Spring 2024 – Week 7 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I write to you amidst a frenzy of creative passion, as both the Evangelion writeups and new DnD projects are flowing abundantly. With our current campaign briefly on hold, my playing party just concluded a two-part post-campaign adventure in the world I created for our last campaign, this time both designed and led by one of our other players. The experience offered a refreshing perspective on campaign and narrative design; I am a creative-first top-down designer, meaning I essentially write a drama and then set to work translating it into DnD’s mechanical structures, whereas this two-parter’s designer is a mechanics-first, bottom-up designer, meaning he designs an interesting mechanical puzzle and then finds a creative coat of paint for it.

It was interesting to see how that mindset incurred various second-order effects in terms of how the sessions played out, and it’s also got me hungry to run my own adventures again. It is a wonderful feeling to have run a campaign that my players are clamoring to return to, and once I’ve concluded this Eva era, I’ll be eager to share some of my design documents with all of you. In the meantime, we’ve got a fresh pile of films to explore, so let’s get to work!

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Neon Genesis Evangelion – Episode 19

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We begin shortly after the last episode’s grotesque conclusion, with Shinji still in the pilot seat. Not because he’s been forced to, not because he can’t escape, but instead because he refuses to leave. Having witnessed what his father is capable of, having been made complicit in this violence upon his friend Toji, Shinji has at last reached his moral limit. A grim irony there; if Shinji had a more compassionate father, one who actually wanted to see his son succeed, this would likely be a moment of pride. His anxious son, who has so often simply gone with the flow and accepted the directions of others, is at last making a stand for something he believes in. But Gendo does not want his son to be a young man of firm convictions and unerring moral character; he wants Shinji to be a tool, and Shinji is now proving himself a defective one

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Big Windup! – Episode 10

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m delighted to announce we’re returning to Big Windup!, and checking in with the increasingly reliable battery of the anxious pitcher Mihashi and cynical catcher Abe. Big Windup!’s first stretch was largely preoccupied with Mihashi unlearning the bad instincts prompted by his traumatic middle school experience, and gaining the confidence to form a genuine partnership with Abe. With Mihashi having achieved at least a degree of trust in his curmudgeonly catcher, we then turned to Abe’s own history, as he described the frustration of the self-absorbed Haruna sinking his own middle school team’s aspirations.

The symmetry of these experiences points towards Big Windup!’s general understanding of personal psychology, its emphasis on the fact that we are all products of our prior experiences, carrying baggage and preconceptions through which we filter and contextualize any new information. Mihashi’s servile affectation is simply the “solution” to conflict he carried over from middle school, while Abe’s bitterness and need for control are clearly an overcorrection from his time with Haruna. Of course, there’s more to it than that, because humans are complicated: Abe would always be less of a people person given his fiercely analytical mind, while Mihashi’s inherent sensitivity to emotions is part of the reason why he felt the frustration of his prior teammates so deeply. And on top of all that, we’ve got the crunchy mechanical structure of baseball itself, a sport that through its distinct, repeated confrontations of batters and pitchers is uniquely well-suited to tactical feints and mind games.

It’s a rich and nourishing stew of variables, and it’s been far too long since we dug in. Let’s return to the pitch for a fresh episode of Big Windup!

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The Big O – Episode 19

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am delighted to at last be returning to The Big O, after an outrageously overlong stay of absence. Big O’s mixture of noir drama, robot action, and philosophical interrogation of identity has made for a show unlike any I’ve seen, one of those unique genre blends at which animation uniquely excels. The show is expertly woven with internal mysteries, but they’re frankly unnecessary to maintain its allure; not when every episode offers something so novel and compelling, whether it’s Dastun’s lost movie love or last episode’s Beck insanity.

With our last escapade serving as perhaps the most irreverent of the series so far, I’m guessing things will settle a bit this time, as we presumably return to the question of Roger defining himself outside of Rosewater’s shadow. Roger has always seen the Big O as his method of enacting change in this world, his will to protect and redeem Paradigm made manifest – but if his identity as a pilot is also Rosewater’s design, can he truly hope to change his destiny through the very means that destiny was provided? Regardless, I imagine we’ve got plenty of sumptuous imagery and charming Roger-Dorothy moments ahead of us, so let’s get right to it!

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Spring 2024 – Week 6 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. We’re finally hitting the warm weather at this point, so I’m happy to be sitting with my windows open and a pile of Evangelion writeups in front of me, all eagerly awaiting their final revisions. It may in retrospect have been psychologically unwise to leave half a dozen deep dives into the mindset of depression and self-hatred all stacked up at the end of my funded projects, but honestly, it’s actually been an absolute pleasure returning to these episodes that still loom so dramatically in my own media development. As it turns out, Evangelion is really, really good, truly one of the great works of narrative art, and every episode I revisit only offers all the more to appreciate. The characters are so richly drawn I can relate to aspects of all of them, and it also simply feels good to at last be fulfilling these long-outstanding requests. Anyway, I’ll likely have the next Eva writeup for you on Monday, but for now let’s see what films I snuck in the margins of the week!

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Wonder Egg Priority – Episode 11

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am both eager and apprehensive to return to Wonder Egg Priority, after an episode that at last revealed the original crimes of Acca and Ura-Acca. Like all of Wonder Egg’s malevolent adult villains, the pair saw young women merely as objects built for their entertainment, toys to be roughly handled and discarded when the interest had passed. However, they took this idle fascination a horrifying step further, actually designing the young Frill “just for fun.”

The audacity of their crime echoed across their lives, though the two remained untouched themselves, and clearly indifferent to the moral wretchedness of their choices. When Azusa and her pregnancy took command of their attention, they discarded Frill without a care, seeing her as a trifle whose purpose had passed. Fabricated nature aside, Frill was treated little differently from this series’ abused protagonists – and like them, she ultimately struck back against her jailers, stealing their new happiness by killing first Azusa, then her daughter Himari.

It is tragic but not surprising that other women paid the debt of Acca and Ura-Acca’s crimes. Even after all they had done to betray her, she still hoped to regain her fathers’ love, or at the very least to be acknowledged as a person. “Don’t pretend not to see me,” she begged. “I was born from the two of you.” But rather than acknowledge their daughter and their crimes, they chose to define her as a malignant, unreachable “other” – a detested symbol of female agency, now hunted by whatever other girls they can con into their service. Though they have saved their own precious friends, Frill remains trapped within the system Acca and Ura-Acca created, lashing out in defense of the only humanity she was ever afforded. Let’s see if our heroes can save her!

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Anne of Green Gables – Episode 14

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am delighted to return to Anne of Green Gables, after far too long away from our precocious young heroine and her fanciful adventures. In the time since our last visit I’ve continued to enjoy as much Takahata as possible, screening both later Ghibli films and Toei Doga classics like Horus, but there’s nothing quite like his beautiful, meditative television work. The World Masterpiece Theater productions remain a singular high point in anime history, and Takahata will likely always be one of my very favorite directors.

Anyway, it is delightful to be back, and it looks like we’re in for another sturdy episode production-wise. World Masterpiece Theater and Miyazaki/Takahata mainstay Seiji Okuda is back on storyboarding duty, with the lack of a distinct assigned director again leading me to assume this’ll be an episode hewing closely to Takahata’s vision of the story. And though scriptwriter Kaizo Kamiyama is relatively untested, I’m not particularly concerned; Anne’s dialogue sings because so much of it was taken directly from L.M. Montgomery’s novel, a trend I expect to continue with fantastic results. Who knew that closely adapting classic novels would result in superior anime dramas? But let’s not get snippy about The General State Of Things, for we’ve got a show to watch. Onward to Green Gables!

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BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! – Episode 13

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today it is with a heavy heart that I announce we have reached the finale of BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!!, and will soon be asked to leave the venue and shuffle our way home. It’s been a poignant, frequently transcendent, and ever-engaging journey with the lost girls, and I’m sad to see our time together drawing to a close. But at least we’ve still got the memories: Anon’s delightfully mercenary recruitment of Tomori, that devastating elaboration of Tomori’s life story, the desperate machinations of our girl Soyo, and the thunderous performances that first rent and then reunited our stars, aligning them in their collective need for a little warmth and understanding, a place that might make a pillbug like Tomori reach for the sun.

It’s been profoundly rewarding watching this crew grow into an ever-frictious but nonetheless supportive whole, and I’d frankly be perfectly content if this episode was just a full-length encore performance for MyGO!!!!! But of course, our story possesses one last lingering question: what the fuck is going on with Sakiko, and why is she assembling a cabal of musical supervillains. Her initial formation of CRYCHIC seemed almost as Tomori-focused as our dear Taki’s motives, and it’s clear that seeing Tomori move on and find a new community hit her like a punch in the gut. Will we at last learn why she was moved to disband her own precious community, and what she hopes will emerge from the ashes? Let’s get to it!

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Spring 2024 – Week 5 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I write to you in the midst of a furious productivity burst, as I charge through my last outstanding Current Projects while also working on various independent creative endeavors. Having broken through the anxiety of doing right by Evangelion’s most legendary episodes, I’ve been savoring my return to the series that first sparked my love of anime, and learning I do indeed have a whole lot to say about the show that made me who I am. And with my house now steadily marching through their third DnD campaign, I’ve been balancing independent writing between whittling journal entries describing that campaign’s progress and plotting out postgame adventures for our previous campaign.

There’s little more satisfying than hearing your players demand they get to spend more time in your world, and I’m doing my best to honor that request with suitably harrowing new adventures. Anyway, I might share some of my in-character diary entries or design documents soon, but for now, we’ve also got a pile of fresh films to talk about. Let’s get to it!

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Twenty Years Later

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Twenty Years Later is the story of João Pedro Teixeira, a leader of Brazil’s rural Peasant Leagues who achieved some notoriety in the early 1960s. Teixeira was vying for more equitable conditions for his town of Sabe’s workers, who were being heinously exploited by the local landowners. Forced to produce cash crops for export instead of self-sustaining food, and constrained within a situation where both their jobs and homes were owned by local barons, Teixeira’s neighbors had no recourse but to come together, using the title of “Peasant League” to avoid the fraught term “union.” This semantic defense did not protect them; Teixeira was murdered on the side of the road while returning his son’s library books, and his league died with him.

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