Fate/stay night - 01-04

I have this feeling that, if I was looking for something else to obsessively learn every detail of, Fate/stay night would do the job pretty well.

At least, that's the impression I get from the preponderance of helpful little notes from fansubbers in the first episode. (Note to said fansubbers: The point of filling the early episodes with random unglossed references is usually tantalizing us with what we don't know. Snotty little explanations that flash by too fast to read are rarely useful.) There's a terrific amount of background trivia there, it looks to be reasonably consistent internally, and unlike, say, British naval history or the minutiae of C++, there are cute girls. Seems win-win to me.

I have a point here, and I'll get to it eventually, but first I'm going to talk about Dragon Quest VIII for a while.

Dragon Quest VIII was not the first game I've played that was entirely about exploration, but it was the first game in a very long time that actually felt like it. I haven't come close to finishing it; I play a little bit of it every so often, whenever I feel like wandering aimlessly.

I said it wasn't the first game I'd played that was mainly about exploration.

This was the first game I played that was mainly about exploration. But its ancestors - which I didn't play until much later - are just as obvious about it.

I only really made the connection to modern games, though, when I was playing Dragon Quest VIII. When you don't have a fully interactive story (and no games have fully interactive stories; at best, they have branching trees) the mechanic isn't storytelling - it's exploration. You can go up, or left, or forward. You can go in the east-direction if you like, or in the more-story-direction if you like. If you are so inclined, you can explore the story of Fate/stay night, or any other visual novel, in its entirety - and you can map it out, if you like.

So, here's a game mechanic: There is a terrific amount of information around. You absorb some of it. Then, you click on a choice, deciding where you want to go next (or what you want to find out about next.)

Ever surfed Wikipedia? Isn't it oddly compelling? It's essentially the same mechanic - only less structured. Nobody's thought carefully about the particular experience they want you to have, but there's not that much difference in the style of "play," or the way you'd go about trying to map it out.

Oh, and Wikipedia doesn't try to tell a story. But this wiki does.

Here's what I'm getting at. At first glance, it seems that "story-driven" games would be great candidates for adaptation into anime - or at least as good as novels, which have worked very well historically. Heck, some of them might, I don't know. My Japanese is pretty good, but it's not as good as it'd have to be for me to have a good understanding of these games.

But you could, at least in theory, make a game that worked incredibly well, and was a great deal of fun to play, that was only "story-driven" in the sense that there was a story, and most of the game consisted of elaboration of the story. "Information-driven," perhaps?

An information-driven game, adapted to the screen, would lose its most important asset - the ability of a viewer to absorb the information the way he chose, at his own pace.

This is all just a hypothesis, though. I haven't played any TYPE-MOON games, and I'm kind of enjoying the Fate/stay night anime.

Kasimasi ~Girl Meets Girl~ - 02

It should be obvious that popular media tends to exalt the dominant social group. Consider, for example, how much of, say Hollywood filmmaking, or American science fiction, is about how cool white males are. (Sometimes white males are dopey but lovable instead. Those movies are dismissed as "chick flicks.")

Anime, though, is an exception to the rule. The dominant figure of anime is not, as you'd expect, the Japanese man (although, yes, anime is generally pretty nice to Japanese men) but rather the Japanese schoolgirl. It's schoolgirls who are most often placed on a pedestal; ask me to name anime girls who have achieved "legendary character" status and I can rattle off Rei Ayanami, Madoka Ayukawa, Lum, etc., etc. Ask me about anime boys and I have more trouble.

There's a disconnect here, in which the audience of these shows are not the demographic that the shows lavish their attention on. It gets even stronger once you start looking at shows aimed at the most avid anime fans; Air was positively worshipful of its female characters. Actually, I suspect what's going on here is some sort of heavily sexualized version of the sacred feminine - but that's a topic for another day.

The usual reaction of a writer, on deciding that some group isn't adequately represented in their medium or genre of choice, is to write the Earthsea novels, or something similar. Address the problem directly.

But Satoru Akahori would have had a lot of trouble pulling that off. Based simply on the covers of his manga, he clearly likes young girls, and likes having them star in his stories. I don't think he would enjoy writing conspicuously and exclusively male characters. But I have a feeling he's very aware that he is not a young girl, and never will be.

(I was previously fairly confident that the mythologization of schoolgirls was having an effect on Japanese young people, but my major evidence was the advanced self-absorption of certain well-publicized young girls. I hadn't considered the effect on high school boys of combining the usual adolescent body-mortification with hyper-awareness of one's failure to be female. It's probably not tremendously common; in fact, in a male-dominated society, the reverse is probably much more common, but the fact that it's even a possibility is really strikingly new.)

Anyway, there's a long and glorious history of gender-changing in anime - but in every previous instance I've ever seen, the condition of femininity was a central problem for the male hero, and its resolution was his main goal. This is not true of Kasimasi. It's something else. There's no hint of social commentary here; it's pure fantasy.

What Kasimasi does instead, which I don't believe has been done in anime intended for mass consumption before (no, this doesn't count,) is offer admission to the privileged tribe.

Now, there's a bit of a sticky wicket here. Japan remains a patriarchal society, and patriarchys have a principle that I've heard called "It's a lot easier to get a woman to wear pants than to get a man to wear a skirt." If you start with the assumption that men are superior to women, it's perfectly logical that women would want to do supposedly "male" things, like wear suits, get jobs, play basketball, etc., and it's usually treated with indulgent condescension as long as they don't do as well as men. But a man wanting to do "feminine" things is immediately threatening. This is why Ranma and Megumi Amatsuka reacted with horror at any suggestion that they might have a feminine bone in their bodies.

It's therefore expected - a convention of the gender-switching genre - that a boy changed into a girl should immediately devote his full energies to regaining his former body. Hazumu doesn't. He only perfunctorily considers the idea. (It's no excuse that a restoration is declared impossible; that didn't stop Megumi.) And Kasimasi rejects the idea. In fact, it seems to reject the idea uncritically, which is even more interesting. It doesn't challenge the idea that Hazumu should want to be a boy, and it doesn't make arguments in favor of being a girl. It takes as a fait accompli that Hazumu should be female.

There's actually this cute little dodge in there to avoid actually arguing the point.. Normally, sex change recipients have to deal with a tremendous social stigma - but, in Hazumu's case, that's loudly removed from consideration. If you're wondering why the aliens declared themselves and apologized to the world, it's so that Hazumu only has to declare "Sho ga nai yo" - nothing I can do - whenever he's challenged on his enthusiastic acceptance of femininity (and then get back to charming the guys with his newly-granted moe.)

In fact, watch how fast the day-to-day problems Hazumu's condition seems to present are taken care of in the second episode - and how much the manner in which they're taken care of resembles initiation into a tribe. I don't think the buying-the-first-bra scene was idle fanservice, even though it was drawn that way. The writing goes too deeply into the technical details of wearing a bra. That, along with wearing-seifuku-for-the-first-time, are classical rites of passage for young girls. Going into the girls' locker room is blatantly symbolic of acceptance into the formerly forbidden society. The reporters (an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of the aliens thing) are apparently dispatched without any difficulty.

And best of all, the one really big problem of womanhood - having to deal with yucky penises - is solved. Hazumu's beloved just happens to be a lesbian.

The word "primitive" has a particular meaning in the jargon of film theory - it means that the motivating allegories of a story are obvious and central.

Kasimasi ~Girl Meets Girl~ is one of the most - maybe the most - primitive shows I've ever seen.

The reason the word "primitive" is attached to that sort of style? Because it's characteristic of the earliest examples of a new genre.

Now there's a scary thought.

Gunslinger Girl - 5

If you haven't seen Gunslinger Girl yet, or you dismissed it as lolicon gun-porn, you need to go see it now. Watch at least through the third episode, although 4 and 5 are terrific too. Yes, it looks at first glance like lolicon gun-porn, but it's actually a terrific Godardian rebuke to the Sister Princess vein of crap that's been inflicted on us anime fans over the last few years. (Jean-Luc Godard famously wrote that "the best way to criticize a movie is to make another movie.")

So go see it. At least to episode 5, if you want to avoid spoilers. Don't read the manga; it's not as good. And don't worry, this entry will still be at the top of the page when you get back.



Okay?

Now, watch this scene towards the end, carefully.





Triela's eyes widen a moment before Jean reveals that Ravallo is dead.

She must have known what he was going to say. Which means she must have already known about Ravallo's death. Her line that began the scene - "Ravallo's been gone a while, hasn't he?" - looks, in this light, like an attempt to gently prepare Claes to accept the news, and adds another dimension to her anger at Jean for just saying it bluntly. He blew her setup.

But wait a minute - how the hell does Triela know Ravallo's dead? There's no particular reason to tell her before Claes. (Well, maybe, if they were going to try to let her break the news gently, but, um, clearly they aren't.) There's only one other way I can think of that she'd know.

Of course, we know Section 2 had Ravallo killed rather than let him talk to the press. And, since killing people is their job, and they're very good at it, they'd have done it themselves rather than hire someone else. So, all things considered, I have very little doubt that Triela killed Ravallo.

Gunslinger Girl is a show that rewards repeat viewings like few others I've seen. It's incredibly careful, and incredibly detailed. There's a whole other track I've been off on over whether Ravallo knew he'd be killed (probably, I think) and how he felt about it (there's an off chance, I think, that he might have committed intentional suicide - but I think it's much more likely that he decided to make the attempt and accept whatever the outcome turned out to be.)

When the last episode gets released, I'll explain why it's exactly the right way to end this show, and why its interaction with the overall structure is completely brilliant.

In Defense of the Obvious

Until about two years ago, I was a film student at one member of the loosely-affiliated gob of mediocre colleges spread over Chicago's South Loop neighborhood. It wasn't an entirely unpleasant experience; Columbia's administration tries their best (at least aside from the scandal-prone president) but they're crippled by an open-admissions policy that leaves the school with far, far more students than it can handle.

Film school, of course, influences the way one watches movies in quite a lot of ways (sooner or later, I'm going to do shot-by-shot analysis in this space, and half my readers are going to die of boredom) - but one of the least obvious and most profound has turned out to be the lasting aftereffects of watching well over a hundred student films, a good 98% of which were earnest, enthusiastic failed attempts at making an original idea work.

I came out of that experience with two things: one, absolutely no tolerance whatsoever for fan films, and two, the following principle ingrained deeply in my approach to creative work: It is more important to be right than to be original.

As with most of the beliefs I hold about how moving pictures ought to be made, I've managed to convince myself that it's widely held among anime creators. Exhibit A is the character designs, which have happily managed to avoid anything like the Klasky-Csupo bout of Ugly that animation went through here in the US a decade or so ago, and have done it by hewing close to (and developing a truly deep understanding of) one basic sort of design model.

And besides, it's only by drinking deeply from the well of the unoriginal that you understand just how much can be done without ever straying from it.

Kaleido Star



I imagine there have been shows more predictable than Kaleido Star in the last few years. I've probably even seen the first episodes of one or two. But there's not much margin left.

Seriously, was there any doubt, from the first moment the words "Mystical Act" or "True Kaleido Star" (in the second season) were uttered, how the story would play out?

The trick is, that's not a problem. In fact, it's exactly why I could never stop watching this show until I ran out of episodes and had to get more. I burned through Kaleido Star in a way I can't imagine rushing through more innovative shows like SaiKano or Haibane Renmei.

Kaleido Star - along with all the other really good sports anime - is about mythic triumph. Inevitable triumph. It's about how much fun it is to watch characters you like succeed. And it's about repeating what you already know.

You know, the idea of the novel, in the sense of a "new story," is just a few hundred years old in the West. Shakespeare never told a story his audience didn't know (and if he was even a little worried, he gave them a damn outline at the beginning.) It used to be that the whole art of storytelling was saying the same old things in a new way.

Every so often, we need that. And I don't, for a minute, mean "comfort food." I have trouble even grasping the concept; I don't see how a person can be reminded of the things they thought they believed, or the things they wanted to believe, and not be a little shaken.

What I mean is that, every so often, you need to ask yourself: Do you really believe in yourself?

What do you want to be the best in the world at? Are you trying as hard as you could be?

Did I leave behind a film career in favor of computer science because it wasn't my real calling, or was it because nobody tried to bring me back?

Give it a shot sometime. Watch some sports anime. (Hikaru no Go isn't bad either, and Battle Athletes Victory has a startlingly good grasp of its metaphor.) Ask yourself if you'd do as well in the main character's place. See if you don't have somewhere in your life where you could ganbarimasu a little more.

Mistake

I should not have promised to start blogging about anime again before I actually had broadband Internet at home.

SBC now claims to have no record of me ever placing an order, which is an odd way to screw up. You'd think they'd at least charge me.

All this is notwithstanding the fact that I have a post about anime I've already seen half-written, and just need to talk myself into finishing and posting it.

OK, let's try this again.

Well, that was rather a longer hiatus than I expected.

There's a general principle involved here: for each day you miss, the next one is easier.

So, over the course of the last couple months, I got a job, wrote the infrastructure for a programming contest, (last year's website might be more enlightening, if you're curious,) finished the first level of a game (and it'll be up on the Web just as soon as I find some legally distributable music to replace the temp-track, which is "The Six Are Always Together" from Azumanga Daioh - if anyone reading knows someone who knows someone, I'd happily provide more details,) took final exams, and pretty much always managed to find something more interesting or important to do than write up the last couple episodes of Air.

But my traffic logs tells me that people still come to this site, which is either a touching demonstration of reader loyalty or a damning indication of just how much of my traffic came from first-time visitors. And I thought, at least while I was writing, that it was a mostly worthwhile thing to do and that I'd like to keep doing it.

So I'm going to try again, albeit maybe with some fiddling in the made-up rules. I'll attempt a post that's actually about anime this weekend.

On Hiatus

I'm spending spring break (this week) at home with my parents, who don't have broadband. So I'm afraid I'll be a little bit later than usual on any releases that come out this week.

To occupy your time:
1) Cutting hair is usually a symbol of growing up, i.e. coming of age. So why does Misuzu look so much younger once her hair is cut? (At least two people - me and Satoshi - were initially fooled into thinking short-hair-Misuzu was part of a flashback.)

2) Crazy theory: Both Yukito and Michiru fiddled with their voice by blowing into a fan, establishing an incredibly tenuous connection. What if Yukito is, like Michiru, an apparition created to fulfull Misuzu's desires?