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Kantai Collection episode 1 impressions. Dropped due to meh-ness

If I recall correctly the story behind Kantai Collection is that monsters from the sea, known as Abyssals, have appeared out of nowhere and they can only be fought by cute teenaged girls possessed by the spirits of ancient Japanese battleships. Or maybe they’re reincarnations of the ships? Anyway, a bunch of girls named after ships take on a bunch of monsters because they’re the only ones who can.

Truth be told I’m actually rather fond of the “cute girls doing cute things” trend in recent anime. And I don’t have anything against the ‘only this very specific group of people can fight this threat’ premise several action shows have. And at least Kancolle has less fanservice than trashy shows like Strike Witches. So the odds were somewhat in Kancolle’s favor, at least at first. Having watched an episode though, I don’t think I’ll continue. My reasons are simply:

– Too many characters introduced all at once.

– None of the characters immediately grabbed my attention. Having characters the viewer wants to see more of is the key to a moe show.

– The ship gimmick is wasted on me because I know diddly and squat about the Japanese navy, historical or otherwise.

– Were the big-boobed commanders really necessary?

– Do they really have to fight in easily-ripped school uniforms instead of sensible battle clothing?

– Fubuki’s schoolgirl crush on Akagi-sempai is annoying. If she wanted to be strong for her own sake or to save the world I could get behind that, but ‘I want to be with my crush’ isn’t something I feel like rooting for.

– The action was boring. They skate around for a while, fire a few bombs and then the enemy crumbles to dust. If Fubuki wasn’t such an amateur she wouldn’t have been in any danger at all. None of them would have been. If the enemy isn’t threatening then the characters just look like bullies. I was almost feeling sorry for the Abyssals by the end.

Since there are so many moe girl shows out there, I don’t feel compelled to stick to anything that doesn’t immediately grab my attention. Kantai Collection is dropped like a sack of potatoes.

Absolute Duo episode 1-2 impressions (dropped)

The story for Absolute Duo goes like: A boy named Tōru Kokonoe decides he wants to become stronger and enrolls in a special school where people manifest their souls as weapons called Blaze. Tor is capable of producing his own Blaze, but for some reason it manifests as a shield instead of a weapon. Somehow he ends up sharing a room with a loli-like girl named Julie. Romantic hijinks do not ensue.

It wasn’t that bad, really, as far as the story went. I avoided reading a summary in advance in order to avoid poisoning my mind, so it came as a big surprise to me when the principal announced the surprise entrance exam. That’s new, I thought. Unfortunately combat was a short and silly affair, with people just whirling and running around with sharp weapons without a hint of choreography in sight. Absolute Duo is clearly not a show you watch for the combat.

What do you watch it for, then? The characters, I suppose. I liked just about everyone, even Thor. He’s a little more lively than your average “forced to share a room with a girl” anime protagonist tends to be, and it was really kind of him to give up his chance to room with his buddy just to keep Julie company. And Julie herself is rather sweet, though her innocent girl shtick is a little overdone. It was nice that she didn’t want to burden Thor with babysitting her, and I’m rooting for her to eventually make some friends and fit in with the rest of the class.

Why am I dropping the show, then? First off, because of scenes like these:

The whole show is just one big excuse for fanservice. I wouldn’t have minded continuing otherwise, but this show and all the scenes in it are just designed to titillate viewers with jiggling boobs and half-naked girls, so it’s impossible for me to take it seriously. When Paul wrote “Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things” in Philippians 4:8, I’m pretty sure he didn’t have this kind of lowbrow show in mind.

The second reason I’m dropping it is that I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the best of what Absolute Duo has to offer, so I want to leave on a high note. In my opinion nothing is going to top the slow development of friendship and caring between Thor and Julie in the first two episodes and the way they came to care for each other to the point of swearing to become a team. From here on out I predict lots of angst and painful pasts and poorly-animated combat (and fanservice, don’t forget the fanservice) so I’m going to get out while the going is good.

Another item crossed off my “To watch later” list.

Assassination Classroom episode 1 – impressions

I’m several seasons behind on my anime-watching, and while I’ve begun to catch up on the best of what I missed, by the time I finish watching the older stuff, what’s currently airing will be old as well. If I’m not careful I’ll always be playing catch up. That’s why I decided to check out at least an episode of everything that’s currently airing (that doesn’t sound too terrible) so I know what to pick up as soon as its done.

First on the chopping block: Assassination Classroom. A story about a class of losers tasked with killing their teacher, who happens to be octopoid monster intent on destroying the world. And a really good teacher too.

Thoughts:

– The opening theme was so off-putting and cringe-inducing I almost quit on the spot. Haruhi has a lot to answer for when it comes to starting the fad for dancing openings, but even that show had some sense of choreography. This is just a bunch of kids jumping around to really, really bad music. Who greenlighted this?

– At least it doesn’t have any really objectionable content. No bad language, no nudity and only comical violence at best.

– From the description and the first few minutes I thought it was going to be a comedy, then some girly-looking boy starts whining and moaning “Boo hoo hoo, I had to go to the classroom for losers! Nobody sees me as I am! Nobody understands me!” Whine, moan, whine.

Then he tries to kill the teacher and fails but the teacher protects him from a grenade. Oh my, teacher-kun does acknowledge me for who I am, ufufu, I’m so happy, my life has meaning after all… I had to pause the video for a few minutes and try not to throw up.

– If episode 1 is anything to go by, every episode will be about some character learning some life lesson or another and finding meaning in their life blah blah thanks to this monster teacher he’s so wonderful but we’ve gotta kill him or he’ll destroy the earth blah blah. The formula is already old and it’s only episode 1.

– The Assassination Classroom manga is still running, which most likely means the characters haven’t succeeded in their goal. If the story was funny it might be worth following, but it’s not and I can’t stand the whining already.

Dropped before I even picked it up. That’s one thing I can cross off my “To watch or read someday” list.

Barakamon epsiodes 1-3. Dropped.

Actually it’s more like episode 1, half of 2, 3, then dropped. I’ve watched enough anime to know what I like and what I don’t like, so there’s no need to drag things out any longer than I should. But still, I started Barakamon because it was a suggestion I got in response to a request for recent, complete anime. It’s only fair to those who suggested it to explain in a few brief points why I quit so quickly, especially when Barakamon is only 12 episodes long so I was already a quarter of the way through.

Reason 1: The exoticization of the “other.” No, this hasn’t turned into a social commentary blog. And you don’t have to memorize any difficult terms, though it helps to know that exoticization/exotification = “the act of romanticizing elements of something, like a culture, that is foreign to oneself.” You’ve probably seen it in action without knowing it, every time you read a book or watch a movie or listen to a BBC documentary about some wealthy, down-at-heart urbanite who moves to some remote island or jungle or whatever and learns from the “natives” ‘what life is really all about.’ In shallower works of this sort, this will often involve fornicating with one or more of the more presentable natives as well.

And it’s always someone from the “civilized” world learning ‘life lessons’ from people who are clearly portrayed as more primitive, more backward, less sophisticated and frequently more ‘in touch with man and nature.’ City boy/girl observes or participates in their quaint little customs and imbibes their quaint little view of life all and suddenly all is right with him again. The protagonist’s struggles to fit in and accept their way of life is only used to highlight just how foreign their ways are to him, and by extension to the rest of the presumably civilized audience.

What a farce. And how dehumanizing to those portrayed as ‘other’ instead of as human beings in their own right. You even get several scenes that mock their local dialect – oh look, the little primitives can’t even understand each other sometimes, they should learn to talk normally like we do. But no, there’s a lesson in this for higher mortals such as ourselves, we’re so clever, etc etc. And so we comfort ourselves thinking we’ve changed from the experience, but actually we have just reinforced our own superiority by taking what is ‘meaningful’ from the experience and melding it to our original advanced way of life.

That’s Barakamon in a nutshell, that is.

Reason 2. It’s too preachy. Just because you have the fairy godmother of wisdom embodied in the form of a 6-year old or whatever doesn’t make preachiness any less preachy. There’s always some lesson for protagonist whatshisname to learn, no matter where he turns. And it’s not enough to merely show him changing or learning, instead the show has to spend a few minutes beating us over the head with it through either a long lecture or a long soliloquy from protagonist-guy. Just show us what’s happening, don’t talk all the time.

Reason 3. I didn’t like the characters. A slice-of-life show lives and dies by its characters. If you like them, great. If you don’t, that’s the end of the show for you. The main character is too self-centered and full of himself. Of course the point of the show is to change that aspect of his life, but he’s so hard to root for that I don’t care to stick around and see it. The rest of the villagers are just too pushy, too over-familiar and too preachy for me to care for. I would be out of the village in no time if people kept shoving themselves into my life the way they do in Barakamon.

Luckily everyone is so nice and understanding that they totally forgive him for being a jerk all the time.

Reason 4. I didn’t like the humor. It would have been better as just a slice-of-life show, maybe, because the harder Barakamon tried to be funny, the more I felt myself pulling away. I don’t like ‘humor’ that revolves around embarrassing someone, for one thing. And much of the so-called humor in this show was just vulgarity, like a 6-year old using all kinds of filthy language, or someone being given a suppository, or a man hugging another man to the glee/shock of a closet yaoi fangirl. That sort of thing. Not my kind of show at all.

And there you have my 4 reasons for dropping Barakamon.

The Irregular at Magic High School – How NOT to write a series about an overpowered main character

Happy New Year! Out with the old, in with the new! Which is why I did my best to finish watching The Irregular at Magic High School before the end of the year. Didn’t want to drag something like that along with me into the new year. Thanks to the regulars at Animesuki Forums, I’ve been given lots of suggestions for good, clean anime to watch this year, so there’s no need to hang on to stuff that’s not working.

So how was the final arc of Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei? Do I need to say it? It was bad. Really bad. The problem with this show, as with many light novel adaptations, is that the writers focused too much on adapting the light novel and not enough on actually creating a good anime. You know how whenever a book is turned into a movie the fans come out of the woodwork screaming about how X was left out and Y was changed, this director is the worst in the world, and so on and so forth? I’ve been guilty of it myself, but that doesn’t mean all changes are necessarily wrong. Sometimes there’s plenty of room for improvement in the original material.

The other problem with the arc was the same one all along: the enemies are really dumb and really weak. It seemed all along that the aim of the evil Great Asia Alliance was the Magic Thesis Competition, but then it turns out that they were actually after the Kanto Magic Headquarters all along.

If that’s the case, why pick a time of the year when security is relatively tight because of the competition? Why pick a date when the most powerful high school students in the country will be gathered a short distance away from your target? And why bother attacking the competition center and other parts of the city instead of throwing your full firepower at your target from the start?

Actually there are a ton of questions left over from that arc. I suspect they wasted far too much time animating unnecessary scenes from the LN (e.g. anything with Honoka, anything with Naotsugu/Shuu, anything with Iso-whatshisname and his girlfriend, the scene with Jiro Marshall, the stuff with the girl that wants revenge, anything with that Zhou-sensei guy since nothing came of it, a hundred other scenes) just to please the fans instead of focusing on telling a logical, coherent story. That’s why the last arc seems so rushed and nonsensical… is the most benign explanation I can come up with.

In the end the day is finally saved by (guess who?) Shiba Tatsuya, dressed to kill in a Venom suit that requires him to thump his crotch repeatedly to fly. Regular watchers of Japanese media might know this already, but the Japanese have funny ideas about what is ‘cool’ and what isn’t. Anyway, Tatsuya eventually blows up the port of Zhenhai and probably the whole city of Ningbo along with it and that’s the end of the evil Chinese invaders, any resemblance to living figures is completely coincidental heh heh heh.

Since Shiba was going to save the day all along and we knew it from the start, why did the writer bother building up the rest of the characters? The cast was entirely too large. If you needed a few students to defend the defenseless, you could have just stuck with Leo, Erika, Saegusa and Watanabe, making room for tighter storytelling and less time-wasting. After all they only really exist to make Tatsuya look good by taking lots of time and effort to do what he can do in a flash. Oh, and to get injured by being stupid just so Tatsuya can show off his l33t healing skills.

The whole thing is muddled even further by the characters lacking any clear, defining attacks. “Everyone can use magic” just makes everyone interchangeable. To the end I still had no clear idea what Saegusa’s magic really was (something about smells?) or what, if anything, glasses girl could do in battle, or what made Kirihara any different from Leo.

…Not that it matters since Tatsuya beats them all anyway, but this was one area where they could have taken a leaf from the better sort of shounen fighting manga. A smaller cast with more clearly-defined roles and abilities would have gone a long way towards making the show easier to enjoy.

Well, that was that. I was warned that The Irregular at Magic High School was rather bad. I refused to listen and I got what I deserved. I’ve seen worse, of course, but I tend to like high-school series and I tend to like fighting series and I tend to like magic series, but when you put them all together and get a complete mess like this? Sad. And this is one area where “the light novel is better!” excuse doesn’t cut it, because the anime did nothing to suggest that or generate any interest in the source material. It didn’t leave any mysteries about what would happen next either (Tatsuya will continue to dominate everyone forever) so I think I’m done here. On to better things!