Question:
As a fan of philosophy, I tend to enjoy shows that take the time to discuss their philosophical or ethical questions, such as Psycho-Pass or Evangelion. However, it seems clear that writers can go overboard with this, and that sometimes these discussions can seem inappropriate or even pretentious. Do you think there’s a specific pattern to when discussions like this are appropriate, and when they start to become pretentious?
Management: Finally posting the sequel to this piece, which focuses much more closely on four commercially successful romantic comedies: Sakurasou, Toradora, Clannad, and Chuunibyou.
Question:
I can see where you’re coming from when you talk of judging a show according to its goals, as well as your reservations regarding some goals. How would you apply these metrics to Sakurasou?
Question:
People often describe shows they don’t like as “emotionally manipulative.” Don’t all shows do that anyway? What do people mean when they talk about “emotional manipulation” like it’s a bad thing?
Legacy is a funny thing. It can inspire the greatest acts of artistry or heroism, but has no tangible form. It can form the cornerstone of societies or empires, or just as easily lead to their ruin. It can inform all our actions, but when our actions are reduced to mere history as well, what does legacy leave us?
Management: This is a two-parter that I’ve split up because while the original question was based on my panning of Sakurasou, it also concerns a lot of media evaluation theory that is much more generally relevant. I’ve divided it as best I can into separate questions to reflect this – Part 1 here should be relevant to everyone.
Question:
It seems impossible to fairly evaluate shows unless you take those shows’ own goals into account, and try to respect their specific priorities. Do you think some of the shows you rate poorly are merely a result of approaching these shows with the wrong mindset, or wishing they were different shows entirely? How do you reconcile your personal taste, or the nature of taste in general, with your attempts to assess art in a general way?
Question:
What makes a show “mature” or “for adults?” I see people throw these terms around in a condescending way, saying that shows like Steins;Gate or Madoka are inferior to shows like Monster because they’re aimed at teenagers. Are there any actual guidelines or metrics here?
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.