It’s a testament to how much Ping Pong respects its characters that the person who would occupy the “villain” role in a traditional narrative is here simply the most tragic member of a selection of co-protagonists. Kazama is an unhappy boy, and this episode was largely dedicated to defining and exploring that unhappiness.
Shiki and the Setting Sun
I’m kind of tired of vampires, you guys.
At this point, they seem just generally kind of played out. They suck blood, they sometimes turn into bats, they originally meant “fear of feminine sexuality” and now mean “sexy danger.” Sexy danger is pretty cool I guess, but if you keep using vampires to be dangerously sexy, eventually the spark fades. The current wave of trashy vampire romances certainly hasn’t helped, but vampires have always had a ceiling on their resonance as long as they stuck to the old model of what vampires really are.
Fortunately, Shiki thinks vampires are something very different.
Spring 2014 – Week 7 in Review
Some strong episodes and some weak ones this week, but fortunately the shows that could really be damaged by a weak link (Ping Pong, One Week Friends) came out swinging. Running them down…
Ping Pong – Episode 6
“Heroes don’t exist. What exists is reality, and the fact that only those who can adapt to reality win.”
There’s a kind of fatalism to Ping Pong, something that separates it from a lot anime out there. Some of its characters aren’t very good, or have damaging weaknesses. Because of this, they fail. There’s no “I’ve got to give it my all anyway” here. There’s no “genius of hard work.” Yeah, you do have to work hard – everybody has to work hard. But sometimes working hard doesn’t mean chasing any dream you choose.
Character Design 101: Want and Need
Management: Vague character-arc spoilers for a few shows here – FLCL, Eva, Tatami Galaxy, Cowboy Bebop, Hyouka. Hyouka’s the only one I get particularly specific on.
Gonna share something a little different today! Recently I’ve been thinking about characters, which is probably because I am always thinking about characters. While a lot of my personal views on character writing have obviously come from reading and watching a whole lot of stories, a fair amount of my understanding has also come from writing characters. As a fiction writer, knowing how to write a fleshed-out human being is rarely optional – but even just as someone who just wants to poke more deeply at the things they consume, I think analyzing characters from a character-creation standpoint can be very enlightening. Characters are kind of like trees – though the individual branches of their actions may look strange and circuitous, generally everything winds its way back to the central trunk of their base nature and desires. And looking at characters trunk-first can do a whole lot of work to make sense of their wildly winding limbs.
So let’s get down to that trunk, to the absolute base nature of a character. There are a few ways to approach this, but personally I think the easiest way to consider character writing is to start with two key variables. The two often-conflicting desires that tend to define their choices, their conflicts, and their ultimate resolution: what they want and what they need.
Spring 2014 – First Half in Review
Welp, we’ve reached the season’s halfway point, which means it’s once again time to roughly shepherd everything I’m watching into a reductive hierarchy that through its very nature misses the point of art altogether. Everybody loves lists!
Incidentally, the fact that it is so reductive is why I do this nonsense in the middle of the season, and not the end. Lists are fun, but I don’t want lists anywhere near my actual takeaway from shows, so I use this mainly just to sort out my general feelings on the season’s overall tenor. This season has turned out to be very good, and I have already dropped every single show I’m not solidly enjoying – if anything on this list looks entertaining to you, I can confirm that even the lowest shows have been solid enough at what they’re doing. And the top shows… yeah, this is a season to be proud of. Let’s run it down!
Sword Art Online – Episode 9
Oh shit, another Sword Art Online post only a week after the last episode? Don’t worry, what I’ve given up in tardiness I’ll make up for in laziness. I actually do want to finish this damn series before the second season comes out, and at this rate, that is very much not happening. So let’s burn some episodes down! Time to fight a giant monster wooooo!
Mushishi and the Hand of God
Mushishi is a broad and ambiguous collection of vignettes, and it offers few easy answers. In light of this, it seems silly to try and impart any “one truth” of Mushishi’s narrative – everyone will take something different from its stories. In light of that, I hope my audience will forgive me for my own somewhat selfish experience of this series. Mushishi can mean many things to many people, but it means one very important thing to me.
Discussion Response: A Few Last Words On Mahouka
Management: If you check my Ask.fm page, you may have run into these pieces before. Recently, I’ve realized I’ve been writing pretty much weekly mini-essay responses on Ask.fm, and since there’s no way to actually search or intelligently archive that text, they’re essentially sinking into a vast ocean of nothing. So I’ll be slowly archiving the more interesting or fully articulated pieces here, and I figured I might as well start with something that’s probably nearing its expiration date – Mahouka criticism.
How do you feel about the idea that Mahouka is an ode to Objectivism?
That it is. 100%. Not even a question.
Ping Pong – Episode 5
Two weeks ago, I described Ping Pong as a “small symphony,” where all the moving parts just work together and elevate each other. This week, that ephemeral quality was probably best expressed not through any one scene, but through the transitions between them.