Ah My Goddess TV - 01

(images added once I got capture working)

I've never quite been able to believe Ah My Goddess. I've made a number of attempts to watch it; they're marked by shouting, with increasing incredulity, "Wait - do they really mean that?" On a bad day, I don't even make it through the opening. I can't remember if I've ever finished the whole OAV series; I certainly didn't have the energy to work out what the hell the movie was trying to do.

Actually, that's not quite true. I'm pretty sure I know what the movie - and this new TV show - are trying to do. They're trying to step back to the early days of the harem show, and figure out what went wrong - possibly head off in a new direction. After all, compare Ranma: the point of the Ukyo-Akane-Shampoo axis (Head, Heart, and Groin, respectively, for those who haven't seen the show) was clear to everyone except fanfiction writers, and used with some measure of grace by Takahashi and the series writers to make a point.

But then comes AMG, and Urd, Belldandy, and Skuld aren't metaphors, they're Older Vixen, Ripe Virgin, and Little Girl, just like they appear to be. And abandoning metaphor - or at least conscious metaphor - is a critical point in genre formation. It's how you get conventions.

So it sounds like that's the answer to my standing question: They don't really mean that. They're just playing with fire, and getting burned. They're doing a lousy job disentangling themselves from metaphor, and tripping over the strings. I'm not satisfied by that, though; could that opening really have been oblivious?

I don't have an answer, so I'll stop introducing there. We've got a new series, complete with a story restart, which might mean people who can shepherd the metaphors through the rocky bits, and I'm dumb enough to want to find out. The first episode, though, is awfully timid.

They decided to leave Belldandy's appearance until the end of the episode. Now, that's really a bold move. In the OAVs, Belldandy was the first thing that happened. She was the first scene. It wasn't pacing, either. The show was about her - how happy it makes her and everyone around her that she's a total doormat, how hurt she is by these dopey pointless obstacles that aren't her fault, and so on. But this show won't have it; it spends 20 minutes, mostly on those cardboard cutouts in the Auto Club, before it brings the goddess out.

Only it doesn't. It adds a pile of pointless goddess-narration, which looks for all the world like it was added at the last minute, to make Belldandy a presence throughout the episode. They start to set out strongly, and make a genuinely different series, and then they don't.

My hopes are not high.

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