Category Archives: Review

The Tatami Galaxy or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ride

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Hey guys, it’s Bobduh. New review today! Hopefully a little less overwhelming than the last, since I have no grand argument I wish to prove on this one. I just watched a really great show and want to talk about it.

The Tatami Galaxy or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ride

The Tatami Galaxy is a dizzying spectacle of an anime. Adapted by Yuasa Masaaki (the extremely distinctive director behind Mind Game, Kaiba, Kemonozume, and recently Kick-Heart) from a novel (a real novel, not just a My Light Novel Can’t Be This Pandering and Derivative LN) by Morimi Tomihiko (the writer of Uchouten Kazoku, which is currently my choice for best show of the year), it’s basically perfect. Not gonna slowroll that – this goes on my list with Madoka and Katanagatari of shows that I couldn’t see meaningfully improved. It’s already there.

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Shinsekai Yori and True Heroism

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I have to admit, I’ve been kind of dreading this essay. Granted, I actually dread pretty much every essay – this may come as a surprise, but writing mostly feels like work, and it’s only having written things that I normally like (or the feeling of editing something I’m already happy with, or that last-act stretch, when the writing feels like those burning, fleeting seconds after a shot of whiskey, and the absolute worth of the task tingles down to your extremities… okay, yeah, writing is actually pretty great). But normally I only fully break down shows I’m very passionate about, and the reason I’m saying any of this is because that’s not how it’s going right now. Right now I’m going to talk about Shinsekai Yori, and I have to admit the show left me kind of cold.

Not that it’s a bad show! No. It’s actually an extremely good show. Many people already love it, and many more should be introduced to it, because they will love it too. It has a remarkable number of strengths in its favor.

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Katanagatari and the Weight of Legacy

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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?

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Blood Ties and Nekomonogatari

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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.

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Suisei no Gargantia – Review

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Suisei no Gargantia is a strange little show. It covers all of Urobuchi’s pet themes at once, while also shifting wildly in tone and pacing throughout. It combines a number of seemingly incompatible genres, including Ghibli-esque adventure, slice of life, sci-fi drama, action, and even some moments approaching psychological horror. It clearly displays some of the most supportable accusations generally leveled at Urobuchi – that his characters lack nuance or depth, and that his stories work primarily in support of ideas and have little power as narratives in and of themselves. Gargantia by itself is a pretty cogent argument for why Urobuchi is such a polarizing writer.

But the thing about polarizing writers is that for all the people they turn off, there are also plenty of people who really like what they do. Like, for example, me.

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Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Comedy wa Machigatteiru – Review

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It’s a common complaint about anime. Why are so many series obsessed with high school? Why do we only get young protagonists? Why aren’t there more stories I can still relate to, now that I’ve grown beyond that setting? And it’s an extremely valid one – anime does squander its infinite potential by adhering to such similar settings, and we really are deeply lacking in protagonists covering the range of mature human experience. The reasons for this trend (the age of the fandom, the high premium placed on nostalgia and escapism, the natural tendency to continue making what sells, the adherence to safe formulas, etc) are as understandable as they are disappointing. And the complaint doesn’t even take quality into account, which is another issue – many of these shows tread the same ground, they often deal in archetypal, empty characters, they often exist as pure escapism or viewer self-insert fantasies, their humor repeats, their drama repeats worse, they exist as commercial shells and have no greater human ambitions. Sometimes it can feel like we’re well and truly fucked when it comes to imbedding some creative spark and ambition in this sea of similar, empty productions.

To this jaded and completely reasonable perspective (one which you can probably tell I largely agree with), I would have to say: OreGairu.

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Hataraku Maou-sama! – Review

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Maou is kind of a tricky beast to review, because though it’s always fundamentally a comedy, it puts on a number of specific hats throughout its run – satire, sitcom, drama, action, romance, etc. But it’s actually normally quite good at whatever it attempts; the action finales of 5 and 11/12 are fairly satisfying, the everyday life drama of the central characters is more believably slice of life than most actual slice of life shows, the characters are decently well-written (with a caveat – but I’ll get to that). The show’s overall high level of storytelling and aesthetic craft is almost certainly its greatest asset – but it can also sometimes kinda be its greatest weakness.

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Brief Aside – The Point of School Days

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Question:

What’s up with School Days?

Bobduh:

It’s an uncomfortably scathing and cynical commentary on the nature of most harems and dating sims. Not a fun ride, but a pretty necessary one.

Most harems exist as sexist power fantasies, relying on the relative inoffensiveness, blandness, or obliviousness of the protagonist, as well as generally a lot of not-taking-themselves-that-seriously, to (theoretically) avoid coming off as creepy and narcissistic. School Days doesn’t do that – School Days plays it straight. It takes a callow, nebbish male protagonist with a weak moral center, and surrounds him with girls with such significant personal issues and such weak self-image that his realizing he can have sex with people just by wanting it and pursuing it makes it actually happen. It’s a relentlessly negative show, but that’s the point – it’s saying that harems are pretty ugly things, and that the circumstances of a harem require a lot of shitty behavior on the part of the guy and a lot of psychological dependency on the part of the girls. By mapping the escapism of harems to characters with actual issues, it acts as a scathing critique of the idea of “winning” girls.

That said, the writing is suspect, the pacing is sluggish in ways that don’t support the material, and the show never actually grapples with its themes, it just exists as a representation of them. The points it makes are a lot more interesting than the package they’re wrapped in.

Kotoura-san – Episode 12 and Final Assessment

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So! Last episode of the most inconsistent show of the season. Although at this point, I guess it has developed a kind of consistency, in that I’ve always been somewhat disappointed with how things are resolved, but like the characters and writing enough to be hopeful for the next thing. They completely, abruptly, kind of ridiculously concluded the mystery plot last episode, so I guess we’ve got a whole episode to deal with Mommy Dearest. I think I know how this one ends. Let’s see it off!

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Serial Experiments Lain – Final Assessment

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That was a very solid show! The ideas were quite interesting and seemed fairly consistent, the mood shifted pretty organically from meditative psych thriller to sci-fi drama, the visual and sound design was excellent, Lain was a solid central character, and it ended very well. Some specific things that really stuck out to me were the excellent contradictory ideas it introduced later on, some really well-directed thriller elements (the sister episode in particular was a highlight), the excellent use of a very broad visual vocabulary (the colors, the repeated camera shots, etc), and the so-smart-it-seems-obvious connection of defining the self with online personas.

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