Trust, Agency, and The World God Only Knows

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Initially, I wasn’t really sure if there was a point to reviewing this one. I mean, it’s the third season of a self-aware harem comedy/parody. If you’re watching it, you know what you’re getting, and if you’re not, you know why you’re not. What would be the audience for a piece like that?

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized this season basically makes the show. Sure, it’s always been funny. Sure, it’s always taken pointed but lighthearted jabs at harem scenarios and anime character writing. But this season takes the gloves off. This season makes a point.

Alright, I’m gonna use one of my least favorite words here. Normally, I think it’s both misapplied and meaningless, but for once, it just might be appropriate.

TWGOK S3 completes the show’s arc as a deconstruction of harem comedies.

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Uchouten Kazoku – Episode 13

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Last Uchouten Kazoku. If I said I didn’t want it to end, that’d be kind of missing the point, right? Well, good, because I’m actually perfectly comfortable with it ending. Uchouten Kazoku has lived well – offering us many beautiful glimpses of a fantastically realized world, sharing a variety of well-written and relentlessly human (loaded word, but we’ll go with it) characters, and telling a sharp, perfectly composed story of life, family and duty. I’m not sad it’s ending, I’m happy it’s ending so well. I think Sou would approve.

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Attack on Titan – Episode 25

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Hey guys it’s me. All caught up, just in time for this freakin’ finale. I’m excited. You guys excited? I guess everybody’s excited.

These last couple episodes have easily been my favorites of the series. Though Eren’s development still lags, I’m loving how they’re putting Armin and Jean’s character growth into practice, and the side characters of the Survey Corps are just extremely fun to see in action. Things are moving fairly quickly, they’re burning animation budget like nobody’s business, they’re bouncing effectively between flashbacks and action setpieces… just lots to love at the moment. I hope it finishes strong.

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Monogatari S2 – Episode 13

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This weekend is gonna kill me you guys. I have written so many words. I have so many words left to write. C3-bu. TWGOK. Gatchaman. Uchouten. Titan. Why am I doing this to myself?!?

Alright, that’s not Monogatari’s fault. In fact, Monogatari’s the nice show, the one that isn’t piling on the mountain of reviews I’ve foolishly assigned myself. So let’s take it easy, Monogatari. Maybe just have an episode of pretty backgrounds I can cap and say “hey look at this pretty background” to. Please don’t get thematically dense on me here.

That seems pretty unlikely, though – between the snake and Ougi, this arc has already firmly declared it will be about the Fallacy of Victimhood, and how Nadeko uses her alleged helplessness as a defense mechanism even as she pursues selfish and potentially damaging ends. Given her desire to direct dissatisfaction outwards and minimal ability to express herself, Nadeko is possibly our most unreliable narrator yet, which in the context of Monogatari is really saying something. Let’s get to it.

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Attack on Titan – Episode 24

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ERMAHGERD THERE’S A TITAN IN THE CITY WHAT THE FUCK.

Alright, I’m sure the army has some kind of backup plan here. And last episode managed the excellent trick of being an extremely entertaining twenty minutes without spending absurd amounts of animation budget. So I’m quite excited to see where they go with this – frankly, the fact that the army went so completely all-in on their Annie hypothesis (putting the words of Erwin and Armin into action) is by itself quite exciting, and demonstrates the overall military apparatus being both more intelligent and more decisive than we’ve seen previously. Does this mean we get more Pixis? Possibly a spirited brofist between Pixis and Erwin? A boy can dream.

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Gatchaman Crowds – Episode 12

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And here we are. No idea how they’re gonna tie up all these loose ends – obviously there are a number of ways they could resolve the overt plot, but that was never really the point with this one. Can the show even take a coherent stance on all the issues it’s raised? Hajime’s philosophy of transparency and “if the internet’s being a jerk, just turn it off” sort of works… until you actually need the internet, in which case you hand out smartphones to everyone, and then Berg Katze gives everybody Crowds and you’re screwed all over again. Fortunately, the actual character journeys are pretty much done at this point – last episode cleared out any doubts of that. At this point, it’s pretty purely ideology versus ideology, so I guess we’ll just have to see what stands when the dust clears.

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C3-bu: Like Evangelion, but with More Moe Airsoft

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C3-bu is a strange little show, marking the second entry in a little genre I like to call “moe club shows that aren’t pointless and terrible.” The first entry in this hopefully burgeoning genre was Girls und Panzer, and going into this show, my most optimistic assumption was that it would be a less good but at least watchable version of that.

C3-bu is not that. Not in the slightest. Girls und Panzer succeeds by working as a legitimate sports show, and C3-bu doesn’t have the slightest pretension of being a sports show. Sports shows survive by infusing their central game with drama, by laying out specific rules to create believable tension, by pulling off fun pure-plot turns in the winding of combat or sport or cards or whatever their chosen game is. And C3-bu never grounds the airsoft enough to make for actual tension – all the battles are essentially “wacky stuff happening,” and sides win because the show’s actual goals demand it.

What are the show’s actual goals?

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Attack on Titan – Episode 23

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Alright, Survey Corps. You’re really in it now – morale is low, the public hates you, and like fifty people just got eaten by giant abominations. If ever there were a time to prove you’re secretly harboring a human-formed titan spy, just like that other human-form titan you swore wasn’t a spy, it’d be…

Well, actually, might want to keep that one under wraps. Good luck out there, Survey Corps! I’ll be right here, a healthy and anonymity-ensuring distance behind you.

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Originality versus Execution

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Management: Another brief one. This topic could easily be expanded into questions like “what is originality?” and “what is the intersection of craft and voice?”, as well as the way craft and insight inherently lead to a level of specificity in storytelling which makes any good genre piece “original” enough to avoid feeling derivative or superfluous. But those are easily essays by themselves.

Question:

When forming your opinion of a show, what do you value more highly: originality or execution?

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Summer 2013 – Week 12 in Review

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Would it be hyperbole to call this the best week of the season? Don’t really see how it could be – sure, Gatchaman was hamstrung by its budget issues, but everything else… well…

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