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?

Air TV - 10

I hate to say it, but Air entries are becoming a chore to write. On the one hand, I'm ridiculously busy right now (and I'm about to take a week off anyway, since I won't have broadband over spring break - we'll see if that helps) but, on the other, I no longer seem to care that I don't know what's going on.

I hated the Summer arc, for one. Actually, this is the first negative consequence of this blog I've found - I spent a lot of time with those episodes, as I've spent a lot of time with every episode I've blogged, whereas ordinarily I would have dismissed them as a brief lapse and moved on. Instead, I tried to look deeper into them, which any high-school English student will tell you is a recipe for disaster.

The core of my dislike, I think, was this: Ryuya, Kanna, and Uraha weren't active participants in the events. They'd react to one tragedy, then another would drop out of the sky on them. In the end, it wasn't a story about three people - it was a story about some stuff that happened to three people. And so I was bored at first, and eventually annoyed.

And I'm not really engaged with this episode, either; it spends an awful lot of time on the mistakes and transgressions of people like Misuzu's hoped-for friends and erstwhile father - people we've never seen and have no reason to care about.

Not to mention, why, why, why, why is Yukito a crow? Yes, I know there are excellent reasons to pick a crow as opposed to other animals. I mean why take away his humanity at the exact moment when he's poised to actually do some good with it? Seeing the world as "Sora" may have helped his (and our) understanding of things, but it didn't change the course of action he would have taken. Now that his side of the emotional story has been resolved, it's just one more obstacle in his path - and without a good explanation, it's as arbitrary as those chanting monks.

On the edge of this, and in a strange position, is Haruko. She's obviously a side character - it's one of the unfortunate side effects of dating-sim conventions that the division between "side" and "main" characters is so clearly drawn - and I almost feel like she's "allowed" to make mistakes because she's not part of the Holy Trinity of perfect girls. Haruko's misery is actually of her own making.

So also for, come to think of it, Minagi's mother. There's a little bit of that in Hijiri too - Hijiri probably didn't handle Kano's situation as well as she could have - but I could see arguing the "it's all Mom's fault" angle just from Minagi and Misuzu. Which is not a wholly welcome direction (some of Freud's craziest ideas were along these lines) and probably not really supportable. We'll see next time how Misuzu's father fits into things.

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A note while I wait for Air 10 to download

Here's something I've learned in the last couple of months that may be useful to other people.

Say you discover experimentally that you can blog an episode of anime every day and a half or so. Just to keep things simple, in fact, let's say you can do 4 a week. It would seem like you should pick 4 shows to blog, then, right? Do that, and your queue will stay at its initial length, which is 0, right?

Wrong.

In fact, if you have new episodes coming in at exactly the same rate you can blog them, your backlog will grow uncontrollably.

We can demonstrate this mathematically. The question we're interested in is how large your backlog will be after a very long time. We can handle this probabilistically - how likely you are to be totally caught up, how likely you are to have 1 episode waiting, and so on. To keep this reasonably concise, I'm going to start using notation - P_n will be "the probability of having, at any given time, n episodes waiting."

Obviously all those numbers are related, and we can work out how by remembering that we're assuming you've been doing this for a very long time. So, we can ask ourselves how you were doing a few minutes ago, and how you've done since.

How you were doing must, of course, have had the same probability distribution. And since then, one of three things must have happened: You blogged an episode, a new episode was released, or everything stayed the same. Here's the trick: If we pick a short enough time, the chances of more than one thing changing is astronomical - so we can assume that only one thing happened. And we can figure out the chances of each change - for example, with the numbers I gave above, we know you blog 4 episodes a week, so the chance of you blogging an episode in a given day is 4/7, the chance of you blogging in a given minute is 4/10080 (or 1/2520), and so on.

So, the chance of you having n episodes waiting right now is equal to the chance of you having n-1 episodes waiting a little bit ago and one being released (time times rate of release, or tR), plus the chance of you having n+1 waiting and blogging one (time times rate of bloggine, tB), plus the chance of you having n waiting and nothing happening. Or, in notation:

P_n = (1-t*B-t*R)P_n + t*B*P_n+1 + t*R*P_n-1

A little algebra gives us:
P_n = P_n - tBP_n - tRP_n + tBP_n+1 + tRP_n-1
tBP_n + tRP_n = tBP_n+1 + tRP_n-1

And we can divide out the time! So it turns out it didn't matter what time interval we chose - we can just figure it was a few microseconds and leave it at that.
(B+R)P_n + P_n = BP_n+1 + RP_n-1

This relationship has a simplified solution, it turns out: P_n = (R/B)P_n-1.

But wait! In the special case that R = B - that is, the rate of releases equals the rate of blogging - R/B = 1, which means that the probability of every possible backlog size - P₃, P₇, P_1,000,000 - is equal. Since those Ps go on forever - or at least until you get sick of it and quit - the chance of your backlog staying a reasonable size is so small it basically makes no difference.

So what this all means is that you may not be able to handle the blogging load you think you can. Actually, another analysis like the one above reveals what you can expect your backlog to average - (R/B)/(1 - R/B).

(This was all worked out in the early days of computer networking, when people were trying to figure out how much server capacity they were going to need.)

And Air 10 just finished downloading, so normal anime blogging will resume shortly, along with a special treat in (hopefully) a few days.

Air TV - 09

I'd be a lot happier right now if there had been more than three (and a half) characters in this storyline.

My problem, specifically, is that there was never any decent motivation for all those faceless minions to be hatin' on poor Kanna. Koi, of course, has dropped a handy little note in the front of the episode to try to save the day, but come on - these are movie villians, who act not according to any logic of their own but according to whatever will bring the heroes the greatest grief.

Now, it's a credit to Air in the first place that I can complain that some of its characters are uncharacteristically unconvincing. But it doesn't help me do what I'd really like to do, which is expand on the connections between the very little we've found out about winged people and their modern counterparts - the best I can seem to do is "Erm, they're all miserable for reasons that have less to do with their own actions than with the requirements of the plot?"

I don't like martyrs. That is, I don't like watching people whine about what a lousy lot they've been dealt, which is neither martyrdom nor tragedy in the classical sense; remember, Hamlet and Macbeth triumphed through their deaths, not despite them. That distaste seems to be a mostly arbitrary thing in my emotional makeup, and you're welcome to enjoy these two episodes yourself, but if this was the only plotline in Air, I wouldn't be blogging it.

Also, this Friday I have to unveil the video game I've supposedly been working on all year. So, um, here's a page on crows in mythology, and I can't wait till next week when I actually have time to write decent entries again.

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Mahoraba ~Heartful Days~ - 06

I love Tama-chan.

I'm not alone, either. Everyone loves Evil Tomoyo - or at least everyone who loves casual cruelty, which, it's long been clear, is a large portion of the US anime fanbase.

And I love how she's appointed herself both guide to and guardian of Those Things Ryushi Was Not Meant To Know. Or master, even - she grants boons and metes out punishment with the air of a capricious overlord. I've even decided to believe that she was completely aware of the mythological implications of "stay right behind me." (Or be lost in this dangerous, unknown place!)

In fact, the whole episode had a gloriously Campbellian structure - and if you have a few minutes free, I suggest passing them by following that link and matching up the outline. (Particular amusement can be had by debating the exact division between the Threshold Guardians and the Road of Trials.) Tama-chan sets up the story and inserts herself into the Wise Mentor role so easily I'm starting to think she's read Campbell too.

So throw all that together, and suddenly the episode's story isn't just a "test," it's a Rite of Passage, which has me scrambling to come up with more than a high-school knowledge of such things - or, failing that, to apply a little high-school knowledge.

See, Wikipedia's entry on rites of passage (and I apologize for linking Wikipedia twice in one entry - it's just too easy to put off writing posts by surfing it) has a link to "hazing," which, of course, is exactly what Haibara, Megumi, and Tamami have been doing to Ryushi with the sleep deprivation. This is Narutakisou's initiation.

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Air TV - 08

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine made a comment about a particular Reason To Like Anime, which, of course, like all such Reasons, is a criminal overgeneralization, and any reasonably knowledgeable anime fan ought to be able to come up with a dozen counterexamples off the top of his/her head. (That task in this particular case is left as an exercise for the reader.)

Anyway, the Reason in question has to do with period and fantasy anime; the default mode of character development (that is, the course taken by writers who don't appear to have thought carefully about it) seems to be to give period characters essentially modern personalities, ideas, attitudes, and so on - to place modern people in an unusual setting rather than try to be "true" to the period. Since anything written today is almost certain to have today's concerns in mind, especially fantasy, throwing authenticity to the winds will tend to make things work much more naturally.

I'm bringing this up now because Air 8 is one of the most extreme cases I've ever seen. From the very beginning, Kanna is facefaulting like a schoolgirl, and then Ryuya and Uraha's casual disregard for taboo. (When I saw Koi meekly excuse themselves for not subbing the episode in Shakespearean English, I burst out laughing - not only would it be a bad idea because getting the grammar of "thee" and "thou" right is amazingly hard, it would be a bad idea because Kanna's speech may be accented, but it couldn't be farther from the stiff formality we now associate with King James.)

Except, just when I got used to the familiar, improbably-coiffed anime personalities speaking with funny accents, a whole bunch of carefully-drawn period people show up. Look at how much Ryuya stands out in that crowd of guards - if it was any other show, I'd just call that laziness, but remember that moment in episode 2, when three walk-on schoolgirls who never appeared again nonetheless had full-scale dating-sim-girl hair.

So now Ryuya, Kanna, and Uraha look singled out by more than the plot - they've been inserted into a world that's too rigid for them. In fact, that seems to be the result of most of their troubles, from the random displacement (that the priestess Kanna's supposed to be wouldn't bat an eye at) to anonymous masked men trying to stop them going into sacred places.

That of course bodes well for Yukito and Misuzu; after 1000 years, they've finally come to a place where they can finally be together. Awwww! but I like crazy theories, so here's one: I wonder if Yukito's wish to "go back to when we first met" is actually affecting Kanna's story. After all, we have little to no idea how it originally played out, before Yukito made his wish - for that matter, one of the only things we have seen, how Ryuya got that wound on his back, has changed significantly. (In that glimpse in episode 7, his attacker charged and slashed without resistance, right?)

So I have to wonder if Yukito's managed to somehow inject his personality into this old storyline - for better or worse - and if his new influence might allow that old web to be untangled.

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