Category Archives: Essay

On Katawa Shoujo as a Theoretical Anime

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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.

Regarding My System of Scoring/Evaluation

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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.

Clannad – A Critical Overview on Character Development, Dramatic Structure, and Thematic Dissonance

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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.

Thoughts on Formulaic Storytelling and Critiquing Entertainment

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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…

Thoughts on Art Appreciation, Anime Culture, and the State of the Medium

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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.

That Whole Sakurasou Thing

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I guess I should probably include at least one piece of my Sakurasou commentary – after all, despite my incredibly mixed feelings towards that show, formalizing my criticism of its narrative and character failings was basically what taught me my current writeup format. So here’s a “greatest hits” collection from the final “What did you think of Sakurasou?” thread

As xRichard implies, I’ve already spilled way too much imaginary ink over this series, on basically every conceivable topic. So let’s see what past me has to say about this show, say… fourteen episodes ago.

“Regarding the comedy. It’s true that there is no such thing as “bad comedy”. However, there is “easy” comedy, or “dumb” comedy, or “commonly used” comedy. A key element of great humor is the unknown – jokes you have heard a thousand times lose their element of surprise, and thus their impact. One way to avoid this trap is to be brilliant, and have great, unique gags. Standup comedians are pretty much forced to do this. Another way is to weave your humor into the very specific personalities of your characters, so your jokes are both fresh and ride on the sympathy your audience has built for your cast. Sakurasou does neither of these things, and while this doesn’t make its comedy objectively bad, it does make it objectively routine.

Regarding the drama. I personally like subtlety in my character relations and dialogue, but I also enjoy a ton of unsubtle things (Chuunibyou isn’t subtle at all, but it still excels in pretty much all fields). My complaint with some of the drama/dialogue isn’t that it’s unsubtle, but that it comes off as false – that it feels like the writers are putting words in the character’s mouths to spell out the themes and the messages of the show. This was most egregiously done with Childhood Friend as they were running away from the pool, and when it does happen, it immediately pulls me out of the show by drawing attention to the raw mechanics of the story.

By the way, Shiina is one of the worst and most discomfort-inducing romantic leads I’ve ever seen.”

Whoa, whoa! That sounds pretty harsh! But that was a while ago, and as we all know, it takes a while for these romances to really get cooking. Let’s check back in a month later…

“Jin seemed like the most interesting character for a while there, but they’re doing serious damage to that relationship by prolonging this drama of false expectations while avoiding a real conversation between those two.

It feels like J.C. Staff believe that if they shake these characters hard enough they’ll get another Toradora, but I think there just isn’t enough substance to their emotional conflicts. They’re artificially prolonging the melodrama – treading water.

I think my biggest problem with this show is that almost none of the characters can have actual conversations with each other. Sorata and Aoyama? Nope, Sorata’s too oblivious and Aoyama too tsun for them to actually talk. Jin and Misaki? Certainly not, both of them avoid talking honestly to each other all the time. Sorata and Shiina? Yeah, those are really incisive discussions between intellectual equals. Romance requires give and take – you show romance by revealing how two people interact with and compliment each other, not by telling the audience these two people love each other and then only showing them avoiding real conversation.”

Jeez, this guy is mad! Maybe another couple weeks could fix things?

“Speaking of forced drama, my eyes just glaze over during every single Aoyama scene. She exists to fail, and to have it be sad when she fails, and to create little hurdles for Shiina to dither about then effortlessly, obliviously sail over. When a love triangle is this transparently lopsided, I don’t think “I wonder what will happen next,” I think “get on with what I know will happen next”. Maybe if she were a bit more distinctive of a character, I wouldn’t have this problem.

Overall, I am desperately hoping next week sees the drama come crashing down. This emotional status quo needs to die in a fire.”

Hah, oh man, did Sakurasou kick this kid’s dog or something? Jeez, what a whiner! Okay, let’s wrap this story up. Episode 20!

“Damn! This was definitely one of the best episodes so far, with great character moments from Akasaka, Rita, and Nanami… none of whom I really thought had it in them. Akasaka’s speech in the first act displayed an awareness and individual perspective that more characters in this genre need, and I still have hope that Sorata’s clinging to an ephemeral present will be called out in some larger way. Plus Nanami’s results weren’t dragged out or used for cheap melodrama – she reacted by bottling all of it, just like she always does. Shiina is still a holy terror of an uncharacter, but outside of her, it looks like the show is emerging from its incredibly rocky middle stretch with some dignity and sense of purpose intact. I’m actually feeling pretty optimistic about the conclusion now.”

What? Something positive? Well, that’s boring… in fact, it looks like most of the comments for the next three episodes are positive, with only vague references to this… Shiina… character. Oh, wait, here’s the ending.

Oh.

“Regarding the entire series, well… I mean, that kind of is what this series has always done, right? It’s almost like an American sitcom in its fear of disrupting the status quo, to the massive detriment of its characters. The main trio were by far the worst offenders in this regard, and it doesn’t help that they were the most thinly and stereotypically characterized as well – Sorata, Shiina, and Nanami all spin in the same dramatic circles for virtually the entire series. Some of the side characters fair better, though Misaki is pretty generic as well (but she gets good speeches on occasion, like when she confessed how tired she was of chasing Jin to Nanami). The comedy was predictably hit-or-miss throughout, leaning too heavily on tired slapstick and exhausted embarrassment gags, but occasionally pulling out a snappy aside or distinctively silly reaction face. The themes were… well, I guess “underserved” would be the diplomatic way to put it. “Used, cheated on, and ultimately abandoned” would be my actual diagnosis – every idea about self-worth, creativity, and the callous nature of the real world this show promotes ultimately gets taken for a ride and then forgotten in the pursuit of reliable melodrama and a universally happy ending. There are good ideas here, ideas a better show would have run with and respected, and there are many scenes scattered throughout that ring personal, distinctive, and true. But they are the exception, not the rule.

I guess, ultimately, I can’t accuse JC Staff of not trying, but I can certainly accuse them of not trying very hard. Picking a love interest like Shiina was obviously the first, most central, and clearly largest mistake – her core personality is “helpless, doesn’t know how to interact with others,” and the only growth she experiences is “learns to love Sorata and Sakurasou.” That isn’t a character arc – her initial flaws are never addressed, never challenged, never risen above. Sorata, for instance, has to change from lacking any real goal, to truly wanting something, to gaining the discipline to pursue his passion through hardship, to dealing with the jealousy and anger of being close to others who are more talented than him (compounded by his quick temper, a definite and convincingly articulated flaw), to dealing with the pain of true failure, to (okay, as I said, they kind of skip how he reaches this, but…) being at peace with trying his hardest while knowing failure is the standard result (actually, they don’t really make him accept that either… okay, so this show sucks at characterization and being consistent with its themes, but the point remains). Shiina? Shiina is an object. Shiina is a goal. Shiina is a reward. And so all the dramatic plot points about her are things like “find the Shiina,” “deal with my feelings about the Shiina,” or “explain this very simple concept to the Shiina” – her own agency is pretty negligible, because she lacks the personality to really bounce off other characters and the intelligence to have goals outside of “staying with the people who are nice to me.”

I honestly hope they realize how big of a problem this is – I mean, they’re not idiots, writing and directing any show is a ridiculously difficult process, and having to work around a human-sized lump like Shiina only makes that task that much harder. And there were still sparks of good stuff here, as I said. But ultimately, Shiina’s character, the cyclical drama, and the way it either abandons or fails to meaningfully follow through on its interesting themes all drag it down. I don’t regret watching Sakurasou, but it wasn’t a good show.”

And back to your narrator

Sorry I didn’t rewrite all my thoughts, but I stand by the thoughts I had in the first place. Good base themes, some good characters, a scattering of solid episodes (mainly 8-12 and 20-23), but it goes in dramatic cycles to no actual effect, it abandons its own themes for the sake of a cheap happy ending, and Shiina is both offensive and by her base nature allergic to romance or meaningful drama.

That said, it’s been a pleasure discussing it with all of you.

On Art, Emotional Resonance, and Understanding Your Audience

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This was a discussion I had with Imperialx regarding his excellent blog post. The context is GJ-bu, but the discussion is really about the nature and purpose of art.

My (pithy, unnecessarily nasty) initial response:

So, GJ-Bu is a mathematically formulated printout of the variables required to make a successfully meaningless SoL/comedy?

Yeah, that’s something. I’m not sure “brilliant” is the word for it.

Imperialx (gamely):

Then what word would you use?

Bobduh (still in snarky asshole mode):

I’d say it’s a tossup between “cynical” and “inevitable”

Imperialx (with ungodly patience):

That doesn’t do the show enough justice though.

Bobduh (finally acting like an adult):

You’re right. I’m being glib and dismissive because your thesis represents what I find worst in anime, but clearly you’re just candidly talking about a show’s “effectiveness” and not really its merits in any way.

Fundamentally, I completely agree with you – the market for these “empty” SoL shows does not demand distinction or creativity, it really just demands the absence of variables that break their illusion of security within the world of the show, or their utter understanding of how that world will continue to act. This is why Tamako Market failed – it didn’t reign the camera into a “comfortable” safe space with the main characters, the prospect of romance represented the prospect of drama, change, or character maturation, all of which are death to that illusion, and the bird represented a glaring fantastical variable that intruded on the nostalgic dream shows like this are trying to manufacture.

But calling an understanding of this dynamic “brilliant” still seems kinda crazy to me – it’s really just knowing your audience, and the fact that this particular audience basically demands exactly what they’ve seen before, with no sharp edges, means works like this work best when they don’t even try. I guess sanding off all possible points of contention or illusion-breaking in a work is a kind of craftsmanship, but it’s just not something I find all that impressive or meritorious.

Imperialx:

This is easily the best counter-point I have read so far in this thread so far as well as one of the most intellectual comments I have ever read on /r/anime. Thank you for taking the time to put down your thoughts in your comment.

You’re right. I’m being glib and dismissive because your thesis represents what I find worst in anime, but clearly you’re just candidly talking about a show’s “effectiveness” and not really its merits in any way.

It’s interesting that you find the action of omitting subtle annoyances as something that hampers an anime’s effectiveness as an entertainment medium. Mind you, I was only talking about this action as part of the subset of Slice of Life where nothing happens only. I don’t believe that simply omitting bad things in other genres can warrant brilliance.

Fundamentally, I completely agree with you – the market for these “empty” SoL shows does not demand distinction or creativity, it really just demands the absence of variables that break their illusion of security within the world of the show, or their utter understanding of how that world will continue to act.

I don’t really like the use of the word “empty” due to its negative connotation, but I can’t say you’re wrong in the way you’ve used it, at least literally. These shows are not “empty” because for viewers that resonate with them, they are absorbed into the lives of the anime characters, filling the “emptiness”. That’s what I personally think are so attractive about “empty” Slice of Life shows that are done well.

This is why Tamako Market failed – it didn’t reign the camera into a “comfortable” safe space with the main characters, the prospect of romance represented the prospect of drama, change, or character maturation, all of which are death to that illusion, and the bird represented a glaring fantastical variable that intruded on the nostalgic dream shows like this are trying to manufacture.

I applaud you, dear sir. The most accurate deconstruction of Tamako Market’s failure I have read to date on the Internet. If I had spare money I’d buy you Reddit Gold for this.

But calling an understanding of this dynamic “brilliant” still seems kinda crazy to me – it’s really just knowing your audience, and the fact that this particular audience basically demands exactly what they’ve seen before, with no sharp edges, means works like this work best when they don’t even try. I guess sanding off all possible points of contention or illusion-breaking in a work is a kind of craftsmanship, but it’s just not something I find all that impressive or meritorious.

Indeed, all it takes for this dynamic to work is “knowing your audience”. However, is it really that simple? If it were truly as simple as doing exactly the same things they’ve seen before, then why did so many other SoLs fail? I used the Acchi Kocchi example, so something must have gone wrong.

People do get bored, and they get bored very, very easily when it comes to Slice of Life shows confined inside a club room. If someone makes another anime with characters with all of the same tropes as GJ-Bu, people will get bored and they won’t gobble it up in the same way again. That’s why Lucky Star sold so many units, and its copycats did not.

In conclusion I do believe the successful “sanding off all possibly points of contention” to require craftsmanship. It involves a deep understanding of statistics and your target audience. Otherwise it will just be another Acchi Kocchi or Ai Mai Mi.

Looking at GJ-Bu’s sales, I think we can safely say that it has passed the hurdle, getting a majority of the population to resonate with it. That is a “empty” Slice of Life which has achieved “brilliance” in my opinion.

Bobduh:

Jeez, thank you for that ridiculously generous complement! I actually think this article and the previous one from your blog have been two of the most incisive anime critiques I’ve seen here, so I very much appreciate it.

It’s interesting that you find the action of omitting subtle annoyances as something that hampers an anime’s effectiveness as an entertainment medium.

I think you’re misunderstanding my intention here – I’m not saying that the process you’re describing hampers a show’s “effectiveness” as a commercial success that this audience responds to (in fact I’d probably agree with you), I’m implying a show’s “effectiveness” is a value unrelated to its “merits,” which I am correlating with its artisticaccomplishments, not its commercial ones.

These shows are not “empty” because for viewers that resonate with them, they are absorbed into the lives of the anime characters, filling the “emptiness”.

This is a fair point, and making a story that can resonate with the widest possible variety of people is a noble goal, but I’d argue there are ways to do it outside of this process. Characters can be distinctive and unique, and their experiences can refuse to follow the generally accepted conventions of a genre, without losing the audience’s resonance – resonance can always be attained if the emotional states underlying these elements are still something the audience can understand and relate to. For instance, Evangelion is a show about a boy piloting a giant robot, which is a situation no-one can relate to. However, the topics the show is really interested in talking about are Shinji’s feelings of isolation, his desire to please the people who matter to him, and his inability to breach the emotional walls of the people around him. Those base emotional states are incredibly resonant, regardless of the surface details, because everyone can relate those feelings (which are, in my opinion, always enhanced by a thoughtfully crafted and distinctive set of surface details) to some elements of their own life.

Indeed, all it takes for this dynamic to work is “knowing your audience”. However, is it really that simple? If it were truly as simple as doing exactly the same things they’ve seen before, then why did so many other SoLs fail? I used the Acchi Kocchi example, so something must have gone wrong.

I haven’t seen Acchi Kocchi, but I assume it fails to resonate with the audience because it fails on both these possible approaches – it doesn’t go for the absolutely honed “empty” dynamics of GJ-bu, but it also doesn’t manage to present believable situations and emotional stakes that an audience could relate to in the tradition of conventional narrative.

Looking at GJ-Bu’s sales, I think we can safely say that it has passed the hurdle, getting a majority of the population to resonate with it. That is a “empty” Slice of Life which has achieved “brilliance” in my opinion.

This is the kind of reasoning that caused me to respond so viscerally to your post in the first place. I honestly find the conclusions of this results-based thinking kind of frightening, and the equating of “successfully caters to an audience we have an utter understanding of by never challenging their existing preferences” with “brilliant” is incredibly alien to my way of evaluating art, and feels almost Orwellian (keeping the proles happy and content with soma that never broadens their horizons, etc). Maybe I was just never the intended audience for so-called “healing-type” shows, but I feel the shows that solve this equation you’ve proposed are kind of fundamentally soulless, and that you can create works that appeal to this audience while still maintaining individual creativity, while still infusing your characters with distinct emotions and the capacity for emotional development, and while still giving your show some fundamental purpose or (fairly light and airy) themes.

And I don’t feel this is just a result of me overthinking a simple comedy – I think Chuunibyou succeeds as a simple comedy while still maintaining all these other narrative “merits” and appealing to this core crowd, for instance. Or, to pick a truly pure comedy, classically sitcom-y example, I think the show Community knocks this out of the park, existing perfectly well as a feel-good, “healing-type” half-hour dose of reliable comedy while also incorporating themes of trust and identity, while also regularly performing incredibly ambitious formal storytelling experiments that you don’t even have to understand to find the show funny. In fact, I think a strong emotional resonance with individual characters only improves the impact of humor, far from making it more difficult for a wide audience to relate to. And I think relegating the definition of “brilliant” to “was successfully embraced by its target audience” kind of devalues standards of criticism in general – I think we should always ask for more than that from our art, even if the audience doesn’t. If we don’t, who will?

Regardless, I totally respect your viewpoints here, and absolutely love these kinds of tough questions and discussions. I sincerely hope you guys keep writing and crossposting this stuff.

Square Pegs, Round Holes, and the Art of Adaptation

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Hey guys. There have been a couple posts recently (well, semi-recently now) about adaptation, and while they kind of talk about what adaptation is, I don’t think they really went into what makes adaptation so interesting artistically. And I have a lot of thoughts about that!

I was originally writing this post as a comment for one of the article links, but I figured that would probably get buried, and the artistic side of this is interesting enough to warrant its own discussion. My thoughts here aren’t law, or based in massive industry knowledge – I’m just a dude who likes stories a whole lot, and thinks about storytelling pretty much constantly. And I have far less of a single thesis here than I did with my Nisemonogatari writeup – if anything, my points are mainly that adaptation is both a craft and an art unto itself, and that understanding mediums is critical to understanding how and why adaptations work or don’t. The main point here is to promote discussion and your own opinions, not just say How It Is. Anyway, let’s get to it. What’s up with adaptation?

Why Are You Even Trying

One of the main reasons I find adaptation interesting is because, although I know this isn’t the actual intent, the very act of adapting something makes me think, “Why? Was it not suited to its original medium?” Every medium has different strengths and weaknesses, and most of the time, a truly great piece of art works partially because it takes advantage of the unique strengths of its medium. An adaptation seeks to take the “essence” of some work and translate it to a different format – but this does not imply a perfect 1 to 1 transformation. In fact, a “perfect” adaptation is very rarely the best possible adaptation, and some restructuring or refocusing is normally required to make the best work possible.

And obviously, from a production perspective, adaptations are chosen not because they make for artistic challenges, but because a proven property will sell regardless of the medium. But that doesn’t make the challenge less interesting, or the results less respectable. A good adaptation requires both a keen understanding of the work you’re adapting, as well as understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the mediums you’re converting both from and to. Misunderstand these strengths, and even an adaptation of a fantastic work can fall completely flat.

So let’s get into those mediums. I’ll only cover a point or two each here, but there are a ton of angles to take on what makes each of these mediums interesting to adapt, so I hope you guys offer some of your own.

Manga

Manga has traditionally been the largest source of adaptations, though the ascent of Light Novels has challenged its position. But it still reliably dominates certain genres, and it’s still the source of virtually all heavyweight long-running commercial properties.

In general, manga might seem like it’s the easiest to adapt, since you could consider it just a series of static anime frames already, with cinematography and everything. In a way, this is true – a strict adaptation makes by far the most sense for this transition. However, one major problem you can run into here is pacing. In a manga, the flow of panels can dictate pacing to some extent, but ultimately it is in the reader’s hands how quickly any given scene goes by. This matters so much when it comes to things like action or comedy – the flow of a fight, or the speed of a joke’s telling and its immediate aftermath, can entirely dictate whether those sequences soar or fall flat. This is why I only read shonens (outside of the rare shonen with both compelling writing and a well-directed adaptation), and why I couldn’t stand the Genshiken adaptation, despite the manga being possibly my favorite manga – the pacing felt incredibly belabored and drawn out, making me feel like I’m watching two seconds of joke and then seven seconds of “THAT’S THE JOKE!”

Also, because of manga’s similarities to animation, adaptations from this medium can sometimes hew closest to the “entirely redundant adaptation” problem. This isn’t actually a bad thing, but I feel it is a true thing – for instance, Monster and Cross Game are both manga with incredible pacing, because both of their artists have an absurd gift for panel flow and a flawless understanding of traditional storytelling. So how were they adapted? Panel for panel. Basically the exact same piece of art, in color, with voices. And there’s nothing wrong with that, of course – but if something was absolutely perfectly suited to its original medium, what does an adaptation really accomplish? This is why the writer of Yotsuba has outright refused to have his manga adapted, which is a viewpoint I completely respect and understand. The pacing and mood of Yotsuba is perfect as-is – he chose his medium correctly. Granted, some people simply prefer watching things to reading them, and anime does offer a few things with no parallel in manga (like sound design), but I think this point remains. Anyway, moving on!

4-Koma

Briefly, 4-koma are a subset of manga that consist of a series of distinct 4-panel strips, normally reserved for comedies. They’re a kind of manga, but their adaptation provides unique challenges, so I’m separating them here.

The 4-koma format is interesting to adapt, because if you’re actually going to transition what was originally a series of 4-panel gags into 23-minute episodes of cinematic television, you basically have to create an entirely new work – it’s barely an adaptation at all. All you’re carrying over is a collection of jokes, characters, and, if you’re lucky, the “feel” of the comic – you need to either flesh out that world and add another dimension (like K-On), or sequence those gags in such a way that they add up to more than the sum of their parts (like Azumanga Daioh). Adapting a 4-koma probably requires the most inherent artistic input of any adaptation – that is, unless you are strictly presenting a series of the 4-koma gags, only animated (which is frankly a huge waste of animation’s potential), you need to find some larger thread to build these gags around.

Light Novels

Recently, light novels have become the primary source for a wide variety of popular anime, from the industry-shifting Haruhi Suzumiya to otaku favorites like OreImo or action shows like Sword Art Online. This makes sense to me – the popular aesthetics and tropes of the core anime-buying market have largely shifted from the action and adventure of the past to slice of life and romantic comedy, and these genres lend themselves to the character and dialogue-focused style of light novels. But creating a light novel adaptation that actually makes use of the anime format is deceptively difficult.

Light novels are tricky for almost the opposite reason of 4-komas – there is very little direction or scene-setting (usually), but there is a very established script, and normally a very specific narrative. The problem here is the mediums have completely separate strengths and weaknesses – light novels are about conversations and character, and generally read more like a play’s script than a novel, whereas anime is a visual medium that is at its best when scripts and characters work in tandem with a strong visual aesthetic. Thus, even in some of the best light novel adaptations (like Spice and Wolf), it’s incredibly clear that this is a light novel adaptation, because it really is just a series of conversations linked by an understated overarching plot. At the other end, some light novels succeed beautifully because a visual component would always have made them better – I think Haruhi is a solid example of this, though that might just be KyoAni being really good at their jobs. But normally, to add a strong visual component to a light novel adaptation is incredibly difficult. Some shows get away with it by essentially treating their material like an actual live-action sitcom, complete with the standard camera angles and lengthy multi-camera-sitcom-esque single-room sequences. In my opinion, this is a huge waste of potential – as I explained at excruciating length in my Nisemonogatari rundown, active cinematography can add a huge amount of emotional impact to a show, or even undercut the spoken message, and by limiting yourself to the tools of a conventional sitcom, you fail to take advantage of your true toolset even if you succeed in making a popular show.

Actual Novels

Full novel adaptations are the rarest of the possibilities I’ll be covering here, but they really, really, really shouldn’t be.

Actual full-length novels are possibly the medium best-suited to anime adaptation, and in fact I’d argue that no medium is more suited to successfully recreating a novel than anime is. They just match up on so many critical variables: they’re both long-form narratives that are generally separated into smaller subsections, they both involve a creator having absolute creative control (unlike the sitcom, or even film, where your ability to manipulate the frame and conjure the unreal is significant, but never infinite), and they both have a critical emphasis on and ability to manipulate mood and tone. Most novels are extended, character-focused narratives that successfully create a strong voice (either through a character or the narrator’s own voice) and contain several distinct plot strands that reflect off each other and ultimately present a number of consistent and well-explored themes. A novelist can conjure literally any scenario he wishes, and have the reader take it for granted as the truth of that world (as long as he doesn’t betray his own truth through inconsistent characterization or world-building). The mood and “feeling” a book evokes in the reader is the result of both conscious narrative choices and the collective impact of the language chosen and the style of writing used. All of these things translate absolutely naturally into anime, and reflect the extraordinarily similar strengths of that very distinct medium. Frankly, it’s crazy to me that more novels aren’t adapted into anime – although considering the sales numbers of Shinsekai Yori, perhaps those producers aren’t so crazy after all.

Visual Novels

A fan favorite, and the one I’m sure my opinions will be the most controversial for. Visual Novels are essentially branching “choose your own adventure” games, generally with a huuuge focus on characters and conversation, and often formatted as a love story where the largest branches correspond to a set of several potential love interests. Because of the player agency and the distinct nature of the main paths, visual novels are often a collection of several very different and separate narratives, though the themes and characters of each may intersect and overlap.

“But wait,” you hopefully ask yourself, “if visual novels are actually a *collection* of stories, then how do you adapt that into the linear narrative of an anime?”

The answer is, “Most of the time? Very, very poorly.”

Now don’t get mad just yet. I’m not saying this is a fault of the visual novels themselves, and I’m not dismissing anyone’s legitimate attachment to and experience with a visual novel adaptation – I’m just saying that when you take four or five unrelated stories and smash them into one continuous narrative, something’s gotta give. Normally, visual novel adaptations result in very disjointed narratives, where a primary set of characters and perhaps main narrative are established in the first couple episodes, and then the story takes its time exploring each of the other potential plot arcs in turn before weaving its way back to that central narrative. While this tactic keeps the fans happy by not significantly shortchanging any favorite character, it is absolutely death to a coherent, focused narrative, and is in fact a fairly poor representation of the original source anyway. After all, does the main character of a visual novel do everything for everyone the way these super-humans often tend to in their adaptations? No. They have one story arc with one character, and that is their story. If you want to have another story, you start over from the beginning, and having another story. Sure, you might “progress” only by completing all these stories, but that’s a meta trick of game design – that’s not the same as all of them being part of the same narrative.

The “fit all arcs into one narrative” approach to VN adaptation not only results in a wandering and unfocused narrative, but it also generally results in an unrelatable superman of a main character, unless the character’s wanderings are somehow related to the main themes and point of the show (School Days, for all its faults, does a wonderful job of making the inherent weirdness of combining separate love stories into The Point Of The Show). I was actually hopeful Clannad would do something similar, and that Tomoya’s savior complex would end up being a reflection of his wish to avoid becoming his father… but Maeda instead merely uses the concept for a deus ex machina ending, and the show remains unfocused throughout. Honestly, I think this approach is nearly impossible, and requires a very, VERY specific narrative for it to work – the only two examples I can think of are the aforementioned School Days and Steins;Gate, which manages to work both the necessity of helping a set of side characters and the temporary nature of the character growth thereby gained into a clever conceit in its third act. So basically, unless your story is about time travel or womanizing, it’s pretty difficult to pull this off and have your story still work as a coherent narrative.

Another approach to VN adaptation, and one I think has a great deal more potential, is to simply drop the ruse of a single narrative and actually adapt your VN as a collection of separate short stories. I feel Yosuga no Sora isn’t a particularly good show, but I think it actually used this approach to fairly strong effect. Other problems do emerge by taking this strategy – for instance, to continue with my example, the second-most-important character in Yosuga no Sora is the main character’s sister. However, she starts off the story in a very unhealthy place emotionally, and because most of the show consists of establishing characters other than her and then backtracking to the start, her personality ends up coming across as artificially and frustratingly static, even though the second the show actually focuses on her, her character growth is immediate. But I feel problems such as this are much, much more easily fixed than the inherent problems of single-route adaptations.

That said, I don’t think the single-route adaptation problems are inherently unsolvable – but for most shows, they would require a far more significant restructuring of content than they tend to receive. Plots would have to be woven together more coherently. Characters would have to take the place of others to avoid “hero protagonist” syndrome. Storylines that could possibly reflect or influence each other would have to be merged. Essentially, a new coherent narrative would have to be created by smashing each storyline into pieces and then patching them together as a single framework – and this is both at least as hard as writing a story from scratch, as well as less likely to appease the fans that desire a strict adaptation of “their” route. As far as I can see, the question of successful visual novel adaptation is still an open one, and the relative success of many very unfocused current adaptations leaves creators with little incentive to truly answer it.

I would welcome more examples of different styles of visual novel adaptations, or examples from within these styles that work well. I’d also love to hear of any adaptations that actually adopted my “smash the storylines to bits, make one coherent one” proposal, regardless of the results. The concept of adopting a visual novel is extremely interesting creatively, even if I have mixed feelings about a lot of the results.

And the rest

There are a variety of other sources for adaptations – toys, idols, videogames, etc – but for most of them, there isn’t really a process of translation so much as full artistic creation or re-imagining, so they’re not really as relevant for the specific topic of adaptation. But anyway, those are just some of my initial feelings on the subject. I know better than to narrow the discussion with any specific questions, so…

Your thoughts?

Nisemonogatari and the Nature of Fanservice

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So, I just finished Nisemonogatari for the first time. And I’m pretty much blown away. And I need to talk about it.

(You might want to sit down, I’ll be here a while)

I’d put off watching this second season for a decent while, for two very specific reasons. First, while I found the first season very unique and artistically compelling, it didn’t really resonate with me at all until that last, basically perfect episode. And second, from everything I’d read online, it seemed like the second season amped the fanservice up to 11. And fanservice, well…

It’s bad. The way it’s normally used, it demeans and objectifies characters, and distracts/detracts from whatever a show is trying to do narrative-wise and emotionally. It makes the camera itself a lecherous observer of characters, and not simply the best framing device for the story being told. It adds to a value unrelated to a show as an artistic work, and in fact normally detracts from its artistic worth and the narrative/emotional weight of any scene. It demeans the audience as well, implying we’re unable to be entertained by the show’s actual worth, and the implications regarding my base-instinct-oriented nature colors my experience as a viewer. It proves that the creators of the show are not taking that show and its characters seriously – and if they’re not, why the fuck should I?

However

Nisemonogatari is not interested in fanservice.

Nisemonogatari is a show specifically about sexuality, perspective, and the conventions of camera use (yeah, I know it’s not an actual camera, bear with me).

Most fan service happens by making the camera take the perspective of an outsider, an intruder to the scene – or at “best” the perspective of the lecherous or hapless protagonist. Fan service is all about the male gaze, that is, women are framed in a way that accentuates their sexuality not because that’s how they see themselves, but just because the cameraman finds that sexy.

In Nisemonogatari, the cameraman has got greater concerns than that. Every shot is purposeful, and from a specific perspective or mentality.

Example 1: the scene with Nadeko.

In this scene, Nadeko is specifically and obviously trying to seduce the oblivious Araragi. To that end, Nadeko is in control of the camera. The camera is portraying her exactly how she wants to be perceived, and most of the humor of the scene is drawn from the contrast between her fumbling, obvious advances and Araragi’s upbeat obliviousness. This is the first of many scenes where a female character attempts to use her sexuality as a weapon, and Araragi’s responses make it clear that the camera is not from his male perspective – it is portraying the way she is attempting but failing to be perceived. Additionally, this is the first of countless scenes where almost all the emotional content of the exchange is contained in the direction, not the script. This isn’t surprising, considering this show is directed by the great Akiyuki Shinbo, but it’s clear even this early that Shinbo has a bone to pick with the way anime portrays sexuality, and his superior, winking control of the camera’s eye comes up again and again.

Let’s run through a few more examples. The next scene, Araragi meets his sister, and this is completely unsexualized – in fact, they even go so far as to incorporate a traditionally grossly fanservicey shot (a crotch shot), but because of her outfit and stance, it’s totally neutral. At this point in time, neither of these characters consider the other sexually at all, so why would the camera? Shinbo knows what many directors fail to either know or care about – that the positioning of the camera both has a significant emotional effect on the viewer, and always conveys information. Information about tone, about self-image, about stakes, about the way one character views another… anime is a medium with literally infinite framing potential, and Shinbo is going to talk about that whether the viewer likes it or not.

The next scene we’re with Kanbaru, and it’s back to “fanservice” – but the context is entirely different from the Nadeko scene. In this sequence, it’s a girl using her body to deliberately fuck with Araragi, because that’s the rapport they share. Unlike Nadeko, there is no subtlety in Kanbaru’s sexuality, both because that’s more representative of her in-your-face personality, and because she just knows Araragi better. She uses her sexuality as a weapon, not to seduce Araragi, but to simply throw him off guard. But again, she is entirely in control of the camera’s eye.

Skipping ahead, we have an episode where Shinobu is naked basically the entire time, but the tone and impression are completely different. The camera trivializes her nudity because to her, it is trivial – it is not sexualized, and is treated in a way very similar to Horo from Spice and Wolf – it doesn’t shy away from it, but also doesn’t fetishize or draw attention to it. Meanwhile, in a brief conversation with a fully clothed Hanekawa, the camera is all about the character’s sexuality. This is because Hanekawa is an inherently seductive presence to Araragi, and they both know it – the sexual tension just barely unacknowledged between them is apparent in the camera’s eye. Again, all these scenes contain the majority of their context simply in the framing of the character – while their conversations are more whimsical and plot or banter-focused, a huge amount of information about the relationship the characters share is conveyed through the camerawork alone. Intelligent cinematography is like a freaking superpower.

And now we get to the big one.

Episode 8. Dental hygiene. The last great point of this series.

To me, firstly, this episode is goddamn hilarious. The primary joke of the second half is, “brushing teeth should not be this sexy,” and that joke only works if the audience can feel how sexy it is for those characters. And this team is obviously gifted enough to know how to pull off a scene like that.

And that’s impressive enough on its own. But what I really think this episode is doing, what I think the point is from the beginning straight through the end, is talking about Intimacy.

I think, and this is pure hypothesis, but it seems pretty reasonable to me, that Shinbo asked himself, “what do people who love fanservice get out of it? Why are they watching an anime, and not just porn? What does this show have that actual direct sexual gratification lacks?”

Intimacy.

The toothbrush scene is so erotically charged because of the intimacy involved, and everything in the show/episode leads into this. First, Karen and Araragi’s relationship always has a weird, semi-flirtatious charge to it, as they’ve moved from younger traditional antagonistic siblings to one of those bicker-flirting couples. Then, everything Karen does at the start of this episode is designed to put Araragi off his guard and in a place of intimacy/discomfort. Her outfit does so much work here, and it’s all her intentional, meaningful decision. First, it serves as a striking contrast against both her normal outfit and her personality – the bee exercise outfit is absolutely her, androgyny is absolutelyher, carefree sexlessness is absolutely her, and putting her in such a constricting, gendered, sexually charged outfit serves to throw off all preconceptions Araragi has about interacting with her. Second, the fact that it isn’t her outfit, and in fact doesn’t fit her at all, puts her in a place of vulnerability, and this also throws off Araragi. Finally, it directly is designed to be sexy, and prove she’s in control of her sexuality, which is something Araragi has clearly been struggling to come to grips with as he attempts to act like a role model for his sisters. All of these things further Karen’s goals in this episode – make Araragi so uncomfortable he’ll agree to introduce her to Kanbaru. All these are choices of the character, not the learing cameraman, and the effect these choices have on both Araragi and the audience is very much the intended effect. Everything else she does – the confession about how his insults used to really get to her, her basically physically assaulting him – all these further that one clearly understood goal.

But I was talking about intimacy. So, what the actual toothbrush scene does obviously builds off this place of discomfort/vulnerability/overt sexuality she’s been intentionally provoking. It combines this with the relationship these two have been building, a great deal of bantering buildup, and a close monologue from Araragi to place the sex stuff in a position of complete emotional honesty. Sure, it’s also played for humor – but the humor is mostly based on the fact that it’s funny brushing teeth can be this sexy, and as I said, for that joke to work at all, the audience has to truly understand that this scene is sexy to these characters. Most powerful moments in most media are powerful not just because of the audience’s emotional reaction to a situation, but because they can empathize with a character’s emotional reaction to a situation. This effect drags us further into the text/film/show and girders our connection with the characters involved – at that moment, we feel for them more deeply than we do for ourselves. Thus, all the prep work of this episode works to help us understand these characters completely at this moment, and when they react to this scene as if it’s incredibly erotic, we can understand it to be erotic as well. The connection between the characters is honest, and the way the show is conveying their emotions to the audience is honest as well – intimacy is really just another word for honesty. This honesty, which makes this scene so strong, is a part of why most fanservice is so bad – because it’s dishonest to the characters, and portrays them as sexual objects when they’re not actually feeling like sexual objects in that moment. But more than that, this honesty is almost entirely lacking in conventional pornography. Conventional pornography is generally a collection of soul-deadened actors performing a service for a fee – sure, they’re naked, but it’s the furthest thing from intimacy you could possibly imagine. To find someone disrobe emotionally, you have to look to art. And so the point of this scene is “Even in a scene as ridiculous as this, honesty can make it ring true.”

One last tangent, but it was very interesting to me, and I never would have thought of it if not for the strong points raised by Nisemonogatari. I think this intimacy issue is a large part of why something like K-On is so damn successful. This is a kind of fractured and difficult point to make, mainly because the characterization in K-On is very difficult to describe as “honest,” but I think from the point of view that these are valid characters, K-On attempts to create a continuous mood of emotional honesty and friendly, unabashed intimacy. It invites the viewer into a safe, loving environment free from any of the hidden motives and defenses that characterize the real world, and is always completely honest with the viewer. For those who watch Community, K-On is basically like the ultimate Abed experience – a world based on rules you understand entirely that loves you unconditionally, and is willing to share all of its emotional secrets with you. Intimacy porn. I mainly bring this up because there was a thread a few days ago where someone said they like K-On because the characters feel “real.” Now, to anyone who knows anything about character writing or, frankly, human beings, that’s a ridiculous statement – but I think what was really meant there was that the characters feel honest, which, though they are very fabricated constructions, is certainly true within the context of that show.

So yeah, the toothbrush scene forced me to reevaluate and perhaps legitimize the emotional appeal of “cute girls doing cute things”. And I think that’s exactly the point Shinbo was trying to make – that sex will never be as appealing as honesty, and that intimacy is ultimately the core of the erotic. And that this, in addition to the issues about male gaze, camerawork, storytelling, and perspective he’s already addressed, is why fanservice normally hurts shows – it’s impersonal and dishonest.

So no, I don’t think Nisemonogatari is a big fan of fanservice. In fact, I think it’s the ultimate, staggeringly coherent statement against it, complete with endless demonstrations of the ways sexuality really can be used to enhance and augment storytelling. And I could not be more freaking impressed.