Air TV - 04

I think, as a starting point for understanding Kano's arc, I have to go back to an idea I abandoned earlier: I think her multiple personalities are allegorical. That is, we shouldn't try to take her story literally - in fact, I don't think it has much to do with dissociative identity disorder.

I'm not completely certain about that; there's another fairly good interpretation that supposes Hijiri's attempts to seal away Kano's feelings (that meaning of the ribbon has been obvious for a while) were the inciting events, and Kano's multiple personalities grew out of the resulting repression. I don't think so, though; I think the ribbon was a symptom of Kano's attempt to avoid dealing with her problems, not the cause of them.

The key point is that Kano is fully aware of what's going on. Her suicide note makes it clear that that's true by the end of the arc, but it's the end of episode 3, viewed in this new context, that convinces me: I can't, for the life of me, figure out why Shiraho would want to hurt Yukito. In fact, in her story, Shiraho is portrayed as very much the opposite sort of person; you'd think, if she was willing to strangle someone, she'd have given that priest a ceremonial statue to the head and made a run for it.

On the other hand, Kano has a perfectly good reason to be upset with Yukito: he's rejected her. So I have to think that Kano's been in control all along, and that the appearance that she's not is, like Hijiri's protestations of "You're not Kano!," an excuse. If Kano's possessed, it means she's not desperately lonely - Kano doesn't have to deal with the guilt of being lonely when her sister's probably got it worse, and nobody else has to deal with the fact that they haven't been able to give her the companionship she needs.

There's a new problem introduced here, though (which wasn't all that small before): why, if Shiraho isn't really relevant, did we spend nearly five minutes of obviously scarce screen time on her story before offering Kano resolution?

I think it's for the same reason Kano's story came first: we're looking at a sort of Haibane Renmei structure here, where the easy problem is dealt with first, and the knowledge gained is used to tackle the hard problem. I think the ideas introduced in these couple episodes are going to inform the rest of the show, and so I'm going to have to remember to keep that monologue (along with the loneliness theme, and the idea of magic-as-expression-of-subconscious) in mind as I watch the rest of the show.

It does reinforce one new idea, though, which ran through the whole episode: there are new connotations of danger and grief attached to the winged-girl motif. That feather in the temple is portrayed as an uneasy thing; it brought disaster on both Shiraho and Kano, and its disappearance is a positive resolution. And, meanwhile, Misuzu had her dream of flight again, but this time she was sad. I still think the flight imagery carries its classic meanings of "freedom/escape;" suddenly, though, as we segue into Minagi's story, that's not being portrayed as necessarily a good thing anymore.

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Jinki: Extend - 02

There were a couple of things that were fairly clear to me back when I was thinking about starting a comically overanalytical weblog (all of two weeks ago.) First, blogging a show would require quite a bit of energy, and so there would be shows I watched but didn't blog. (Sorry, Komugi-chan, but it'd take more cultural knowledge than I have to do you justice...)

Second, I wouldn't blog a show unless I could start from episode 1. Writing about a show fundamentally changes my experience of it; as much as I'm enjoying Fantastic Children, I don't want to try to "catch up" by shortchanging earlier episodes, or draw an artificial line between "blogged" and "unblogged," or "blogged with foreknowledge" and "blogged without foreknowledge." What's more, I'm hoping more than anything that I'll manage some insights into the overarching structure of these shows, and to do that I'm going to need a good record of my thoughts as I encountered each episode.

I'm confident I'm right about those principles taken separately, but together they mean that pickings are going to be a little slim in the early months. I did okay my first week by playing catch-up, but now I'm basically current, and I'm faced with an awfully disappointing second episode of Jinki. It's as frustrating as I was worried it'd be.

Jinki, after all, made it into the "Current Series" list mostly because I thought it might pick up and I wanted a little diversity, not because I thought the first episode was really impressive. Now, the show seems to be disavowing the early gestures it made towards self-awareness (Aoba's mecha interest is a character point, but it doesn't really look like it's going to be used for meta-commentary) and settling into a comfortable position as a straightforward genre show. It still hasn't finished expositing, though, so it might do some interesting things with that story arc the first episode foreshadowed.

There's a dynamic being set up between Aoba and her mother, Shizuka - Aoba clearly didn't have a very happy homelife, but I actually think she's angry at Shizuka as much for invading the robot-filled paradise she's just found as for whatever went on long ago. The main point of this episode (aside from giving things names) is really the division between Aoba-around-mechanics (sunny, cheerful, and talented) and Aoba-around-her-mother (sullen and upset.)

I'll be watching to see if Aoba develops a full-blown Electra complex in the coming episodes as a result of that duality, or if her attraction to Ryohei (has an anime girl ever dubbed a male character "hentai/sukebe/pervert" and not actually had a thing for him?) is handled separately. It's also possible that the dualized father-figure of Genta and Ryohei (who are rarely apart so far) is split for exactly that reason: Genta's the kind and nurturing side, and Ryohei is the sexually desirable.

For that matter, that metaphor explains why it's Genta and not Ryohei that's wounded, allowing Aoba her first piloting experience. Godannar, of course, explicitly parodied the stylized sexuality of tandem-piloted mecha, but it was always there, and incapacitating the nonsexual, nurturing character adds strength to the loss-of-virginity motif.

So Aoba's loss-of-innocence is firmly established, and portrayed as mostly a positive development in the context of mecha, but then I can't help wondering why her mother, who seems to represent an alternate loss-of-innocence (or at least acknowledgement that mecha don't make everything immediately wonderful) is portrayed as a villain. I'm waiting for the inevitable backstory (in particular, Shizuka's side of the story) to see if it helps resolve that contradiction.

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Air TV - 03

Clearly, this show is trying to drive me crazy. I'm warming to the characters, I'm starting to feel like the absurd cel budget is being used to develop them rather than just move them around for the sake of movement and the actors are getting comfortable in their roles - and, meanwhile, half the subtext is being made explicit, which makes it a lot harder for me to analyze it and not sound silly. (Misuzu holds her arms out all the time! I wonder what that could mean?)

The obvious isn't a bad place to start, though. So, first, I want to look at the cyclic plotting of the episode: it ends in almost exactly the same place it started. The difference is in how much we (and our avatar, Yukito) know.

Which begs the question: Is Kano's response changed by Yukito's new knowledge? I think it's probably meant to be just natural progression, but this is nonetheless an interesting tangent to go down - after all, Yukito's invaded her privacy. The late-night hospital scene, I think, was partly metaphorical; Yukito's achieved a level of intimacy with Kano that I'm not sure he's entirely comfortable with. Not only that, but Kano's made an attempt to disqualify herself from the running for Yukito's Winged Girl ("I'll look for that girl for you," she says) and has become aware of Misuzu's existence. Heck, if I really wanted to get into meta-commentary, I'd say she was upset that Yukito's player decided to focus on Misuzu's storyline.

Or maybe that's actually a clue. A Google search before I started writing this post told me that susuki, or Japanese pampas grass, is associated with autumn in Japanese poetry; that, plus that yellow ribbon, is creating a very strong connection between Kano and autumn, which puts her out of place in a show that proclaims "summer" in its opening. The sneaky feeling that she's not the "primary" character just makes it more so.

I also want to talk about Potato's little escapade. For me, Potato is associated with this show's strange, elusive "magic;" he was the first sign that the weird things in Air's world went beyond Yukito's puppet - that, in fact, the laws of physics were subtly different. (Plus, he's an adorable mascot character, and we all know how closely those are involved with the supernatural.) So his incredibly scrupulous obedience seems like it could be generalized to a law: Magic gives us what we ask for.

In that light, then, Kano's episodes might be explained as a manifestation of her psychology. (My original guess was that they were a metaphor for it, but I think this works better.) If she's feeling unhappy, and experiencing the usual symptoms of mild non-chemical depression (I'm thinking particularly of escape fantasies here) then her glowing-self might be an expression of those fantasies.

Finally, I want to make a note for future reference: Misuzu talks a little about her dinosaur fixation here, but what she brings up is their extinction. It's romantic, she says, and a little sad, which would be fine if she just liked dinosaurs. But she wants to become one. This is something to keep an eye on, especially now that Yukito's acknowledged the Kano/Misuzu duality ("You're both weird.")

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Jinki: Extend - 01

Mecha shows have had a bit of a hard time since Evangelion.

I don't mean that Eva set a new high-water mark for quality; I like the show, but actually I think its quality above a certain baseline wasn't really relevant to its effect on the industry. The effect I think Eva had, rather, was to call the genre conventions into question. According to classical genre theory, that should have sparked a "revisionist" movement within mecha shows, which would examine and question those conventions, followed by a final descent into parodies and the end of the genre life-cycle.

The defining parody, though, when it came, ended up being Nadesico, which not only came too soon, but wasn't even sure it wanted to be a parody - it really, deeply revered its source material. The effect has been glorious confusion; directors who want to make mecha shows aren't really sure, anymore, what the conventions are, or if they're "allowed" to approach the subject matter without irony.

I'm mostly in favor of this, since it means the genre's become delightfully unpredictable, but it also means that new shows are awfully hard to pin down. It's mysterious to me, so far, what Jinki is trying to do. Making Aoba a mecha otaku seems to be hinting at a Nadesico-like self-awareness, but on the other hand, nobody's questioned the core conceit that flighty teenagers are really the best people to pilot giant war machines.

Not that they've ruled it out. The story arc's already been suggested by the first two scenes, assuming that the first is the flash-forward that it appears to be. In particular, the art: the first scene is gray and shadowy, and the second (Aoba at home with her grandmother) is bright and pastel, but both are designed to make us aware of their art as an unusual element. It's meant to consciously not look like the anime we're used to.

Then, once Aoba's in the military base (and, by inference, in an environment where she's comfortable, as opposed to girl-otaku-in-a-men's-world, where she doesn't seem to be) the colors and drawing style revert to an essentially neutral palette.

This is an arc that's practically the reverse of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey - Aoba starts in a place that's not really home, journeys to a place that is, and then returns. Or, alternately, mecha-pilot life turns out to be not so wonderful, which I don't really need to do visual analysis to predict. It's one of the oldest conventions of the genre.

Not to mention another very old trope that appears in Jinki: the mecha's cockpit is in the head. That was its location in the very earliest shows, but it was quickly moved to the heart for very sound Jungian reasons. I'm not sure if Jinki is trying to reverse the standard meaning of that placement and imply the primacy of reason over emotion, or if they're trying to evoke an older generation of mecha designs.

Or could it be a subtle hint at the wrongness of the mecha crew we've just been introduced to? My first reaction to that Biblical quote was to worry about it as a sign of Xenosaga syndrome (how sad that Namco's legacy is probably going to be nothing but knee-jerk negative reactions to religious symbolism for years to come) but it's a quote about temptation by evil, and it's placed on a pedestal after the credits. Obviously, we're supposed to be made uneasy.

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Oh my god, people are reading this now...

Thanks to YSP: Duh! for my first link, and Hontou Ni Taihen desu for my first blogroll spot (nestled between david.anime and g.o.o.d.t.i.m.e.) It's an odd feeling to have people besides me in the visitor logs, but it's certainly not a bad one.

Only 29,998 more and I'll be a real boy!

As an added "benefit," the prospect of actual readers has gotten me to sit down and thread these posts together in lame ad-hoc fashion, so you can now hop to my snotty dismissals of first episodes and then watch me slowly talk myself into the shows, either from these links, or the ones over on the sidebar.

Ah My Goddess TV
Air TV
Mahoroba ~Heartful Days~


UPDATE: And now I'm in Matthew's Anime Blog, too! Pretension is on the march!

UPDATE 2: And Momotato Daioh. Holy cow.

Ah My Goddess TV - 03

I really thought Belldandy's reaction to Keiichi's wish was going to lead somewhere. But it's been another episode, and I haven't seen any more indications of dissatisfaction from her.

But, then, if she's not just playing along, I'm going to find the show in general pretty hard to believe. That forced little smile whenever Keiichi looks at her is one thing, but counting 600 sheep is another; it goes beyond the bounds of what a human being would do without some driving motivation.

On the other hand, maybe Bell's reactions aren't about playing along, but instead about resignation - or even about doing her job. What if she's dedicated enough that she's decided to fall in love with Keiichi, and is looking for ways to get herself to do it? "There are incantations here on Earth, too," she said, when Keiichi brought up counting sheep. I wonder if that's her way of looking at it. Making tea every day, living together, and counting sheep: If I do these things, I will fall in love.

Is it working? Well, Bell shows real emotion (as opposed to generic pleasantness or mild worry) for the third time when Keiichi falls off the temple roof. And it's the first time she shows real affection for him. It's worth making a note of, as is the fact that every scene that's gotten a rise out of Belldandy has involved magic in some way (she's perfectly OK with the unfamiliarity of the world she's been dropped into) but I'm not sure what to make of it right now.

So, let's talk about the temple. All along, it's been symbolic of tranquility, tradition, and so on, which makes it an obvious setting for Belldandy and Keiichi's Domestic Bliss; this time, though, it's inhabited before they arrive. The priest cedes the place, practically as a matter of plot (in fact, the temple becomes theirs in exactly the same way as before, namely "Bell's magic makes everything OK.") I'm awfully tempted to take this as a meta-point; the priest has built a tiny outpost of tradition, just like, as I hypothesized earlier, Ah My Goddess itself is intended as a classic show in a sea of Sister Princesses. But I'd rather take it as a continuation of an earlier motif: People are being displaced in this show. The first three episodes have revolved around lives being rearranged, regardless of inconvenience, to make room for Bell and Keiichi's romance.

That's probably it, actually. The obvious purpose of the episode is establishing and delineating Bell's powers, and setting up the rules of the world. (That's why Holy Bell was introduced here, too.) So the priest was there to help establish in what respects things would go right and wrong for the couple.

What's more, if this was just an exposition episode, then I'm justified in holding onto the hope I've trumped up for this show. So I'll go with that for now.

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Air TV - 02

Well, it looks like everyone but me is absolutely head-over-heels for this show. If I was a review writer, of course, I'd be talking about keeping myself "pure," forming my own opinions, and so on, but this is a blog and one of the advantages of blogs is I get to make up the rules. So my response is what it normally is when my opinion is downstream of everyone else's, and that's to wonder what I'm missing, and watch more carefully.

On the plus side, the constant flight imagery is starting to show a little depth. I'm very interested in the interplay between that and the loneliness theme, especially in Misuzu's character. She's so incredibly needy, both explicitly ("Let's play hide-and-seek!") and passive-aggressively (fishing for a "Happy Birthday.") I think she has abandonment issues, and yet she has a flight fantasy, which is traditionally about freedom, or escape. The contradiction looks intentional, too - Misuzu falling on her face when she's running with her arms out is a pretty clear hat tip.

At the same time, there's a duality being set up between Misuzu and Kano. Kano's own flight fantasy, which she admits on the school rooftop, is the giveaway, but the two girls also have the same family structure - especially with Yukito being insinuated into both households at roughly the same time. We've got what almost amounts to a scientifically controlled experiment here: Kano is Misuzu, only something, and that something is what has Kano glowing and wandering around temples in the dead of night.

I only wish I could say what something was. I want to say "less needy," which would fit in very well and set up a confidence-in-oneself story, but she sure tried hard to impress Yukito back in the first episode. I wish we'd seen more of her, so I could figure out if that was something more than the friendliness implicit in dating-sim girls.

But on the other hand, I still think the opening is comically overblown, and Ryoka Yuzuki is way out of her depth as Minagi. (I'm not sure if the staff doesn't know why Minagi speaks slowly, or it's just Ryoka that doesn't know, but it sounds completely stiff and unmotivated to me, and unmotivated speech idiosyncrasies as a substitute for character development drive me crazy.) The voice acting in general's picked up a little, though, and the animation doesn't strike me as nearly as ostentatious as it did at first.

If they start talking about the Hedgehog's Dilemma, though, I'm gone.

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Ah My Goddess TV - 02

I don't know if I can remember seeing the nature (and appeal) of a wish put so plainly before: "If you want to destroy the world, we can do that too."

It's played for laughs, but I think it's fundamental to the scene. Belldandy is offering Keiichi, as a reward for his unselfish nature, a moment of ultimate selfishness. Only she doesn't mean it; watch her backpedal. ("Of course, we wouldn't come to people who would do that.") She doesn't actually expect Keiichi to take the chance, which is why she's so staggered when he does.

That's another new thing. I don't think Belldandy likes the premise of her show anymore. I remember her, last time around, being basically unfazed by Keiichi turning her life upside down; this time, the mask drops for just long enough to make it clear it's a mask.

Not to mention that Keiichi knows exactly what he's doing. This time, that little theory about his buddies playing a joke on him isn't the crux of the scene, it's tossed off just for a moment. At first, I almost thought it was just a little bit of fanservice - an allusion to the earlier series, rather than an actual plot point. Keiichi believes that Belldandy's the real thing, from the very beginning. He decides, right there, to bind Belldandy to himself. (Ultimate selfishness, right? He understood perfectly.)

Not that he's going to admit it, of course. I fully expect that, by the end of the season, he'll have declared at least once that he thought he was just playing along with a prank, and hey - since I'm the only one with footage of the scene, some of the other characters might even believe him.

It's going to be interesting, also, to see how long Gohda keeps Belldandy and Keiichi literally inseparable. He's already suggested it's not permanent - in that scene where Keiichi's helmet catches on Bell's clothes, and it holds them together just until it's not inconvenient anymore. I have a feeling Bell's delighted "Ah! It came off!" is going to get funnier and funnier as I see more of this show. (She's really happy. Do you suppose she saw the symbolism too?)

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Mahoraba ~Heartful Days~ - 01

(images added once I got capture working)

So it turns out that Mahoraba ~Heartful days~ is based on a manga, not a hentai game. I was surprised at first - after all, the female lead has a split personality, which is just the sort of inspired perversion I've come to expect from those things. Two sexual partners, but they only have to come up with one character design!

And then there's Megumi. Megumi has big breasts, glasses, antenna-hair, and little fangs. It's as if creator Akira Kojima was trying to get all the fetishes out of the way right at the start - until a little further in, when it turns out that Meg is actually the scary older woman who never, ever gets into the doujinshi because all the male fans are every bit as terrified of aggressive women as the main character they're supposed to identify with. (No, Virginia, Tenchi wasn't gay, he was just scared to death of sexuality.)

So I'm starting to suspect that Kojima is playing a little game here, and I'm certainly not averse to having games played in this sort of show. In fact, Rozen Maiden last season convinced me that there's going to be a harem-show backlash, it's going to be soon, and it's going to be great, even if that show took its inspired premise (it's just like a harem show, except the girls are all dolls! Hee!) and wasn't interested in doing much with it besides building an internal mythology.

I have a little better idea of what Mahoroba is up to, though, and I think it has to do with the setting: not just a lovely old Japanese boarding house, complete with garden and koi pond, but a lovely old boarding house surrounded by ultramodern skyscrapers.

This show thinks of itself as traditional.

In other words, it's a Maison Ikkoku wannabe, not an Ai Yori Aoshi wannabe. Kojima has the same feeling as the Ah My Goddess crew; somewhere around the beginning of the 90s, this genre went off the rails, and so let's wind the clock back and see if we do better. If I'm lucky, it'll hearken back to the classic Takahashi format of "one girl for every character flaw the author can think of" instead of the modern "one girl for every sexual fetish." If I'm really lucky, the jokes'll actually be funny.

Or it might have that same awkward uncomfortable feeling as those Ah My Goddess OAVs. Kozue, that female lead, has a split personality that works as follows: she's sweet and compliant, unless you startle her or get her riled up, in which case she becomes rude and unfeminine. (Yes, I'm pretty sure that's the adjective her rough speech is meant to bring to mind.) There's an attempt here, perhaps, to comment on the ridiculous overfeminization of ren'ai heroines, but I'm not sure I like the symbolism of the counterexample.

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Air TV - 01

(images added once I got capture working)

Key's games are mostly off-limits these days to people like me who only speak marginal Japanese and aren't willing to fool around with text-only fan-translated scripts. So I can tell you only a few things about them - one, that anyone who follows the dating-sim scene will tell you Key is the king of that hill, and two, that they try really hard.

I mean it. So do they, for that matter. Every frame, every screenshot I've seen positively drips with effort. This new TV adaptation of Air is wonderful visually; the dialogue scenes are meticulously planned, and full of little gestures that you almost never find animators willing to spend effort on.

If only it worked. Instead, I'm entirely disconnected. I'm impressed by the effort, but not by the result. Misuzu is adorable, and she plays very well in any given one of her scenes, but I don't have any grasp of her character, or any insight that I'm not supposed to have. Worse, I don't really believe that she's a person at all, any more than I believe in Yukito's puppet; I'm far too aware of the animator's hand.

But then, this is Key, and I never quite forgave them for releasing "adult" and "all-ages" versions of their games, as if sex was something you could just drop in or snip out of your life with no consequences. Yes, we can argue commercial reasons, but, frankly, if you're going to try to take a genre defined by pandering and raise it above its origins, I reserve the right to call you to task for such an egregious surrender. I don't even think the "player choice" argument holds water here; if you're really trying to simulate the experience of having a relationship (which I'll assume for the sake of argument is a worthy goal) then wouldn't it be much more interesting to offer the player the choice to have sex or not within the game, and then make him live with the decision?

Except that that wasn't really Key's goal in releasing the dual versions. The real goal was to declare to the world that they didn't need sex - that they had made a game that was about something grander.

It seems to me that the best way to make a worthwhile game (or anime) is to just go do it, rather than spend all that effort proclaiming your ability to make a worthwhile game.

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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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