#i kinda like her design now! it is miku but her own twist and shes a queen for that

[ladyloveandjustice]

Summer 2017 Anime Overview: Re: Creators

Okay, time to review our next batch of Summer 2017 anime. I watched 7 anime this season. I’ve been ranking them from worst to best. Previously, I reviewed what I considered to be the weakest anime I watched this season. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, we’re getting to anime that...well, kinda sits squarely in the middle of this season’s batch as far as “good”and “bad” go. I have a lot of mixed feelings and a lot of things to talk about. So let’s get down to it! This is a review, so it’s gonna spoil a bunch of things.

Re: Creators

Oh, Re: Creators. What am I going to do with you. You had such good ideas. You could have been so much better than you were.

Which isn’t to say Re: Creators is a bad anime. It isn’t. But it’s kind of in the area of “fine” rather than anything great, mostly because it couldn’t figure out how the execute the very interesting concepts it had going effectively. 

Re: Creators was a story about writing itself. Basically, a bunch of animanga, light novel and video game characters were transported to the “real” world by a mysterious woman in a military uniform, who encourages them to take vengeance on their creators who made their lives hell.

Like I said, that a hell of a great concept, and Re: Creators does do some interesting things with it. The show is at its strongest when it’s discussing the struggles of writing and the power of stories. It also does really interesting things with how writing functions in the internet age. 

For instance, the mysterious military woman character ends up being a very popular fan creation named Altair. A teenage girl named Setsuna created Altair as an alternate version of a character from a story she liked- essentially she was a fanfic. But then her design went viral and she morphed into a character all her own through the internet. 

Since Altair is a collective creation of the internet, basically everything the fans on the internet do with her- all the scenarios, all the music videos, all the fanfic and fanart- is accepted into her “canon” which means she’s infinitely powerful and versatile compared to the other characters because she’s not bound to one author or continuity and is constantly being updated. Basically, she’s Hatsune Miku. 

And that’s really cool, and shows a real understanding of how storytelling has morphed thanks to the instant and collective communication the internet has.  It also shows the negative side effects has- the reason Altair wants to destroy the world is because Setsuna- the one who had the idea for her first place-was driven to suicide by the cyber-bullying and harassment she got as a writer and artist. So Altair’s here to take revenge for her author.

Again, REALLY cool and impactful concept for a story, something that really cuts to the heart of issues creators face in the internet age. And when it comes down to it I think the main issue of the anime is how it fumbled in telling that story. Basically, they felt the need to filter Altair and Setsuna’s story through the lens of a Bland Male Protagonist and that ruined everything. Setsuna’s story was told the point of view of her male friend who felt all guilty because he got jellus of Setsuna for being a more successful creator than him and stop talking to her and he feels that contributed to her suicide and YAWN I really don’t care about his manpain.

Basically, because of this filter, we don’t learn that much about Setsuna as a person, or Altair’s inner struggle,  or the relationship between Altair and Setsuna. This makes the actually-really-cool-high-concept ending to their story have a lot less emotional impact than it should. 

Seriously, this show well done and interesting resolution to its central conflict(so cool I screencapped it for imgur to show my gf. You can see it here.) It just...wasn’t built up to properly at all. It’s an ending that depends of Altair and Setsuna, but they were barely characterized throughout the show, so it falls flat- and that’s such a shame, because it is the kind of ending that DESERVES strong characters behind it. 

I know it’s very easy to say this is “how I would have written” a story after the fact, hindsight being 20/20 and all, but if I’m going to tell you anyway. I would have written this story from Altair’s point of view. I’d have shown Setsuna’s struggle and her suicide from the point of view of the character she created. I’d have Altair enact her plan to destroy the world on her authors behalf, but at the same time she’d be using it as an opportunity to find out more about her author’s life. 

She’d spefically attack Setsuna’s friends and loved ones who abandoned her and demand to know why they did what they did to her creator. Rather than it just be one boy manpaining over everything, I’d make it so Setsuna had a couple different writer friends and family members who treated her badly due to jealousy or insecurity over her success, and Altair’s encounters with them, where she used their favorite characters to bring them down, would have been central to the anime. 

The story would have been so much more effective if it had actually focused on the characters who were at the center of everything. Instead it just ended up being a show with really good concepts and cool meta shit, but one that didn’t use it’s full potential in executing those concepts, and kind of threw the concept of “characterization” in the trash.

The show has a lot of meditative thought on writing, from the dark side of it- the struggle, the tears, the weird relationships creators have with fans- to the positive impact and powers of stories. “A story has the power to save someone” was a line in the show. As a writer I found it all very moving.

Unfortunately, though, as good as Re: Creators is with concepts- as good as it is when it comes to how it TALKS about characterization and writing and all that, the writing and characters on the show are actually pretty weak. It’s kind of hilarious that a story about the power of writing, a story that does this whole spiel about how the audience needs to be invested in a story for it work....also forgets basic things like “show, don’t tell” and “don’t include more characters than your story can handle” and “carefully build up your character arcs”.  

This is an anime that would have benefited GREATLY from having less characters. We’ve got a huge sprawling cast and none of them are developed properly. Altair should have been a great character, but up until the very last episode she was basically a very 2D villain, alternately stoic or cackling, only to suddenly have this emotionally moving finale which would have been way more effective if the show had built up to it properly and explored her point of view more. 

The show tended to communicate the character motives, backstories, feelings etc through boring exposition rather than showing them. A good demonstration of this is when one of the characters is making this heartfelt appeal and her writer says knowingly “she’s talking about her dead childhood friend”. OKAY THANKS. WHY SHOULD WE CARE. We don’t know this childhood friend, we don’t know anything about her story. Having a character randomly say “this is Significant” doesn’t make it actually significant.

Honestly it seems such a waste to have characters coming from all different kinds of stories and never showing what their stories they came from are LIKE, aside from a few extremely brief flashes. Ideally, this show would have cut to scenes from their stories, each in a unique art style, and got us involved in where these characters were coming from.

They have characters who TALK about having relationships and feeling all these emotions with these various other characters, but we never see them. One character came from a brutal dark fantasy and is all mad because of that, but the show never shows us a full scene of the story she came from. Who did she lose? What horrible things happened to her? 

This really ended up badly hurting the show at a key points- and example is when the main female action hero’s mentor shows up to fite her, it’s supposed to be this big dramatic twist but it makes zero impact because we know nothing about this dude other than she’s mentioned liking him a couple times. The show quickly tells us he feels world weary or whatever and that’s why he’s opposing her and then they have a big fight. But the fight is not going to have any emotional punch if the very REASON for it is just stated hurriedly and randomly at the last second, if this relationship and character have basically no foundation. The anime needs to show the audience actual scenes that demonstrate and build these characters’ relationship, show this mentor character worn getting down by life, at least give us SOMETHING. 

If the cast had been cut in half and if they’d given each character the time and care they deserved, this show could have been something really great. But it ended up focusing more on boring government meetings and dull explanations of the battle mechanics.

For a show that focused on writers interacting with the characters they’d written, it didn’t seem to care about its characters all that much when it came down to it. This stung especially because a few of them had some really good potential that was promptly wasted in a needlessly cruel way.

 An example of this was the bond between this dark fantasy knight lady (Alicetaria) and a Precure-style magical girl (Mamika). It was one of the highlights of the show for a while and I was pleasantly surprised a show like this was paying so much attention to the friendship between two female characters- then I realized that, the way this show was going, the fact these two characters were getting any attention at all had to be because one of them was going to get killed off so the other character could swear vengeance and yada yada cheap drama. 

GUESS WHAT, I WAS RIGHT. And it was even stupider and more manufactured than I expected- Mamika got killed in a totally idiotic way that was the show basically saying “LOOK her magical girl ideals are SO NAIVE she believed she could solve things with friendship and kindness but it just got her BRUTALLY MURDERED” (wow so edgy this has never been done before OH WAIT IT’S BEEN DONE TEN BILLION TIMES will these grown-ass men ever get tired of shitting on shows for little girls for daring to be optimistic and hopeful?)

 And the most untrustworthy character on the show just HAPPENED to witness Mamika’s death and then for some reason Alicetaria believed this VERY OBVIOUSLY untrustworthy source when she said it was one of the good guys had killed Mamika and attacked the good guys. It was all so goddamn manufactured and pointless and accomplished nothing. 

It led to some storyline where Alicetaria became a double agent and tried to bring down the bad guys from within that ALSO went absolutely nowhere- she didn’t like, weaken their team or get valuable intel or anything, she had no apparent strategy, and the villain knew about her plan the entire time. So she just ended up being killed off like a chump. So, this story about respecting the characters you create...had its character be unbelievably stupid for cheap drama and gave them utterly meaningless deaths. Nice. 

 Mamika in general deserved a lot better. The idea of a kids show character entering the real world and experiencing shock that things work differently is a cool concept. I liked the scene where Mamika was horrified her attacks made someone bleed because there’s no blood on her show. But I think that sort of story can be told without shitting all over the idealism of kid’s shows. It would have been a much more interesting story if Mamika survived and struggled to maintain her idealism in this harsh world. If it was tested time and time again and she lost hope and broke down and got angry, but in the end realized the world of kindness she wants is still worth fighting for. Killing her off is the absolute laziest way to go about it.

(Also the fact Mamika violently attacked a character who disagreed with her for no apparent reason and this was condemned as if it was something endemic to the magical girl genre made me think whoever wrote that ep had never seen Precure, even though that’s what she clearly based on. Magical girls, especially Precure style ones, don’t attack first and ask questions later. They try to reason with their opponents and don’t fight unless they are attacked or others are attacked. A Shonen hero might respond violently to someone arguing with them/ consider physical fighting the best way to solve a problem, but a magical girl never would. Sorry just a PET PEEVE I had as magical girl fan).

Sigh. I’m glad I watched Re: Creators. It was really moving in how it discussed writing. The ending was very good, even through it wasn’t built up to properly. How it wasted so much of its characters and ideas makes me really sad, but it also inspires me. I want to think of something like these concepts and execute it in a way that satisfies me. And that’s really what Re: Creators was all about- the power stories have to inspire.So while it was a very flawed show I have incredibly mixed feelings about, in a way, it did its job, and I commend it for that. 

#re: creators #re creators #summer 2017 anime #anime overview #altair #alicetaria february #magical slayer mamika #setsuna shimazaki #shimazaki setsuna #gifs #this is a LONG post #suicide cw