Otakuism

This post contains a ton of spoilers for Blassreiter up to episode 15.

The first half of Blassreiter has been fairly intriguing at best, featuring some pretty cool fights marred by a lot of melodrama and the poor video quality I am forced to watch. So as the mid-season mark approaches Blassreiter follows the iron rule for most tokusatsu (and mecha) series: time for some pruning and a complete change of pace. So the show kills off most of its cast and introduces a tragic background for the rest. And by tragic, I mean incredibly horrible deaths involving many children. I’ll explain.

First off, Wolf finally goes full Demoniac and betrays all of XAT be infecting all its members, except Hermann and Amanda who were in solitary confinement. The new Demoniacs precede to rampage across the city destroying everything. Brad, Al, and the other infected but still human members of XAT fight to get Hermann and Amanda out alive, and the two manage to escape in a helicopter. Everyone else is killed by Demoniacs or Wolf. The worst part of this is that Wolf tries to use Brad’s love interest Lene, who was just introduced a couple episodes earlier, to kill Brad by taking over her Paladin, a transforming motorcyle/robot. Instead of turning her into a Demoniac and saving her Brad instead shoots her in the head with the special bullet he received from her on their first mission. He is then gutted by Wolf. That’s just the beginning.

Elsewhere, Meifing, a minor character so far, reveals she is a double agent with the real organization Zwolf, for which XAT was just a public front (it’s basically the SEELE of Blassreiter, german and all). With her high-tech jet she decides to nuke the city to kill Wolf, not even trying to save the friends she had been working with. Hermann and Amanda’s helicopter is damaged in the explosion and Hermann forcibly ejects Amanda in her own Paladin, while he dies when the copter crashes. A now alone Amanda finds Jacob again and learns his back story.

Joseph was an orphan raised by a church that helped Outsiders, outsiders being any undesirable peoples that are treated like shit. Apparently world war 2 never happened in Blassreiter cause everyone in Germany is still racist. Not the most accurate or flattering depiction of the country. As a boy Joseph allows himself to be beaten up all the time by these really evil kids just so their families will donate money to the church orphanage. Even when a wandering pastry chef tries to help Joseph the kids push the pastry chef into the river with his cart falling on top of him, putting him in the hospital. They then push the blame onto Joseph. If ever there were people you wanted to physically reach into the screen and strangle, it’d be these kids.

Later on Joseph meets Xargin while helping an Outsider community displaced by a flood and also meets his sister he never knew about, Sasha, who originally made the blassreiter nanomachines. Everything is good until the kids in the community get scarlet fever. They have no money for antibiotics so Joseph and Xargin go to steal some and are caught by the police, but let go due to Sasha’s research. While this is going on the kids find out that they’re parents are starving themselves to feed their kids. The kids feel terrible about this and sell the antibiotics for food. Of course, the scarlet fever comes back and since the kids sold the medicine they all die. Yes, every single kid dies. They even show them all being carried away in caskets. Oh, and Sasha is beaten to death by a mob for being an Outsider.

This all drives Xargin crazy, so he takes the nanomachines, blows stuff up, infects Joseph, and then leaves to destroy the world. This leads us to the modern day. The series now takes place with both Amanda and Joseph working for Zwolf. Zwolf has three super high tech mecha, Meifing’s jet being one of them, all piloted by cyborgs. One of the cyborg’s just happens to be Joseph’s sister Sasha, who didn’t actually die. She convinces Joseph to go through excruciating torture so he can get his mid-season powerup. She also promises to kill him after Xargin is dead. And the best part is that Zwolf is actually a modern day incarnation of the Knights Templar, so now we got religious fanatics fighting against Xargin, a religious fanatic himself who is trying to bring about the apocalypse and recruit his own four horsemen.

So, I think Blassreiter succeeded in its change of pace. It will be interesting to see how Joseph evolves now since he’s basically being made to lose control of his blassreiter form. There’s also Zwolf, who definitely have an alternative motive behind everything their doing, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they turn out to be the big bad boss at the end, with the Director transforming into a hulking monstrosity per tokusatsu tradition. And there’s even more CG galore now, so anyone who couldn’t stand the first episode probably should still stand away. Aside from that Blassreiter is a pretty entertaining, if very pulpy, sci-fi adventure. Can’t wait to see where it goes from here. I did prefer the old OP, though.

And this is a pretty cool MAD featuring clips from the first half of the show. The song is White Night, the OP to Nitroplus’s early game Vjedogonia, which is very similar to Blassreiter:

IKnights article about his love of Karin got me thinking about if there was some forgotten or maligned anime I’ve seen that, despite my own high standards, I loved anyways. So I go to check out my MAL anime list and it turns out there’s not just one show that fits the bill, there’s a slew of shows that make me wonder how I ever finished them AND enjoyed them.

For instance, there’s Dragonaut, the most maligned series in recent memory (ie. from two seasons ago) and for good reason. It is a sloppy mess of a story filled with big boobs and bad CG. Admittedly it was probably the boobs that got me to watch the show, standards mean nothing before hormones, but I did finish it because I liked the characters and the story, however awful it was. There’s Grenadier, a show whose main selling point was that the heroine reloaded her gun just be swishing her breasts around. A pattern may be developing here actually.

Continuing on, there’s Elemental Gelade, which I doubt many remember. If there was ever a definition of generic fantasy anime then Gelade is it. Still, I watched all of it, no doubt helped along by how insatiably moe Rin is. Also had a great OP. Then there’s Gift ~eternal rainbow~, yet another eroge adaption that was probably forgotten because Kanon was airing at the same time. I can’t remember how I even started watching it or what drove me to complete it. It’s pretty average - there’s probably worse eroge shows - and to its own merit it has a few good Kaede moments towards the end. Keep in mind I also couldn’t finish ef, the eroge darling before Clannad started, which really says something about my slippery standards. Then there’s Mai-Otome…well, we all got duped into watching that so I can’t say much there.

Apart from the genuinely bad shows I enjoyed, there’s also the many goods ones that were for whatever reason tragically ignored. I will sing the praises of Bartender to the hills and back as one of the most brilliant adult pieces of anime ever made, but people easily dismissed it for not owning up to its epic hype, which admittedly I also fed. Betterman is the only anime I’ve ever seen that actually has horror that makes me huddle down in my seat, but because it’s old and mecha and had a somewhat whiny protagonist it’s forgotten.

Ufotable’s Futakoi Alternative is probably the best dramatic-romantic-comedy I’ve seen but many people just tuned it out, mainly for refusing to settle down into one category. Even when a show that defies genre conventions comes around people still ignore it for not following the same conventions they were already railing against. That’s more a fault with people in general, actually. Finally there’s Skull Man, which was a perfectly plotted dark and mature show. It was also based on a one-shot tokusatsu story written in 1970 from the guy who made Kamen Rider, so there wasn’t much hope for it to begin with. And then there’s all the old shows I’ve seen, but they’re old so nobody cares.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned after so much blogging and so much watching, of both good and bad, it’s that anime really is the most subjective form of art. Objectively people will point to some work - invariably Hayao Miyazaki comes up a lot - and say “look! That’s the best of anime right there,” but that doesn’t work out. Anime is made of so many diverse elements - design, animation, characters, story, voice, merchandising - that even the worse show can have one element that some person out there will love it for. So, really, none of us should feel guilty for liking one show or entitled to like another one just because it’s critically acclaimed. In my head I call it the Aesthetics of Likeability, but if I really understood aesthetics could I actually have watched and enjoyed Dragonaut? Now that’s a question that requires some deep soul searching, which I don’t have time for cause I’m going to go watch some Kamen no Maid Guy.

Is it possible to love a show just for one man’s voice? Cause I tell you Norio Wakamoto just made this episode perfect. The Emperor had more lines this episode than the rest of the show combined, and they were all so awesome. I don’t know how Lelouch plans to defeat the Emperor when all he can do is cower like a little school girl before his awesome, powerful voice. LE-LOOOOSH!

It’s also perfectly normal to freak out after killing the man you’ve been meaning to kill for 39 episodes, instead of, say, dancing a little victory jig over his corpse.

I have no idea why C.C. needs to be naked in this scene, but I’m not complaining. There’s probably still more to the Geass mystery (oh look Jupiter’s hanging out in the sky), but with C.C. all amnesiafied we won’t find out anything more for a while. Code Geass now returns you to your regularly scheduled political thriller, and I use political lightly.

Another season under my belt just in time for the special episodes being released with the manga. Then again, who knows when we’ll see those. I think I understand what I really enjoy about Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei now. It’s not the retro-avant garde art style courtesy of Shaft, though the animation certainly is nice. It’s not the great characters everywhere (Komori is the best hikikomori ever). It’s not even the insanely awesome OP’s. It’s that the show can bring up the most random topic or observation and I immediately think it’s true.

Take for instance the “maybe, maybe fraud” of episode ten. It’s all about how when one person says a ridiculous idea might work everyone else thinks it will too. As the episode went on I realized “hey this is completely true. I see this all the time!” SZS has the perfect way of satirizing society in the most insane ways possible, but no matter how weird it gets there’s still the ring to truth to it. Even the downright bizarre Zetsubou Fight segment from episode nine, the weirdest segment the show has ever done, has some depressing truth in it (which basically says we’re all going to kill each other).

SZS is probably the weirdest, most experimental anime to come out in years. I don’t know if it can be enjoyed by everybody. You’ll probably want to start with the first season, though, since technically I am reviewing the second season. For everybody else who already watched and enjoyed the first season, then what are you waiting for? Zoku Sayonara Sensei is even more spastic, ludicrous, and surreally great comedy that is unlike anything else being done today.

NPR did a short segment on the amazing popularity of graphic novels, and of course manga is featured as an integral part of that explosion. There’s nothing really new or interesting to the segment, but about halfway through a line from an anime is played, and as soon as I heard it I swore I had heard it before. Lo and behold, it was a line from Takemoto of Honey & Clover. He always did have such unique ways of speaking. But the interesting thing is, where did they get a recording of Honey & Clover when the anime isn’t out in the US? Is there some secret otaku out there in the NPR offices? You can listen to the segment here.

I actually stopped watching Zoku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei at episode 5 back when it was airing (shame I know) due to - what else? - lack of subs. But now I’m finally getting back to it and finishing it off. Episode 7 really is the most experimental one so far, what with the channel changing segment and the differing animation styles at the end. The clay animation part was particularly surreal, even somewhat disturbingly so. Komori with an older brother was the best joke. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that much emotion from her voice. And like most random things featured in ZSZS, I kind of want a Lily Cure anime now.

Now that’s a yell.