Finally! An
Animation Deviation page that isn't me droning on about Samurai Jack!
Also quick addendum,
that ending was brilliant and I will fight anybody who says
otherwise.
Instead, I am here
to give some personal opinions about animated shows or anime that
have caught my attention for one reason or another. Why so
scattershot? It's an aspy thing, and I'm weaponizing it for blogging!
But first, a very
crucial preface about my feelings about anime and the anime industry
in recent years. I'm no avid follower of trends of the industry, my
flag is firmly planted in games media after all, but I do get a bit
of my info from the YouTuber's Mother's Basement and Digibro, whom I
mostly follow for confirmation or refutation of some of my
assumptions from an outsider perspective. Otherwise, my following
thoughts are purely anecdotal and should be seen as a personal
lightly-informed opinion.
I've been of the
mind that I have mostly grown out of the demographic for anime. Being
a child of the 90s I loved the hell out of Dragonball Z, Sailor Moon,
and Yu Yu Hakusho, and getting really into the stuff during my teens.
Death Note, Rurouni Kenshin, Yu-Gi-Oh, that was my jam. But then
high-school and college happened and very slowly I slipped out of
anime.
A lot of it had to
do with me becoming familiar with and sick of the various tropes of
anime. The Shonen series' tendency for filler and convoluted plots
and deus-ex machina super transformations. The abundance of fan
service and shallow titillation of certain female characters. The
glorification of various forms of entitlement by the main characters
in various anime series. And of course, a heaping helping of terrible
writing that bends over backwards to justify most of what I've
written above.
Seriously, some of
the most popular anime that the new generation are into absolutely
pisses me off with how terrible they commit these crimes. Attack on
Titan has maybe six good episodes in it before it divebombs into
tedious inanity. Sword Art Online is ostensibly a love letter to
games and gamer culture, but the creator didn't do any research into
how MMOs operate or how gamer culture works, so it watches like
poorly written fan fiction about a guy whose like really cool at
games and stuff and he's got a hot girlfriend and he like totally
beat like six MMOs cuz he was best ever and he's good at computers
and he has an AI daughter and he's so hot that his sister kind of
wants to sleep with him man.
Gimme a second I
think I need to vomit after writing that terrible run-on sentence.
I bring all of this
up because there has been a concerted effort to observe and even
subvert the very systemic tropes and memes of the various anime
genres. Some of these I enjoy, some of these I wish would go further,
but they are a collection of shows that have slowly brought me back
to enjoying anime, both in their current form and in this new
subversive style.
Which finally brings
me to the topic of discussion in this week's column: Re: ZERO –
Starting Life In A New World, aka Re: Zero.
The show starts off
as a very generic fantasy adventure, with the protagonist being some
nobody geek from modern day Japan getting flung into a fantasy world
straight out of Dragon Quest. So what does that mean? Is he the
chosen one? Was he summoned by a powerful sorceress to help them win
some grand war because of his l33t video game skills? Did he die
doing something heroic in the real world and for his bravery given
new life by some benevolent god-like entity?
Yeah right.
Honestly, that's
where Re: Zero becomes kind of brilliant. I am roughly six episodes
into the series and as far as I can tell, there was no reason. The
protagonist basically got thrown into this world for no apparent
reason.
But his very first
thought upon entering this world was every single variation of what I
mentioned above. And he's smug about it. This is the kind of
character type I've really grown to hate in recent years. Not someone
who just loves video games and geek culture, but makes it his entire
life. Not in a proactive way like becoming a critic or PR guy, that I
would respect, but a guy that works a dead-end job, stays locked away
in his home and just subsists on games, Gundam models and a lot of
porn while whining about how his life sucks and how this window to
escapism is the only way he can feel important.
But, turns out he
does develop a superpower of sorts upon entering this world, and it's
the greatest curse I can think to level at this guy. Within the first
episode of the series, the hero bumps into a girl sorcerer and goes
on about how she is going to be important to the plot somehow and
sticks around with her to get back something she lost. After some
basic detective work they find a shady house in the slums, where our
main character... gets eviscerated to bloody pieces. And the series
doesn't treat this in a flippant hyperviolence as slapstick kind of
way either. He suffers, holds on to dear life and then slowly chokes
to death drowning in a pool of his own blood.
And then he wakes up
Groundhog Day style a day earlier wondering what the heck happened.
That's right. The
guy who thinks by shear virtue of being a regular modern day gamer
being thrown into a fantasy world will go on to become its savior
gets a big old freight train of reality slammed into him but with a
Dark Souls-esque twist.
Except it gets
worse. Even if he just keeps his head down and does nothing, certain
days will repeat anyway. He effectively is being forced to put up or
shut up using various mechanics that are a shorthand for him, but
turned into its darkest most psychotic extreme.
This isn't to say
the show is perfect. The first few episodes do a decent job showing
off the hero taking advantage of some of his modern paraphernalia, at
one point he tries selling his smart phone for a bag of gold just so
he can eat something for example, but at the same time his smugness
can get pretty insulting. Also, until the death loops start happening
and more gets unveiled, the anime itself is very by the numbers no
matter how many times you can hear it ironically rolling its eyes. There is also still some pretty blatant bits of anime cuteness, the biggest offender being the maid twins, but that's small potatoes.
However, in terms of
premise, slapping the taste out of the mouths of certain hopeless
shut-ins with the very fantasy they crave is something I find
deliciously sinister and quite cathartic from the perspective of a
low end games journo and critic who winds up dealing with them on bad
days.
It is currently
available to watch on Crunchyroll and I sincerely hope you give it a
look if any of this sounds interesting.
I mean what else is
good to watch until the next JoJo comes out?
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