The main cast of the show – there is no one picture to capture the essence of the show.

Shin Sekai Yori/From The New World is a show from last season. While it was airing some people have suggested I watch it – I looked over the plot synopsis, I looked over the synopsis of the first 6 episodes, and apparently very little happened, so I didn’t watch the show. Then while looking for something to watch, I’ve decided to watch this show. And am I glad that I have.

(I’ll cut to the chase – you should watch this show if you feel like watching a really good show, with a good and thought-provoking story, so long you don’t come just for the action.)

I’m going to try to avoid spoilers in this post, because part of the fun in the show is having things revealed to you/trying to figure them out on your own – but the reason I don’t mind not having spoilers in this post is the same as I don’t think spoilers will ruin this show – there are no real “Getcha!” moments in the show, the strength of the show, of what is discussed is in you thinking about it and hopefully having a nice discussion with others about it. The “reveals” in themselves don’t command power, which makes them worthier, not less – there’s actual content and not just a bright flash meant to dazzle us.

This show is based on a book. Not a light novel, not a manga, an actual book, and you can feel that it takes its time to develop things, that it has a different pacing from many of the other shows released in recent years. As such, it’s less surprising that an actual Science Fiction story, not just Science Fantasy or another fight-show with futuristic trappings is book-based.
It does have a place or two where I felt the pacing was a bit off, such as something taking half an episode or one episode longer than it should have, but in retrospect considering how much it affected the rest of the show it could be warranted, even if the pacing is still awkward (the early rat segment).

The setting feels very rustic, as this is a post post-apocalyptic setting, a thousand years in the future, after psychics have destroyed the modern world by going on a rampage. In the show everyone seems to have psychic powers and is living in an idyllic countryside setting. After the opening segment of mass destruction this is more than a little disorienting.

The show is full of such moments of disorientation, where things feel not just right, where things aren’t as expected, where you go “But this contradicts what I’ve been told earlier…” – this is done on purpose, and is done well – you question why things happen and later in the show, perhaps even much later you’re given an explanation. And if not, feel free to ask around and it’s likely someone will have an answer for you.
For instance, when the characters hit 14 or so, I was a bit critical of the nature of their romantic relationships, because they all were the way they’ve been – it felt forced, it felt fake. And having asked around, someone said that it makes sense for them to be manufactured this way, the relationships, for reasons that you can see in the show’s ending conflict (the reasons the ending-conflict came about were something I realized were the true reason a certain stricture had been set on some characters).

Now, there is one big plot-hole in the show, and there are a couple of “Huh? Why did they do X when they could’ve simply done Y which would’ve been simpler and saved everyone all this mess?” – but these do not affect the questions the show raises, nor the emotional weight that you can find, and have more to do with some plot-structure and the structure of the world.

I definitely sense some “Return to nature” themes in the show, or “Look at how we affect nature and the world,” this is more pronounced since the “False Minoshiro” we meet early on makes the sound of  the tree-spirits from Hayao Miyazaki‘s Princess Mononoke, and the way its body operates is akin to the Night Walker’s from the same movie.
At some point we supposedly are given the theme of the show – the fear of adults of children, something you certainly can feel in some Japanese anime, but I think it’s the reverse – the fear children have of adults, who curtail and control their paths through life, even as they are forced to make the very same decisions later on.

Conclusion:
I will score this show 9.3/10 sci-fi thoughts. This show is a masterpiece, but it is just short of perfect.
While I liked the cast, and the voice actors all do a good work, and you certainly feel like you get to know the characters as they age close to 30 years in the show, I never felt truly wowed or close to them.
While the animation is top-notch, and the music is mostly serviceable and doesn’t get in the way too much – things can’t be faulted, but they don’t bring you above and beyond what you expect them to – they do their work, very well, but that is all they do.
To put it another way, it is one of the best anime I’ve seen, but it’s not one of my favourites, the two are not the same thing.

The show has many themes, and if you ever watch an anime in a “Book Club” form in order to later discuss it with other people, this is probably a good show to do it with.

Let’s begin with new series:

Valvrave the Liberator / Kokumeiki Valvrave – We have a mecha show that really reminds me of Code Geass. Considering how much I love Code Geass, this is a good thing. We have kids running their school/country, we have mecha and inhumanity, we have an oppressive military empire opposed by a jackass capitalist empire… everyone is a jackass in this world, and thus far everyone also has redeemable qualities and isn’t a caricature villain. Good job thus far.
Only complaint is Fukuyama Jun gets a minor adversary role of A-Drei when giving him L-Elf who’s bound to get more time in the show would’ve been perfect.
Watched: 5/12 episodes. Second season already slated for Fall 2013.
Current Grade: A. Worthy of your time, unless you dislike school shows, dark shows, mecha shows, and political shows. In that case, what anime are you watching?

Hataraku Maou-Sama! / The Devil is a Part-Timer – slice of life/comedy show. The plot is very Disgaea-like. The Devil of another world loses in a war after trying to occupy humanity and escapes to our world, where the hero of the other world follows as well. Due to Earth’s lack of magic-power they get stranded in modern-day Japan and have to take up part-time jobs. Hilarity ensues, obviously.
Voice actors seem taken from last season’s OreShura, a comedy. While I think taking Fukuyama Jun to be the Devil and the knight’s voice actress from Maouyu (Miyuki Sawashiro) to voice the hero would’ve given the show a much different feel, it’d have changed the show, so it’s more interesting as something to think of. I still wish the hero wasn’t given such a whiny attitude :-/
Watched: 6/13 episodes.
Current Grade: Between A and A+. Give it a shot.

Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet

Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet / Suisei no Gargantia – What a mouthful of a name in English. A space pilot gets stranded on futuristic waterworld Earth. Knowing nothing but killing aliens he has to cope with a very different lifestyle, and life-speed, on earth. This show does have a question at its core, which is “What is the meaning of human life?” The show reminds me of Eureka-7, but mostly superficially, due to some moods and the art-style, but Eureka-7 due to having over 50 episodes to work with had a lot of different stuff in it, mostly dealing with adulthood – but then again, we’re only just in the beginning.
Watched: 5/12 episodes. Really feels like it should’ve been a 26 episode series.
Current Grade: B, got weaker since episode 2. I’d wait a bit more to see how it is.

Shingeki no Kyojin / Attack on Titan – Humanity had penned themselves in walls, as the world is filled with huge human-shaped giants who eat humans. The original concept immediately made me think of the Earthdawn RPG (originally by FASA), but there aren’t really similarities. This is an anime about fighting back. Very shonen, probably the best/most hyped new show of the season. Still need to see if it’d grow to have anything more than cool art and action, and the most kick-ass OP ever – which is getting variations everywhere, similar to the treatment the 300 trailer received in the past. They’re also changing the “Attack on X” part and showing us monstrous whatever. Quite amusing.
The animation quality is superb.
Watched: 5/25 episodes.
Current Grade: A+. Lots of promise, they just have to fill it with more content to keep us watching. Based on a manga which seems to have some more depth, so we’ll see.

Red Data Girl - A girl who gets possessed by a deity, who can see other deities. Goes to a school where everyone is a psychic, shaman, mountain-monk or whatever. The problem with this show is that it doesn’t know what type of show it wants to be, seems romance is the eventual goal. Every time something begins happening they back off and leave the promise unfulfilled – let the show get somewhere! Reminds me in a sense of my review of Seitokai no Ichizon. Episodes 4+ at least show some more promise.
Watched: 6/12 episodes. They release them ahead of time as web-downloads in low quality, but I’m patient.
Current Grade: C+. Watch if you like meandering shows with serious pacing issues. Hope it’ll get somewhere.

And now for shows returning for additional seasons:

Toaru Kagaku no Railgun S (2nd season) / A Certain Scientific Railgun – The second season. It’s more of the first show – if you liked that, you’ll probably like this. The story is a lot more continuous than Index, just like in the first season. We currently seem to be covering the Sisters arc which appeared in Index S1, since this is not a “Spin-off” that happens after a certain character “leaves” like in American TV shows, but the world from the viewpoint of someone else.
Love the OP, maybe not the music, but the energy, and the animation level and composition are superb.
Watched: 5/25 episodes.
Current Grade: A. Watch if you liked the first season, pass if you didn’t?

OreImo N (Ore no Imōto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai / My Little Sister Can’t be This Cute) (season 2) – When I’ve began watching this season I’ve felt weird, it felt like someone took my friends and replaced them with look-alikes – The voices were slightly worse, the animation slightly weird, the level of sound too muted, weird music in the wrong places… so I’ve went and rewatched Oreimo S1′s Blu-Ray version and I’ve seen this is the way the show had always been! My memory had lied to me.
The production is a bit weird, but the story is still amazing. I love this show. I call it the most “Genshiken-like” show, and Genshiken is coming back next season as well!
Watched: 5/13 episodes.
Current Grade: A+. If you’ve liked the first season, watch it, if you didn’t? Pass. If you hadn’t watched the first season – go and do so now.

So, loyal readers, what shows are you watching, and what’s your take on them?

I’ve watched the Neon Genesis Evangelion series many times, I own it as a set of individual DVDs before they released a smaller box for all of them together. As such, I was very excited with the ending of the 2nd Rebuild of Evangelion movie, it was throwing us both off-course in what was happening, and  when it was happening. I expected we’ll get new content, unlike what we’ve seen in the anime – so after we went through 1.9 movies’ worth of old content we’d finally get new content!

Well, there’s an idiom where I live that says that as big your expectations, the disappointment are just as big, and it couldn’t be more true than what I think of this movie. Again, massive spoilers ahead. This won’t be a review, more my thoughts on the movie and thoughts arising after watching the movie. If you look for an actual review, you should look elsewhere – the goal here is to lead to an interesting conversation.

The movie pick up in space, where Asuka and Mari pick up a container, get attacked by an angel, and get saved by what we discover is within the container – EVA 01. We get back to earth, and we have no idea what is happening. We see Shinji, he’s not treated well, and he can’t understand why, and we can’t either. If there are two things that the movie does well, then one of them is being a study on disorientation - what is happening? Why is it happening? Where are we?
It goes beyond what is going with Shinji and us being put in the same position as him – as people who don’t understand where the world is and how it got there – I feel that this is disorientation aimed at the movie goers. And doubly so for people who’ve watched the original series before. The director drags things as long as possible – no reason to do it to Shinji, but there are reasons to do it to us. We’re left in the dark, then when we finally get told what is happening, it doesn’t come as knowledge shining into the darkness of the unknown, but as a light grenade that blinds us even farther.

What do you mean 14 years has passed? Why do you mean Misato is leading an anti-NERV organization? What the heck is going on here?
The way I often described the original series is that things are normal, then BAM, you get hit on the head with a piece of mystery, then things slow down once more and BAM! again, and the time between the punches thrown at us gets shorter and shorter until we’re assailed by an endless barrage of hard-hitting emotional moments and/or inscrutable mysteries.

But that feeling is only worthy as a supplement to what happens later, as a side-dish for an engaging story. And this is lacking here. I may have been somewhat judgmental, but by the time “Wunder”, the ship leading Wille, Misato’s anti-NERV organization had turned into a giant mecha-albatross-whale that can fly, I was thinking to myself, “Could it be, did Evangelion just literally jump the shark?” and after I’ve finished watching the film with regards to the above about the director’s goal of disorienting the movie-viewers purposefully, I can’t help but think we’re getting trolled, for “artistic” reasons – just like in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya‘s 2nd season the “Endless Eight” happened – the characters were stuck in an 8-week long time-loop, and we as the viewers got 8 episodes covering it, rather than wrap it up in 2-3 episodes. But “artistic” reasons again should serve to highlight what is there, not supplant it.

What Are You Even Doing Here?

14 years had passed, not only nearly all the characters look the same (making the “EVA pilots don’t age” “BAM” not nearly as impressive), but the characters also didn’t change their personalities – Gendo is still Gendo, Rei is obviously a blank slate, Fuyutsuki (which should be ancient right now and isn’t) is still unsure about what the right thing to do is. The only character who really seems to have undergone any changes – and this in a span of 14 years where the world had undergone an apocalypse and everything got turned on its head is Misato – and this with her having about 5 lines in the movie, total. Why did we skip 14 years? Just to disorient the viewer, those 14 years are inconsequential. Only existing as an excuse for Wille to have the time to set up their forces, really.

Mari Illustrious Makinami – Everyone was excited about her originally – a new character injected into the world of Evangelion, which could change the story. Well… thus far she’s done nothing. She has a few lines, she sounds a bit cool in the 2nd film, but overall everything she does fits the role of a forgettable no-name stunt who just stands in, not a named character with so much promotional material.

This was easier to accept in the first two films which had tread material already covered (though then again, wasn’t the whole point to tell the story again, which would permit things to be changed?) – but in this movie there is no excuse. The only reason I can think for this is that true to Evangelion’s series, the movie is somewhat of a deconstruction piece. Mari’s role in the series is to be us – us who thought “Man, if only I were in the show, look what a cool role I’d have.” but no, the role we’d have is that of a bystander, who is ever at the vicinity of the main characters.
And also, Shinji is the one we’re made to sympathize with. Weak, stupid Shinji. Shinji who is a human, just like you and I, who’s thrown into a mess and acts the only way he can, the way we’d expect him to.

Wunder, Jumping the Shark

The movie’s graphics are top-notch, and I’m sure we can find symbolism everywhere – such as Shinji’s room’s floor being unrelieved red, with him stepping over the blood of the world, hiding from it on his bed. The movie’s name is especially apt – Shinji wants to re-do, he wants to undo destroying the world and recreate it. But he cannot, and in his actions, well, he does “redo”, but the exact thing he doesn’t want to – he brings the very same apocalypse the previous movie ended with all over again.

Now, I’ve loved The Matrix Reloaded, unlike many people, there was a lot going on, you could tell there was a lot going behind the scenes, and reading some explanations of the symbolism in the movie had left me amazed. But the movie stood well enough on its own. Here, this movie doesn’t. It may sound from the above as if a lot of stuff happened, but not really. Aside from the “Study in Disorientation” which would indeed take time to affect us (and which I’m not sure is worthy of being there), the whole movie feels as an overblown anime episode. I have a hard time justifying the content in this movie taking much more than 30 minutes. Certainly not an hour and a half.

Conclusion: The movie is pretty. The movie passes well the feeling of disorientation, but that feels more as an attempt to “troll” and play with the movie viewer than something that advances the story. The movie sins by wasting your time as a viewer, by not giving you enough content, by not advancing the character-building, the action, or the story enough in the time it is given.
As hard as it is to say, if this weren’t the third movie out of four, I’d tell you it’s entirely skippable. How I wish they could re-do.
This movie is scored 4.5/10, and certainly does not live up to my expectations – not only is it not a good Evangelion film, I feel it’s not a good film at all. While it may have succeeded at some of the things it tried to accomplish, we can question whether those things were worth accomplishing to begin with.

Related articles

• Rebuild of Evangelion 3.33: You can (not) redo Anime review! (voltrebellion.wordpress.com)
• Evangelion 3.33 (themoviefilmreview.wordpress.com)
• Evangelion and the Power of Fandom (animetantrums.wordpress.com)

The cover of the first volume of Fairy Tail(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Bleach, Naruto, Gintama, One Piece, Fairy Tail – long-running shonen shows that have drawn many thousands of viewers, they are based on long-running manga that is still running, we’re talking over a decade. There’s a lot of money in these shows, and as such they keep them running though often there is no real content to show – so things get paced poorly (see my post on Naruto), and they add a lot of original content that’s usually a lot poorer than the original content (called “Filler”). But it keeps going on, because we enjoy watching those shows.

A month ago I’ve began watching Fairy Tail, and over two and  a half weeks I’ve watched all of it (minus the filler episodes), aside from how silly the first episode was – which actually filled me with concern that I won’t like the show, it was just too silly and random – I’ve really enjoyed this show. I am sure that it might not be the favourite show of anyone, but I still think that out of the shows above, it’s the most well rounded one, and might be the best as well.

(This is a Things I Like post, it’s not a review, but more a discussion of the show and of ideas that have risen in my mind as I’ve watched it. I expect no spoilers in this post.)

Some background – I’ve watched all of Bleach, I’ve watched Naruto up to Naruto Shipuuden episode 87, I’ve watched 12 episodes of Gintama, and I hadn’t watched One Piece (the prospect of beginning to watch a show nearing its 600th episode is worrying :O).
So, each of those shows has a different mixture of things – Naruto has some silliness, combats that drag on endlessly, some slapstick humour and some emotional content. Bleach has angsty teenagers, but it’s mostly about fighting – the feel is darker and more serious than Naruto, at least Naruto’s earlier offerings – the colour palette is also darker to support it. Gintama is very silly – it’s essentially a comedy show with the rest inside.

The focus of each show is different and as such I expect different people will find a different one of the shows to be their favourite, because it gives them a lot of the content/feel that they like, and only a smaller amount of everything else – almost non-existent, in fact.
Fairy Tail is different – it has a lot of emotional content, it has quite a bit of humour – not just splastick, but it goes a few steps forward, and there’re fights, obviously. I think it has its airtime percentages split more equally amongst its constituent components, so the “leading one” has less space, but the show as a whole is much richer. If all you want are comedies, you should look elsewhere, if all you want are emotionally resonant moments, look elsewhere, if all you want are endless determinator battles – look elsewhere. But if you want one meal that’d fulfill all of those different things – watch Fairy Tail.

When I’ve reached episode 175 of Fairy Tail I’ve searched online to see when the next episode is coming out, and I’ve found out the show is going on a break – rather than pad all the episodes as they’ve done in the last season – where the recap of previous episodes grows longer, and you have someone in the beginning of each episode telling you what is going on – which drives people crazy and throws the show’s pacing out of whack – or throw endless filler episodes at us (which also make people drop the show), they’ve decided to let the show take a breather as they wait for more manga material to be released. I appreciate their decision, which is not the one most of those shows make – which is keep airing content at all costs.

Here’s another thing, when Bleach’s anime-run ended and the manga hadn’t, I had no real issue with going to read the manga. When the Sword Art Online show ended, I had no issue going to read the future books (ok, let’s be frank, I couldn’t stop myself from doing so). I can’t imagine doing so with Fairy Tail. The voice acting is really good. The soundtrack is superb, it is very much Irish music fused with punk/rock, with a small dash of choir music thrown in. The music  has a large part in magnifying the emotional gravitas of scenes – whether it’s light or dark, heavy or cheerful, or just to prepare you for seeing a super-magic unleashed – where it feels you with dread as the power is gathered. This is everything a series’ soundtrack could ever hope to be, and reading the manga without the soundtrack would feel like half of the heart is missing, and I’d be amiss to read it like that.

Score: Fairy Tail deserves 8/10 precious moments spent with everyone. I don’t think it’ll be the favourite show of many out of the endlessly running shonen shows, but I think it’s the most well-rounded one, the one with the most content to fit everyone. And while I feel most such shows are aimed at 12-15 year olds, with perhaps a few more years for Bleach’s darkness and Gintama’s humour, Fairy Tail feels the most complete show, also complete emotionally, and as such the most fitting for viewers who are older and look for real emotional content in their shows.
The show does have a bit too much fan-service – as in, at some points you go “Was this shot really necessary?”, but the show is definitely worth your watch, and the soundtracks as well.

P.S. Another thing this show had done for me personally is redeemed Rie Kugimiya. I love her character in many shows, I love many anime she was a main in. But her roles are too samey, and her type-cast was getting very annoying to me. Happy, the flying cat, had been a breath of fresh air and is my currently favourite role by this voice actress.

Seitokai no Ichizon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Student’s Council Discretion, also known as Seitokai no Ichizon, is a harem anime that’s too busy trying to be clever than delivering what it can. It shows us at parts what it can do, but it just feels that between trying too hard and not understanding their strengths, the show is a missed opportunity, and in the end just a mediocre viewing. But there are glimpses of better stuff, which makes it sad.

The premise of the anime is that a high school’s student council is selected by popularity vote for 4 of the members, and the 5th member is the student with the highest grades. The 4 students picked by the popularity vote are 4 females, and the 5th member is Sugisaki Ken, a male student. What follows is unsurprisingly, a harem anime.

(This is a “Things I Like” post, and as such covers more my thoughts, and is less focused as an actual bona fide review. There will be a large amount of spoilers in this post, but I don’t think it’s going to ruin anything, personally.)

As I was watching the two seasons of the anime, I was struck by how badly fleshed out the characters were, the other title I considered for this post was “Characterization doesn’t mean you have a character.” The characters are for the most part 1-dimensional archetypes, common in anime/manga, and the way they give them “depth” is by revealing to us their kind sides. Now, sadly, that is just some more trope characterization – we have the tomboy who punches the boy she likes, but then sometimes has a kind side; the scary upperclassman who scares everyone to do her bidding, but secretly is a nice person; the girl who only plays video games, but secretly cares about others; the childish and attention-demanding loli-character who secretly does care and listen to others and can be mature… secretly mostly means “At times, and when we want to make you care for them.”

Also, this is another thing, character growth means the characters change. If all that happens is that we learn more of the way the characters always are, or of their past trials and hardships, they’re not changing, it’s just that our opinion of them does because we learn how they got to where they are now. This is not character growth, and character growth in this series is seriously lacking.

Another thing that is lacking in this show is that instead of true comedy or being genuinely funny, they rely on inner jokes, just like all comedies, but they just fall flat here, they call upon the conventions, but there’s nothing else to back them up. The 2nd season has a lot of 4th wall breaking, with them talking about getting a 2nd season and all, but it isn’t cute, it just gets in the way of the actual show.
What is nice/weird when it comes to the comedy part is, Ken, the male student, wants to get everyone in his harem, so he is often abused, locked up, and other gag-jokes, but that’s not what I find interesting – being this sort of character, the others often put him in his place – he’s a gag character, but most of the time he’s the “Straight Man”, he’s the one the others’ jokes play off of, and the one who tells them things can’t go the way they want. This does make sense if you see what his personality really is like, and why he wants the harem – which you do as the show goes on.

The 4 heroines whose route we just briefly visit

For the most part, the two episodes that tell the series’ story – that Sugisaki Ken, the male student, double-dated in junior high (his childhood friend and his step-sister), then got ostracized, at High School he was depressed until he met the four girls he is now in the student council with, and as such dedicates himself to making them all happy – thus his desire for a harem, is covered in the last episode of the first season and the first episode of the 2nd. This is the best part of the story, and this is basically all there is to it. It just comes a bit too late, if you ask me.

The best part of the series, aside from those two episodes, is the latter half of the 2nd season, there are numerous parts where I laughed, and kept on laughing. The best characters in the show are the secondary characters you meet, especially Ken’s younger step-sister. But for most people, it’s probably too late, far too late.

You see, the real thing that is stopping the show from going places is that it’s like an aborted Visual Novel. You have an episode for each girl. Sugisaki Ken gets close to them, we see their relationship, they are warm to him – then the next episode it’s all more or less irrelevant and we have the same going on with the next girl. It’s like someone is playing a visual novel, tags a few “flags” for a heroine, saves, then moves to another heroine’s “route”. Without ever going all the way along any girl’s route, there is just no continuance, and we keep treading the same ground for some cheap emotions and characterization, rather than let the relationship and the social situation amongst all five characters develop.

Score: The show gets 5.8 laughs out of 10. The show is just too afraid to go places, takes too long and too rare to show us its heart and humor, and in the end squanders the time you give it. It’s not a waste of time, it can be fun, but you have an endless array of better shows to watch.

Just napping in the sun.

What lead me to want to talk about K-On! is the following comment I’ve left on Yi’s post about the movie (which I still hadn’t watched), and using my post there I’ll jump of to discuss the series at more length:

It really is a show about the every-day comfort, not the everyday with the ups and lows. It’s a very laid-back show, it’s the mental state of napping in the shade on a warm spring day.

Anime have a genre dedicated to this sort of show, which is called “Slice of life”. I think for an episodic show that has no real continuity between the episodes and where you can watch each one completely separate from the others, having no real plot makes sense, and many of the “gaps” also makes sense. K-On! with its two seasons is only half-way an episodic show, however, and halfway a show with some sense of continuity of goals, with references to what had happened before.
Slice of life shows tend to cover a certain “slice”, because you can’t cover everything. But, on different episodes you can cover different slices, and “slice” often isn’t a specific aspect of life as much as it is a “snapshot”, covering a day or two and then moving on. But with K-On! we’ve got three years’ worth of high school time, we have 1.5 full seasons (39 episodes total), so the lack of certain things is really noticeable.

Just having fun

Where are the parents? This is something I’ve noticed lately, that parent figures are almost completely absent in series, and not just shonen shows where it makes sense (see Joseph Campbell), but the parental unit is just not there, and there aren’t even parent figure replacements – the parents are more like siblings to the characters in the shows, and unlike some series, it’s not even explained here.
Likewise, where are the boys? The show covers for the most part 9 girls, over 3 years of their lives during high school. We have the teacher figure’s love-life woes get about 5 minutes of air-time during the whole show, and the other girls spend about 30 seconds discussing boy related issues during the show (Someone receives a letter in their shoe-box and thinks it might be from a boy).

Now, we can certainly have a show without parents or any boys in it, but since it’s not explained at all, I have a somewhat hard time thinking of it as fitting in a “slice of life” show, and on the other hand, it is also extremely fitting – I mean, we get a very limited variety of slices, which is what I’m faulting the show for, but for the specific slice they show us, it is fitting.

But there is another thing that is missing, and this is also the real thing that makes it hard for me to consider this not only a “plot-show”, but “a show with a plot” even. There isn’t really adversity in the show. Adversity doesn’t necessarily mean combat, or even human adversity, it can be time, it can be not having money when you need to buy something – it’s just things not going the way you want them to. K-On! doesn’t even have that – one of the members is rich and mostly any part where they’d need money is solved instantly – even when picking a guitar. There is nothing to really move the story forward, there’s no impetus – and thus, we don’t really move forward, the show is about a certain moment.

We’re here to be with everyone, so let’s just have fun ^_^

Even within the show they talk about it – how while they’re ostensibly a music club, most of what they do is drink tea, eat cakes, do homework and talk to one another. Their table is lit by the afternoon sun. This is the moment the show is about – there is no story that moves forward because this is not what the show is about, the show is about being comfortable with your friends. It’s about spending time smiling in a cozy and safe environment. The show is about this certain moment, frozen in time.

There is only one word I can think of to describe such an atmosphere, which is even more fitting when you think about the lack of any real conflict (things are smoothed over, you gloss over any and all negativity), when you think of it as a “moment frozen in time”, and that word is nostalgia;  This is the essence of the show K-On.

Another break! You know that’s what we’re here for!

Score: This covers two seasons, combined I give them 6.7 smiles in the sun. I’d give the first season more along the lines of 7.2, and the second season 6.2. They just could’ve done more, could’ve done things differently in the second season, but I respect this is not what they were going for.
The animation is crisp, the voice acting works, but from a show that is ostensibly about a music club, I’d expect more songs. This is a good show to watch when you need something warm and comforting, when you need something to pick you up, but to some degree the show is between popcorn and warm chicken soup – warm and tasty, but leaves you wanting something more nourishing.
I’ve watched this show one episode a day, during my lunch break. I think this is the best way to watch this show.

This is footage from the, well, for lack of a better way to put it, one of Israel’s (Jewish majority’s) two secular high holy days, the Holocaust Remembrance day. On 10 AM during the Holocaust Remembrance Day, once at 6 PM the evening of the Soldiers’ and War casaulties’ memorial day, and once at 10 AM the day of. The two occasions are one week apart.

Standing during the siren is voluntary, no one forces you to stand (but you might get evil glares should you not stand in public). Many people stand up even when they are alone in a room with no one to observe them. This is part of the (Jewish) Israeli culture. As I thought of what I wanted to write here I noticed I’ve said much of it in my post about Grave of the Fireflies, which I’ve described as a “Holocaust Movie”. But it still holds.

Last Monday was the Holocaust Memorial Day, and as I stood, I felt a slight choke in the back of my throat, and I thought of the fact I have a really hard time feeling sadness due to real life, and am much more likely to feel it due to narratives in media – and I thought that the Holocaust Day is a day that is all about making the Holocaust into a narrative, of telling us its narrative. Note, I am not using “Narrative” in the derogatory way it is often used in modern deconstructionist works, but at face value – it has a story to tell, it tells by way of a story.

Yearly speeches at school, meeting in homeroom classes and talking about the Holocaust, the radio having nothing but melancholy songs, etc. Think of sequences in anime where someone dies or you say goodbye to someone, and you have dozens or hundreds of people in the street, and the synchronicity of all these participants in and of itself lends gravitas to the scene. This is what you see above in the video, the fact that it’s not staged is impressive – meaning, it leaves an impression on you.
Think Katniss‘ farewell to Rue in The Hunger Games, think saying goodbye to Laxux in Fairy Tail, and a great many other such sequences. Think even how impressive the following is, though it’s staged and has no real world implications:

I’ve read something interesting about the siren, and how everyone stands still – standing still is exactly what memorial days, what remembrance is all about. You take a moment to stop advancing, you stay in the unmoving time, you think back to the past. And then, it passes, and everyone goes back to the moving time, you let go of the past and return your walk into the future.
But every so often you stop, you stand still, the world stands still, and you remember. Remember the narrative that you’ve been told, the narrative that you create and propagate by standing still. You take the past with you.

(Note, this was an unscheduled post, and as such next week will likely have two entries. Also, due to past experiences, I’ll moderate comments on this post.)

Sword Art Online is a series that had occupied an important part of my psyche for a while, and even now I think of it often and fondly. It was the right show at the right time for me, though I suspect any time it’d have come out in the past few years would’ve been the right time. It’s not without its blemishes, but it’s still one of my all-time favourite shows.
It also helped that the concept was something that had immediately drawn me in – “MMO, the players are stuck within, and if they die inside the game they die in reality.” I probably expected it to be a lot more “Lord of the Flies” than Shonen kick-assery, but I liked it, it had a lot of heart moments as well.
EDIT: This is something I meant to write in but forgot – I watch anime in large part in order to feel, this is why I watch anime. As such, the story is often secondary to how much the show makes me care, so long as the story isn’t broken so much I can’t stomach things any longer.

When I’ve began watching the show, it had about 15 episodes out. I’ve watched them, rapt with admiration for the show. And then, about episode 9 I’ve caught myself thinking, “Wait, in a couple of hours I’ll catch up to where the show currently is, and what will I do then? How will I wait one week at a time for an episode?!” and indeed, I’ve been in nearly physical agony at times, thinking of the show, undergoing withdrawal as I was waiting for the next episode to come out.

But, I did not just wait for the next episode to come out, as I will go over in a future article, I’ve rewatched episodes, I’ve rewatched sequences that were fraught with emotional impact in the show, for me, and those scenes did not only keep my attachment for the characters, but it reinforced it, and made me think of the way emotional attachment can form, and how we can grow to like characters more.

(This is a “Things I Like” post, and as such covers more my thoughts, and is less focused as an actual bona fide review. There will be a medium amount of spoilers in this post. I will also talk a bit of things happening in the Light Novels but not yet covered in the anime, but only with regards to pacing and emotional manipulation – not story content.)

Now, there are the obvious sequences to rewatch, where Kirito is all cool – where he unleashes Double Sword for the first time and takes on a boss more or less on his own to save everyone, when he becomes the anti-hero to shoulder the blame for having participated in the Beta and not having shared the information with everyone else, when he adopts the form of the boss he defeated in Aincrad to fight the Salamanders in the second arc of the show… these are all “cool” moments, but they’re not what had me really coming back to the show.

Let us look at a sequence I found especially important, as early as the third episode. Kirito ends up feeling responsible for the deaths of a group of other players. He hears a rumour of an item that can resurrect players who die within the game, and sets out to obtain that item. I am not going to tell you exactly what happens, but it’s sad, it’s heart-wrenching, in fact. Now, the first time I’ve watched it I’ve had the slight pressure in the back of my throat which I often experience while taking in sad moments in media, but as I’ve watched that sequence time and time again (And I’ve probably watched it more than a dozen times), is that I’ve shed tears. The sequence acted in two different ways depending on when I’ve experienced it.

Kirito and Asuna say goodbye, to Aincrad, and to one another.

You see, it’s like infatuation – when you meet someone who looks average, they look average to you (surprise!), but if you keep on meeting them and actually grow to like them, then slowly they might look better to you. Now, if anyone watches the series and accuses the writers of being heavy-handed in how they lay on the emotional manipulation, then they are probably right. This sequence is horribly sad. The goal of this sequence is to make us care for Kirito, and for everyone else who is trapped in this insane death-game. They lay such sequences in every single episode going from episode 1-4, and at episode 7. These episodes truly make us care for Kirito, because how can we not?
(Episodes 5-6 cover a side-story written much later in the Light Novels, so the reason it feels kind of out of place is unsurprising).

But then, when I’ve rewatched the episodes, it was different. Beforehand, the sad sequences were made to make me care for Kirito, but what happens when you read or watch really sad things happening to people (characters) you deeply care about? You are sad. Before, the connection was created, later, the connection was there. By rewatching the show time after time I did not only pass the time until the next episode had been released, but I had deepened my connection to Kirito, Asuna, and the other characters. As I watched the series more to alleviate my need to watch it I only needed to watch it more, in turn.

This is also part of why the second half of the series doesn’t feel as impactful. After we sped the first half of the show growing attached to certain characters, the characters who have the more emotionally heavy and impactful scenes are different characters. We’ve grown attached to not just Kirito, but his relationship with Asuna, which doesn’t really exist until the final two episodes, and even Kirito’s scenes pale compared to Suguha’s, his cousin. But the scenes with Suguha, which are nearly as sad as some of the ones Kirito goes through in the first half of the show don’t impact us nearly as much – they mean a lot to her, but sadly, she doesn’t mean a lot to us, just yet.

Suguha, we don’t care for you just yet.

Not only that, there is a pacing “problem” in the second half of the series. The first half of the series does end on a sort of resolution, but we really didn’t resolve everything, especially not what we really cared for – which wasn’t people being escape the game, but Kirito and Asuna, our friends, outside the game. But after the first half of the show ends explosively, with things happening quickly each episode, we expect the second half of the season, if it’s not to start explosively (after all, we could use a bit of exposition), that it’d at least get back to the action pretty quickly.
This doesn’t happen, and things go on quite slowly for the most part, with not a lot of “Action” action – or say when Kirito saves the Sylph and Cait-Sith meeting in half an episode, you expect them to keep on advancing the plot in the latter half, but they just talk.

In understanding this, it helps knowing how the light novels are constructed – what happens in the second half of the first arc, all the “Action” and Kirito and Asuna’s relationship happens in the first light novel. The moments that make us care about Kirito happen for the most part in the second light novel, which is about side-stories from Aincrad. The second half of the anime series is contained within the 3rd and 4th books. As such, those who’ve been reading the books had been waiting a long time for the story to resume, and in books it is much more natural for there to be a journey and exposition. It’s just that the anime really left us hanging, and then the break in the pacing came as quite of a shock.

But, if you watch the second half of the show patiently, you see a lot of the non-action is the same as the emotionally heavy sequences of the first half, while more care-free, they’re still there to teach about the new world, to get us to care for the characters, and because as far as the books are concerned, this is a new journey. Could it have been done better? Certainly, but it wasn’t bad.

Now, about the future of Sword Art Online. I am sure there’d be more seasons, seeing how immensely popular this show seems to be. And as you can imagine, I couldn’t really say goodbye to Kirito and all the others and had read some of the upcoming light novels. While the next world “Gun Gale Online (GGO)”, will definitely start slow, it’d come off more natural – it’d be a completely new season, and things HAD been answered to a satisfactory level after the first season ended.
I’ve also read Mother Rosario, which is sort of a side-story. The emotional manipulation there is extremely heavy-handed, and there I realized once more that Reki Kawahara, the author of the series, is probably not the best writer there is (part of it could definitely be the fan-translation I was reading), but recognizing that I’m being emotionally manipulated did not make it any less effective, at quite a few sequences, and I still found myself tearing up reading the story or thinking of it.
This is a blog post about the Shigofumi anime, which deals almost entirely with emotional manipulation.

Score: Sword Art Online gets 9.7/10 loving tears from me The art is very well done, the music score works very well to complement the show, and the voice actors have all done an admirable job, for the most part.
The first half is a perfect 10. I suspect that watching this series all at once might have made me feel different about the second arc – it might have made me like it more because I wouldn’t have kept thinking “Man, where is the action, when will we get to Asuna?” which I kept thinking, but maybe without rewatching so many scenes and episodes time and time again I wouldn’t have cared as much for the show to begin with?

Related articles

• Infinity Moment Takes Everything You Know About Sword Art Online, and Turns It on Its Head (kotaku.com)
• Sword Art Online’s Third Story Arc is Excellent (kotaku.com)
• Sword Art Online (safelass.wordpress.com)

But first, Music Monday dictates, so a song:

I think this is a good song to get you pumped up and ready in the mood to keep on striving, it sure does that for me (even if I couldn’t find the version I wanted for you guys). I’ve been a huge fan of Jeff Wayne‘s The War of the Worlds ever since I’ve first heard it, back in the 4th grade. Originally a musical style disc from 1978, which is hard to guess from the sound of the music, based on H.G. Wells‘ novel from 1897.

The most well known piece and the blog-resurrection parts after the jump.

The most well known piece of music from Jeff Wayne’s rendition is the almost instrumental only piece called “Eve of the War”. There are also versions of the tracks you can find on youtube or on a disc format which contain a whole lot of people talking, the telling of the story. I own both the music only and the whole narrative format myself.

The plan for this blog is going to be periodical posts every Friday or Saturday. Periodical I say, but how often? Well, that depends on how many upcoming posts I have ready. You see, I work full time, I study for an M.A. in Philosophy, and I have other things I need and want to do (such as consume media in order to fuel this blog). As such, I’m going to write blog posts as drafts when I have free time.

The schedule for this blog will depend on how many upcoming posts I have, when each month the calculation is made based on how many posts I could release within two months. So if I have 4 posts written already, then there will be one post every two weeks. This is the absolute minimum.
If I have 8 posts written, then there will be a post every week for the month, and should I not manage to write at least 4 more posts during these 4 weeks, then the next month will only have a post every two weeks.

Sounds confusing? Don’t worry, there’ll be at least one post every two weeks, and for the next 4-5 months you could expect one post per week, every Friday/Saturday, at least.

Some of the topics that we have coming up include:
Movies: Django Unchained – Where do emotions come from?; Oz The Great and Powerful – On plastic acting and beauty.
Anime: Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere – Just because you say you are doesn’t make you the protagonist; Maoyu (Maoyū Maō Yūsha) -  Economic anime; Seitokai no Ichizon – Characterization doesn’t mean character. Sword Art Online – Emotions through repeated exposure.
Games: Atelier Totori Plus – How not all grinding is the same.
Editorials: Favourites and “The Best”; My awful experience obtaining my PS Vita, and customer support.

Something for everyone, so I hope you guys will come visit and read the posts. And please, since the blog is just now coming up, I’d be thankful if you could tell your friends I doubt I’d have time to read many other blogs in the near future, but maybe once summer hits. It might take my posts a bit of time to be as fluid as they used to be, but I’ll embark on this journey with you guys.

I’ve recently watched Magical Lyrical Girl Nanoha. Ok, it’s been more than a while, and I’ve then watched A’s, but still have the last three episodes to watch… I’ve been occupied lately, and the show is not entirely engrossing.

The show is somewhat anachronistic; the art style is more reminiscent of early 90s anime. Alternately, it kinda looks like Digimon in a way, it feels like something rushed out to make money, or shoved into its slot to fill it after something else got cancelled. The models, that is, the characters are not very well drawn, but are cute. I nearly had an aneurysm in the beginning when each character has like a mad mad hair at the front, with a bunch sticking out, and it’s “Aligned” to the side, and the moment they shift their head slightly the hair really jumps a bunch to the other side.

The graphics of backgrounds, the city-scape, it’s very blocky, the number of different characters in most scenes is exceedingly small (1-2 in a lot, 4 is like “Whoa!“). The characters are often static and talk to themselves, or we have Nanoha’s waking up sequence, which while cute repeats itself. It really feels like on the production front, this show is exceedingly flat, and didn’t have a lot poured into it.
Not to mention, some of the seiyuu, like Arf‘s seiyuu, Natsuko Kuwatani, just sounds so annoying. “Fate-o Chan!” Blergh.

(This is a “Things I Like” post, and as such covers more my thoughts, and is less focused as an actual bona fide review. There will be a medium amount of spoilers in this post.)

Well, it’d be remiss of me to judge a series only based on its superficial values, but it’s also important to note them, because they affect your overall impression and enjoyment of a series. Moreover, as in this case, it had lead me to believe certain things regarding the amount of effort and time given to this series, which in turn are also reflected in what I will address next, the story.

The characters are not that fleshed out, and as had been pointed out quite hilariously in Ore no Imouto, Nanoha fulfills the saying “Shooting and crying”, all that good jazz of shooting her friends, for their own benefit!
The world feels empty, due to the backgrounds and such; the world does not feel lived in. There are barely any passersby, so most scenes are empty, and the collateral damage  lacks people and thus also a lot of impact; we’ve got big explosions and the only thing we see as a reaction are the sounds of sirens closing in and Nanoha running away…

Of course, remember what I said about number of characters in a scene? There are very few characters, and very few in a scene, much of the characterization of characters is not shown, but told. And a good advice in stories is “Show, don’t tell”. We have characters sitting in a room and talking to themselves, or us hearing their thoughts, so we know they think/feel a certain way due to being told, rather than coming to a conclusion about it on our own, as a result of the characters’ actions.
We also get some note regarding Nanoha’s father, but it doesn’t get more than touched upon.

And of course, the “Big Mama”. Fate’s “mother”. The evil witch. This is handled sort of like a Disney film (BTW, watched Tangled last weekend, and it was good!) . She is crazy, she has motivations which need to get us to sympathize her, but in the end, she’s inhuman and alien to us. Not because we can’t understand her motivations, not because we can’t get the tired trope of “The end justifies all means! All of them!” but because she’s as mad as a hatter, and that she does many things that help her cause not one iota, and only serve to alienate us. And then she dies, like most evil (step-)mothers in Disney movies.
And Fate, fulfilling her trope of obediency and mother-love just becomes as alien as the mother to us, or nearly.

The show has some good moments, the show has some charm. But you mainly keep watching the show because it’s “light”, though the art-direction in the end is not just not very well executed, but “Heavy”, and so are the plot-lines. Somehow, I kept watching it, and I didn’t suffer, but I also didn’t enjoy it that much. The second season was much better.

Score: Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha gets 5.5/10 butchered English phrases. You can watch it, but you probably have better things to do with your time. I’ll try to watch the movie soon and see if it’s better. Also, 5.5 is not an F, it’s “Average”.

(Guy’s Note: Well, Hobby Search not loading its pages in English means the “Figure Friday” of sorts post I was meaning to make will be postponed for sometime during the week (or next Friday).)

For those who don’t know, Domu is an anime written by Katsuhiro Otomo, the creator of Akira, and had been written (and serialized) between 1980 and 1982. I’ve read the graphic novel version translated by Dark Horse, unsurprisingly. The story follows an accursed housing block in Japan. Accursed you ask? There’s an astonishingly high number of deaths and disappearances around the block, and they send detectives to investigate the matter. And things escalate into a psychic duel.
And this covers the general plot of the story, which you could probably find out online with minor poking.
(This is a “Things I Like” post, and as such covers more my thoughts, and is less focused as an actual bona fide review. There will be a LOT of spoilers in this post.)

So, there isn’t actually much story in this manga. It’s kinda like a horror movie in this regard – you have a psychic old man who’s killing people, and it’s unclear from the title of the manga – “Domu: A Child’s Dream” and a small comment by a visiting psychic, whether the old man is trying to fulfill children’s dreams, or he’s killing them because they compete with his dreams? Anyway, he’s killing them in order to get their things which kids want, toys, a shiny hat, etc.
And then you have a small girl with awesome psychic powers whose family moves into the housing block, and then the two resident psychics fight it out, with some detectives coming to try to get to the bottom of all this.

You know how you can distill any story down, but there’d be a lot left outside? Sure, I could tell you of the kid she befriends, the retard who helps the small girl and her friend, her friend’s drunk father who’s controlled by the old man… but it’s all incidental. It’s not “Story”. It’s not what the story is about, it’s not really “plot”, it’s just “stuff that happens”. I adhere to the notion the story is what the story is about, not just “what happens”. So this story, it really could be summed in about two to three sentences.

But this is unsurprising. Horror “stories” are not about what the story is about, it’s not even about what happens. Horror stories revolve around atmosphere. They revolve around 2 minutes of looking at a close-up of a character while nothing happens, and seeing the fear in their eyes; their anger as they are pushed against a wall, and as they fight for their survival. It’s the shock we experience as things go “Bump” in the night (and also “BAMF!” ).

This works very well in movies, where things can be drawn out. This also works well in books, where they take the time to scare us, where we pull page after page and get sucked in, as we can hear the characters’ thoughts, as we can read those descriptive words that add no content but add atmosphere (Hurriedly, desperately, out of breath…), but in a manga, where there’s very little talk or thought bubbles, and almost everything is action? Well, it’s the kind of horror you get from Alien versus Predator when you take the humans out of the equation. It’s an action story, and there’s nothing to reinforce the atmosphere – not enough dark shots, no ominous music.

Domu is a nice manga, with ok drawing, but there’s not enough meat in it, and it’s not scary, or even very emotional in its resolution. It does feel a bit like a real housing block with the gossiping neighbours and the atmosphere of that, of the ordinary suburban life. But it’s not scary, and it’s more like X-Men than Scream.
Horror storytelling had advanced since, and I’m not sure if manga is the best medium for horror.

Domu: A Child’s Dream gets 6/10 screams from me. Well, more like 3.5 as a horror manga, but it’s an ok book.

BTW, do you think manga is suitable for horror, and if so, which good horror manga have you read? I can see suspense in manga, since I’ve read thrillers in manga (Deathnote).

Well, we’re in the middle of the current anime season (Fall 2010?), and I thought rather than wait for all these anime to end, I’d say a couple of words regarding several series I’ve been watching, meaning to watch, etc. There’d obviously be longer posts after these shows end. Or at least the current seasons…

Ore no Imōto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai – for short, Ore no Imoto, or even shorter, Oreimo. In English: My Little Sister Can’t be This Cute.
This show is like Genshiken (blog post) in a way. A show about otaku, exploring them. It is more comical though. Episodes 5-6 were a bit weird, but the show had definitely taken on slightly less hijinks and crazy anime lovers attitude, and a somewhat more “Slice of Life” stance. I have high hopes for it to keep going strong. I love it thus far. Good show, enjoyable cast, cute characters, some good laughs (albeit some weird moments like when Kyosuke fought their father..). But overall? WATCH IT. Right now.

Hyakka Ryoran Samurai Girls – Beautiful Flowers Samurai Girls or some such in English?
This show is beautiful. It often looks like some high quality video game, complete with effects. The drawings’ quality is of the highest caliber. There are effects of ink blots that look nice during battles, but are mostly used to hide the private parts of characters during the show. This happens quite a bit. This is a super soft ecchi show, ala Queen’s Blade. You can already tell those ink blots will be coming off in some future DVD release…
The show is mostly devoid of story, even 7 episodes in, and whatever is there is sparse, and is just an excuse for the pr0n. The voice acting is not that impressive either… so it has Rie Kugimiya, but there’s a limit.
Watch if you want beautiful drawing of beautiful 2D girls. Pass otherwise.

Shinryaku! Ika Musume – Invasion! Squid Girl
I did not watch this show. But, after watching the following video on YouTube, I just know I’ll have to watch it… Do watch the video!

I also need to watch Toaru Majutsu no Index season 2 (A Certain Magical Index, see first season post), but I just hadn’t had the time… been sleeping a lot lately. A lot!

I’ll also get you some preliminary thoughts on Highschool of the Dead, later though.

So, what did you watch? What did you like? What did you hate? Tell me what to watch, and what to avoid!

~jiiiiiiii~

(So I’m joining up to help fill in the blog here on occasion, and this is a cross-post with my own small blog adventure: Wishray Fountain. *shameless plug*)

I’ve been watching this show, Lie to Me*, since it began, and I’ve got to say some things about it. These things are more than just the usual: you should be watching this, it’s good television, and the drama is engaging. Instead I want to talk about magic and chemistry.

By all rights this is a show that should flop. A lot of its scriptwriting is rather humdrum, some of the characters are cardboard cutouts, and it on occasion breaks down into a formulaic pile of dog poo. However, much like House, it goes beyond all that and you just end up liking it in the end.

Now, why is that? It is the magic of the actors doing their job amazingly. Tim Roth has been great in every role I’ve seen him in (a certain crazy monkey comes to mind!). He makes Cal Lightman a very real and quirky + interesting character. You’ve got Kelli Williams who makes Gillian Foster sparkle, and the chemisty between the two on screen is compelling.

Right, and here is where it all falls apart. The rest of the cast seems capable enough, but they just don’t come together in any interesting and engaging way. Every time they are on the screen (with one exception) I’m like, GET OFF THE SCREEN AND GIVE ME MORE OF WHAT WORKS DUMMIES. The exception is Emily Lightman (Hayley McFarland) who exists solely to play off Cal and Gillian anyway, so that works too.

Now I could go step-by-step and explain what works and what doesn’t but I’m not going to spend the time or energy to do so. Instead I’m going to finish by talking about what really matters: the content of the show that drives the drama. The show is a drama, about the character and when it focuses on that its really shines. When it addresses the science of the “microexpression” and lie detection more directly it’s not as good, but it’s thought-provoking and meaty (full of substance – Guy). It’s one of the more mentally engaging shows I’ve seen in recent years. They just have to make the science more subtle, tied closer to the drama, and break it out of the formulaic approach. The show does so all this at times, but never maintains it.

It’s hard to find good sci-fi on TV, and I’d say this qualifies. Now if it could just get a coat of polish to cover the imperfections, we’d have a real winner and possibly a runaway hit. Here is hoping for a tighter, cleaner, more awesome Lie to Me* around the corner – and I’ll keep watching waiting for it.

The sweet sweet fate not blogging "Saves" you from.

I’ve gone in a past post on my figure purchases up until that time (back in September 2009). It came out to $374 back then, and well, it’s gone considerably higher since (especially with the purchase of a limited figure such as Saber Alter Maid version by Alter, reviewed here). Anime also takes time, even if it’s something I find enjoyable. So the blog also costs you time (and this is aside from time spent on it!).

I know some people write blogs and don’t really read others’ blogs, and for the next week or two I’m afraid I’m also going to be a part of this group, at least to a degree. More importantly, there are people who read others’ blogs without writing their own, and what I am talking about? They suffer from it even when they do not blog themselves.
This is so because the real way blogs cost you money is not directly related to the blog and blog-writing itself, but what it entails. Back when I still wrote Figure Friday (I am still trying to see how to get it back to life, it’d probably include resuming Tumblr posts and then collecting those posts every 1-2 weeks), I spent several hours each week looking at all of the new figures released and announced, all the new sales, via HobbyLink Japan, Hobby Search, Neko Magic, Kumo’s blog, and many others.

Now, my cynical personality and attention to details helped me stave off the desire and urge to buy all the neat figures I came across. But the lack of much disposable income had probably played a major part in it. You will see new figure enthusiasts get any figure that is merely “nice” or “neat”, and while there is nothing wrong with doing that there’s a reason they stop after several months: Running out. They run out of space for all those figures, or they run out of money to spend on these figures. And then they only buy the figures that they really want.
Of course, how quickly figures sell out is actually a scheme by the manufacturers to combat this, so you’ll feel you have to get it now or you never will, so you’ll pre-order before you have enough time to think it through.

A wish, by no circumstances to be confused with reality.

When you don’t blog, you don’t see new figures, new books, new video games, new DVDs, whatever. When you don’t blog, you don’t know of what you’re missing (including anime), which maybe sad, but you’re also not getting tempted to buy all those things you don’t really want and are likely to regret or not enjoy as much later. And if you’ve missed any anime while “it was happening!!!” (what’s the big deal about being part of something “While it’s happening”? Good movies/books are nearly timeless), then in a couple of months’ time people could tell you if it truly was worth watching, so you won’t waste your time on things that turn out to be annoying, like Angel Beats! turned out

And now I’m back to blogging, and now I have a new job, and I will need to demonstrate restraint, because “Disposable income” is a lie. There is always something else you can do with the money should you save it now. Such as save up to move out, or buy a car, or purchase an ace computer, or a new desk, etc. No income is truly disposable. Respect the money you earn…

…which is so very hard with sales such as this one…

Zombie Jesus lives too! Well... sort of?

Grrrrr. WordPress just ate a couple of paragraphs I wrote…
Anyway, there are two ways to get back to posting: Go with “I’ll post whenever I feel like it”, so you’d make a post without feeling an obligation to keep on posting, which I dislike (and also, once I resume posting, it’s not an obligation as much as a snowball; can’t stop!). The other method is to bite the bullet. Stop procrastinating, and just resume blogging. Delve head-first.

There’ll be a blog post coming once a week, gauranteed. Even if the skies fall or Cthulhu and the lost city of R’lyeh resurface. I will try, and I think in most weeks will succeed, to get two posts up. I’ll be aiming for Sunday-Tuesday for one and Thursday-Saturday for the other. Some weeks may have three posts, but I’m not promising. I’m too wise for that.

Expect a figure review or two, some editorials on geekdom in Israel and how I became a geek, some anime reviews and even some first impressions. My opinions on movies, series, manga, games, etc. And also Ewen’s Corner’s return and another guest blogger.

This blog will resume its life, and hopefully, you the readers, the old ones, and any new ones who come along, will find it worthy to read the new entries, and perhaps also the old ones.
I will try to hunt down and update my blog-roll over the next week and a half, and will reply to all unanswered comments in the next two days.

Today, well, it is today by now, will be the first day of my new job. I have one course left in order to graduate with my B.A., and I’ve spent a lot of time in recent months with miniatures, which I’ll also tell you guys about.

So, how’ve you all been?

The hype and excitement over Starcraft 2 is quite crazy, and it’s not like Blizzard even had to do a lot to fan it. Well, that’s not entirely true, they fanned it by not speaking too much about it, and letting gamers who were honestly excited do all the promotion on their own. This is a winning technique, when you already have people going crazy for your next release, no matter what you say or do.

Raynor. Jim Raynor. Human badass.

I really started playing serious video games in my own home when I was in fourth grade. One of the first few games I’ve received was Warcraft 2, and then its expansion (which I didn’t enjoy much with the crazy magic difficulty). I still remember after my father installed it he tried to play and couldn’t get things done, and I got things working from the first few minutes of playing the campaign – I found it intuitive; same as some years later my cousin had Age of Empires and didn’t know how to get things done, and I sat down and within a couple of minutes got the hang of the game.

Starcraft, the first game? I only got to play it at a summer camp sort of thing I went to, with a focus on war-gaming, geeky fantasy movies, etc. I was the only kid there who had not played the game before, yet when all the others got teamed up, the computer I was on was the one which had me controlling both armies of my “team” on my own. Oy. I only picked the game up a couple of years ago, nearly a decade after the original was released, and had fun with its campaign. It was neat.

Warcraft 2's cover art. Sure brings back memories.

Warcraft 3 suffered from a big issue many video games suffer from: The campaign does not train you to play against other people. Take first person shooters, playing the campaign never trains you to play against other people, it teaches skills like caution and conserving ammo… or in WC3: Slow advance, whereas even the basic computer AI will rush and smack you if you try this approach. I know rushing and hotkeys are a big part of SC and WC3, but to a degree, it almost feels like those with better hotkey command don’t need to be masters of tactics, and tactics only really hit in when both players are of equal hotkey skill.

So, I much prefer turn-based strategy games, on the whole, mulling over my options, making decisions, without losing things in the heat of combat. Which I might be more ok with if there was less hotkey action going on. Furthermore, while older strategy games were intuitive, the tech tree of SC1, or even WC2, once you are plunged into a free-for-all game on the internet (and thus have all the options available to you) is overwhelming. The addition of a screen which shows what’s going on is going to be very helpful.

So now I am going to go and pick up a copy of Starcraft 2, and I hope I won’t lose too badly online (though I usually do ), and am eagerly awaiting Diablo 3

In the year 1999, a movie is released; it’s called, “The Matrix“. In this film viewers are introduced to a technique called “Bullet-time“. A year or two later, and dozens of movies which do not benefit or have a plausible explanation for the usage of bullet-time are produced. Most of us grow weary, as bullet-time no longer elicits amazement, but is delegated to being a gimmick.

It is now the year 2010, and in 2009 a movie called “Avatar“, directed by James Cameron, is released. This movie comes out in 3D, and although it’s not the first movie to come out this way, it is buoyed by waves of PR and marketing and mass hysteria. This signals the beginning of the high-budget 3D movies’ assault, which had been planned in advance; which is evident in how many of the 3D movies coming out this year had already been in production when Avatar hit the silver screens world-wide.

The 3D is neat, it’s pretty convincing, and in one scene I moved my hand forward to move aside some banners which were hiding Woody. But to be honest, our mind is a great computer, and one that always falls for optical illusions. We’ve been capable of tricking it into seeing 3D for quite some time. Heck, taking the special glasses off I didn’t see non-3D, just a bit blurry as there were double-edges going on.

Last, and most important in regards to the 3D experience? The glasses. I already wear glasses to correct my vision. The 3D glasses are heavy, and my nose actually hurt by the time the movie ended from the weight inflicted upon it. It was also quite amusing to see how fearful and strict the orderlies were, for fear we’d steal them.

Toy Story 3? The movie in the beginning was quite charming, which is what I expect from Pixar shorts. The main event was quite touching in bits, but suffered from the Disney Ending (evil character is evil and vanquished, the minions are just misguided, and later we all forget what they’ve done before – no harm, no foul). The cast was shrunk to the main characters, same as per the second movie, which allowed for more air-time for the characters that mattered, and zero time to all those who had been axed.

I shed a couple of tears. It was touching.

Score: Toy Story 3D: 7.8/10 growing-up moments. The 3D? Still on the fence about it.

Is not what? When a mystery show is not a mystery show.

I love House M.D. I’ve been watching it every week on the cables for several years now, and have just watched the last episode of season 5 (brilliant!) and the first half of season 6. Now, House M.D. is billed as a “Medical Mystery Show”, but it’s not. After season 3, it seems the writers had figured out for themselves how much it’s not either. I’ve said it before, but it’s still true: All stories are human stories. The mystery is almost incidental.

 When we re-watched season 1 (re-runs in preparation for season 4), my mother remembered the “solution” to each of the cases. I usually didn’t. But that’s because in my mother’s mind, the important thing, and thus the core that she remembered was what the mystery, and its solution, were.

I didn’t remember the mysteries, because they were only catalysts for the important thing. The interaction between the cast of characters, and House’s personality. Seeing the ridiculous, often funny, often amusing, sometimes deep, that he’d throw at us, and at his “friends”.

In season 4 or 5, first Wilson and then Cuddy comment on the manner in which House works, how from a seemingly random thing that occurs he makes the connection. A deus ex machina of sorts. If this were truly a mystery show, then this would be horrible, as the solutions are such that are not only very remote and unlikely, but the kind that you as the (non-doctor, or even doctor) watcher could never figure out on yourself – which is the opposite of what mystery/suspense shows want – they always want to make you feel as if you’ve got a chance.

But this is all ok, because you don’t watch the show for the preposterous medical anomalies. You watch it for the people. It’s almost like Gilmore Girls in that sense!

So, do you watch House M.D.? What do you think of it?

Summer is the season where traditionally students are let off from their chains at school, to go home for two months and go to sleep somewhere between 4 and 5 AM, and wake up around the time they’d usually return from school. Well, it’s been 2003 the last time I had a proper summer vacation, aside from the time I had after finishing my time as a medic and beginning university back in 2007. Yeah, that’s a time where I had time off…

Mindless Anime Characters Celebrating their Youths! Thanks to Yi for the picture.

Well, summer’s here, and as you can imagine, and perhaps see from the slower pace of posts, I don’t really have time off, again. I am currently finishing my last major tests’ period for my B.A. which involves tests, home assignments, and papers slightly longer than 20 pages. I mean, the sweat I get is mostly stress-sweat, and not anything as exciting as the sweat as I flaunt my youthfulness energy around! Besides, who speaks that way aside from people who had underwent lobotomies and characters in anime who celebrate and must commemorate their youth! Then again, is there a difference between the two groups? That is, lobotomized people and stupid anime teens?

Now, I’ve already went to the sea once this season. And I am planning to go back to playing tennis on a regular basis, and Israel is hot and either dry and very sand-stormy, or extremely humid, so I’ll probably be sweating enough. Don’t you worry about me Well… there’s a good reason houses without air-conditioning are so rare in Israel, and then they have a lot of fans.

Anyway, this is a season that will mark a change in my life. I am one course away from finishing my degree, so I will begin looking for some sort of job (probably something computer/tech-related..) this summer, in order to begin earning money.

Normal blogging schedule should resume by this weekend. And you should really read the previous post about the question at the heart of every story. I think it’s a really good one

Understanding this question can often shape the way you look at a story. Things that you did not understand their “Why?”, the reason they occured, and that had seemed meaningless, are suddenly seen in a new light. You construct the story and give it a theme, of answering the question, of resisting the question, and so on.

Most interesting is the analogy of coloured glasses, or a point of view. Many people see a different story being told, a different theme. And in many cases, there are many “legitimate” answers, and switching from one question to another can help you consider the story from different directions.

An anime I absolutely love is Code Geass. Many people have found Code Geass, and especially its second season to be lacking, in some way. I try to get them to look at this “question” that the series poses as its theme in order to help them see the series as I see it, and hopefully appreciate it as I do. The question Code Geass poses is this, “At what cost victory?”

The first season is quite light-hearted, in a way. We see what Lelouch is willing to do, who he is willing to quash, what he will do in order to secure victory, and the world he is looking to establish. The second series is where the question which the protagonist thought he answered decisively in the first season returns, and the protagonist is told that his answer is unsatisfactory, his resolve untested, and that he must demonstrate further conviction.

And so, the second season has Lelouch meet with hardships at every turn, and Lelouch suffers losses. The second season asks the same question, and shows us what Lelouch is not only willing to inflict upon others, but what he is willing to give up in order to win. The second season is all about “At what personal cost victory?” and Lelouch finally answers decisively, in a way that cannot be ignored.

Likewise, Mai-HiME, an anime that I love, has a relatively unsatisfactory ending, I agree. It might also feel like the first half of the series and the second are not in accord, but I disagree. The question this series poses is “What will I do for the sake of Love?” You can also pose it as “Which love is stronger, for my friends-comrades, or for my “Dear Ones”?”
Once you look at it like this, it’s pretty clear that the first half of the series is there for a very real purpose – not “just” so we’ll care for the characters, but so the conflict the question generates will be meaningful – if the choice is obvious, then the story falls flat.

In this case, the first half of the story serves as build-up for the characters to care for one another, and for us to care if they will sacrifice their relationships with one another. Thus, the ending, with Mai fighting her close friend, is part of the answer to this question. That they all end well, and previous “costs” are wiped away cheapens it, but the nearly-ending does fit with the story until that point, according to this question.

Yes, that’s another word for “Question” in this sense, “Conflict”. The question both drives the conflicts in the story, causes the main characters to clash with themselves, with their friends, and with the society that surrounds them, and is the engine that drives the story forth. If there is only one answer, it may be futile to resist, and the story can be about resisting the inevitable. If there is only one answer, and choosing it costs the character nothing, then there is little interest in the story.

Shigofumi, and “Science Fiction”, could be seen as having a big question, “When people die, and they get to send one letter from beyond death, what will its effects be?” Now, this is a situation. In the case of Shigofumi, it’s the premise of the story, but not the question the story answers. Being more of an episodic series, the series poses different questions every arc: “You’ve found out you have cancer,” or “You are bullied.” The original situation is the background of the series, and we see the issue explored, but it’s not the story’s question. Well, according to me.

Finally, if the paragraph above seems weird to you, as the “Questions” posed within Shigofumi are not questions, that’s because you can simply append “What do you do?” to them. A question need not be something we ask, but a situation that is present, demands action, and cannot be ignored.
Slice of life or SitComs also have such questions. We face questions all the time. What is “SitCom” if not a series where we have a “Situation” or “Question” (often two) in each episode to generate interest and friction?

In the end, stories are (almost) always about people.

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