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regarding-stories · 22 days

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Inertia Itself: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

TL; DR: I'm gonna bash the series somewhat. (Sorry, folks.)

After it coming with a lot of praise and kept being recommended, the series itself didn't end up being what I expected, especially given the omission in Crunchyroll's synopsis blurb. I still watched it, and all the fan praise is... a bit over the top. (I'd say the movie deserves it, though.) Depending on your tastes and sensitivities, this can be a decent or good series. It has flaws - but it definitely is not just more of the same when compared to others.

This first part of the series aired in 2006, so you can expect spoilers.

The Setup

Initially we learn about a rather peculiar teenager named Haruhi who makes her entrance to high school by stating she's not interested in anyone who isn't an alien, a time traveler, or someone with PSI powers (also called ESPer after "extra-sensory perception").

Our actual protagonist-narrator, a regular guy we will soon know only by his nickname "Kyon," takes an interest in her and eventually befriends her. Little does he know that by doing so he unleashes a series of events that leads to Haruhi forming a club that does her bidding which she dubs the "SOS Brigade" which will look into the phenomena she's interested in.

The catch in the setup is that Haruhi is a being with god-like powers that is not aware of them. She can alter reality, but this happens unconsciously. It plays out mostly like a genie's wish: Whatever she wishes for has quite a bit of self-sabotage baked in. This is not apparent to her at all, and to some, I guess, the source of show's humor.

This leads to the following cast:

Haruhi Suzumiya: The universe centers around her, and she has the personality to match. She bosses others around to the point of bullying, becomes pouty and stubborn like a five-year-old when she doesn't get her way, and is often quite unreasonable. She's also a big tsundere which has a hidden crush on Kyon which she'd never admit, so she instead she treats him like a doormat. Her inner life is never revealed to us, except when others comment on how regular reality is after all, hinting that Haruhi's eccentricity is mostly on the surface. Beyond being a tsundere she's also a genki girl, being very lively, animated, and has endless motivation and stamina when it comes to put her plans to fruition. She's also kind to kids if not her friends.

Kyon: The everyman. Kyon is cynic and sarcastic, but almost never opposes Haruhi openly, instead playing an inner voice narrator commenting on everything. Most of the time he's a passive character, resenting being pushed around, but if put on the spot, he'd be forced to admit that he would never truly opt out. The show never makes it clear whether Kyon has some romantic attraction to Haruhi, even though at least Koizumi comments about it regularly. If he has, he's so put off by her antics that it never gets to surface throughout the run of the series.

Yuki Nagato: The resident alien, sent out by a near-omnipotent AI-like entity. As such, she's basically a robot, can conjure nano-machines, and whisper formulas that alter reality. Yuki is a "cold" character with no emotional response, and her supposed motivation is "to be an observer" because Haruhi seems to be an original factor that actually originates new things (which also suggests the universe would be kinda boring without her). Yuki is also the story's source of magic solutions to problems Haruhi causes and can be relied on to provide exposition when needed. And... she was recruited to the brigade to get Haruhi the former literature club's room.

Mikuru Asahina: A time traveler, and recruited to the brigade mostly to have a hot member. Investigates why no past exists before Haruhi entered middle school, but frankly, she really does nothing of her own through almost the entire series. Haruhi does whatever she wants to Mikuru, including dressing her in various embarrassing ways as the brigade's mascot, and in general Mikuru mostly sobs and goes along. Kyon also has a crush on her.

Itsuki Koizumi: This one is the PSI guy. He cannot do anything, however, except when a particular sort of crisis ensues: Apparently Haruhi's mood swings create destructive "closed spaces" in which giants start to destroy the world. The organization Koizumi is part of fears that if they are left to grow this would destroy the world, so he is the one pushing the most for keeping Haruhi in the dark about her own effect on the world and her powers, reiterating many times how he likes the world as is. Koizumi gets roped into the brigade because he's an exchange student and there must be something up with that, according to Haruhi, which she promptly forgets afterward. Koizumi's personality is rather manipulative and he can't drop it, and I can readily understand why Kyon is not especially keen on him.

But that's just the cast and their motivations, if any. What really matters is...

The Dynamic

What keeps the show going are the manifestations of Haruhi's powers based on her conscious and unconscious desires and the pushback from the other brigade members to keep those in check and preserve reality.

The roles in this are clear:

Koizumi will provide the rationale and some of the exposition, always arguing for preserving the status quo. (And also manipulate others.)

Mikuru will be comic relief and part of Kyon's motivation to get involved.

Nagato will provide solutions when the group cannot solve problems with regular means. She'll also at times provide information dumps, but mostly say very little.

Kyon will provide a reaction to it all, his narration provides an ironic take on the events, but his involvement will be crucial in driving the plot - where there is a non-magical solution, it will fall on Kyon to derive it and put it in place.

What I personally dislike about the show is this dynamic because it's focused on keeping things in place and preventing change. This is embodied especially in Koizumi, whose manipulations often leave a bitter aftertaste (and then he laughes them off).

But it's also present in Kyon's character. He will disagree internally with Haruhi but go along like a doormat. This then builds until a resolution of sorts or until one of the few instances where Kyon actually loses his shit after things have gone way too far and he's complicit in it for doing nothing and saying nothing. Most of Kyon's interactions with the world are internally, and whenever he's called to action, he often acts very late and when it's clear that nothing else will do.

Taken from another but similar angle, a lot of the story is about denying Haruhi satisfaction, and watching Kyon being basically an unhappy character who cannot enjoy things for what they are by constantly judging people around him. At least Haruhi tries to do things. Koizumi especially wants to prevent things, and Kyon mostly lacks impulses of his own.

Without Haruhi, Kyon would have fewer friends and lead a boring, ordinary life. With Haruhi, Kyon gripes about the hassle of having more than an ordinary life. What is his aspiration in life? Would he ever do anything?

Endless Eight

There's a special punishment hidden in this show, its absolute low point. A series of episodes titled "Endless Eight I - VIII". It reminds me of a quote by Douglas Adams: It is by eating sandwiches in pubs on Saturday lunchtimes that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They're not altogether clear what those sins are, and don't want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever their sins are they are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat. If there is anything worse than the sandwiches, it is the sausages which sit next to them. [...] The sausages are for the ones who know what their sins are and wish to atone for something specific.

(From "So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish".)

Leaving aside that the British should know what their national sins are, this encapsulates how I feel about having watched these eight episodes. It must have been some sort of atonement. Because they suck worse than the sausages.

"Endless Eight" itself is your garden variety time loop triggered by Haruhi's unconscious wish to have a never-ending summer break that she enjoys to her fullest. So they end up going through Haruhi's list of summer activities, only they end up doing it over and over again. The show suggests that the they do this more than 16,000 times and well over 300 years in total (repeating the same two weeks of August).

The characters react to this situation according to their dynamic:

Nagato actually knows but as an observer, she does nothing.

Mikuru notices the absence of a future beyond the end of August, but only falls apart, triggering a higher level of involvement by Kyon.

Koizumi drops exposition but does nothing to change the situation itself, except dragging Kyon into it and suggesting that if Kyon simply played the part of Haruhi's boyfriend, the situation would resolve (= he manipulates him).

Kyon does nothing with the information given to him and hesitates except for the one time he breaks the loop.

Frankly, seeing the group being dragged through this summer break makes me sorry for Haruhi for a change. She strives hard to make a fun summer in her bossy way, and everybody else looks like they've been run ragged. What would the summer have been like without her? Kyon on his couch, watching boring baseball games?

Endless Eight, ignoring the execution for now, itself exposes some depth in regards how it sees the situation. It plays with the concept of lucidity and a certain kind of probabilistic determinism. The characters will react to similar stimuli within a given range of variation, meaning the situation repeats almost entirely the same in the end. The only thing that can break such a situation is lucidity, and this lucidity is highlighted by slow motion moments in Kyon's awareness. In all other moments, everybody is sleepwalking through the same motions of their lives.

This view of human consciousness may be, depending how you see it, somewhat realistic and/or depressing, but there's nothing wrong with it - and it's one of the most compelling points the show puts forward in its run. However, the how is... horrible.

You see, the show repeats the same episode eight times with no real variation in plot - except for episode I and VIII. (Because August is the 8th month and an 8 laid flat is infinite and... pure lack of imagination.) Given the length of an anime episode this means you sit through about 160 minutes of repetition. The show does no montage of the events, it repeats the same key bits out. It basically makes you live, yourself, through part of the time loop in probably the least imaginative way - or at least the least narratively artful.

Now, while the story is roughly told identically beat by beat eight times, it is animated differently eight times. Camera perspectives change, meaning they each had to be animated individually. Same for the voice acting, lots of minor variation. (So they all did their job, I guess.) The eight realities subtly differ - what clothes everybody wears. Unimportant choices they make. Like what popsicle to get or what mask to buy on a Bon festival. Many people in the comments expressed their appreciation of the love of detail.

There's something wrong with these people. What they're saying is that they don't mind being served up the same story eight times if only the trappings change slightly. I guess this got us Episode VII of Star Wars...

To spoil it further: This run of episodes is a trap. There are no real hints to the resolution. You start seeing patterns where there are none. I even thought for a short while that the iterations might be counting backwards. They are not. And while this might get you to ask some questions, it's a really horrible, in-your-face, unskilled way of doing so. And in that it's the low point of the show.

The resolution is to make summer end by doing homework together. Does this somehow imprint the end of summer on Haruhi's brain? Does this mean she gets to spend more time with her friends on their instigation? Does it mean she was secretly hiding she didn't do her homework after all?

Whatever. The lame ending would have been excusable if they hadn't set the bar so high by walking us through an overlong movie version of this. This is the kind of stuff people walk out of a cinema for.

What makes up for it

Now, the way I describe Haruhi and Koizumi suggests I don't like them very much, but especially in case of Haruhi that's not true - not to the extent it might seem. She has definite character flaws, and they're probably quite intentional - but Haruhi, unlike other characters (looking at you, Koizumi) gets things going. And her inner motivation is relatable. Have we not all looked at the world at some point and thought "What if this place was less mundane and boring?" If not - why watch anime?

Nothing makes this more clear than the follow-up movie "The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya"!

This movie does its characters and premise more justice than the series did. Kyon ends up in an alternate reality/timeline where Haruhi isn't in his class, there's no SOS Brigade, and his friends are not his friends. And he doesn't like it one bit!

In a late twist reminiscent of Data from "Star Trek: TNG" we see a reality where Yuki Nagato is not a near-ominiscient robot, but a shy and adorable girl. Kyon fights to get his reality back. Mikuru, even though it's her future self, actually does something effective. Koizumi still is dragging things down, but can be tolerated. And Haruhi isn't actually gone after all.

The story has heart, and it contains some cruel choices. It lets us also sit through some parallel world "nobody shares my memory" shenanigans, but not for so long that you inwardly opt out. It's well-paced, and it's focused on moving things forward - even if forward means "back to the future." But I can't help but feel that Kyon has changed inwardly in response, realizing at long last that what a world without Haruhi actually means.

And that's just brilliant. It has a bit of heartbreak, it has tension and suspense, it has making choices. By taking the dynamic of the original and inverting it in parts, I actually like it a lot. (I still doubt I would rewatch the series, though.)

To be fair, the anime makers may have drawn out the original material - a lot. The movie is essentially one volume of the series, and that works. But the original 24 episode series (plus bonus material) just encompasses 3 and a half volumes, and that seems awfully little. (The manga adaptation apparently sliced the salami quite differently.)

Anyway, you might find something for yourself in this series. It has had a certain staying power and a fanbase, and not many shows would manage to still be talked about ten years after their reissue. The art is... nothing to write home about, but the premise is unique enough to be worth your time once.

Just skip Endless Eight II to VII... Unless you have a yukata/swimsuit fetish.

#the melancholy of haruhi suzumiya #anime series #high school anime #the disappearance of haruhi suzumiya #endless eight

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regarding-stories · 27 days

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Deeply manipulative, slightly flawed: Your Lie In April

Well, I got into this one expecting more of a rom-com vibe. (Thanks for nothing, people writing those synopses.) Underneath the veneer of a romantic and funny start ticks away a very calculated machine delivering hurt and pain like clockwork. None of this is by accident.

In fact, "Your Lie In April" is a good example of a carefully crafted story that executes its basic idea to finish, and if I had to fault it for something it's the very fact of how much manipulation it employs. It became hard to ignore towards the end. Ironically it raises the same idea of craft versus art that the story itself also tries to discuss (and where it is most flawed, albeit to not to a big degree.)

This story is almost a decade old, so expect massive spoilers.

The Machine That Grinds (And Transforms)

If you view "Your Lie" from its last episode backwards, you will get the most honest view of how it is designed. In her posthumous letter to the protagonist our heroine explains why she did what she did, and why she needed to do it that way. But in principle she simply describes the basic setup by which the original author put the pieces on the board, how he immobilized them to create the situation to begin with, and how the heroine decides to interact with the situation in a way that she sees as the only one but which creates more tragedy down the road.

The basic setup is that our protagonist is horribly traumatized by child abuse, the death of his mother, and the guilt he feels over it induced by her warped upbringing. Our heroine is in love with him due to... reasons (more on this later)... but is dying. Her death due to "soap opera disease" (thanks, TV Tropes) is conveniently forestalled for several years while our MC agonizes in a personal hell. He's tight with his childhood buddies, and the girl one is the classical "childhood friend" who's in love with him (but doesn't realize yet).

Through her decision to make most out of her (remaining) life she begins a transformation in him away from his pained relationship with music to a joyous one, and from mere execution to art. But in order to do so she has to navigate past the childhood friend, hide her feelings, and get close to him. So she lies about her feelings (which are eventually evident even to her dim chosen boyfriend) and the only one she convinces is the MC. (Because the story needs to work.)

From this point on the cast's dynamic is mostly encased in amber - MC loves heroine, but thinks it's unrequited; heroine loves MC but needs the childhood friend's help to get even past the gate, so she pretends to love his buddy; childhood friend gets to watch while her love interest's heart is filled with another person; and even dim buddy gets to live with the feeling that he lost someone special which he truly never had.

We watch on as the MC moves from the original trauma to the next trauma, all the while evolving from a virtuoso to an actual artist. While this is happening, nobody gets any real satisfaction, not even temporarily (at least not truly). The best you can get in this show is being held while you cry. We see the tragedy of two lives cut short, the tragedy of a mother who can't raise her child or deal with her imminent death, the tragedy of a girl who can only do so much before her time runs out and is blocked from it from all sides. We see how the MC hurts, we see how people around him hurt.

Truth to be told, when the show is funny, it's damn funny. But it charms you like a disaster movie. It will kill the pooch from the beginning in the end. And its design is merciless. It never truly resolves any of the amber it casts each character in - unless you count playing a concert with what might be the spirit of another person departing to the afterlife.

In the end, all the other characters become background to the MC's transformation. The heroine's transformation happened off-screen and is told in flashback.

But all of this is well-executed. You don't feel like there are major gaps in the narrative, the logic is stringent though forced, but it holds surprisingly well before it's undone. But what it left me with was the feeling of having been manipulated by intent. This is the part that the audience shouldn't catch on to be truly great.

Here the show falls (somewhat) flat because it doesn't dare to be honest before it's too late, and in my book that was the straw that broke the camel's back. You can withhold only so much in the end before it strains things too much.

Machinations and the Living Metronome

I said "machine" above and I mean it. The story takes all the choices that are convenient for its dramatic-tragedic goal. It cannot let the heroine live past her dramatic usefulness, especially since it set up conditions that indicate that being cut off from making music is worse than death.

In this sense the heroine dies for the story's sake, and this reduces her from character to storytelling device in the end. In general, however, the story manages to brings its cast alive quite well, it's just that the cast is chained to rowing benches of a sinking galley.

What flies under the radar is that the inciting incidents of this story do not work. Several of the characters in the story (all the musicians) are drawn into the MC's wake by his performance. Except his performance is robotic and perfect because it's the result of drill. If that was what touched humans, we would have completely replaced orchestras and solo performances with MIDI sequencers. (We haven't.)

While a good part of the series tries to tell us that carrying emotion and expressing an idea is the true art (and not skill), all the people in the show have been swayed by the protagonist's performances when he had nothing but skill. Doesn't work. And yet this is the reason why they either fall in love with music, with him, or both. He is supposedly a catalyst for all of them, but in his own story he has not yet been transmuted.

We could assume that he had always a hint of genius about him, but that would be a story-telling cop-out. While it's not binary, either-or, he fails to impress a lot of people beyond pure clinical skill. A very interesting take came again from TV Tropes: His mom probably taught him perfection on the skill side because the time was too short to instill the art side which could come later.

Don't pull that thread or it all unravels.

While I can see how sticking to the score can be important in competitions, score is a very incomplete thing. It lists timing, pitch, and duration. Everything else is annotated in. It's a shorthand that by itself might be too little to deliver a touching performance for a piece with depth. It cannot tell you truly how hard or soft to play each note, even if it can demonstrate emphasis. This is where the performer comes in.

But while this requires skill to deliver it, skill cannot tell you what to do here. It is your understanding of a piece that delivers this, and this understanding can only be hinted at by the score. And hence the journey of classical music never ends.

The show itself tries to make a similar point, but ironically completely ignores it when it's convenient for its own setup. This is something I felt while watching it - why are they all so enchanted by his playing when he's a slave to the score? (And lacks the maturity to understand the piece.) And if the score does not convey the piece completely, what did they see in him?

The same is true for the story itself, but in reverse. It never deviates from the rails the author sets. It's unwilling to go for anything but maximum drama in the end, and by letting the convenient define the ending and, if in doubt, the characters, it loses some of its humanity in its attempt to leave the biggest impression.

Don't get me wrong, it's good and expertly crafted. The author telegraphs all his intentions, and I knew by episode 4 how it would end. I just didn't know the details. There are no truly serious flaws in its storytelling, and it trounces a lot of other shows in terms of consistency, characters, and storytelling. So why am I griping?

Because even the sendoff the story gives to heroine loses some of its glory because it's so deliberate and calculated. She had to die there. Him seeing her in his vision does not feel like mercy or grace, but leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Your mileage may vary.

I mean, look at it. Look at the childhood friend after the heroine's revelation. Even that last scene is designed to tell us "If you love that person, prepare to hurt for a long time." There's no acknowledgment for her. Because there's no room for true mercy. The story has a degree of human warmth, but it's tied to tragedy like an addiction.

Till the very end.

#anime series #high school anime #music anime #story about artists #art vs skill #manipulative #romantic anime #drama #tragedy #your lie in april

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regarding-stories · 1 month

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Winter Was Not An Exciting Season

When I started writing this, about 3-4 episodes had dropped for most shows that started in winter 2024 season on Crunchyroll, and I came to the conclusion there was no reason to get excited... And I think that's pretty much how it worked out. I stopped watching most of these shows at some point. Eventually I dug into the archives on Crunchyroll instead... which was much more rewarding.

I by the way never bothered with "Solo Leveling" or "Shangri-La Frontier" because I don't get what's the point with these kind of shows. OP skill this, video game that, and usually no actual stakes at all. Why bother?

Delusional Monthly Magazine

Hot trash.

Weird scientist tries to place his research in a paper that's more of an "I saw an UFO manned by Elvis" style tabloid. Lots of unconvincing hijinks happen.

Stopping point: I switched off in episode 1 when somebody suddenly developed a superpower because this is all over the place. And stupid.

Villainess Level 99: I May Be the Hidden Boss But I'm Not the Demon Lord

Girl gets reborn as the hidden boss of a game she used to play. She decides to avoid becoming a problem and also levels up to 99, which is a level reached by no one in this world (and the limit).

It does not help that she has dark magic as attribute and the heroine of that game is a light magic user.

What's hard to bear is that she gets constantly ostracized way into episode 4. Everything she does is taken negatively and the potential love interests of the heroine (it's a dating sim) constantly stir trouble for her because everyone assumes the worst.

On the surface this is yet another show about being reborn into a dating sim, like "The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs" or "I'm in Love with the Villainess". Though I can't help but think that the setup is also a tongue-in-cheek about how being exceptional can get you bullied in Japan. "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down" is idiomatic there for a reason.

In general a decent show, but what kind of person is the protagonist that she doesn't understand social cues at all? I don't think that's established very well.

Stopping point: I'm not sure why I stopped watching around episode 6, there seems to be no strong reason beyond losing interest. Might revisit.

Sasaki and Peeps

Middle-aged salary man gets himself a pet bird which turns out to be a reborn wizard from another world.

What follows is a wild (and also illogical) mix of genres. He gets transported to an Isekai world and learns magic, but mainly he wants to open a business there by transporting Japanese goods there and selling them. (Yet he never figures out that he could transport gold back to pay for them - or just be rich.)

His magic then gets him recruited into a squad of psychics fighting other psychics. He's totally OP because psychics have only one ability and his magic works differently for every spell. Anyway, the show doesn't benefit from cutting across plots. It first tries to hit the "living the quiet life in another world" vibe, then goes into "everyday man thrust into the world of superpowers", and now seems to also tap into "adventuring in another world..."

Sasaki is likable enough, an innocent man, mostly, really drab and unassuming. What disturbs me is that so far all the females appearing are minors. There's a high school girl waiting for him every day next door - why? I don't want to know. His wild colleague at the agency who is a snappy dresser? Supposedly 17. (Yes, high school age.) The person he's supposed to protect next - a child beauty. (She seems important as she was given a completely "doll style" credits variation of her own.) I seriously don't want to know where this is going...

None of the GIFs here on tumblr feature the protagonist. Funny.

Stopping point: After Episode 3. After the third under-age girl appearing I was wondering how many other genres they are going to cram into this one.

Hokkaido Gals Are Super Adorable!

Tokyo boy moves to rural Hokkaido and meets his future girlfriend, a total gyaru (gal).

Actually, he meets several, but I can't imagine this show playing out any other way. Has surprisingly little to say about Hokkaido itself except that it snows a lot and you need to keep warm.

The show has a mellow, slice of life flair but lacks originality. I actually ended watching the full season, it's an easy show to watch. The three heroines are all pleasant people that overlap with part of his life, making the harem-ish setup of all three crushing on him a bit annoying since two of them never stood a chance.

Stopping point: I actually finished this one but I must say the drama built for the last episode was a complete no-show and completely unconvincing, even by the typical "Japanese is a language of unsaid things" standard.

The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic

Frankly, initially this was the absolute highlight of the season. I waited for every episode.

Two talented teenagers are summoned to be the heroes saving another world. And a third, average guy, who happened to be nearby. He ends up stealing their thunder because he has the rare healing magic talent.

Surprisingly, the other two people are really decent (looking at you, "Shield Hero") and in general he's treated well. The only dramatic concern is that healing magic has found its master in his teacher, an over-the-top drill sergeant style woman.

It quickly becomes apparent that healing magic, if used wrongly, is the strongest of them all - giving you infinite stamina, instantly restoring your strength, making you the perfect tank. You just have to train like a maniac. Which our drill sergeant ensures will happen.

Stopping point: After episode 7. The show is funny and has heart up to a certain point, but somehow I lost interest, also because it's destroying its previous vibe by hinting at impending doom. Interestingly I read a review today that points to mid season being a complete drag and messing up the pacing, and the finale not saving it. I guess I'm not surprised?

7th Time Loop: The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy!

A woman gets reborn into another world as a noble, only for her defining moment to repeat over and over. She turned down by her prince fiancé and basically ejected from her social status.

But this filly has spirit, and so she cuts out a life of her own successfully. Only to die in a war years later and to find herself at the same scene! Since she retains her memory she starts to pick different routes, leading various lives, picking up skills and knowledge, only to die eventually in the same continent-spanning war.

Her last time around, something odd happens. Just as she's escaping her betrothal she runs into the instigator of that war, the dark prince of the empire. And he is so taken with her, he proposes to her.

An unusual setup for sure. At some point we will likely learn what is behind the whole war business, but just watching her navigate all situations in stride is actually interesting by itself. As the title suggests, big drama is mostly absent so far ever since her "final life" started.

Stopping point: Middle of Episode 6. The mini-villain little brother turns out to be the complete opposite of a schemer and actually only wants the attention of his oniiii-chaaaan!! The whole flip was so unconvincing, I couldn't anymore. It's absolutely unclear why the guy she married does anything, including telling her to avoid his brother.

Tales of Wedding Rings

It would be hard to take this show serious at any level as it mostly exists as a vehicle to get this guy together with big-buxomed vixens for plot reasons - but there isn't much plot either.

He follows his childhood love to another world and accidentally marries her, getting the first ring of power. Then he learns he must fight off some evil led by the Abyss King. For that he has to marry more princesses.

There's no logic to the action, though. In the first kingdom he can fend off abyss monsters but gets his ass handed to him by an abyss knight. So they run off, abandoning their own kingdom?!? Then, as soon as he gets the ring from the elven princess he easily hands the abyss knight their ass without even trying. Instant wipe. So that knight keeps showing up and somehow evil rings appear and there's no rhyme or reason to the drama.

Otherwise it's pretty clear that he wants things to work out with his childhood love, but the other girls want attention, too. So another unrequited harem, badly done, too. And yes, the kingdoms they encounter are sexy elves, sexier cat people, and lolicon demon people. Expect plenty of fan service.

Stopping point: Episode 9. No special reason. The show is easy to watch, undemanding, but also doesn't deliver much. You can pick it up at any point and leave it and you won't miss much. Ironically I got mostly GIFs for "Rings of Power" when searching, and frankly, even this anime is better than that.

A Sign Of Affection

I almost forgot this one.

The heroine of the story is for all practical purposes deaf but she soon gets to know an absolute boy-hunk and wonders what these feelings are. Which she then proceeds to find out since he also likes her.

As for a story that focuses on a character with a disability, it does very little with it except her having a lot of trouble reading situations around her and the impediments of communication. And people constantly getting in her space. (Which is a necessity but unusual in Japan.)

It's certainly a high profile production for a romance, with great art.

Stopping point: After Episode 2.

In spite of being a fan of romance stories, it somehow rubbed me wrong that not only does an absolute model boy (the art is good enough that nobody needs to tell us) become immediately interested in her, he also is portrayed as this interesting character who travels abroad in a moment's notice for his studies. Mr Perfect on day 1. There didn't seem to be anything interesting to be going on at all. So I lost interest.

When looking around on the internet, in most places this show is described with one short paragraph for a synopsis. A critic compared it to "A Silent Voice", but that show needs almost a full page to have its synopsis laid out on Wikipedia - because it's a complex take on multiple topics - disability, bullying, social dynamics, and the ability to change. Somehow that strikes me as a contrived comparison.

#delusional monthly magazine #villainess level 99 #sasaki and peeps #hokkaido gals are super adorable!#the wrong way to use healing magic #7th time loop #tales of wedding rings #a sign of affection

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regarding-stories · 2 months

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Until it breaks: Suspension of disbelief has limits

Nothing deals damage to suspension of disbelief like cold hard facts. Because once the analytical part of your brain kicks in, it's all over. All the Fridge Logic will unravel, and frankly, the enjoyment drains out the watching or reading experience.

Now, I picked this topic because of a recent Lupin III Part 6 episode I watched. Being one of the longest-running shows with endless material released over the course of decades, Lupin III has in general good writing. Or let's say it like this: Typically the authors nail the characters.

Yes, part 6 in general is a highly enjoyable show that can bank on the fact that our main characters - Lupin, Jigen, Fujiko, Goemon, and Zenigata - are well fleshed-out, recognizable characters that you are just gladly along for the ride with and the general fun factor of the show ensures that you merely experience the differing quality of episodes as minor ups and downs along the journey.

There are exceptions, though.

When it holds

Lupin III is basically revived as "parts," where each part could be considered a big season. I'm currently watching Part 4, and several episodes definitely have the quality of Fridge Logic - you might question things after the episode finishes, but you're basically okay with how things unfold while they still do.

One episode, hitting that slightly noir vibe, focuses on Inspector Zenigata, Lupin's eternal complement.

The show aired almost ten years ago, so forgive me for spoilers.

The basic plot of the episode "Until the Full Moon Wanes" revolves around every scoundrel in the world believing that the widow of a media mogul sits on a huge hidden fortune because her husband seeded the rumor before he died. The first climax of the episode seems to be convincing the world that this was indeed a lie - a cooperation between Lupin and Zenigata. In the denouement we learn that the fortune actually exists and the widow wanted potential thieves off her back, Lupin shows up to steal it and is finally thwarted by Zenigata.

The episode really revolves about human folly, with a media mogul rescuing a girl from sexual violence, taking her as his beloved wife, then completely scorning her when she cheats on him once - including marking her body. This theme of scorn beyond the grave and its somewhat noir vibe playing on human passion and the unreliability of love and character are enough to keep us entertained until we get our inevitable finale.

I'd say this one stretches suspension of disbelief but doesn't break it. Though it raises questions - even if she had a huge fortune hidden, wouldn't it be easier to own it, hire guards, and just enjoy it? Furthermore, how did Lupin and his gang intend to steal the fortune?It's gold. It weighs tons and tons. (And yes, it's enough gold to be considered the reserves of a country. Did the author not watch "Die Hard with a Vengeance"?) It's also stacked in the most stupid way possible to impress the audience. Once you start to think about it, the story unravels and falls apart. But I'd bet while it goes on with its (somewhat forced) twists and turns, you're willing to follow it.

When it breaks

There are, however, some episodes too stupid to live, and so far the unrivaled king of the trash heap is "The Jet-Black Diamond". I'll spoiler this one so you don't have to watch it.

So, some small wooden dolls are somehow supposed to lead to a treasure. But the story makes no sense, no matter which way you look at it.

The central theme behind the treasure hunt is supposedly a love story. A somehow Japanese woman in Brazil falls in love with a pirate who basically sacks her village but spares her. (Because seeing people die you spent your life with is conducive to romance. Maybe she had Stockholm Syndrome.) They know they have little time so they concoct a plan to hide some treasure and meet again. Which never happens because the pirate gets executed shortly after and she commits suicide.

This might make sense on the surface but just wait for the rest...

The clues they leave lead to a cashew tree with magical red glowing flowers that only blossoms every 75 years. The biological facts themselves are mindboggling - how does it benefit the damn tree to blossom only every 75 years? And how is it so exact over such a long period of time?? And why is everyone showing up at the right time to see it???

Breathe. Slow, deep breaths.

So this basically means they planned to meet again when they were around a hundred. Instead of, you know, like five years later.

Then... piracy in the Caribbean and around South America was a phenomenon largely limited to the 16th and 17th centuries, with stragglers hanging on until the 18th century. Steam vessels and larger national navies ended it for good in the 19th century. (To put it very roughly.) The episode itself can be assumed to be set in 2021 when Part 6 aired. So, are we to assume that old-fashioned piracy occurred in Brazil in the mid of the 20th century? The age of airplanes and nuclear bombs? (Piracy persists but is a rather local phenomenon in the world, relying on quick hit-and-run raids.)

What is the treasure, actually? Pepper. Some special pepper, that supposedly ended up making the village prosperous. This is probably an allusion to the times when pepper was still highly valuable, something which was maybe true up to the 17th century (as a little research shows).

What we really have here is an author shoe-horning a pirate story into Lupin III, and somehow trying to tie it to a love story and a living relative. (Instead of a long-lost pirate treasure.) But frankly, the whole thing fails over and over again. The finale is devoid of any logic. Even the dolls are somehow important because their patterns help identify the tree by its blossom patterns. The only tree blooming in that particular year, looking entirely magical and obvious BY ITSELF!!

(Also some young local thugs show up to gang up on the old lady and her company because everybody thinks about the ages old treasure all the time and so the arrival of a Japanese lady is clearly stirring up the area.)

To make the offense even worse, just when the story focuses on Fujiko being in the lead for quite a while, Lupin shows up as a drone projecting a hologram acting as Captain Exposition, stealing her thunder. They couldn't be arsed to write him in properly, but they couldn't leave him off-screen for five minutes or have somebody else have the spotlight. Wow, that was horrible writing altogether.

And here we have it - it qualifies as a story. It's tied together by a plot. Events happen, characters appear, and the same mixture of twists and turns and a lack of treasure at the end (for Lupin or Fujiko) appears, but it doesn't work. You could be forgiven for not knowing about the history of piracy, but the notion of a tree with such magical properties is not a twist to a story, it's a ridiculous device meant to introduce one twist too many to a poorly written story.

Because for some reason the author was so focused on thwarting the thieves so much he had to set up an entirely unbelievable gotcha even for Lupin standards. A show where people evade bullets near point blank range or where eating a steak can restore Lupin's blood loss within hours. It's actually quite the accomplishment!

#anime series #lupin iii #lupin the third #lupin the 3rd #part 6 #suspension of disbelief #part 4

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regarding-stories · 3 months

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Literally hard to finish: The World God Only Knows

There are some shows that are hard to finish for various reasons - you don't like where the plot is going, you don't like a twist, or the character arcs, or even the characters themselves; for some reason quality dropped, etc. But some shows are literally hard to finish - because you have to chase their content across multiple media to do so. Astoundingly, this is not always easier in the age of the internet!

This review will contain spoilers. The show aired ten years ago, but is still popular enough to be retained and recommended on Crunchyroll. (Or to have animated GIFs here on tumblr.)

The basic premise of the first two seasons is as following: There's a hell that keeps particularly bad souls in check. "Some" escaped. Keima is a guy who played a lot of dating sims, he's an over-the-top obsessed gamer known as "god of conquest" on the internet. One day a "demon" called Elshie "tricks" him into signing a contract that requires him to capture loose souls or lose his head.

Over the course of the first two seasons Keima then "conquers" girls through his knowledge of dating sims - basically figuring out the central problem for each that "caused an emptiness in her heart" to appear to allow the "loose soul" in, and then finding a way to fill that heart with a romantic moment that helps them over that emptiness and drive the soul out for capture.

This sounds like the setup of a harem show, but the first two seasons avoid this through a tiny twist - once conquered, the girls don't remember the key part and that they fell in love with Keima Katsuragi in the first place. So each girl gets to stand on her own and gets her own story without there being a pre-determined "number one." Episodes don't match up with girls, instead each story unfolds at its own length and pace which works quite nicely. Side plots fill us in on the true extent of Katsuragi's gaming obsession, how New Hell works, and so on.

It's an enjoyable, light show, damn funny, good characters, and with a whiff of romance.

And then...

Let's Do The Time Warp Again

If you're very confused starting with season 3 you're not the only one. We finish season 2 with Keima having "conquered" 9 girls and us seeing a preview of five more characters to appear. At the beginning of season 3 we are informed that it's 14 now, and characters appear we haven't seen yet while the plot begins to focus on them. Also, you get flashbacks of conquests that haven't happened on-screen - what is going on?

The production of anime series in general used to be focused on promoting well-selling manga. Especially in light romance and similar genres you would usually get one season and that's it. This is gradually changing. But "The World God Only Knows" is an odd case. They basically skipped their original plans for season 3. So you'll only get to know what became of one of the girls "previewed" at the end of season 2.

To make this even more confusing, the story unfolding in season 3 had already started with two OVA (direct-to-video) episodes not included on Crunchyroll. So you're starting in the middle of things, having to pierce things together. They simple cut an entire season's worth of content and the beginning.

And this creates even more problems. But we'll see that after we look at season 3.

Where We Go Off The Rails

So, let's review what this series was for 2 seasons: A light, episodic show where each installment can largely stand by itself and actions in one part have few consequences in others.

Season 3 throws this over board entirely. Childhood friend Tenri is host to a goddess named Diana, and Keima has to find 5 of her sisters among his previous conquests to protect them from a scheme by an evil organization trying to bring back Old Hell, appropriately and cringeworthily called "Vintage."

And girls that host goddesses remember the previous conquest, blowing the original setup out of the water. The start is Kanon, the idol girl, who publicly declares her love for Keima for all the school to know, acting as the inciting incident that allows the protagonist to spot the goddess hosts, as they're all kinda mad at him for neglecting them and getting confessed to by another, VERY popular girl.

Quite frankly, this shows an ugly side of the protagonist. Yes, he tries to save everyone. But he comes across as even more calculating and manipulative across this season as he tries to balance finding and "conquering" four more girls among the possible candidates.

To further complicate things, two of them are friends, Ayumi and Chihiro. Really close. Like "I'm willing to stand aside for you and support you." Keima goes really far with Chihiro only to realize in the last moment that she doesn't remember the conquest. She is not a host! She just fell in love with him, a teenage crush.

This is a defining moment and a moral dilemma. What will Keima do? He doesn't take advantage of Chihiro's feelings, but he hurts her horribly to get her out of the way. He comes across as cruel and cold at this point, a culmination of the whole trying to act detached and just conquering girls for their own good.

At this point we can't see inside Keima. Even his thoughts are tightly guarded. What's even worse, in order to save the goddess inside Ayumi he has to enlist Chihiro's help. And she helps, but she also retaliates against Keima. But she stops short of making his job impossible. That establishes her character very effectively. She's hurting, but she's not consumed by jealousy or her hurt.

The whole season concludes by the goddesses stopping Vintage's plan for hell on earth. Chihiro actually notices the goddess wings that Keima's "love" brought out in her friends as she plays a concert with them on the school festival stage. She cries over her hurtful youth romance.

And we see Keima crying over regretting what he did to Chihiro, the only girl he ever truly feels sorry for.

And then it all ends.

The fuck what??

Chasing The Wild Goose

The makers of the anime royally screwed up. They skipped an actual season 3 to make the season they probably thought had more potential. But. When they ended that, they were stuck with a series that hadn't finished yet. They never made another season. Though admittedly the manga itself finished half a year later, so maybe that's not the reason.

But if you know only the anime you have missed out on not only the content that season 3 points at, you also don't know how it ends. What's with Chihiro, dammit? That's all I wanted to know.

This is where you have to turn to the manga. And there you have another problem. No electronic version. Yes, somehow this manga only sold as paperback. Can't find it on ebook sites.

Good luck scouring the used book market for old volumes. It's unclear why no ebook marketing took place, why they can't be had anywhere. But what's clear is that at this point you can't even get money to the author as used sales only shuffle money around between people that already bought the book and people who can't buy the book any other way. Isn't capitalism great?

Anyway.

How It Ends (Eventually)

Now, the goddess arc was... debatable. It infuses action elements and an ongoing plot and recontextualizes previous parts of the story in order to create a new story. Or you could say: It recycles the characters of one kind of story for a different story.

While that new story is okay, it's real redeeming quality for me is the potential "Chihiro ending" that's written on the wall during anime season 3. But before we can get to that, we have to wade through the content of a potential season 4 that never materialized, the final arc.

What do you do if you beat the big bad? You reveal the bigger bad behind the lesser bad. And behind Vintage is Satyr. What unfolds next is a story that almost entirely leaves the world the series built before behind as Keima travels ten years to the past.

The main character of the final arc is the mind of 17 year old Keima in his own 7 year old body. Conveniently for the drama the goddesses didn't tell him why he was sent back. So he time-loops through some really unnecessary stuff so that we can learn why.

I think the final arc isn't that great. After all, it leaves the premise almost entirely behind, but it gives us peeks at some of our heroines at age 7 (Ayumi and Chihiro, of course), it also introduces some new characters. What unfolds, basically, is that Keima has to set up its own timeline in the past. So 17 year old Keima is, in a sense, his own grandfather. (No, he isn't. LOL.) Actually he's the instigator of events that lead to all the goddesses being in girls at his school that he will link up with in the future.

I still was a bit glad when it was over. I mean, after revealing that Elsie, the hapless demon, was secretly the personification of the Ultimate Weapon... Lord...

But we do get a decent enough happy end. Keima confesses to Chihiro who blows him off. But they end up together as she actually is in love with him - the only girl to fall for him before he even started his machinations.

There's also a sad note. All the goddess hosts retain their feelings and have to come to terms with them. This is hard on Tenri who not only loved him for ten years straight, but who hosts a goddess that's also crushing on Keima. So there's a bit of heartbreak. But somehow it all feels right.

While the foreshadowing of the ending only truly started in season 3, the romance between Keima and Chihiro doesn't seem random. It doesn't feel like a last minute twist. It already started to feel a bit like this might happen during Chihiro's conquest in season 2. While Keima tried being her Cyrano to get the other boy, she just so naturally fell into the flow of talking to him instead. She felt like the only girl who doesn't entirely depend on a big, dramatic setup to just chat. Even more convincing, she does what some teenage girls do, though likely at a much younger age than 17. She teases her crush. Right from the start. Calls him dweeb and such.

So, looking back at the series, they have a satisfying dynamic. Unlike some series I know... As I said before, a romantic story needs to clue us in on who has feelings and chemistry with whom. Even if they don't end up together because of problems along the way. But romance is about the feelings you have and show but maybe not act on. It's not about surprise twist endings and off-screen character development. And on this count "The World God Only Knows" qualifies as a decent love story. We see our main couple clash and quarrel, but we can believe the ending.

Now, whether if the two final arcs were really good... They were decent. They lost most of the innocent charm and goodwill for the MC built in the first two seasons. They did build a grander story and expanded the setting, but arguably so late in the series (technically a season 4 and 5) that it wouldn't be surprising if part of the audience simply opted out. But they're done well and I enjoyed reading it enough to stick it through. Though admittedly, skipping to the very last chapter would have done, too.

Finality

There's one benefit to the time travel arc, though.

Elsie/Elsea/Elshie gets to pick her own ending. The demon orphan that not only adores her "Nii-sama" older brother but also her adoptive mom reinvents herself in the time stream as the younger child of Keima's mom and dad, undoing the separation she caused between the parents to fit in as the illegitimate child. (Played for laughs, but oh boy...) As befitting a time travel story she's always been there and spent not only all her life at her brother's side, she will always remain his sister Eri and have a loving family. That must have been her one true desire, given that she became human for it. I mean, she spent 300 years in hell on cleaning duty before. (Immortality is not really that sweet deal for some.)

We also learn that their duo was the only hunter team to successfully employ love as means to fill gaps in hearts. And without relapses. So maybe our ditzy demon had the best intuition of them all as she made Keima her buddy in saving the world from loose souls.

Give this story a chance, it's among the better long manga. It overstays it's welcome a bit but it does end at a good point. It doesn't reset progress like "My Dress-Up Darling", or, worse, "Rent-A-Girlfriend". It changes what story it is but I don't think it stalled us unduly.

Be prepared to chase it around for the complete picture.

#the world god only knows #anime series #manga series #romantic anime #high school anime #chihiro best girl

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regarding-stories · 4 months

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Round them up, I say!

I've watched more stuff. Let's quickly run over it...

Stardust Telepath

A really socially awkward and shy girl fantasizes about space to find friends among the aliens. Only to meet a really strange girl (and classmate) that claims to be one! In her efforts to get her back to her home planet she befriends two more girls and they all get into launching model rockets.

This is a show that teases with yuri vibes, but it is really a wholesome story about friendship and... gun powder model rockets?? I wonder if there will be a season 2. This stuff is heartwarming. Bonavuu!

Locodol

What does a small town that isn't particularly outstanding in anything do to promote itself? Besides inventing a mascot, it apparently creates a local idol group - Locodols!

In the end, two girls are chosen, and two more girls (of small build) are hired on to wear the mascot costume. Again, a story about friendship with yuri-teasing vibes between the two Locodols themselves.

It also opens a bit of a window into how the parts of Japan outside Tokyo try to generate interest in themselves, especially to attract tourism, including inventing new local specialties or events. And the cute mascots battling it out on national TV were hilarious!

Bocchi the Rock!

Wow, I'm really backlogged. This one actually deserves its own article, but right now I don't have the time to do that...

A socially awkward girl obsessed with rock music and actually a secret shut-in guitar hero dreams about making friends. Her lucky star gets her roped into a band with (eventually) three other girls where.. she initially sucks. (Playing with others is a separate skill, believe me.)

We not only follow her journey towards self-actualization through rock music, we also get to watch her inner world. In a hilarious twist, all her friends can too! It's what makes it one of the funniest series out there.

Bocchi the Rock! is funny and fun to watch, and contains some genuine stuff about making music and being in a band. Apparently it was an instant hit and people can't wait for season 2. Me neither! You go, Whatever-san!!

Burn the Witch / Burn the Witch 0.8

A quick warning before you watch this. The first season of this is only 3 episodes long. This series from the creator of the extremely popular series Bleach has simply not amassed enough content for more, that's why it initially was released as movie. (And then it was split into episodes.)

Given how much worldbuilding and character intro is done in this short season, one would expect a lot to follow. A season two will eventually drop. Until then we are left with a lot of concepts that have been name dropped but answers will have to wait.

Burn the Witch tells the story of two young witches that work as Pipers, their job is to be first responders on dragon sightings (and lots of menial work) to secure the scene until the heavy guns (the Sabres) arrive. There are also a dude who attracts dragons (a Dragonclad) and his adorable feisty doggy. And some deranged girl named Macy that is apparently here to stay, her actual role still unclear.

Currently airing is Burn the Witch 0.8, a prequel season that explains how the witches ended up with Balgo, how Balgo ended up being a Dragonclad, and what everyone's darling doggy really is underneath. (This changes things?)

Gorgeous art, funny dialogue and scenes, great action, and some really ingenious (and horrible) dragon designs. Especially magnificient: All the fantasy elements we see in the countryside outside of Reverse London.

INVADERS of the ROKUJYOMA!?

An older one - guy moves into suspiciously cheap apartment for high school, only to find it to be the battleground between a ghost, a witch from an underground civilization, a space princess, and a magical girl, all of which need the apartment for various reasons.

They of course all end up liking him or become his friends, and their rivalry gradually turns into friendship as they master individual adventures. Slight harem vibes, but mostly just good fun. How the ghost girl acts like his live-in girlfriend and actually sleeps sideways piercing through him is... unique. Good enough to deserve a season 2, but released in a time where that was rare.

(Apparently no GIFS for this one.)

Love Flops

I finished this one before HiDive actually closed shop in my country.

I'm going to spoiler on this one.

Starts out as a weird harem show where inexplicably five girls fall in love with same dude and confess to him in no time. In an even weirder move, they all end up living with him. Makes no sense, right?

Turns out, they are all AIs and he's in a virtual reality. Each one of them is the best effort of a team from a different nation to present an AI that can feel emotion. Hence their original weirdness before they start to grow into more real personalities.

The story takes a more emotional turn when we learn that the base of all "personality AIs" is the protagonist's childhood love, Ai. Her father scanned her personality and brain into a computer before she died of a brain tumor.

The story resolves in a dramatic turn where the main character gets to say goodbye to his first love and they get to share the feelings with each other that they could never express while she was alive as they were too afraid and immature to handle the situation.

In a weird hurricane of a self-contained season this original anime series (not adapted from a manga) moves from explicit harem comedy with lots of fan service to action show to actually really sad and emotional drama. The ending is somewhat predictable, and that after all they put us through before.

It's watchable, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, and a whole lot stupid, too. It touches on spy action, magical girl, and even a gender-ambiguous arc. Parts of it are indeed touching. Could have done with being less things at once.

I'm Giving the Disgraced Noble Lady I Rescued a Crash Course in Naughtiness

... and that's not even the full title. And it's not shorter in Japanese, either. (The poor naming of most Japanese light novels is its own genre of comedy.)

The basic premise is that a Cinderella-like beauty gets framed for a crime, and somehow ends up in a powerful magician's care during her escape. He totally not has the hots for her, and wants to teach this innocent beauty how to be "naughty." The sublimation is powerful in this one! (Even if the search for a title wasn't.)

(No GIFs on this one, but thankfully also none for "disgraced," either. GIFs have become kind of naughty, lately.)

Crash Course presents a rich fantasy world and an evolving love story with a growing cast of characters. Breaks genre for a whole episode in the middle..? I liked it well enough. And it's about as naughty as Dark Helmet from Spaceballs is scary.

Classroom for Heroes

The great legendary hero that saved the realm gets reborn as a high school student, attending an academy where none of the students (and aspiring heroes) know his identity. He's totally overpowered, though, and quickly befriends not only the local prodigies (which he beats), but also a dragon (which he adopts), the robot guardian of an underground library (which becomes his maid), etc...

A lot happens in a season and I lost track. It's generally fun to watch and has characters you end up liking. Nothing too surprising, all in all.

And that's it for now.

#anime series #stardust telepath #locodol #bocchi the rock!#INVADERS of the ROKUJYOMA!?#I'm Giving the Disgraced Noble Lady I Rescued a Crash Course in Naughtiness #love flops #classroom for heroes #burn the witch #burn the witch 0.8

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regarding-stories · 5 months

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Rounding them up to keep up

So, I watched and read more stuff. But before I get into the "new" stuff, some updates for stuff we had before:

I just finished reading the final volume of "No Matter What You Say, Furi-san is Scary!" It was a delightful, highly pleasing end of a series that was heart-warming, well-paced, and fun to read.

I watched season 1 of "Kubo won't let me be invisible" and it was delightful.

I'm well into "season 2" of the -Monogatari novels and find them truly good (except the endless banter dialogue about anime and wordplay). Tsubasa Hanekawa got to be the narrator of her own volume and is definitely best girl. Why is nobody streaming this in Japanese anymore??

And so, without any further ado, some recent discoveries.

Flying Witch

This is an "older one" and hence we're unlikely to see another season. I'm glad the time is ending where most anime wound up with one season only.

This is one is a bit subdued, more slice of life, and absolutely a comforting treasure. Young modern-day witch arrives at her relatives, begins to slowly get into the business of witching she's supposed o learn, and also attends high school.

Three episodes in, already loving it. Countryside goodness. Wholesome to boot.

Bullbuster

A different take on giant robots. Small down-on-its-luck company uses giant robots to battle monsters that have overrun a Japanese island - in a Japan very similar to present day. But the show is not about endless robot-vs-monster battles, it's really about the people working at that company, uncovering the mystery behind the monsters, and the realities of the workplace. It's fun and relatable.

No animated GIF for this? Meh.

I'm In Love With The Villainess

Rae loves her dating sim games and one day wakes up in her favorite one. But instead of winning over any of the handsome three princes she goes after her favorite, the haughty noble and game's bully/antagonist - Claire.

Rae is armed with the knowledge about the game's many paths that somehow still play out, but the more she progresses down her path to win Claire's affections, the more she gets into the unknown.

What makes the show work is the Claire has actually quite some character under her off-putting demeanor - and what makes it funny is that Rae is perfectly content to be Claire's masochist doormat - which really freaks Claire out. Freaking out Claire is best!

Definitely above par for a "I'm in a game!" show and entertaining.

Ron Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deductions

Here's a modern Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson pairing. Ron is a genius but (complicated backstory, yada yada) forbidden from sleuthing - which is all he lives for. He's of course quirky to boot.

Toto is a most hapless police detective that was about to be fired from the murder unit because he couldn't solve any cases. They team up and Toto becomes the front for Ron to solve cases.

It's super-quirky, funny, and has great mysteries. I think it also abides by the code for writing a true detective mystery by providing us enough clues to solve the mystery ourselves. (As opposed to hack stories like the BBC's "Sherlock" which is all about grandstanding. Sorry, Benedict Cumberbatch. I still love you.)

Our Dating Story: The Experienced You and The Inexperienced Me

A shy high school nobody is dared to confess to his class' super-popular gyaru that he has a crush on. And she says yes? Turns out our heroine did have a lot of boyfriends because she says yes to all of them and tries to make the boys happy, only for them to take advantage and leave. (Because she thinks this is as it should be and not of herself.)

It's not very convincing a setup, and the show suffers at times from it, but it's heart-warming how the protagonist slows things down and actually tries to date the person she is and cares about her and how actual feelings bloom.

It's very low on drama, save for one episode, and very untypically for a Japanese show, the drama is nigh-immediately resolved by... talking it out? Communication? Where is the several seasons of dysfunction and unsaid words? Somebody clearly didn't get the memo.

(Actually I like it. It's an easy show to watch.)

The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, REALLY Love You

I thought this would be too stupid to bear but it's actually working. A god fucks up somebody's wish for a girlfriend and grants him 100 soulmates. And to make it worse, they'll die if they don't get to be with him. And he meets all in high school.

Title is a dirty liar, though: So far it's five. And they rock, even though they simply are a harem covering all character type bases. (But I won't pretend I remember their names.)

The show is funny to watch, there is not much drama, and it doesn't take itself seriously. And the girls agree that they other can date him, too? And have all kinds of interactions themselves?

This could be a show about polyamory except it's too silly for that. But it makes me laugh. It's really into kissing, though.

Psycho-Pass

Japan in the future. An omnipresent AI can detect whether people are so psychologically unstable they would get violent or murderous, so a special police task force hunts them down.

And who better to hunt them down than people with high disturbance scores and their handlers? Yeah, makes sense...

I'm only halfway, but I suspect more is behind the show's setup than simply enabling the episodes to proceed as they do - the underlying arc is only unfolding slowly yet.

But talk about dystopia. This is "Minority Report" all over. The reaction of people to other people being in actual distress is itself disturbing. May be a very clever show. I hope. It sure thinks nothing of allowing maximum violence against people who have merely a high score... Wow, there's more? But not today.

#anime series #flying witch #bullbuster #wataoshi #i favor the villainess #Ron Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deductions #rkfd #Our Dating Story: The Experienced You and The Inexperienced Me #100 kanojo #psycho pass

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regarding-stories · 5 months

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The dark abyss that is Andor

There were several things that led to Andor.

On the one hand, Disney screwed up its Star Wars intellectual property by handing it to complete hacks for Episode VII to IX, leading a potential cash cow to attract less and less viewers over the course of three increasingly bad installments. Seriously, The Last Jedi is one of the worst disappointments I've actually watched, and not only was I thinking "This can't get worse..." every five minutes only to be proven, "Yes, it can!!", it completely killed my appetite to see IX (and I would have left the cinema at that one's sheer stupidity). With VII, I saw it once with some initial excitement in a cinema when it released and a strange feeling afterwards, and I never revisited it. VIII I saw on two separate long-distance flights because I couldn't stomach the thing in one sitting. IX I didn't see at all, but devoured YouTube videos ripping it apart. Clearly, Disney had a Star Wars problem.

The other thing is the reboot that was The Mandalorian, especially season 1. The Mandalorian had a penchant for not very strong logic in its writing that you still accepted because you had so much damn fun and loved the characters. Given the fact that it clearly pulled lots of viewers into Disney+ that were loving its vibe that was true to the core of Star Wars, Disney management saw the fact that theaters and theme parks were closed due to COVID on the one hand and that big Star Wars movies were at risk of actually losing money on the other hand, and they did what executives are wont to do - they decided that if it worked once, it will work again and declared they will pump out TEN Star Wars series in the near future.

Meanwhile they cancelled also their ongoing series of "A Star Wars Story" movies that started with what could be called "Episode III.5" - Rogue One. Rogue One was plagued with production problems, so much so that seeming key scenes from the trailer weren't in the movie. "I rebel!", anyone?? Still, it turned out to be something new - a new kind of Star Wars story. It took the idea of a war movie (or its modern equivalent, Band of Brothers) and put it into the Star Wars cinematic universe. It did without an actual Jedi (kinda-sorta) and it showed a strong performance of Diego Luna as the morally gray Cassian Andor. And... (spoiler alert) ... it killed its whole cast in its finale.

I know people that say Rogue One is their favorite Star Wars movie. (But other people dislike it.) I hold it in high esteem. The way the resistance is portrayed also seemed to be somewhat subversive - both to its previous image on screen and to what is portrayable on screen for mainstream audiences in general. It became clear that unlike in the original three Star Wars movies resisting an empire is, on the ground, a dirty business and not just about big battles or commando raids. (Which then happen anyway. Because Star Wars.)

Then followed the lackluster Solo and the third installment Yoda was never made as Star Wars increasingly lost its ability to draw crowds into seats.

And thus it came to Andor

Now what do you do with a character that (spoiler alert? really?) dies. You make a bloody prequel. Which is funny. Andor is a prequel to Rogue One which is a prequel to A New Hope. Prequels, like sequels, carry the risk of rehashing the original material without adding anything to it (Solo ...) and being trapped by the inevitability of what has to happen next, curtailing its writing (Kenobi ...). But Andor season 1 betrays none of that. (Talk about being addicted to prequels, Disney...) It is a strong piece of cinematic art in its own right.

And yes, I'm saying art. About a Star Wars series. That's how I feel about it. Andor not only has strong execution, it has depth. It was a show that made me pause it and think about what just happened on screen. It's a show that gets deeper if you know about history, unlike most shows that actually reveal their shallowness to the knowing eye. (Looking at you, The Man in the High Castle. Boy, I hated that tripe.)

But even before we get into that, let me say how I impressed I was with its set and costume design. Whereas the Book of Boba Fett gave us cyberpunks on floating scooters, Andor poured a lot of heart into how everybody looked in their various environments, creating a more rich and varied Star Wars society by portraying various strata thereof, from the life of imperial senator Mon Mothma to the middle class living literally in her shade somewhere on the middle levels of planet-city Coruscant to the mining town labor class that we find Cassian in. It flawlessly cuts between different well-thought out locations, including, of all things, a holiday resort.

This is paired with some very strong performances by similarly strong actors. I mean, we all knew Stellan Skarsgard would deliver, sure. But Denise Gough absolutely kills it, acting-wise. Her delivery as a villain is perfect, the way she manages to always look so sour and annoyed already is quite something, how she normalizes evil into a technocrat career. Every flinch of her face conveys books of information to me as the fascinated viewer. She is at the heart of this series, and worth the price of admission alone.

And let's not forget Andy Serkis' heart-rending performance. Really, we're being spoiled. People are seriously acting, not just standing in front of a camera wearing costumes! In Star Wars!!

And yet, if it was only that, it still wouldn't have impacted me as deeply as it had. There's one more layer to this, and it's the massive bottom of the iceberg that is Andor. I haven't forgotten, even though I'm writing this a year after watching it.

(And definitely spoilers from here on onwards.)

Life under fascism

The second half of season 1 however can put deep horror into any thinking person's mind. It radically departs from previous portrayals of the evil Empire. It's not relying on cheap gimmicks like Episode VII where we see a village razed by the First Order. (So evil. So cliche, too. Also murdering Max von Sydow. Tsk, tsk. They had to get him off stage before any good acting happens...) Andor creeps under our skin and then reaps havoc.

(This part of this entry will become increasingly dark. You might not want to read on. Because fiction is one thing, and comparing it to historical reality is another. This is an actual trigger warning. Proceed with care.)

The first half of the season is standard fare, almost. Cassian gets himself in trouble and there is really no redeeming quality about it. He also gets everybody else into trouble. The Empire in its heavy-handed hurry to eradicate resistance actually creates it in the first place. And still... the lack of compunction about torture, about going victim by victim, vanishing people into its torture cells, breaking them... this is merely an overture. No hero is born here, but evil wears its mask imperfectly.

Cassian escapes his small world to eventually live the good life on a resort world, getting laid, pretending to be someone else. Instead of being caught as the fugitive and murderer and partisan he actually is by now, he simply gets caught up in the arrest of somebody else. The way the Empire "perpetrates justice" not only gets him arrested while having done no wrong (in that cover identity), he also gets sentenced by a court that doesn't even pretend to actually care about due process in any way. There's a machine of oppression, and instead of competently catching him, Cassian becomes caught up randomly in one of its many gears.

And while this may seem random, it's brilliant. It's one of the many reasons why resistance exists. Because the Empire's overreach is everywhere, grinding up people just living their lives while trying to perfect its control. The corruption of the desire for power leaks through in its banality.

What follows is Cassian's imprisonment, and this segment is brutal and horrifying on a deep level. The more you know, the worse it gets. Cassian is transported to a prison facility where he's forced into repetitive labor to make equipment for the Empire. There's a set of steps every labor team has to execute, and the team with the lowest quota gets punished with electric shocks. Day after day.

This is "Vernichtung durch Arbeit." ("Destruction through labor.") This is what the Nazis did to their political opponents. Before there was a Holocaust, there were concentration camps. And prisoners were made to work - the cynic motto across the gate of Auschwitz was "Arbeit macht frei." ("Labor sets you free.") People would gradually be ground down until they gave out in one way or another, fell sick, die of exhaustion, broke psychologically. The series never tells us its "inspiration," it just goes through similar motions. With the veneer of a super-clean techno prison over it.

Not only that, the very scene reminded me of what I read in a book about the Holocaust. Towards the end of the war the engines for the new secret weapon jet planes or rockets were manufactured by prison labor. Crews of malnourished prisoners would each execute a few pretrained steps and crank out more jet engines in slave labor than was previously done in the Reich's armament factories. This was the culmination of the Nazi system where all labor-intensive things like the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall or the underground factories of Dora-Mittelbau were erected by and on the back of slaves that were themselves gradually killed in the process.

Without ever breathing a word of what is portraying, Andor portrays the same. Skillfully, horribly so.

The devil is in the details

Some way into this horror, everybody gets their sentence doubled. The counter simply goes up. No explanation. Total helplessness in the face of total control. The deep gut feeling of "No one gets out here alive" or "It will never end" begins to descend. That number was a sort of life line for people to brave another day. And it lies!

As unbelievable as it may seem, people did get released from concentration camps, especially those on "lighter charges" like "antisocial behavior." But nobody really knew how long they had to stay or if they were to be released. Often, initially told they had to do 3 to 6 months depending on their conduct, and yet most people never left alive. A quick read in a book behind me says that 8 million people were sucked into the system, 7 million died, 200,000 left by being released by the system itself. The idea you might be released one day added false hope that in itself could create further psychological torture if it was dashed over and over again.

Then there is the "divide and conquer" approach to prisoner management. Work crews are led by other prisoners, rebellion and resistance is quelled within the ranks. This Andor merely hints at, but the Nazi oppression system skillfully created hierarchies to make sure a comparatively small detachment of guards could handle a large mass of inmates which could overwhelm them if acting together.

But it doesn't stop here, not in Andor, either. Eventually we learn that the Empire starts to eliminate the prison population. Rumors start to spread that an entire floor of the super prison was eliminated by electrocution. Just like the real Nazis the space Nazis start to construct yet another death machine to eliminate opposition.

And this leads to that sub-plots final chapter, the prison revolt. There are a few historical mass escapes, even from Nazi death camps. There's also the heroism of the two uprisings of Warsaw (including the ghetto uprising). Left with nothing to lose, left with nothing but death ahead, the prisoners overwhelm the guards.

And this happened in real life, too. It's probably based on the historical case of the death camp inmates that were forced to run the gas chambers and crematoria themselves. This is part of the Holocaust itself, the Nazis had finally dropped all pretenses and resorting to kill people in an industrial manner. And these people knew that eventually their whole detachment would be killed. They knew too much, were witnesses to this massive crime against them and humanity itself. They were also among those destined for death. Like in an antechamber of hell itself they were merely bidding time. So they managed one of the few mass escapes on record.

While Andor doesn't stray as far down the road as actual history does, it knows how to cite history for those who know. It's not made up of whole cloth. It actually is referencing the real history of the most inhumane version of fascism, but it does not put the fact in your face. But if you know, its chamber of horrors becomes so much deeper.

And that's why

This is what makes Andor an absolute masterpiece. It recreates the conditions without blindly copying the source. It adapts, but you can feel how deeply inhumane the circumstances are that it depicts. It gives you the bloody creeps, and even if you don't know how much it is rooted in darkness, you will still feel it. It shows. It tells. But it never spoils the source material.

This is art. This is the deep craft. The banality of evil, the careless, uncaring attitude of evil towards those it deems unworthy and not human. It's all on display. It switches us into the place of Cassian and of Andy Serkis' character as it draws us in as audience. We don't see what happens on other floors. We don't have the information advantage. We can only imagine. We are subjected to the fact that we can only imagine it. And so we share a bit in the plight of these characters. Sometimes not showing a thing is the highest accomplishment of movie making.

And this is why I'm pissed that a series that was planned for five seasons was already cut to play out in two. Because we need more of this and less of more Jedi doing backflips. Just like Loki plays on a completely different level than the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Andor leaves all of Star Wars in its dust. If Rogue One was the attempt to tell a different kind of story in the same universe, Andor is the attempt at a different level of depth.

And this, more than Rogue One, makes it clear why they fight.

Watch it if you can.

And sorry if I horrified you.

#andor #andor series #cassian andor #rogue one #star wars

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regarding-stories · 6 months

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Rent-a-Girlfriend: The Guide to Unhealthy Relationships

I finally finished "Rent-a-Girlfriend" season 3... and it was a chore. Biggest disappointment was that it ain't over yet. Seriously. This series needed to finish at that point. No wonder the internet predicts it's going to be downhill from there.

(Spoilers going forward. Yeah.)

This show depicts a lot of unhealthy patterns in relationships, and does it rather well. I just don't think it was intentional. What I think happened is that the author set up some conflicts meant to keep the series going and by now they have gone to their logical end - which is by the way not a resolution!

The story so far... college student Kazuya gets dumped by his rather new girlfriend Mami and goes into a funk. So he rents a girlfriend over an escort service, and Chizuru shows up to play the perfect mate. Due to a series of escalations they end up pretending to be boyfriend and girlfriend to others to keep their grandmas happy who happen to be friends. Then Ruka shows up who decides that Kazuya is "the one" and tries to make him her boyfriend with the subtlety of a crowbar. To round out the pseudo-harem, extremely shy whisper girl Sumi is introduced to Kazuya so she can practice being a girlfriend for rent.

Kazuya develops feelings for Chizuru but whenever things seem to move into something more than a business relationship between the two, something happens. For example, Ruka pushes her way into becoming his girlfriend "on a trial basis," a fact which seemingly everyone forgets immediately and acts as if they're an item when it's convenient (for more drama or slapstick). In spite of this, Kazuya shows his dedication to Chizuru who turns out to be an aspiring actress (that's why she needs the money). He ends up financing and directing a movie she can show to her dying grandmother. During the making of the movie, Chizuru becomes increasingly aware that she has feelings for Kazuya as well, something she could push away as mere infatuation before.

Normally, at this point, the story should move into resolution at a brisk pace, the conflicts should be cleared up one way or the other, and given that this is a rom-com and not a drama, a happy end should ensue...

Nope, they leave you dangling. (It's symptomatic that after showing her a good time to cheer up is that she tells him he can't expect "a happy ending." Of course she meant something else, but one wonders if she talks to the audience....)

The Push and the Pull

If we leave the silly shenanigans of the first season aside - and there's plenty - then we still have to say that there are actual character traits at work in this story. Anime/manga stories often rely on gimmicks to drive a story forward, but they still need actual conflicts to justify the whole thing or they become boring and idiotic really fast, like for example "Saekano - How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend". shudder

There is an actual underlying logic drawing Chizuru and Kazuya closer. At first the driving force are his hormones, no surprise there. But then he discovers who she is. They both care about their grandmas. He's impressed by her resolve to pursue her dream, given that he himself already knows he will inherit the family store and that's it for him. Her "going it alone" life with only one living relative (and grandma is already in the hospital all the time) triggers his inner white knight. He wants to protect and support her. This motivates him to change, and Kazuya increasingly develops some of the qualities desirable in a partner. He delivers on his promises, he can be relied on, and he empathizes with her goals and genuinely cheers for her successes.

On her side, we also, as viewers, discover who she is. The two central figures in her life were her grandparents - the grandmother she dotes on and wants to see happy. And the late grandfather who was a hopeless dreamer and idealist but who also worked hard to keep the family afloat as a taxi driver. The parallels between Kazuya and her grandpa provide a strong partner role model, something that can strongly influence what qualities one pursues in a mate. Add to this the fact that her grandfather's life was cut dramatically short - another loss in a series of losses. We see that she can be more herself with Kazuya, including her abrasive side, but also be vulnerable.

So there are genuine character traits pulling these two closer together.

There's also things pushing them apart.

A certain amount of this derives from Kazuya's personality. He has an inferiority complex, and because he idolizes and idealizes Chizuru, the perfect 10, he cannot see himself with her. So we constantly (and annoyingly) see him agonize about her, about what she might think, etc. This eventually drives him to action, but it also provides a lot of stalling and pulling back at decisive moments. It doesn't help that he has a habit of telling white lies, pretending he's fine, not speaking his mind, and so on. But part of him is simply a Chizuru addict. And a horndog to boot, though he tries his best to suppress it.

I cannot help but think that initially this actually helped his case as he was not pushing for an actual relationship when the feelings were yet to bud, but now it keeps him firmly in the friend zone. His inability to say no to females doesn't help, as he's stuck with Ruka who he doesn't love but he can fool himself into thinking so by a mix of hormones and empathizing with how she must feel. Also he doesn't have the will to drop a clingy girlfriend. He can be a total pushover, and it's apparently this quality that drew Mami to him in the first place. (My guess.)

But what keeps the stew brewing the most is Chizuru's guarded personality, her habitual keeping a distance to everyone and acting out pretenses. Her pushing away people that might draw closer is quite probably motivated by losing so many people that mattered to her suddenly, but at this point she's become a nigh-impregnable fortress. She puts on an act to not expose what she feels, she overplays any weakness, and when she makes a move, it's so ambiguous that you can't tell.

Worst of all, she's much more of a flip-flopper than Kazuya is. She might feel drawn to Kazuya on an evening together in a hotel, but when the opportunity doesn't present itself (because he fell asleep before she can act) she reverts to her snail shell immediately the morning after. If we go to Kazuya's perspective, a lot of the things we get to see happen off-screen for him because she hides her feelings and withdraws at decisive moments.

I get it. This keeps the show running. But frankly by now it's time to go big or go home. And frankly, when looking for hints if there will be another season, the fanbase seem to agree that it's downhill from here - the series reverts to gimmicky misunderstandings to drag the inevitable out. Quite frankly, I was already fatigued in regards to the show's pacing midway through third season, we definitely don't need another twelve episodes at this point. And if the source material gets bad because the cash cow needs more installments, just deviate and resolve it in a movie that ignores that crap.

To what end?

The question is - what relationship would these two actually have?

One way to look at it is the power dynamic. Chizuru is strong-willed and can be outright intimidating to Kazuya. Kazuya is by nature weak-willed, leaving aside his determination when he's committed to something. But it's pretty clear that this relationship would have a boss.

If we leave it to Kazuya, it would in fact revolve around Chizuru. Make her happy, continue putting her on a pedestal he can worship her on, encourage her to an unrealistic degree. How that would work out if she hits a snag in her career or ends up the eternal B actress is anybody's guess. Who wants to be reminded of one's potential in face of life's failures? Granted, Kazuya seems the type who sticks through thick and thin, but you have to take into account how annoying he can be. These are the kind of things that can drive many a good fight and fatigue people from each other.

Once the fortress is breached, I could imagine that Chizuru could actually try to counterbalance this by doing doting things for a boyfriend as her love language. She herself probably doesn't want to be worshipped. Inside she is somewhere between realist and outright cynic, and if he has his head in the air, she has her feet on the ground. Since she can be perfectly blunt and cut through BS quickly, there is some reason to think some aspects of the relationship can work.

The baggage she brings is putting on an act for everyone. It's now deeply ingrained. Her supposed friends don't know what's going on with her. She hasn't told anyone she has feelings for Kazuya except hinting at it with already dead relatives. Even people that know about her double life are kept perfectly in the dark about what goes on inside her.

To make this worse, this act is driven to the extreme. The mask has to stay on even if she's near breakdown. And let's not forget that she earns her living by a careful manipulative act that keeps customers coming back. She compartmentalizes her life, keeping everybody guessing where the rest of her is. Look at it, she keeps up three separate personas - college student, actress and acting student, and finally escort. She leads no double life, she leads a triple life.

Kazuya's need to idolize a woman is a sign of his immaturity. He has his partnership work cut out for him with Chizuhara, an onion of many layers. Sure, if he gets inside her shell, a lot of devotion may develop, but the reason there's a shell is quite serious. Maybe such a personality is needed to shield out the inevitable cruelty of the acting life - bad reviews, fan hate, rumors. The layers can buffer some of it.

But eventually you want to build relationships with other people than your partner, ideally common friends. The separate islands of life in one's twenties can either come together, drift apart, or be entirely replaced. But the ability to trust and form friendships is vital for long term happiness. So even if they can balance out their own dynamic, problems may lurk down the road.

Looking into the present, there's plenty of lying, lying by omission, pretending, misunderstanding, and bad communication. Seriously, find out if you can even have a relationship and wrap it up. What follows after has the potential for some serious drama, anyway.

Bonus item: Ruka

While she's played for laughs as the clingy girl (including her own funny music for outbursts), just imagine actually dating Ruka. Again, ignore her supposed 10 looks and look at the established personality. (And one wishes Kazuya had such clarity, but the guy needs some immediate relief to actually think straight.)

Going with her cute looks, her personality is in many ways child-like. She throws tantrums, she's clingy and jealous, and she can be very manipulative to get what she wants. Ruka also is willing to step over any boundary as long as it keeps her desired person with her.

This may actually seem attractive to a young guy on hormones, but with her one wonders if she's the one most likely to have a mental health problem. I'm not saying Japan's dating customs have merit, but in a sense Ruka is willing to "demean herself" by stepping over boundaries, even just for a chance to "stay in the race" or one-up her rival Chizuru. She's not simply a bit early in making moves, she makes them to reel a guy in that she's kind of aware is at this point not in love with her.

Ruka has more than a few problems with reality, loves to pretend, takes pretense as fact, and has no problem throwing herself at someone. She's the type to check your phone, eternally insecure, and I would bet this wouldn't change much once in a relationship. The kind of person that drives away friends because nobody can be closer to you than her, even remotely.

Run for the hills, Kazuya. Ruka needs a shrink. Or two. In spite of having some charming qualities, her baggage could eventually turn toxic, and she'd need to address that first.

#anime series #romantic anime #rent a girlfriend

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regarding-stories · 7 months

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The Dangers in my Heart

A few months ago I got a manga promotion for "The Dangers in my Heart", the series going on sale in anticipation of the upcoming anime adaptation. I tried a sample and was put off and didn't look any further.

You see, the series starts out with a weird setup. Kyotaro Ichikawa is a middle school kid and loner entertaining delusional revenge fantasies, something very similar to the so-called "8th grade syndrome" where kids of that age indulge in fantasies of being powerful like their anime and manga heroes. Except Ichikawa conjures up images of murdering popular kids and keeps his books in wrappers with titles like "Murder Encyclopedia".

Anticipating that this series would involve more cringe and delve deeper into that mindset than it actually does, I did not dig further.

What really happens is that the rather short Kyotaru actually keeps having run-ins with the popular Anna - who is nothing like what he imagined her to be. Even late in the series he imagines her to be making fun of him, when in reality she is mostly a ditz that obsesses about food and has a kind disposition.

(Anna) Yamada is modeling as a part-time job and is already a head taller than Ichikawa. Her 172 cm height and mature figure certainly make her the focus of attention of most male classmates, and the school's "pickup artist" keeps pressuring her for her LINE contact.

Ichikawa, however, gets to know the real Yamada. A girl who hides in the library to be by herself and snack to her heart's content. Who never had a boyfriend and lets her best friend ward off guys pursuing her. And in spite of Kyotaro's paranoid expectations, she doesn't really judge anyone or behave like a snob, but is kind and also quite naive.

As these shows go, the both of them fall in love, but the setup guarantees some complications. Kyotaro has to gradually realize that he thinks about her so often not out of "taking her down" but that he is actually crushing on her. But even when he does, he completely dismisses any and all of the plentiful hints that she is interested in him. Unsurprisingly he has an inferiority complex.

What makes the series work are the wonderful main characters and how the story unfolds. Kyotaro is actually quite bashful but right from the start tries to channel his feelings into keeping Yamada from being put into a bad spot, playing the white knight while jumping through mental hoops in his own logic. Yamada figures out her interest in Ichikawa quite early and becomes a driving force, and her advances are sweet and ensure that the story goes forward.

What the story does without is people randomly falling on each other or on each other's face. If there are "getting close incidents" they are carefully manufactured out of the characters' actions, and often quite charming - like walking home hand in hand.

Yes, there will be some pubescent boy stuff, but most of the time it's adding realism - a growing up boy's mind is a strange place - instead of trying to do blatant fan service. And our protagonist at least tries to keep his motives pure - which makes him the sole boy doing so appearing on screen.

While sometimes naive, Anna is not an idiot. She knows what she wants and goes for it, the author doesn't resort to creating stand-off conditions that will go on and on. Instead there is a steady and well-executed pacing, and also a lot of humor in the story, and the cringe is kept to a necessary minimum. Love it!

#the dangers in my heart #anime series #romantic anime

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regarding-stories · 7 months

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Reading round-up

Sakurai-san wants to be noticed

This is a manga series about a girl putting herself in front of a boy in the most blatant way until he gets a clue. It spans four volumes and is rather charming and typically very cute.

If I had to name one downside, it's the fan service picture each volume. They're not in tune with the series' feel and that makes them feel crass, somehow.

Do give it a chance, it actually it's a breeze to read through and finished recently.

Bakemonogatari

"Bakemono" - altered thing, "Monogatari" - thing told (story). A boy gets drawn into solving mysteries affecting young girls and classmates involving spirits, gods, and monsters. Almost everybody he meets outwits him, though, leading to lots of mocking dialogue. Maybe almost too much of it.

The resolution of the first story is amazing writing, hands down, masterfully executed. I loved it. It already has me hooked. Each encounter with the unknown and mystical is also a personal emotional riddle to be unraveled.

A really long-running series, and being currently in the fourth story (2nd volume, somehow they collect them in twos), I can already tell why. I mostly started reading this because I could find no one streaming the sprawling anime adaptations, but the writing itself makes it very worthwhile.

No matter what you say, Furi-san is scary!

A short manga series that will conclude with upcoming volume 5.

Furi-san looks like a juvenile delinquent, but beneath the exterior hides a surprisingly wholesome girl that nigh-immediately develops a crush with the boy sitting next to her. He in turn starts out being scared of her. Her inability to express her wholehearted crush is comedic gold in itself.

Can't wait for the finale, really.

Kubo won't let me be invisible

Here's another one with an anime adaptation I didn't get to watch.

The basic setup has me in stitches. The protagonist is a boy whom everybody overlooks. People can't find him in the same classroom, his ability to not be seen (not intentional) borders on magic. Except for Kubo - a girl who set her sights on him.

I find it funny how her whole family can somehow spot him when even his friends have a hard time. Wonderful shenanigans. Also the cute version of the art style is to die for.

There are plenty of volumes in the pipeline for this one, waiting to be translated.

#manga series #kubo won't let me be invisible #no matter what you say furi-san is scary #bakemonogatari #sakurai-san wants to be noticed

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regarding-stories · 7 months

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Teasing Master Takagi-san / Karakai Jouzo no Takagi-san

Wow, finally a Japanese title I can almost read? (Forget about reading names in Japanese, it's utter madness. Separate dictionaries exist only to let you know which sounds go with what kanji when it comes to names.) So the Japanese title basically says "Takagi-san of good at teasing". Try getting a good-sounding title out of that!

This series starts out with a simple premise. Two kids are sitting next to each other in middle school, a boy named Nishikata and a girl named Takagi. Takagi likes to tease Nishikata mercilessly, and Nishikata keeps on embarrassing himself in trying to get back at her.

Frankly, this alone would get stale soon, so even episode 1 teases at the fact that Takagi does all of this because Nishikata is her crush.

Frankly, the initial episodes didn't really get me. It just seems so odd a match. Takagi is orders of magnitude smarter than Nishikata, often plotting a whole series of steps ahead. She's a chess master of teasing, up to an absurd degree. She has such a good read on Nishikata that she can predict what he says next out loud or in his thoughts. And this initially soured me on the series. The pairing didn't make sense.

Well, except if you see it as comedic setup. Takagi possesses perfect delivery, complete poker face if needed, whereas Nishikata is a mix of embarrassed reactions, attempts at grandstanding, followed by his downfall.

And after a few episodes, they have you...

The simple life

It's not immediately apparent, but over time you will notice that this series is set in a rural Japanese setting. Glimpses of the town these two walk through hint at traditional back streets, the sweets store everybody in school visits is a mere shack. Eventually you learn it is set on an island off the coast of one of Japan's major islands, Shikoku.

Separated from a larger world by at least a ferry ride, Teasing Master Takagi-san knows how to charm you. Gradually it introduces the antics of other classmates, growing a small cast of recurring characters. It's a boxed-in place, small but endearing, with a good reason why these two end up walking home together so often. The setting convincingly mirrors the ensemble premise.

This comes to the fore in small ways, like how the local fireworks festival is laid out on a hill below the shrine. How Takagi-san can't return from a visit to the mainland due to a typhoon. A traditional torchlight procession. This show is not set in Tokyo, and it makes the most of it without getting obnoxious. I enjoyed this aspect very much. Some of these scenes are just visually stunning and taking you to a Japan bordering on fantasy.

A rewarding wild goose chase

In order to watch the three seasons and concluding movie, I had to spread my watching over Crunchyroll (season 1), Netflix (season 2), and HiDive (season 3 and movie). I just wanted to know how it ends, it would be a terrible shame to miss the last part! Good thing some streaming services still offer trials... (I think I missed the OVA after season 1, but knowing your typical filler OVA I doubt I missed much...) Netflix has the guts to call it an "original series" for airing only one season of the whole lot...

A lot of the dynamic of the series follows a typical Japanese anime trope. The boy resorts to a "It can't be true" logic after he gets clear hints that Takagi-san is in love with him, whereas Takagi-san gets cold feet and prefers to tease by voicing her true feelings and then leaving it unclear whether it was a tease. The series builds tension quite well here, given these are just middle schoolers. All the blushes and sweet moments...

And thankfully, it being set in middle school, we are spared all the other anime tropes of the rom-com genre. No panty shots, no boob jokes, no people defying gravity by falling onto each other. This is the time when holding hands is a big deal, making this show a rather unadulterated joy (pun intended).

And Nishikata's passion for a silly shoujo rom-com named "100% Unrequited Love" (kyun kyun!!) is the final bonus sealing the deal, both the content of that show-in-show and all of Nishikata's reactions to it. Peering inside his mind is always fun and a bit cringe, anyway.

Do prepare for some tears in the movie, but it's all good.

#karakai jouzu no takagi san #teasing master takagi san #anime series #romantic anime

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regarding-stories · 7 months

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Roundup of the backlog... returns!

As the Bloodhound Gang said... I had a lot of time. So, naturally, I watched anime and read some light novels and manga!

But I didn't end up writing about them. Fail. So let's give some at least a mention.

Hell's Paradise

The protagonist is a shinobi/assassin from a village who trains lots of them, finally up for the chopping block due to a betrayal. His executioner is a female sword master. Because the shogun craves an immortality elixir, both of them end up on a cursed island full of a strange remix of the Daoist, Buddhist, and other afterlives, fighting for their lives and seeking the elixir. As the story unfolds, more than a few things unravel.

Visually stunning, rather gory and violent, interesting concept and execution. Nasty butterflies, though.

Wave, Listen to Me!

Series focused on a woman who doesn't have her life together, ending up getting a radio show for her artful rants. The story is irreverent, doesn't thrive on typical anime tropes, and sometimes the protagonist is just... endless cringe. As such the whole thing is relatable and aimed at adults, for a change.

Intense, too... Give it a try, you might like it.

Listeners

I'm feeling like I'm spoiling something major here, but it gets revealed very early on, so here's the synopsis: Guy finds girl on trash yard and recognizes her as a "Player" because she has... a place to connect an audio cable? He then shows her the "Equipment" he restored which turns out to be a... guitar amplifier. Yes, the thing that takes electric guitar signals and makes them loud and awesome. And when she jacks in... it turns into a giant mecha under her control, in a design resembling the original guitar amp.

Fuck yeah!

So, "Players" battle a thread called "the Earless" with the help of their "Equipment." Expect to see a lot of classic guitar amps, mecha designs lovingly crafted to incorporate what made them stand out, and a deluge of references to all kinds of music, including ... Einstürzende Neubauten?? Yes, this is definitely from Japan.

The Prince/Artist Formerly Known Of... episode kinda sucks, but it's a solid anime with a unique twist in how it tells a story involving giant mecha, and some of its pop culture jokes are priceless.

The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten

Unsurprising plot surprisingly well executed. Girl that's sweet on a boy starts showing up to take care of him. Takes him all season to get a clue (because Japanese rom-com). Wraps up with the season.

Generally sweet and I enjoyed it all the way through.

Hinamatsuri

Girl from the future with telekinetic superpowers shows up on Yakuza middle manager's doorstep. Yes, he kind of becomes her dad.

Everything about this show is weird (and so is the original manga, which you could get for cheap on Humble Bundle). It mostly features girls at high school age suddenly thrust into the world of adults, working jobs, for example, a theater of the absurd.

Blew my mind when it actually gave serious consideration to the life of homeless people in Japan. (In a dignified way, for sure.)

One of the weirder shows out there while still featuring a plot progression and character arcs. Go figure.

Malevolent Spirits: Mononogatari

In this show, objects can take on spirits and this gives those spirits access to the mortal realm. Meet an overzealous guy with tragic backstory who is tasked with policing them. To teach him a softer touch, he's thrust into a household with a young woman (with a tragic backstory) and five such spirit-people who enlisted in helping fight out-of-control spirit-people. Of course he doesn't like them at first, bonds form, lots of dramatic battles and slow personal change.

So, this is basically a slow-boiling romance between two unusual people interwoven with something that resembles a bit a police procedural, definitely a lot of action, and a growing cast of characters. Expect intrigue and some gray areas, too.

It's really hard to summarize this show, it's actually better to watch it!

Masamune-kun's Revenge

Masamune was a fat kid who got his heart broken in the most cruel way (and beaten up), so he got obsessed with working out. When he realizes the girl that did that to him is the man-hater of his new high school, he begins to plot revenge - to make her fall for him and then cruelly dump her.

Many people apparently expected that to go straightforwardly, but the series is actually full of plot twists and a somewhat sweet romance story.

The problem is that it at some point doesn't know how to sustain its own continuation, so instead of winding down, it throws more plot twists at us. Also expect lots of "never communicate" moments.

It has some nice characters going for itself. It also has some of the worst character intros. And whenever it seems to finally go well (in terms of a resolving narrative), it reverts to some unfortunate harem logic - which it didn't set up properly, either, so it doesn't really pay off. This prevents this show from getting truly good - it probably paced itself wrong, and then flails making up for it.

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead

Wow, this show is surely grim in its look on reality. Meet the protagonist, working a dead-end job for a black company. He literally works all the time, his life unravels, sleep-deprived, unable to enjoy any of it. Watch his descent into becoming a mindless capitalist zombie...

And then the actual zombie apocalypse happens. What a relief!

So, Japan is afflicted by a massive outbreak, almost everyone is dead, Tokyo is overrun by zombies that move way too fast, but this guy sets out to do 100 things to enjoy life before he dies. Somehow this struck a nerve, because it already got a live-action adaptation while the anime adaptation is also released.

It has strong art, it's super-gory at times, its humor is extremely dark, but most of the time it's fun to watch. (Just not while eating dinner.)

And all the parts really hard to watch are when we see the psychological abuse heaped on our main character in the workplace. That tells you something... Here the show is absolutely merciless. No kidding.

Am I Actually the Strongest?

Japan's anime industry is a hungry beast, and for plots it mostly surveys its enormous manga (so it also saves on original designs) and light novel markets. And there are only so many original ideas, it seems. So a lot of books with unimaginative titles exist, something on the nose like (I made these up) "Vampire Maid from Another World" or "Strongest Necromancer Now Reincarnated As Manga Store Clerk". And you would be surprised how many of these end up being picked up to be given at least one anime season. (Bottom of the barrel, anyone?)

"Am I Actually the Strongest?" is taking such a "remix premise" but it definitely has good execution. Boy is reborn in another world, and the ditzy goddess in charge of his case actually tries to make him an absolutely overpowered magician, but she fails to give him a magic school because she doesn't understand the magic system. He's born to royalty but since his magic is off the scale, the magic detection ritual actually reads it as almost non-existent, and he's discarded in the woods. Yes, a comedy of errors unfolds.

(Can't find any GIF for this I'm willing to show.)

The show makes fun of some of the Isekai genre's tropes, and follows our protagonist around as he rises in the world while actually trying to return to the lazy shut-in life he enjoyed before. So his character arc is actually involuntary and maybe driven by his care for this growing cast of people around him.

All in all a decent show, but expect some typical anime shenanigans.

The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses

Did I mention on-the-nose titles? Middle schooler has a crush on the girl sitting next to him. Luckily for him, she always forgets her glasses and apparently is almost blind as a bat without them.

Slowly this unfolds into a sweet little love story where he constantly tells himself (to an annoying degree) that she's not into him to keep the tension just a bit longer.

It's one of those guilty little pleasures where you wonder how they twist it in the next story, but we all know the premise is stupid.

Konosuba

Speaking of idiot goddesses. Konosuba is a parody on the Isekai and fantasy genres. Guy dies trying to save someone (but it was actually unneeded), so he gets to reincarnate in a fantasy world, allowed to take "one thing" with him to aid him in his quest against the Demon Lord. Since the ditzy goddess pisses him off, he chooses her, and he ends up in that world without a special skill and with her by his side.

His party soon fills up with two also completely weird characters - a wizard who can cast only one giant explosion per day and then collapses, and a crusader knight who misses every swing but can withstand massive punishment on the front line. The wizard is a "loli" obsessed with only one kind of magic and no other skills, and the knight is a beautiful but completely perverted masochist who says the most outrageous things throughout the series while on the surface pretending to want to remain chaste. The goddess herself is spoiled and wastes money, and spends the majority of her skill points on (surprisingly expensive) party tricks.

This is one show that takes neither itself or its genre serious, sometimes to its detriment. You'd wish at some point that it was more plot-focused or its characters had more sense... yet it relies on this setup for humor. It still grew on me.

It definitely is a show full of boob jokes, though. Excessively so. They aren't very funny, either. A very self-referential anime full of tropes to boot - and that part is funny.

#hell's paradise #wave listen to me #listeners anime #the angel next door spoils me rotten #hinamatsuri #mononogatari #masamune kun no revenge #zom 100: bucket list of the dead #am i actually the strongest?#the girl i like forgot her glasses #konosuba

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regarding-stories · 11 months

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Rejection Carousel: "Sing 'Yesterday' For Me"

I quite enjoy watching this one, but after a while I realized that practically all characters either rejected someone, were rejected by someone, or both. Given that the cast grows over the time of the show, that's quite a rejection pile for one show!

Rikuo is a loser, working as an aimless loafer in part-time jobs after graduating college. There he meets Haru, an eccentric younger girl with a pet crow who keeps showing up at the store. Turns out she's been into him for five years. He rejects her.

Shinako went to college with Rikuo and they were friends, but upon graduation she moved back to Kanazawa where she came from. Suddenly she's back in town after six months, working as a teacher. Rikuo confesses to her. She rejects him. Eventually Riuko leans that Shinako is still grieving her first love Yuu, who died while she was still in high school.

Rou is the brother of Yuu and loves the much older Shinako, but she sees him only as a little brother. She rejects him. Repeatedly. He's learning to draw, the only skill people seemed to value him for while his dying brother got all the attention.

Minato is a former classmate of Haru who ends up working for the same gallery as Riuko. He was in love with Haru since high school. He confesses to her, knowing Haru is in love with Riuko. She rejects him and he gets closure, leaving Japan to see the world as a photographer.

Kyoko is Haru's employer at the "Milk Hall" café. We learn she rejected Izawa, the guy who runs Rou's art cram school.

Chika is Rikuo's ex-girlfriend who's avoiding her strict parents, so when she's out of a job, she crashes at Rikuo's place without asking - knowing he has no girlfriend and wouldn't say no. She didn't really reject Rikuo, in fact, she would have not minded a casual thing, but she dumped him after only four months in high school. She's basically never been in love with anyone and dumped Rikuo because somebody else asked her out, and she "likes being liked." So instead of rejection she dishes out loveless relationships... yay...

So this is Japanese romance, huh?

Basically the whole setup where all characters start from is either unrequited love or at least rejection from someone, starting out from Shinako over Riuko to Haru. (And Haru basically rejecting all her potential suitors - girl could have a harem...) And then, at a leisurely pace, the show tries to get moving.

I have no idea how it will end, actually, and that's two or three episodes from the finish line of a 12 episode (only) season. I think the anime makers had mercy on us, given that the manga was collected in 11 volumes, so it probably plodded even more than this one.

Not that I mind it so much, though. Japanese love stories seem to revolve about people not voicing their feelings for a long time, hurt, fear, rejection, and slowly growing closer. In spite of being a mature, maybe adult or young adult story, the roots of all loves are way in the past - most of them in high school, one in childhood, one in the first year of college. Each character has to wait five or more years for any sense of closure. And still the show never truly feels like a downer. Strange, huh?

Given how things move I might be pissed off at the ending, but it's a beautiful show, set before the internet age when people had to catch each other on their landline phones. If I read it right, this series took from 1997 to 2015 to fully get published, after all. (Anime aired in 2020.)

But if you want a show about lonely people and friendship that still somehow manages to feel good and has a sense of beauty woven into it, maybe you should check this one out.

Bonus

Also, how could somebody reject Manic Pixie Dream Girl Haru? (Well, I guess she's borderline for the trope, but the crow seals the deal...)

She's definitely the show's resident Miss Fanservice, showing off costumes as she plies her job as a ... coffee delivery girl?

What, no GIFs of her riding her delivery scooter!? You fail hard, internet...

PS - It doesn't stick the landing

I think the ending is utterly unconvincing given how Rikuo behaved towards Haru the whole time. Your mileage might differ...

I think Shinako should just see a shrink.

A bit of a shame, really...

#romantic anime #anime series #sing yesterday for me

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regarding-stories · 11 months

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Roundup of the backlog...

I realized I watched more stuff than I even can keep up with writing about. So let's do a speedrun...

given ("Can't Say Goodbye, I'm Still Drifting With Your Echoes")

So, I got into this one because it was about musicians and being in a band. It also seems to be a boy-on-boy love story... as such, I don't mind. The characters are all drawing me into the story. And as a musician I can't resist the loving attention to detail - as an aspiring guitarist you could learn some things from this show. I certainly didn't know more than this as a teenager myself...

I'm just a few episodes in, and I like what I see.

TONIKAWA: Over The Moon For You

An unlikely beginning - a boy promises a girl to marry her. Once he's of age, she shows up on his doorstep, ready to go. From this premise unfolds an incredibly cute story of two people figuring out life and romance together. She's probably a legendary character from a Japanese story, too. These blushing newlyweds are simply adorable.

Don't Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro

A loner artist second year runs into a gaggle of trendy first year girls - and one just won't leave him alone. I gave it a chance because I was curious, and I don't regret it. Frankly, what happens in the first episodes would probably count as bullying, but very soon it becomes clear that there is something between especially these two characters, and Nagatori-san is not nearly as cool or experienced as she wants her Senpai to believe. Over time he also becomes friends with the whole gaggle. The show is changing from funny to cringe to adorably cute constantly. It's certainly entertaining.

My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lv999

Girls gets dumped for another girl, gets drunk, runs into young hot dude (who doesn't say much) and realizes he's the popular streamer her ex adores. Ends up passing out on his bed, too. She joins the MMO where he hangs out with his friends. Initially a very one-sided crush, but as the cast expands it becomes a rather chill and nice story about misunderstandings and friendship, plus a slow-burn romance. Airs on Crunchyroll once a week - and I find I look forward to every episode.

Tomo-chan Is a Girl!

Oh, I'm definitely sold on this one! Tomo is a high school girl that confesses to her childhood friend, except he doesn't seem to understand and only see her as his best friend. Over time both cast and backstory expand so by the end of the series you will understand why things ended up this way. Very satisfying, doesn't overstay its welcome, supposedly better paced than the original web manga. Wraps up in a single season.

First show where I recognized a Japanese voice actress again. The boyish Tomo has the same one as the not-very-girlish Anzu from Romantic Killer. Just listen when she is surprised or weirded out - you can't miss it.

Skip and Loafer

Very nice coming-of-age story, airs weekly. Girl from remote rural community joins Tokyo high school to realize her ambitious plan to become a public servant. Ends up being friends with laid-back guy whom all girls adore. Frankly the first episode is some of the best-paced funny stuff I've ever seen. The show then grows its cast organically and settles into high school life, plus it's a love story, of course, but not in a hurry.

Waiting for the next episode is hard...

To Every You I've Loved Before

Without knowing I watched a sequel! A very satisfying story on its own, this one is about parallel worlds and how we constantly skip between them. A boy is the son of the guy who's researching how choices create parallel worlds, and the first major branch in his life is when his parents divorce. Continuously throughout his life he is confronted with the impact of his choices as his life unfolds together with a girl that he ends up marrying and growing old with.

A story about love, loss, choices, grief, happiness... Very satisfying, told at the right pace, always engaging, and not afraid to go in a new direction even in its last half hour.

As I said - the story of a boy who makes a choice. But guess what? There's another movie, "To me, the one who loved you". Telling the story of the same boy, but making the other choice. I haven't watched it yet. Maybe I have spoilered myself by doing this in the wrong order. But even if only this movie existed, I would have been very happy with it. Fun detail: It may be sixty years into the future with pocket watches that measure parallel universe shifts and holograms everywhere, but apparently people still do the thing where they wear "belly pouches" diagonally over their chest. I guess they didn't make up a "future look" for all the filler pedestrians...

Alya sometimes hides her feelings in Russian

This was a chance buy - it's a light novel series. High schooler sits next to very pretty "solitary princess" - the platinum blonde Alya who's half-Russian. And sometimes she says the most outrageous things to him, thinking he does not understand - yet he does.

First novel was rather good, but then you can tell the author tries to drag it out. Protagonist ends up knowing all the most pretty and popular girls in his elite academy... yawn. Still, the story is at times rather charming and funny. Too bad it tries to keep the cat in the bag - it didn't have enough substance for what we're getting. Stuffed to the hilt with light novel tropes... she's probably secretly his childhood love he got separated from and learned Russian for in the first place, his sister has the hots for him (they grew up separate after some family fallout), student council this and that, let's obsess about girl's exact bust size, hints of harem, the works... and the artwork does not do a good job of keeping some of the girls apart except for the title heroine. Also, outrageously dumb hypnosis scene?

Still, the author can write and largely delivers an entertaining story with that nice little twist. I started disliking the protagonist because of his habit to prank Alya... not charming. Usually he's a very upright and forthright guy, and completely oblivious of his feelings for Alya.

Not exactly recommended, but readable.

#my love story with yamada kun at lv999 #don't toy with me miss nagatoro #tonikawa #given #anime series #anime movie #tomo chan is a girl!#romantic anime #skip and loafer #to every you I've loved before #to me #the one who loved you #Alya sometimes hides her feelings in Russian

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regarding-stories · 11 months

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Didn't expect that: "Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai"

There are shows on Netflix that I notice, then don't watch at first, remain confused by their descriptive text, then watch after all. It kind of was like this with the amazing Romantic Killer, and it was definitely like this with the Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai.

I somehow stumbled about some online comments disliking the series, and let it sit for a while. But somewhere down the line I was casting about for something to watch, and frankly, it completely surprised me.

(I will do some spoilers, but I try to keep it light. Also, looking for an article I wrote about Romantic Killer I found I haven't written one - talk about being backlogged!)

My Little Science Mystery

At its heart, the show looks at consciousness and self partially from a perspective of quantum physics and mathematics, focusing on aspects like attention, observation, strong wishes, parallel selves, and branching timelines. To get such topics into the story it invented "Puberty Syndrome / Adolescence Syndrome," a mysterious condition most people believe to be an internet urban legend. Except that almost everyone that loner and high school 2nd year Sakuta knows or ends up knowing will end up having it - if they're girls, that is. Or himself.

To explain what that is, let's go with the opening scene. Future heroine Mai, an extremely good-looking third-year (and hence Sakuta's senpai in high school), walks around the library in a Playboy bunny costume, unnoticed by most everyone except our protagonist. This seemingly eccentric scene from the trailer has a serious background - an increasing number of people cannot see Mai anymore.

Sakuta teams up with Mai and his hot science geek friend Rio to solve the mystery, digging into the relationship between the observer and the observed from quantum mechanics - or rather the idea from philosophy: If a tree falls in the forest without anybody seeing it, has it indeed happened? (And what sound does it make?) This leads of course to also very practical problems: You need other people to observe you to interact in daily life. And it begs the question - if our reality is a consensus, do we need the acknowledgment of others just to exist...?

The show, behind its science-y techno babble, actually has a lot of heart. The problems all root in emotions, interpersonal problems, and their resolutions are often very dramatic and touching. This is true of Mai's story as of the other ones to follow.

Some things to note

First of all: the series name. Each book in the light novel series has a title starting with "Rascal Does Not Dream Of" - but somehow the anime series got named after the first installment. This is most apparent once the money-making train rolled out of the station - instead of continuing the apparently successful anime series, the very dramatic events of two volumes were packed into two animated movies (mo' money! kaching!) - Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl and Rascal Does Not Dream of a Sister Venturing Out. I had not access to these so I read the books.

The books, in turn, are very readable, and given their content, these two movies are some heavy, dramatic shit, no doubt. The series heavily escalates its dramatic impact towards these two titles. In fact, you could say the books rolled into the anime series are actually a setup of characters and ideas that will culminate in these movies. (Which will also invest you into watching them. Well played, studio, well played indeed.) Sakuta's own Puberty Syndrome, that of his sister Kaede, the mystery stranger Shouko, all of that is set up long before you ever really pick up on it, revealing a series that had a long-term plan.

The books are good reads, solid prose, too. The pacing of these two particular books is kind of dragging, but the author really wanted to transmit the heavy emotions of the protagonist. They certainly had me near my limit! The story of Mai, Sakuta, and his first love Shouko is beautiful, sad, dramatic, and ultimately very, very satisfying - and I don't want to spoil it for you! Just know that if you only watch the anime and I guess the movies, you're probably in for feeling very rewarded and satisfied - after a certain amount of suffering. (Again, couldn't watch the movies, but the book version is already top.)

Having started with the anime, I can only guess that the term "rascal" is what they translated differently when Rio keeps calling him a "pig." Somehow she always insults Sakuta (throughout the anime series), and admittedly Sakuta has a pervy side - but unlike most protagonists he seems to be a bit of a happy masochist when it comes to his love interest.

Anyway, the show and books are well worth it, the cast of characters is built over time and well done, and innocuous background details presented in the start will be the seed of more stories to come. The series is going strong, there are still untranslated light novel volumes, and so I will keep on reading.

#rascal does not dream of bunny girl senpai #anime series #high school anime #romantic anime #rascal does not dream of a dreaming girl #rascal does not dream of a sister venturing out #light novels

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