?
Bobduh:
I really like the point your article raises, about formula-breaking moments containing that much more power and significance by virtue of how established those formulas were prior to that point. The problem as I see it is that those moments don’t actually validate all the formulaic stuff that came before – sure, they lend it added significance, but they don’t make it in and of itself worthwhile or artistically interesting. I don’t know if there are any easy answers here, either… hm… let me cover some other facets of this, and then I’ll try to loop back around to that.
Alright, first, I do think formula does in fact have a place in certain works. It’s generally not that compatible with tight storytelling/character-building/thematic explorations, but not all shows are about those things, or need to be – for example, I think Madhouse’s Hunter x Hunter reboot is just a very fun exploration of the shonen genre, and most of the arcs follow semi-typical shonen structures, but the show is meant pretty specifically just to entertain. Well-crafted popcorn can be its own reward, and I think formula can be used to great effect there.
But regarding shows that actually want to say something, or develop characters with emotional resonance? There, I think it’s much more difficult to argue for formula, but there are still examples that kind of ride the borderline. For example, I think Cowboy Bebop is a great show that articulates a classic but still solid theme about the difficulty of rising above your past self and redefining/rebuilding yourself, but I also think it uses formula to great effect – many of the episodes are just “bounty-of-the-week” adventures, but they work very well as independent storytelling vignettes, and they contribute both to the mood/world-building as well as the slow-building empathy the audience is meant to feel for the emotionally distant/reserved protagonists. And many great shows are built almost entirely of similar thematically related vignettes (Kino’s Journey), and many other shows use a series of utterly unconnected and similarly structured conflicts to slowly build a mood and set of characters for the underlying story (Hyouka). There are endless examples of degrees of this, and frankly, the fact that anime is an episodic medium means that for most shows, the mere necessity of an initial conflict, rising tension, and resolution each episode will result in a number of semi-similar structures. This is just how storytelling works in mediums like this.
But I think your point was treading on more difficult ground – if the formulaic structure is useful purely because it provides a structure that can create suspense and surprise if deviated from. Honestly, within a single work, I don’t think this leads to incredibly successful art – it might lead to great moments, but as I said at the beginning, the subversion doesn’t retroactively grant all the prior material meaning, character, and distinction if it didn’t have those things to start.
However, I do think the meta-narrative trick of subverting expectations with the entire scope of a work can be effective and lead to consistent artwork, as long as that work is internally consistent. This is where I think shows like Eva and Madoka fall – even if part of their power comes from changing what came before, all the parts of those shows are solid on their own merits, and in fact the first few episodes of each provide some of that original context (though obviously well-written and tonally/thematically consistent with the later parts) to provide a portion of that dramatic turn even for people not well-versed in the relevant genres. Most of what makes these shows good is not their deconstructive or genre-defying nature anyway – it’s the fact that they’re well-written and well-produced stories with a lot of good inherent ideas, regardless of their position within an artistic tradition.
Incidentally, I think another interesting example of a similar effect is Aku no Hana – I don’t think it would come off nearly as effectively if audiences were used to rotoscoping, and that the art style intentionally serves to unbalance viewer expectations. But again, I think that art choice also results in a mood that works in that show’s favor outside of medium-conditioned viewer expectations, which makes this another example of “it works partially because of this expectation-subverting trick, but it also just plain works.”
Question:
Management: I’m rewriting this question so my response makes any goddamn sense – it wasn’t even really a question initially, but the subject is so interesting that I kind of went off on it regardless.
I think there may be differences in our standards of evaluation. I look for anime to succeed first and foremost as entertainment – and that moment of unexpected subversion results in great entertainment for me, regardless of whether it succeeds as “high art.” Also, you’ve covered a variety of ways formula can affect anime, but isn’t the phenomenon I’m referring to with Mazinger a little different from the craft arguments you’ve put forth?
Bobduh:
I don’t really mean to deny or demean the role of entertainment in media, I just feel that even (in fact, sometimes especially) shows that exist primarily to entertain still work within structures that can be examined and discussed – they have “goals” just like any message-oriented art, those goals are just different. For example, I think Redline is a pretty perfect piece of entertainment and nothing more, but it’s far from a stupid work – it displays an incredibly high degree of craft through its mastery of propulsive storytelling structure and economy of characterization/dialogue. Its “goal” is to entertain, but it entertains by doing what it does very intelligently and well. I don’t think saying “this work is just meant to be entertaining and nothing more” means it’s not useful or interesting to critically examine that work – it might not have deep themes to discuss, but storytelling is an art form worthy of discussion even if you disregard “message” works. So when I talk about whether a work is “successful” or not (I also don’t really like the high art/low art divide, and don’t find it all that meaningful), I’m mainly talking about whether I think it did the best job it could to succeed in its own goals, be they tell a taut and entertaining story or illuminate the nature of the universe or whatever.
But your point about entertainment being a relative value is a sound one. As much as I believe there are definite ways mastery and execution of craft can be close to objectively measured, art’s effect on the viewer, and what specific elements that viewer responds to, will always be a subjective, personal thing. It’s always good to keep that in mind.
I also agree that the specific situation your article describes is different and distinctive from the ones I’ve been discussing. There’s something more fundamentally shocking there, something that really seems difficult to quantify according to classic storytelling models… if I understand the kind of series Mazinger is, it seems like it conditions you to love these characters in the context of one entire genre over years, and then flips the table on you. That’s not just deconstructing a preexisting genre – that’s changing the stakes of a world you’re already emotionally invested in. The only example of that kind of thing which immediately comes to mind for me is Clannad, which is basically one story and genre of anime for 35 episodes, then abruptly shifts to another story and genre of anime, while keeping the characters you’ve already associated with the first mode. The thing is, I don’t think Clannad actually works in the way I talk about things “working,” because, well, first the writing is just not very good, but more fundamentally because the kinds of repetition that characterize the early arcs are not the correct kind of repetition for the emotional turn it’s hoping to provoke – they reflect more on tangential side characters, and their emotional stakes are not tied tightly enough to the actual protagonists, at least not often enough.
But if a story did do that… if it used the kind of repetition I mentioned Bebop or Hyouka employing for many episodes, and then veered into a turn in the way Clannad or Mazinger does…
Yeah, I think there’s a whole goddamn lot of resonant storytelling potential there.
Damn, now I’m getting all kinds of crazy ideas…
Question:
How do you think anime and manga have affected your view of Japan and its culture/people?
Bobduh:
It hasn’t really influenced my perspective on Japanese culture, because most anime don’t try to be realistic, the ones that do tend to paint Japan as a nation of people just like any other (with some cultural quirks, obviously), and anime is generally not created to cater to the sensibilities of the “average Japanese person,” if such a thing can described of any person of any nationality (it can’t).
What it has done is give me a pretty solidly negative impression of the relevant, anime-watching market. But again, that’s still not a monolithic group.
Question:
Can you you elaborate on your negative impression of the anime market? I’m curious because I always see you give pretty insightful analyses of anime in general.
Management: I promise, I would have rephrased this question to be more neutral if my own response didn’t actually address the choice of words – and I think the tone of my response is kind of critical to keeping these discussions civil, so I’m leaving it as it was originally written
Bobduh:
That’s a dangerous question, but you also flattered me, and that’s well established to be my only weakness.
Let me preface this by saying that these are all my opinions, and most of what I’m talking about are things that are frustrating for me specifically as a consumer of media who would like to see more media that appeals to my interests. They are not value judgments on anyone outside of myself, and obviously people like media for different reasons, and that’s totally fine. People find their bliss in all sorts of ways; that’s totally cool. And I’m being reductive here as well, and I admit that, and I understand people are complicated organisms. And in addition to that, I don’t personally live in Japan, so everything I’ll be talking about will be inference based on the media I’ve seen, the ways I’ve seen audiences interact with that media, and the news surrounding fandom that has reached my distant, obviously not-fully-informed ears. One more time: these are all just my opinions, based on what appeals and matters to me. Alrighty.
Well, first there are the issues that could be leveled at the general audience of virtually any medium: the audience places a heavy premium on works that don’t really challenge them, they highly value familiarity and specific, sometimes problematic, sometimes just storytelling-averse tropes, they judge shows based on a variety of surface details as opposed to their underlying quality and nature, they judge all shows within similar frameworks of their own media desires, and will condemn or simply not engage with shows that have goals and ideas outside of their specific avenues of appreciation…
But as I said, that’s pretty much every medium. Anime seems to combine this with a few distinct and in my opinion negative additions: a pervasive acceptance of and even desire for sexist works, a particularly virulent desire for catering to their specific media and cultural preferences (Sakurasou getting attacked for containing a Korean meal, of all things), a predilection for “untroubled worlds” that don’t reflect any aspect of real experience and are generally storytelling and meaning-averse, a strange conflation of their media preferences and actually real-world identity and opinions (which is fine in moderation, but that’s not what I’m referring to here – and when you combine this with that fetishizing of “untroubled worlds” that don’t reflect reality you get things like the Aya Hirano slut-shaming scandal or the general idea of “idol purity” as something to be valued), and a related near-idolizing of various elements of their media (Love Plus vacation experiences, etc). Basically it seems like a portion of the audience’s attitudes and the industry’s need to cater to those attitudes to survive creates some kind of media obsession feedback loop that strikes me as socially limiting and also predisposed to result in awkward, artistically uninteresting media (which brings us back around to this being a problem primarily because I’m mad not enough people like what I like to dictate the majority of what gets produced, not because people don’t have the right to be who they are and like what they like, which they obviously do).
Question:
It seems like you’re implying that anime will only continue on a downward spiral due to continuous re-enforcement of what you view as negative tropes (although I say “what you view as,” I’m pretty sure 90% would also regard those same tropes as negative). Think there’s any realistic way the current models can change?
Bobduh:
I honestly don’t think the situation is quite as dire as my post possibly implies – in fact, although many shows do seem to reflect the things I bring up, I’d say we’re actually entering/living within a period of relative artistic vitality.
Many people complain of desiring a return to anime’s “good old days” of the late 90s/early 00’s – perhaps there is something to this, but I personally I think this is partly nostalgia infusing old shows with merit they didn’t actually possess, partly a compression of the greatest hits of a ten year period and disregarding of the actual “average show” of that period, and partly a fact that the mainstream entertainment back then just catered to a different audience – the action and adventure shows that came across as more popular then weren’t necessarily “better” than the current trends (less psychologically questionable might be a decent argument, though), they were just different trends that appealed to different people.
It seems to me that, although the anime-culture trends I’ve referred to aren’t really positive ones, there’s actually a greater variety of solid works coming out these days, and certain studios are taking creative risks, whether they end up being rewarded or not. And there’s a whole gallery of talented and creative writers and directors who are being given a great amount of artistic free reign in spite of any ostensible market trends. The market also seems to be growing – charts like this one seem to imply more people are buying anime in Japan in general, which can only be good for the diversity of productions. And though obviously some people could happily watch shows catering towards the market I was describing forever, I think the law of diminishing returns applies here, and most of the audience will move on towards the next big thing soon enough. Regardless, it seems like there’s still room for shows to make at least reasonable profits without bowing to any perceived fandom needs.
Most things in most mediums will not be that artistically profound or interesting, and I don’t think anime’s entering any kind of death spiral in that regard. I just think some mainstream views within anime culture/fandom are pretty problematic in a very specific way, and that appeals to those attitudes tend to be reflected in too many works.
