Summer is here! A wonderful time to hide on your computer and watch cartoons so other people don’t have to. This first week has had some hits and some misses, but overall it’s looking like I’ll have a healthy mix of genres to replace our dear departed Ping Pong. Let’s run down some first episodes!
Rough Notes Archive: Revolutionary Girl Utena
Management: Once again, got some requests for some of my original show notes. As before, these aren’t in any way formatted for readers – they’re my notes to myself, containing immediate reactions and anything I thought might be useful for pulling together the motifs and themes of the series. They just go straight through from first episode to last, but of course you can ctrl-f to find the scattered references to any particular topic. The occasional bolded sections are stuff that I thought were key points at the time, or pieces I was sure I’d use for my eventual essay.
Anyway! That’s all for preamble. These are mainly for the crazy few people who are into this sort of thing, so don’t feel obligated to read, there’s no prize at the end. This really is just a whole goddamn ton of Utena notes. Enjoy!
Sword Art Online II – Episode 1
It’s time. IT’S TIME. IT’S TIME TIME TIME. Sword Art Online II has arrived, and I can finally watch this show at the same time as everybody else. No more constant spoilers, no more comments laughing about whatever I’m about to run into, no more one-way delicious tears. Sword Art Online is very clearly our form of Event Television, and thistime I’m actually going to be there at the starting line.
If you don’t follow my site, you may not be aware that I’ve actually been cataloging my journey through the first season over the past few months. I’ve done episodic writeups for all the episodes, with my final one containing abrief overview of the first season, which I found pretty aesthetically impressive but very narratively lacking. Or if you just enjoy the silly concept writeups, you can stick to Hardboiled Sword Art Online and Kirito, The Hand of God – yeah, things have gotten pretty weird these last few weeks. Either way, I’m excited to finally be watching SAO as it airs, and want to please ask anyone commenting to refrain from spoiling future stuff – it’d be nice to actually experience this show fresh for once.
So… yeah. New season of SAO, new game for Kirito to conquer, new love interest played by friggin’ Sawashiro Miyuki. I’m ready. You ready? YOU BETTER BE READY. GET HYPE, IT’S SWORD ART ONLINE.
Spring 2014 – Week 13 in Review
The season’s ending is upon us, meaning I get to slack off and only do like half a post, hurray. And in the spirit of that, I’m tired of writing this intro and am stopping now.
Sword Art Online – Episode 25
You know, it’s at times like this that I think it’s most important for all of us to remember not to jump to conclusions. I know you want to. I know I want to. And it’d certainly be easy! Over time, as these episodes have stretched on, I’ve given snide little asides and mini-sermons on what I think of the underlying philosophy of this show. How it plays into perverse, naive ideas of meritocracy popular among gamers or outsiders in general. How it doesn’t really seem to understand human beings on more than a superficial, “man-creatures do this” level. How it seems to like violence just maybe a little bit too much. And it’d be easy to extrapolate from this that, say, all gamers are psychopaths who dream only of murder. Or that videogames are popular because they provide the killing fields these bloodlust-crazed time bombs so desperately desire. Or that Sword Art Online represents an idealized view of the world written from the perspective of a person who knows he deserves to rule, scorns those who currently thwart him in the cruel outer world, and longs for the day when he will bring swift and long-awaited justice in the form of righteous, delicious, endless acts of brutal, merciless violence.
But let’s not jump to conclusions.
I could be frank, though!
Should I be frank?
Alright, let’s level for just a brief moment here.
(And before we begin, let me make it clear that I am not talking about “all gamers,” that my statements come from a position of extreme investment in the medium, that everyone I know and am friends with plays videogames, and that I will probably be playing some Soul Calibur tonight or hopefully New Super Mario Bros if I can convince my housemate to let me use his system)
If you read these posts, if you follow my twitter, if you’ve visited my ask.fm, you probably know I have a, to put it charitably, “dim view” of the gaming community at large. I don’t think this is because videogames turn people into monsters, although I’ll get to that in a moment. I think it’s because videogames are what they are.
They’re alternate worlds. Escapism in the form of controlled realities. They are inherently appealing to people who feel powerless, and people who feel powerless often feel the desire to exert power. They’re a specialist interest, leading to insular communities. They were traditionally the domain of boys shunned by social circumstances, leading to an ingrained undercurrent of resentment and an us-versus-them mentality. They make strict, logical sense, a comfort to people who wish the world or other people would do the same.
All of these things lead to gaming surrounding itself with a community predisposed towards some pretty negative stuff. And this is compounded by the fact that videogames are Murder Training Devices.
Alright, hopefully that got your attention, even if it’s a lie. Because it is a lie – if videogames are murder training devices, they are not particularly good ones. But it is true that our media influences us. Forms our cultural landscape. Tells us what is normal and unacceptable. Makes us feel more or feel less. And perhaps most importantly, our media helps us grow.
Which is really the biggest single problem I have with someone who dedicates their life to gaming, and one of the central problems exhibited by Sword Art Online. It’s most strongly illustrated by the villains here, but it’s evident in almost all the characters – they don’t feel like people. They seem like ideas of people, like stories received from a book or, more likely, a videogame. In order to create stories, you must engage with the world, and engagement with the world requires absorbing a variety of rich experiences and rich media. Games are, to be frank, not there yet. They are still largely toys, and cannot substitute for an engagement with the world through literature, film, and human experience. The problem with games isn’t that they are good for you or bad for you – it’s that they are nothing for you. Two hundred hours spent in Call of Duty does not teach you one single thing about why someone might be led to commit an “immoral” action. Fifty hours of mastering a specific speed run won’t give you a single insight into how people react to traumatic circumstance.
Sword Art Online is hamstrung by the fact that its author did too much research, and too little engaging with the world. He does not understand people, and so he cannot write them or empathize with them. His story is an extension of himself, and his shadow does not extend very far.
That may be the harshest thing I’ve ever said about a writer! But it’s honestly the impression I get from this work. The binary worldview, the simplistic characters, the gleeful violence – I think it all comes back to this guy just not spending enough time really trying to understand other people. And I kinda feel sorry for him, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna go easy on his creepy little adventure.
It’s time to finish this, old friend. Let’s Sword Art Online.
Sword Art Online – Episode 24
You guys are assholes. You know that, right? I get all optimistic and bright-eyed based on one half-decent episode, and the entire comment section starts friggin’ salivating. So yeah, apparently this episode’s gonna be another round on SAO’s wild rape train, or something equally horrible, and I should probably just steel myself for whatever hell awaits, but I’M NOT GONNA LET IT BE LIKE THAT. Sure, the one character whose journey I actually liked is out of the picture now. And sure, the conflict has now likely come down to the three characters who are co-responsible for everything terrible SAO has become. And SURE, Sword Art Online is always at its worst when Kirito needs to be a hero, and this problem will probably only be amplified by the fact that Snidely is such a transparently absurd cartoon villain, and Asuna will undoubtedly end up being used as more hero-fodder in some gratuitous and narratively despicable way…
Wait, where was I going with this.
Alright. Fuck it. I’m ready for this. Positivity, resilience, strength. It cannot possibly be worse than it has been. It cannot possibly be worse than it has been. It cannot possibly be worse than it has been.
Let’s Sword Art Online.
Top Shows Addendum
So I wrote my Top 30 Shows of All Time list, and that was great and super convenient for a while, until I came to a startling revelation – there are more than thirty good shows, and even worse than that, people keep making new ones. Clearly there’s no way I could have predicted this turn of events, but I’m doing my best to take it in stride. And in the spirit of promoting More Good Things, I’ve decided to create this Additional Top Shows supplement.
I don’t really want to cut off shows when they fall out of the thirty – I’d rather recommend more good stuff than less, and the number was initially envisioned more as a quality marker than a hard, arbitrary line. And so instead of having shows disappear and be gone forever, shows that drop out of the thirty, or that just barely don’t make it, will instead find their home here in the Top Shows Addendum. I hope you enjoy this jumbled list of Slightly Less Top But Still Pretty Great Shows!
Sword Art Online – Episode 23
I have now passed what I have been informed are both “the low point” and “the high point” of this second arc – The Dream of the Power Fantasy’s Waifu and The Fall of the House of Imouto respectively. If I still possessed the capacity to feel things, I assume this would generate a feeling of accomplishment – as is, much like my old friend SAO, I can only roughly approximate emotions while smiling a little too widely at the camera. However, in spite of me not really being invested in her story, I actually do like Sugu as a character, and I’m hoping the end of last week’s episode will prompt a bit more real life drama this time. Alfheim itself has been a bust, but all the stuff around it has been on a much higher level of writing and direction than Sword Art Online normally musters. Meaning that even though I’m sure this arc’s actual finale will combine everything I dislike about Kirito, Asuna, and the show itself, there’s a good chance Sugu may lend some actual poignancy to the final climb.
Or Oniichan will just give her a hug and then she’ll be back in the harem and this will just end up being one of those “I’ll let Asuna have you… FOR NOW” Anime Things and everything will well and truly be terrible.
POSITIVITY.
Spring 2014 – Week 12 in Review
Any week that features the finale of a Yuasa show and Joseph Joestar fighting his own arm has to be a keeper, right? You can’t really go wrong with either of those things. Plus Chaika and Sidonia both pulled off top-tier episodes, so overall I’d say this week was a roaring success. Let’s run it down.
Ping Pong and the Courage to Fall
“A new age has come, but I still can’t get out of this rut
And it’s too straight and narrow, no escape routes around…”
Tadahitori
“Staking your life on ping pong is revolting,” says Smile, the ostensible “protagonist” of Ping Pong. In the context of a sports show, that seems kind of like sacrilege – what can be more important than giving it your all, than pinning your hopes on the pursuit of a crazy ping pong dream? But in the context of Ping Pong, his words make sense – because Ping Pong isn’t really much of a sports show. The matches are emotive and interpretive, the “training arcs” don’t exist, and instead of characters learning new techniques, we get rambling Christmas song montages. There’s no romance in believing in victory here – in the context of Ping Pong, Smile’s belief in a hero that will save him seems to almost be some kind of ironic joke.