This is legitimately disappointing.

Nothing to write about today. Have a draft in die need of editing/rewriting, but it's nowhere near ready for semi-public consumption.

Didn't think I'd find myself phoning one in this early in the year. I considered trying to limit myself to just three a week, bit then I'd still feel obliged to stick to some kind of update schedule and at least daily posts keeps me in the habit (in theory).

Still find myself trying to write about "worthwhile" stuff, rather than just writing. I should probably do more with drafts, just so I don't get to half eleven and raise I'm totally stumped. Having three or four possible stubs could help.

Space Dandy - A Dandy Guy in Space

It's unusual to see a show come out swinging with the force Space Dandy has; to have it come out so soon after KILL la KILL could be a coincidence, or just a sign of trends in the anime industry at the moment. The confidence on display isn't the only common ground, either - both Bones and Trigger are unfazed by fanservice, although Dandy doesn't seem to be making any attempt, yet, at building a case for nudity-as-metaphor the way KlK is.

The opening half of this first episode seemed weaker on my second viewing; I'm not sure if it's that the dub script didn't capture the same spark as the Japanese (which I saw first), or because it was technically the third time I'd seen the first ten minutes. There's a lot of dialogue and setup in the opening act, while the second half's action focus is much more immediately engaging.

It's hard to dissect this first installment having seen it in both languages, though. While most of the dialogue is essentially the same (a small furore over one joke aside), there's a much more knowing tone to the English version. The narrator in Japanese is over-the-top and unnecessarily serious despite his ridiculous exposition (when he can be bothered to finish it), but in English he's seemingly aware of how dumb his lines (intentionally) are.

Notably, Space Dandy was broadcast in America before the Japanese premiere, on Cartoon Network's [adult swim] block. If this isn't the first time such a thing has happened, it's certainly the most high-profile; it normally takes months or years for an anime show to get licenced, translated, dubbed and released in the West, and with Shinichiro "Cowboy Bebop" Watanabe's name attached, I would normally have expected a lot of distributors clamouring for the rights.

I'm not sure if this earlier-than-usual US broadcast meant the dub had to be done more quickly than the usual process, but the script does feel unwieldy in places. It's the first time I've ever really appreciated how difficult comedy is to get across in translation - and in addition to making the joke work at all, there are timing and animation considerations that further limit your options.

I think I found the jokes in the Japanese script marginally funnier, but the delivery is something that the English version managed to edge out. The sideways remarks and reactions seemed more natural, though that's possibly just as a result of my own native language.

Given the ludicrous and excessive finale to the episode, it's anybody's guess how they're going to get even one more episode out of the plot - let alone a 24-episode series. But it feels like a while since I watched a show that's so singularly colourful, both the visuals and the story, and which doesn't take itself at all seriously, so I'm in for the long haul. This season seems like it's going to be a low-profile one generally, and Space Dandy is definitely a cure for that.

Before my body is dry

I made a flippant comment on Reddit that my favourite track on the KILL la KILL OST was "whichever one is playing at the time", but the more I listen to the album the more accurate that statement becomes.

Not only are there no tracks that I dislike, there are no tracks that I'm indifferent to. They're all great, in a variety of ways. The rock stuff, the dramatic orchestral stuff, the weirdly un-weird pop songs - you can pick any piece at random and I'll be pleased with your selection.

I pre-ordered the OST months ago, before the first pressing bonuses were announced, and never bothered to check back to see what they were. It's a gorgeous package - the outer box has a dramatic shot of Honnouji Academy from above, with the logo embossed along the bottom.

The big surprise was the bonus booklet - a complete score for several of the tracks, including the Reddit-famous "Don't Lose Your Way" (officially titled "Before my body is dry", and with an unfortunate rap section in the full version), which I almost immediately set about transcribing to tab but sadly doesn't sound quite the same on an acoustic.

That's one of maybe three tracks I recognised from the show; I'm surprised at just how many of them are unfamilar. I'm tempted to use this as an excuse for rewatching the show, but I've got a bunch of other stuff to get through (I'm determined to see if Shuffle! has any kind of payoff) and the new season's about to start.

Hmm

I was going to write about the (relatively) new Perfect Blue Blu-ray for today's entry; I've got a big text file with notes made as I watched it this evening. But I sat down to type it up more coherently and remembered I wrote about it less than a year ago.

So now I'm out of ideas.

I realised tonight that it's really hard for me to write critically about Perfect Blue anyway; I've seen it too often to separate my love for it from the film itself. I tried to keep a more detached perspective tonight, but by the time Mima shoots her first Double Bind scene I was pretty much totally absorbed.

Which isn't to say I don't have criticisms. As I mentioned last time, MiMania's character design is too grotesque to really be effective; if he looked more normal (and didn't have such a prominent place in the opening CHAM concert), there'd be room to play him as a figment of Mima's imagination more consistently.

And this time, the nice bow on the ending bugged me more than it has before. Considering how obtuse and incoherent the film very deliberately tries to be in places, it's odd to have such a resoundingly optimistic ending.

I'm curious!

I'm pretty sure I figured out what was really going on in Hyouka at the exact same moment as the main character. This is rare in anime, and especially in mystery shows - generally speaking the audience is either way ahead or way behind the characters, thanks to the uneven distribution of information available on each side of the screen.

Succinctly described to me on Twitter as "a mystery show about nothing of any consequence", Hyouka follows the Classics Club, dragged through puzzle after puzzle by the infinitely-curious Chitanda Eru. Their secret weapon is Oreki Hotaro, supremely observant and insightful, but also hopelessly lazy (or as he'd call it, "efficient"). The mysteries they solve are ultimately irrelevant even to those directly involved; a 60-year-old school expulsion, unimportant items missing from the cultural festival, a hot springs "ghost".

None of the cases matter much to the plot either, except for the way they bring the characters together and force them to change or re-evaluate themselves. The hot springs episode, remarkably restrained for anime generally and especially a KyoAni production, flipped a switch in my brain; I'd been enjoying the show up to that point, but one scene clicked the point into place in a way I couldn't have seen.

High in the running for my favourite anime scene of all time is the haircut scene from Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid. It's not action-packed or even especially well-animated, but the characters' history makes the atmosphere electric. There's a bottle episode of Hyouka that stretches a similarly-charged emotional current out over the entire 22 minutes.

The final scene in the final episode is one of the strongest emotional gut-punches I've seen. Incredibly sad, beautiful and hopeful all at once, it still gets my heart racing to think about it. There's no indication of a continuation yet, and with the shift towards anime-as-advertising¹ we might never see more - especially since there's only one more novel to adapt at the moment (the 22 episode series covers four).

The slow-burn nature of the show could be offputting for some, but even when they were spread over three or four episodes, the characters made everything worthwhile. They're almost mysteries by themselves; there are suggestions and hints at the backstories of and between the Classics Club members, and I had more fun trying to work them out than the cases they were trying to solve.

¹ The increased number of shows based on manga and light novels isn't (simply) a drought of ideas, but instead the animated versions are used to promote the higher-profit-margin original source material. Which is an awkward position - if the anime doesn't increase sales of the novel, there's no point investing in more; if it does, then the show did its job and why bother with a second season?

DmC Devil May Cry

I want to like this game.

Despite the trying-slightly-too-hard punk aesthetic and UE3's best efforts, I really like how it looks. The story feels oddly like a movie adaptation of a videogame, somehow, but that's still better than a lot of games manage.

I am really bad at it, though. These sort of action games have never been my strong suit, for much the same reason as beat-em-ups - combos are simply beyond me. I can't remember them in the middle of a fight well enough to execute them, and I don't have sufficient reactions to dodge (even when I remember what the dodge button is). I end up sticking to the same basic four-hit smacking, trying desperately to defeat all the enemies before they take me out - a recip for boredom and frustration more than anything else.

The reason I started playing DmC was as a palate cleanser after I'd finished P4G and was finding it difficult to get into Ni no Kuni, but it's also been on a couple of GOTY lists so I figured it should be worth a look anyway. It's just not for me, though - like every other game in the genre, it's just not clicking right.

I feel some kind of weird obligation to see the story through - maybe I'll drop the difficulty - but have no idea why. It's not that special, and a combination of online comments and obvious foreshadowing means I'm pretty sure how things are going to play out anyway.

Shuffle!

This is probably the worst show I have ever seen.

It looks bad, sounds terrible, the story is happy to ignore its central conceit for episodes at a time, and the characters are painfully cliché. It attempts to create dramatic scenes based on the revelation of information that both the audience and cast already know and take for granted.

The one thing keeping me going is that the show was recommended to me in a r/anime thread about School Days, which the episode-preview screenshots on our media server back up - they suggest something shifts significantly towards the end of the series. I'm not expecting a Nice Boat ending, but any kind of subversion of the tropes Shuffle! is dragging itself through can only be an improvement on what it's doing now.

But it's getting tougher with every episode. I've been told that #18 is when things start to get interesting, but that's still seven episodes away (God help me). If any aspect of the show was even slightly better - there's a lot of side-story bullshit that could easily be trimmed to get this down to 13 episodes, which would help immensely - I think I'd be close to enjoying the experience, but every element is so dreadfully executed.

Back when I ran my anime site, there were times I'd have to force myself through a series for a review. I'm not entirely sure why I'm still watching this one, since I no longer have any such obligation - even self-imposed.

All This Has Happened Before

I will admit to being a little disappointed with the ending of Battlestar Galactica. Not as disappointed (or enraged, as the case may be) as some "fans" were when the final season came to a close, but it did feel like the religious implications made by the finale were somehow out of place with the rest of the series.

Having rewatched the first season-and-a-half over the last couple of days, I'm not stunned that any of us expected anything other than a faith-heavy conclusion.

There is so much stuff that can only be explained by supernatural forces at work, if not full-blown divine intervention. Gaius Baltar's continued existence can only be the result of either the least-believable chain of unbelievable luck, or the hand of God. The visions of Laura Roslin and the predictions in the Scrolls of Pythia are too perfectly-aligned to be mere coincidence.

I suppose the "dumb luck" theory could hold more weight if there was any evidence in the show of anything other than divine intervention that could possibly explain how Gaius knows the things he does ahead of time (told to him, in most cases, by Head Six - who calls herself an Angel of God's Will on at least one occasion), how Leoben predicts the fleet's discovery of Kobol, or any one of the dozens of prophecies that come true.

I recall the third and fourth seasons drifting away from the spiritual focus of the first two, so maybe the shift to "proper" scifi was a bit of a bait-and-switch. But sitting through the early part of the show again, the ultimate ending seems much more appropriate than it did at the time.

Which isn't to say it's perfect; I don't like how upbeat a lot of it is, and the modern-day coda with the Baltar and Six angels in New York is really dumb.

Kill La Kill

Cards on the table: I f--king love this show.

Even knowing that it's a product of the minds behind Panty and Stocking and Gurren Lagann, the energy, style and above all else the confidence exploding out of every frame is incredible; the fight choreography is a step above almost anything I've ever seen in animation, even if the budget doesn't quite do it justice.

But there's a lot of subtext to the story that makes me… not uncomfortable exactly, but unsure of my footing.

Spoilers follow.

Social Links

Warning: Spoilers ahead for Mass Effect 3 and Persona 4 Golden.

So much for that plan

I started off 2013 with the intention of writing something - anything - on this blog every day. I didn't even manage three whole months. I missed one day in March, four in April, and after that I just kind of ran out of steam.

I have an idea why. Part of the reason I wanted to try writing more regularly was because of a website project I had turning over at the back of my mind, but it would be a big commitment and I wanted to make sure I could keep up the volume of writing it would require. I also wanted to get better at writing, and that means writing more. The down side of this approach - writing for a purpose, rather than just for the sake of it - is that I wanted everything I posted to be interesting. I should have just sat down and picked something and wrote about it and published that. Of course, you need feedback for that, and I can't take critism well, so I never really told anybody that I was doing it, never asked for feedback, never shared what I'd put up here.

Another side effect of the "wanting to be interesting" thing was the number of posts I started, abandoned and deleted because I couldn't say exactly what I meant consisely; I didn't want to have thousands of words of anime backstory before I could explain my dilemmas about Kill La Kill, but getting my point across for a reader unfamiliar with the show is difficult (another problem: I don't know what, if any, audience this thing has). I've had a post about agnosticism sitting in draft status since February 7th, 2013 because I can't figure out how to explain myself.

In 2013 I published 138 posts - which is one every 2.64 days. I don't think I ever expected to actually reach 365, but I'm still disappointed that I didn't get more done. Still, that's almost as much as I wrote between the start of 2005 and the end of 2012, so I'm not thatbothered.

I'm going to try again this year. Hopefully I'll make it longer than the 29th of March before skipping a day, this time.

Present day... Present time.

Over a decade ago, the first anime DVDs I bought were American imports - the Pioneer boxset of Serial Experiments Lain. The day it arrived, my two brothers and I watched the whole series on a PC in a bedroom in my parents' house, in a single sitting.

Until last week, I hadn't seen it a second time, despite a few aborted attempts at rewatches. I'm not sure why I found it so difficult to get into between the first viewing and now, but I was home on my own and having already burned through Puella Magi Madoka Magica at the start of the week I figured it was as good a time as any to park myself in front of a screen for five hours, and give Lain another shot.

The first time through, I realise now, I was not paying attention. I didn't really follow the story, couldn't understand much of the subtext, and missed many of the references and hints scattered throughout the series. It's an overwhelming show for the unprepared mind, and I certainly wasn't prepared.

This time, I had the benefit of a decade's worth of thinking, reading and talking about the show as a foundation, and a familiarity with the order of events that meant I could focus more on the philosophical aspects - but for the first eight episodes or so, I was still feeling incredibly out of my depth. It wasn't until "God" makes his appearance that the ideas started to gel together, and having reached the end (and thought about it for a few more days) I have a proper theory about the whole thing¹.

There's still a lot of the show that feels like misdirection, though - and a few things that remain unexplained, even at the end. At least two thirds of the show is philosophy for its own sake and worldbuilding, bringing up more ideas than it ever intends to fully address - and remains totally unapologetic about it. It doesn't feel like those threads are abandoned or incomplete, however - while it's far from a "coherent" work, the questions you're left with are the same ones Lain herself faces throughout the show - and even she doesn't understand everything when the final credits roll.

I know I've got to rewatch it again at some point, with my theory in hand ready to see how well it holds up against the whole thing. I just hope it doesn't take me another ten years to get around to it.

¹ I'm not going to post it here because spoilers.

Valvrave the Liberator

This is the story of teenage mecha-pilot body-jacking space vampires fighting immortal Space Nazis. In space.

Incredibly, that synopsis does not encapsulate half of the wall-to-wall batshit weirdness that is Valvrave the Liberator. I'm having a difficult time thinking of any other show that has taken quite as much pleasure from setting up a cliche and then taking a hard right to crazytown before it gets there.

The first episode opens like it's a high-school romantic comedy; if it wasn't for the mecha in the OP you'd be rightly surprised when it turns out that their school is on a politically-neutral space station and then under attack from the aforementioned Space Nazis for no adequately-explained reason.

Immediately after his primary love interest is hit by an enemy missile¹, our intrepid hero, Haruto, climbs aboard a mech that suddenly appeared from underground, resigns his humanity², and proceeds to slaughter dozens of the attackers with little remorse.

The episode ends when, after being shot and apparently killed, Haruto comes back to life and bites an enemy spy, taking control of his body.

Every time I've thought that I'm finding my feet in this show, it changes its game. The first few episodes are straightforward (..ish) mecha combat, but then there's a break in episode five where the students sing a pop song in an attempt to gain PR points with another country to help defend themselves against the Space Nazis. There's a Galactica-style detour into the political process of the newly-independent Module 77 when they hold elections. The enemy spy possessed by Haruto in the early episodes, L-Elf³ becomes a military advisor for the colony, against his former allies.

I wasn't sure that I liked the show to begin with, but the longer I've followed along the more intrigued I've become. At this point, there's only one episode left in the second season and no news of a third; I just have to find out how the hell they're planning to wrap up the story, let alone adequately explain a 200-year flash-forward from the start of the second season.

¹ By the end of the second episode it is revealed that she pulled a Norwegian Blue and was, in fact, only resting - in the most disappointing anime resurrection since Attack on Titan.

² When he first enters the machine, he has to answer "yes" to the question "Do you resign from humanity?" in order to start it; he is then given superpowers including immortality and the ability to take control of someone else's body by biting them.

³ Or, as he's known on r/anime, "ERUERUFU".

Nice Boat

There's something of a running joke on r/anime that, when a user asks for a recommendation to introduce a parent/work colleague/friend to the medium, someone will suggest School Days.

Based on a visual novel, the show follows a high school student's attempts to woo a girl he sees on the train to school every day, with the help of a classmate. This setup lasts for all of an episode before things take a turn for the complicated, and the series ends with the most… unconventional resolutions to a love triangle.

Spoilers follow.

Torture in an open world

There have been a lot of articles recently about the content of Grand Theft Auto V, and how it reflects on, approves of, encourages and/or influences the behaviour of its audience. A torture scene is being called out as particularly problematic.

I've still not played the game - I hope to borrow a copy from someone at work eventually, but I'm not going to buy, implicitly supporting, Dan Houser's… output - but there's certainly a question about how necessary it is to portray torture in a piece of entertainment, and how necessary it is that the player participates in it.

One of the main problems with this conversation in the context of Grand Theft Auto as a series is that it's difficult to take it seriously. The previous games have always positioned themselves as parodies of their cinematic forebears (best exemplified by Vice City's wholesale appropriation of the plot of Scarface). But it's never been a series with a message; indeed it seems like the developers encourage people to shrug any controversy off with "it's just a silly game".

In the context of Spec Ops: The Line, you can make a point about the willingness of players to go along with objectives unquestioningly, no matter the outcome - in that instant, it's essential to the theme that the player takes action. It's much harder to communicate a point about the consequences of your actions in a game like GTA because the whole thing is a celebration of consequence-free activity.

The minor penalties visited on you for breaking the law - which only come after an exhilarating car chase, trying to outwit and escape the police, and even then only if you fail to get away - are far from prohibitive. You lose some money and your weapons, but you always come back with a clean slate.

With that in mind, it's difficult to see what point, if any, Rockstar are trying to make by including a torture scene. It doesn't seem to serve any narrative purpose - in fact a number of comments online suggest it's actually out of character for the player's avatar to go along with it - and it can't, by the nature of GTA itself, have any long-term implications for the player or characters.

The only possible conclusion is that it was included for people to talk about, to drive up controversy. Which is hardly a first for the series, but the original Grand Theft Auto's playground wasn't trying as hard as Rockstar's latest to take a place alongside mature cinema.