Just when you thought that the shark had been jumped, a NEW shark appears beneath the soaring motorcycle

Anime all too often sucks because it’s too much about sneaking soft-core porn into an adventure story.

Mind you, adventure fiction has had a huge porn component for a long, long time. Gothic fiction was pretty close to bodice-ripper porn even before King Solomon’s Mines invented modern adventure fiction, and once R. E. Howard started writing, it was pretty much heaving bosoms and mighty thews all around.

So I won’t complain that adventure fiction USED to be pure and non-sexual. That was true only for a small subset written by guys like Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle.

The second season of Durarara jumped the shark by putting a threesome romance into the main story.

That’s soft-core porn territory; at that point, the action-adventure fights are just a distraction.

But shows like Durarara require me to care about the characters. The whole point of a character like Anri is that she’s supposed to have tragic feelings and a deep need for meaningful love that the male hero has a chance to satisfy.

There are two problems here.

Jungle de Ikou!

 

Experiments in the Revival of Organisms

Armitage the Feminist

http://myanimelist.net/anime/1079/Armitage_III

Armitage starts off with a rather silly stripperific costume, but she gets different clothes as the story goes on.

A serviceable little story with Yet Another Amnesiac Heroine

It is dangerously easy for grimdark stories to get excessively grim. This can go wrong in a number of ways. Sometimes the audience is just so crushed that the angst dulls their appreciation of the story; more often, the angst is too amateurish, and it turns into Wangst.

Sometimes, even if the writer(s) can avoid Wangst and Anvilicious Sledgehammer Angst, the story can get hung up on unpersuasive stylistic tics.

If the audience is constantly snapped back into criticism mode, immersion is not possible.

(E.g.: Dr. Adder is a story all about sexual tics that would have been shocking in 1962; it was shocking when it was written, circa 1970, but it was already badly out of date by the time it finally found a publisher brave enough to print it – in 1984. One can still read it – it’s not a bad style piece – but it’s like critiquing a student project – everything feels artificial and hollow. The constant writing about sex seems to be the author venting his own neuroses rather than telling a story.)
 

By contrast, Battle Angel Alita is a dark, brooding cyberpunk noir story that isn’t afraid to use shopworn stereotypes, starting with the amnesiac heroine, which has got to be one of the most over-used stereotypes in modern history. Nonetheless, the story works. It’s a workmanlike little piece. The two-episode OVA introduces a serviceable Action Girl heroine. It’s very believable that she’s a super-warrior, because she’s not a woman, except for her brain, her blood, and perhaps a few auxiliary organs. She’s mostly a hyper-advanced combat cyborg, so her body is just super-strong and super-fast, with excellent combat instincts.

This is a show that introduces us to a likeable warrior character – technically female, but I get the feeling that the author understands fight scenes and doesn’t really understand mushy emotional stuff. The heroine isn’t really a sexual being – she has a good heart, and mushy feelings of loyalty and friendship, but she’s a childish symbol of adventure, not a realistic character with convincingly-depicted sexual needs.

I’m not about to go and seek out the manga – the OVA wasn’t that fascinating – but it’s a decent little story. I can guess that the manga goes on for volume after volume of repetitious comic-book style fist-fights between super-powered cyborgs.

Just because you’ve ripped off Blade Runner, that’s not enough to make you cyberpunk

There are a couple of things that bother me about A D Police.

For one thing, there’s supposed to be a “tion” in “Extention,” as in, “Voodoo Organic Metal Extention Resources.”

For another thing, even if they ripped off Blade Runner, that doesn’t mean that it’s really a noir story. Maybe it’s a little bit on the hardboiled side, but there isn’t enough black-and-grey morality to make it really gritty.

Garo the standard theme: learning the TRUE meaning of “to protect”

Sometimes when we talk about sappy writing, we summarize stereotypes by saying, “He learns the TRUE meaning of FRIENDSHIP.” We mean to say that the story is using themes that are suitable for small children; we imply that we have seen these stereotypes a million times before and we’re getting pretty bored.

Garo has this problem, a bit, but somehow it’s still fairly charming. The protagonist is learning the TRUE meaning of “to protect.” In theory, fictional action heroes are always supposed to be protecting something. In practice, action fiction sells because it stimulates our primal need for violence. There’s no need to pretend that we know about ethics or hard decisions, unless we are TV producers selling a stupid show to the parents of our target audience of six-year-old consumers.

A good fiction writer is just a competent propagandist. The fact that he’s good at propagandizing suckers doesn’t mean that he uses his skills for the truth. Even if he wants to tell the truth, he probably doesn’t know what the truth is.

Parasyte the breather episode

Episode 21 is well-written and it satisfies the needs of the overall story.

We can’t object to such episodes.

But I have consumed too much fiction, and if the fiction does not distract me enough, I will notice the tool marks on the artwork.

 

The screenshot might display incorrectly, but it shows a heavy-handed theme getting dropped into the show. That’s fine: a serious show needs serious themes. But I can’t help but snap out of the suspension of disbelief long enough to register the theme.

In theory, this is the kind of art that I demand, when I complain about how most anime isn’t serious enough. And yet somehow I don’t like this show as much as I thought I might.

Is such a thing even possible? Yes it is.

People who have been watching Shirobako will not be surprised to see that Andes Chucky had a real-life inspiration

If you’ve been watching Shirobako, you’ve noticed references to the fictional show “Andes Chucky,” which is a fictionalized “Bland Name” referring to a real-life classic: