Edited by The Davoo

It’s time that we address the elephant in the room–the elephant so large that none of us even realized it was standing over us at first; like that scene in that shitty Godzilla movie where the camera pans out and you realize they’re all standing in Godzilla’s footprint.

It’s time for us to look at Ayato Amagiri; yeah, that’s right, I actually learned his full name just for this. Ayato is quite possibly one of, if not THE single worst anime protagonist that I’ve ever seen.

I know, that sounds unbelievable. How, in a world with so many awful protagonists, can this guy be the worst? Well, to clarify, I’m not saying that he’s the most hateable or the worst fit for the story that he’s a part of–rather, I think that he is one of the most incoherently constructed anime characters that I’ve ever thought about. And worse yet, it’s not at all obvious.

At a glance, you could probably name a hundred characters whom Ayato reminds you of. He’s a ridiculously overpowered badass who solves everyone’s problems and gets all the girls, like Kirito and Onii-sama; and he’s a sexless virginal weirdo like 90% of all harem protagonists. But the thing about Ayato is that it’s not so much that he’s just like one of those other characters, as it is that he’s just like ALL of those other characters. Ayato Amagiri is a hideous frankenstein monster of anime protagonists so baffling in his construction that if the creators told me that he was meant to be a parody of the typical light novel protagonist, then I’d be inclined to believe them–and to congratulate them on a job well done. Allow me to examine the patchwork of this monstrosity.

Ayato’s baseline state of being is that he’s tired and bored. He sighs whenever he has to do anything or put up with anyone, and generally seems like he’d rather be taking a nap then doing whatever the show asks of him. This kind of attitude is pretty typical among Light Novel Guys, because it’s a part of the image that the viewer is supposed to project onto–this sort of hipster-y desire to not come off as a try-hard, so that whenever you do something badass, it looks like you did it with no effort and without even really giving a shit.

It’s possible to make a great character following this archetype–Yoshihiro Togashi seems to be a master of it. Yusuke Urameshi was a punk kid who just wanted to relax and take life at his own pace, but the world was constantly asking more of him; and what made him endearing was to watch him mature into someone who gave a shit about the world around him. He learned to become that guy by getting the shit kicked out of him constantly, even in the process of being a badass cool guy. Killua was a ludicrously powerful amoral assassin kid who couldn’t give a shit about anyone except for his friend Gon–but the push and pull of realizing what kind of hardships come with caring about someone brought all sorts of emotions out of him.

Of course, in both of these examples, Togashi came at the characters from the perspective of an older person who can see through all the bullshit that teenagers project about themselves, and both criticize that attitude as well as show how those kids can grow up. The Asterisk War feels like it was actually written by a teenager with no self-awareness, writing a character who somehow manages to be the nicest, most helpful, most powerful, best guy ever, while still maintaining that standoffish, too-cool-to-get-involved attitude most of the time.

Now, if you’ve been watching this show, then describing Ayato as I just have may seem like a mischaracterization. This is a guy whose primary motivation is that he’s searching for a purpose in life; and who finds that purpose in deciding to protect his friend. He leaps into battle for his friends without hesitation and is so dedicated to helping people that he jumped into a girl’s window just to return her dropped handkerchief. He doesn’t seem at all like the standoffish, too cool to care type of guy… right? Well, that’s the issue. He’s not.

For the most part, Ayato’s personality is more akin to a typical shounen protagonist. He’s the type of guy who’s spent most of his life having a strong sense of morality drilled into his head by his older sister. He can’t help himself but to step in and help people with their problems without a second thought, no matter how minor those problems may be. He’s driven by a quest for purpose, and is inspired by the purpose that he sees in the people around him. Everything about his upbringing and personality suggests a person who sees helping others as a part of who he is.

So why is he so bored all the time? Why does he seem to find people so hard to deal with? If he’s all about helping people, then why does helping people seem like such a hassle to him?

This kind of dichotomy is present in a lot of light novel protagonists. Touma from Index is always presented as someone who considers it a hassle to deal with people; but in the end he can’t stand to see them in trouble, so his morals end up tugging at him until he jumps in to help. Kirito was always presented as this sort of amoral misanthrope who didn’t want to help people because he can’t stand the pain of losing them; but for one reason or another he’d end up caring about people and fighting for them.

But with these characters, we at least understood that their morality is some kind of struggle which doesn’t come innately to them. Each of these characters would rather be doing something else, but they get dragged into these situations by circumstance. Ayato is presented as though the same thing is true for him as well, but his personality and goals are totally at ends with that. His main motivation literally is to protect people, and nothing about him would suggest that he’s anything less than a kindhearted, morally upstanding person–except for that fact that it also seems like doing anything is a huge pain in the ass to him.

That’s what I mean when I say that Ayato is a frankenstein monster of light novel characters. He is somehow at once the big, valiant hero who wants to fight for a purpose and protect the people he cares about, while also being the jaded asshole who’d rather do anything other than fight or care.

Another thing which Ayato has in common with his genre contemporaries is that he’s ludicrously overpowered in comparison to everyone else in the show. We’re not just talking about a guy who wins every fight that he gets into–we’re talking about a guy who completely overwhelms most of his opponents–many of whom are established as the most powerful fighters in the city–even with severe limitations holding him back.

In Ayato’s introductory scene, he makes the fifth-strongest fighter at his school look like a chump, by easily deflecting all of her attacks and then saving her from an assassin. In episode four, said fighter is pinned by another student whom, by the show’s logic, ought to have been much weaker than her, but nevermind that; Ayato shows up and defeats him without taking a scratch, and spends the entire battle carrying Julis in one of his arms. Yeah, that shit happens. In episode five, he loses to the most powerful fighter in the school because he gets distracted and forgets the rules of battle; so in episode seven he defeats her and takes her place as the number one. At least that fight seemed like it took a little bit of effort–but at this point, Ayato is proven both the strongest fighter at his school, and, by that logic, probably one of the top ten fighters in the city.

Bear in mind that all of this is Ayato’s baseline power level. This guy hasn’t spent any time beefing up or training or anything–no one at this school was competition for him in the first place. In episode two he tames the most powerful weapon that the school possesses without breaking a sweat. In preparation for the Festa, it seems more like he’s training Julis to try and catch up to him, more so than actually training himself to get better.

But Ayato’s power does come with a catch, as we learn in episode four. Apparently, his older sister has put some kind of curse on him that limits his supposedly uncontrollable powers; and when he goes too far beyond those limits, then it causes him to crash in a painful burst. Allow me to detail all of the reasons that this is the worst excuse for a power limitation I’ve ever heard.

1. Ayato doesn’t even lose control of his powers when unleashing them. It’s possible that maybe his sister had intended to remove these limitations once he was old enough to master his powers; but either way, there is currently no consequence for using them.
2. The problem that comes from using this power only appears after it’s already been used. Ayato can potentially defeat any opponent using this power, and it will only affect him once the battle is over, at an indeterminate time.
3. The very first time that we’re introduced to this limitation is after Ayato has already exceeded it. He says that he’s never been able to use the power for as long as he did in that first battle, meaning that the limitation is flexible and can be broken to fit the situation.
4. Likewise, the source of power is so ill-defined that it could potentially grow infinitely. We have no reason to believe that Ayato can’t just continually unleash more and more power to match the situation based on how motivated he is or whatever.

Ayato’s limitation barely even qualifies as a limitation; if anything, it seems to suggest that he can be as powerful as he needs to be at any given time, so he’ll always be able to turn the tide in any battle with the odds against him. Moreover, he barely even needs this power in the first place to conquer most of his opponents. It would be laughable to consider that Ayato may ever be in danger during any of his encounters unless he had to fight someone with the same powers that he has–and even then, it’s hard to imagine that anyone relevant will ever be in danger in this show.

Now, I don’t doubt that these limitations are going to come into play in future battles to try and add to the tension–in fact, I’ve read some spoilers, so I know that to be true–and by the time this video comes out, it will probably already be true in the anime. My point is more that this is how Ayato is established–as someone so much more powerful than everyone else that even his limitations are suggestive of even larger capabilities. And going by the spoilers I’ve read, his power level is only going to get even more utterly insane as the series continues. This character takes the wish-fulfillment aspects of the light novel protagonist to a far-away extreme–which is why he only gets weirder when we start looking at his sex life.

There seems to be a trend in light novels lately of filling the main character’s harem with girls who would otherwise be the strongest characters in the story, if not for the main guy. The wish fulfillment aspect of this is obvious–you get to date all of the hottest, coolest, most powerful women around, while still outdoing all of them and keeping your position as an alpha dude. At the end of the day, when the chips are down, you get to swoop in and save the girls like the big hero that you are, but you don’t have to feel bad about being attracted to a damsel in distress, because she could totally kick anyone’s ass on a good day. It’s all about striking that balance between having so-called “strong female characters,” while also promoting the male power fantasy that young guys who watch this stuff are looking for.

Naturally, all of the relevant female characters are attracted to Ayato–in this case, usually for no reason whatsoever. It’s almost creepy the way this show just takes for granted that any woman with a speaking role would have to be a part of the main character’s harem without even really convincing us of why any of them would care about him beforehand. Nevertheless, you could reasonably make the case for why these girls might fall for him–and given the type of show that this is, it would hardly be shocking that they do; but that’s not the part that makes him weird.

The weird part, rather, is how Ayato keeps his distance from these girls. Once again, it’s something that the show takes for granted because it’s a common trope in anime that the main characters remain virginal weirdos for the majority of the series; but the way that this show presents this aspect of the relationships is what makes it come across as strange. To explain what I mean, I present this scene from the start of episode three.

Claudia calls Ayato up to her room in the middle of the night, and deliberately times it so that she’s just gotten out of the shower when he enters. After several minutes of Claudia showing off her body and Ayato clearly checking her out, Claudia outright comes onto him, basically propositioning him for sex and placing his hand on her breast. Ayato… runs away.

Now, I am not going to deny the possibility that perhaps Ayato is uncomfortable with the idea of sex, or even that he’s just not ready for that kind of contact. I’m not necessarily saying that any of this behavior is unreasonable, or even that it’s out of character. I just don’t quite get it.

Ayato is an unstoppably badass fighter. He’s confident, somewhat outgoing, and has no trouble talking to people he’s never met, including women. He’s not awkward in the slightest for the most part, and he seems to get along with all of the girls just fine. He’s clearly attracted to all of them, and gets flustered when he sees them naked–but it seems like he gets that way out of something like a moral obligation; like, when he catches them undressed or soaking wet, he feels bad that he saw them in a compromising way without their permission.

But then we come to this scene, where Claudia is clearly coming onto him and basically asking him to do something. Even if Ayato wasn’t interested in doing anything with her, it would’ve been reasonable to at least say something or to talk about it–but instead he just runs away all flustered, like he saw something he shouldn’t have. If I were Claudia, I’d probably feel insulted after this guy just checked me out for three minutes and then took off without saying a word. I’ve thought long and hard about why the character would be written this way, and I think I kind of understand.

See, when I was thirteen–a time during which I probably would’ve enjoyed a show like this–I was old enough to know that I found women attractive, but I hadn’t quite yet gotten my head around the concept of sex. I still felt like it was some sort of adult thing that I wasn’t supposed to know about, even as I vaguely understood that it was something which I wanted. Since that was the age I was when I first got big into anime, I can actually remember things like how I was always afraid to buy anime with full frontal nudity in it because I was ashamed of it, even though I was always checking out the cute girls in the shows that I did watch. Around that time when I was acclimating to the idea of sexuality, I think I would’ve totally been into a show like this where the sexual content is evident, yet kind of immature and childish. I might not have been able to relate to a hero who actually had sex, but I could project myself onto one who was surrounded by it.

It’s because of that experience that I understand why Ayato ran away from Claudia’s sexual advancements. It really has nothing to do with what makes sense for the characters, and everything to do with what works for the audience. The kind of kid who looks for the sort of wish fulfillment that this show provides is probably pretty young, and probably a virgin. In spite of their desire to be an all-powerful badass and the object of affection for a bunch beautiful women, the idea of what they’d actually do in a moment of intimacy is still alien to them.

What makes this particular scene so weird, though, is that something like this even happened in this way in a show of this nature. Sure, harem characters find themselves in sexual situations all the time, but there’s usually some kind of reason–however stupid–for why the situation doesn’t amount to anything. Usually, it’s because the girl is embarrassed. Sometimes, it’s because the guy is outright not interested in the girl, or because her personality is really extreme and the situation has gotten out of hand. Sometimes, there’s like a rule in place that prohibits the characters from going any further. Sometimes, there’s one girl that the main character is most attracted to or otherwise has to answer to, or he likes all of the girls and is afraid of choosing one of them.

This scene with Ayato running from Claudia doesn’t have any logical thread to it. Ayato hasn’t shown any affection for any of the girls yet; and as far as we know, he’s not particularly interested in any one of them over the others. There isn’t any circumstance for why he wouldn’t be able to do anything with her, and it even seems like he’s attracted to her physically. Her personality isn’t very extreme, and she certainly isn’t embarrassed about it–so what is he running from?

Again, I’m not saying that it’s totally unreasonable to make this a part of his character; but what I got out of this scene was not that Amagiri Ayato is afraid of sex. What I got out of it is that this is what’s expected to happen in a harem show. It’s been so normalized that the fanservice scenes in a series like this won’t lead to anything that we’re not even expected to question it when the main character runs out on a sexual advance. It’s just how these things work.

Once again, this is what I mean when I say that Ayato is a frankenstein monster of generic anime protagonists. His character isn’t constructed in a way that logically fits together; he’s just a random combination of everything that these kinds of characters are known for. He’s a cosmic badass, but he’s also a shy virgin. He’s the nicest person in the world, but he’s too cool to care about anything. He’s all of the wish fulfillment tropes that every other character embodies, all rolled up into one guy that no one can actually relate to. Even Kirito–a character that I’ve been ragging on constantly for the past year and a half–was consistent enough to help out only when he felt like had to, and to have sex with the girl who climbed into his bed. This Ayato guy is so confusing that I can’t even imagine what he’d be like if I threw him into another situation. Would he run away from Julis if she came onto him like that? I honestly have no idea.

There’s a line in episode three where Julis says to Ayato, “you’re unfathomable, aren’t you?” –and I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I would honestly be willing to accept that to some extent, Ayato was designed to be that way. For being the main character of the story, the show tries its damndest to make him seem mysterious, and to disclose as little as it can about his past–though it kind of does that with everyone. Enough of the characters seem to regard him as something different that I can’t help wondering if he’s supposed to just be this huge weirdo. I’m a lot more inclined to believe that he’s meant to be someone for young guys who are both morally upright but also want to be seen as giant badasses to project themselves onto; but this is one character who’s managed to stump me so hard that I’m willing to listen to some creative intent if I can get it.

Of course, even if I did accept that Ayato’s weirdness was intentional, it wouldn’t stop him from being totally unlikable, or make this show any less of a slog to watch. I’ve still got plenty of little details to dissect about the coming episodes, so the videos must go on!

Continued in part eight.

Edited by The Davoo

Alrighty; at this point, I think we’ve all got a pretty firm grasp on the broad strokes of what’s wrong with this show, as well as a lot of its typical methods of fucking up. Generic and boring characters, a nonsensical setting and worthless storyline, badly directed fight scenes full of weak effects animation, and the worst versions of any tropes that it tosses into the mix; but I don’t think it’s fair for us to simply call it here, because The Asterisk War is kinda worse than that. Another way of putting it is that most of what we’ve covered so far were probably issues with the source material just as much as with its adaptation, and were things which could’ve been a problem with any number of shows.

What I’d like to get into now is more of the issues that I have with the way that this series was adapted, focusing most strongly on its lack of attention to detail. After all, this is a huge part of the problem I that have with this studio in particular–the way that so many of their shows seem to have so little thought put into their presentation, leaving us with a product that would probably have looked better in our imaginations while reading a book.

After some recap footage at the start of episode three, which they hope you won’t mind as long as there’s a couple new angles on Claudia’s naked body, Claudia explains to Ayato how Seidoukan academy basically follows Kill la Kill rules; the higher a fighter’s rank, the more spacious their accommodations. It doesn’t seem like this counts for much, though, because it’s not like the weaker students are living in the slums–the entire city is pristine and beautiful. We never get more than a glimpse of what Ayato’s room looks like as a new student anyways, and at worst it seems like he just shares a college dorm-style room with Classmate Guy. Big deal.

Claudia launches into some boring exposition about how the dumbass student council is only just now realizing that the four students who have already been attacked and had to bow out of the Festa were probably connected. I guess I can’t blame them for failing to realize the importance of these events, considering that they happened to four perfectly generic students. If I were picturing this scene in my head, I’d probably have gone with some people who actually look like they could compete in the Festa; but what do I know about character design?

Funnily enough, this scene actually does try to use its details to set us up for guessing who the assailant is. We find out that Big Dumb Guy and one of his lackeys are suspected in the case, but the other lackey is conspicuously not implicated. The only reason it doesn’t work is that who the fuck cares? These dudes have been on screen like once so far and left no impact whatsoever. You could hardly be expected to have remembered that these characters existed if you were watching this show weekly and this scene came up. Besides, this is the first time that we’ve spent more than twenty seconds even addressing the whole assault subplot–so you may as well have forgotten about that, too. The first time I watched these four episodes, I would never have imagined that this was actually the central plot of the entire arc.

So after Ayato pussies out on getting some pussy, we finally cut to the start of his date with Julis to show him around the town. I feel I should mention right now that Saya will not make any appearance in this episode or the next; so it was super necessary to spend the majority of the last episode on her introduction instead of fleshing out this whole assassination plot more.

Julis shows up in this white gown with a yellow trim, which I actually think is pretty damn cute–but what the hell is up with the parasol? Does Julis really seem like the kind of girl who’d carry a thing like that around all day just to match her outfit? I know they’re trying to do that thing where she’s actually got a secret girly side in contrast with her confrontational nature, but I can’t help finding this a little bit excessive.

I’m also wondering what season it’s supposed to be here. Julis has on long sleeves and stockings, which would make it seem maybe a bit chilly; but the bright sunlight and the parasol would imply that it’s pretty hot outside. Ayato is wearing a short-sleeve button-up over a baseball-cut shirt, which could pretty much mean any weather; and all of the pedestrians are dressed at random. I know this sounds like a particularly pedantic complaint, but if there’s one thing that most anime do exceptionally well, even in less-detailed productions, it’s making sure to dress their characters for the season. It’s almost weirdly prevalent.

It’s kind of depressing how little effort the anime staff put into making Asterisk City feel like a unique location. I’ve mentioned before how after showing the main stage where all the Festas take place, Julis talks about how the city is full of little stages; but we never see any of them. If people are constantly fighting in the streets like Julis says they are, then it seems like the obvious way to handle this tour would’ve been to have fights breaking out all over the place as they walked around town–or at least to show some in the background. Hell, I’d accept a little montage of panning shots of some of the other stages; anything other than mentioning the only thing that sets this city apart and then failing to show it.

The one pervasive detail throughout this scene is the use of holographic billboards, which were shown in the cityscape shots of the first episode as well; and which feature a hodgepodge of text in different languages. I get that this is supposed to evoke how all of the world’s countries have fused into one, but it’s such an uncreative representation of that concept. Apparently, none of the world’s cultures or languages have been changed at all in the past hundred years of cataclysm and restructuring, nor has the way that they advertise in the big city. Having spent a month in the Manila metropolitan area, I can tell you that a lot of big cities have billboards in many different languages already anyways–and a hell of a lot more of them then what’s present here.

I noticed in one shot there’s like a holographic stop sign that says “stop” in both Japanese and in English, but the way it’s laid out is weird as hell. The Japanese characters say “to ma re” in hiragana, which means “stop,” but then at the bottom is also the kanji for “to.” I looked up what Japanese stop signs look like, and they’ve all got that kanji as the “to” in “tomare,” so I’m not sure why this sign includes both the hiragana at the top and the kanji at the bottom. I know this doesn’t really matter, but the point I’m making is that even the details which they did include don’t seem to make a lot of sense or add anything to the setting. I don’t even want to imagine how this complicated-ass stoplight is supposed to make more sense than the ones we already have.

Our duo stops for a bite at WcDonald’s and orders a WcDouble Dose of Cliches. First of all, WcDonald’s is one of the most commonly-used parody names for a major business in anime, and it barely even makes sense in this context where McDonald’s should probably either be out of business, or changed into something radically different by this point. Secondly, the whole joke about how rich girls are fascinated with fast food has gotten old. It was funny when K-On did it six years ago, but the returns have rapidly diminished. I’m willing to give the show some credit for this not being Julis’ first time at a fast food place, and for her criticizing Ayato’s assumption that princesses wouldn’t be into fast food, but I don’t think being a little tongue in cheek about it alleviates the fact that I’ve been here a number of times by now.

Ayato broaches the topic of the attacks on Juils’ life, and she responds essentially that she will not allow herself to give in to terrorism. She then starts prattling on about how she’s going to forge her own path and about how her will belongs to her alone, and it’s at this point that I feel the need to dive into this show’s confusing politics.

Looking at the broad strokes of what Asterisk City stands for, it seems to operate under a sort of hardcore capitalist mindset. The idea is that your quality of life will be determined by your functionality in society. The strongest fighters get the biggest houses and the chance at untold wealth, and they’re handed this power by the corporations that run the place. Any semblance of government that exists on this island seems to be operated by those corporations; and everyone who lives there does so by deciding to work within this system to achieve their goals.

Julis seems to be intended to function as the viewer’s moral compass through which to navigate this city’s way of life–but trying to follow her line of thinking has gotten me lost.

Near as I can tell, Julis has a pretty capitalist mindset herself, with a hard dose of libertarian ideals sprinkled on for good measure. She doesn’t want the government–i.e. the school–interfering with her business, and she holds her own autonomy in very high regard. She comes to this island in the hopes of fulfilling her personal goal, which is to make a lot of money and put it into the orphanage that her friends come from; and to accomplish this, she’s fought in countless battles and maintained a stubborn pride about her status.

And yet, in spite of the fact that Julis has chosen to operate within this capitalist system and to harbor a capitalist mindset, she apparently hates this city and considers it a greedy hive of scum and villainy. She criticizes the fact that money is what drives society, and seems upset that the greedy people of this world aren’t, say, putting money into that orphanage; even though she herself seems to have a libertarian, fight-my-own-battles-myself mindset.

It’s a little confusing when a character denounces money in one sentence, and then says that she’s fighting for money in the next; and talks about how she’s the master of her own destiny, while also lamenting that the world doesn’t seem to care about impoverished people. If this show were smart enough to recognize this duality and to paint to her as like a hardcore socialist who feels that she has no other way to fight but then to do so within this capitalist system, then maybe she could be made interesting; but honestly, it would take a lot of effort.

Luckily, there was another show that put in such an effort, and it was called Kill la Kill. In that show, one of the main characters created a hardcore Randian objectivist society wherein the living conditions of the populace were REALLY determined by the fighting capabilities of teenagers; and where she was trying to raise a team of elite fighters using the same system as the force which she was attempting to rebel against. In the end she realized the flaws in her ideology, and how you can’t be anti-something while also embodying that something, and joins the side of a sort of a non-partisan coalition of the people. It’s a good show, go watch it.

So anyways, there’s a really poorly animated scene where they argue with the big dude–his name is Lester, by the way–and then some flirting, Julis calls Ayato unfathomable, and then they stumble upon this fight in the woods. Apparently the idea here is that these guys are pretending to fight so that they can surround their target and then attack, but it doesn’t look like that’s what happens at all. This is one of those things that probably made sense in the light novels where you could try to imagine how it works in your head, but the adaptation does such a shitty job of presenting it that the entire idea looks stupid; not that it matters, because Julis destroys them all in one second off-screen. Again, I’m left to wonder why these rival schools keep hiring assassins with such comparatively pathetic power levels.

After Julis interrogates this mohawk guy for a second, the guy spots the person who hired him sulking around in the woods, and Julis recklessly runs in after him. For someone who was able to identify that she was being lead into a trap mere moments earlier, you’d think she’d give some pause to consider why the enemy might lead her into a dark, wooded area–but nope, she goes off Naruto-running into the woods without a second thought.

So Julis invites Ayato into her room later that night, and she tells him very matter-of-factly to remove his clothes. It takes her a moment to realize why he’s flustered at this, and she tells him to get his head out of the gutter. Apparently in her mind it’s totally reasonable that if someone invited you into their room at night and told you to take your clothes off without any given reason as to their intent, you would assume that they wanted to stitch up the holes in your shirt and not that they wanted to see you naked. This is a conversation between characters whom we are meant to believe are human beings.

It turns out that Julis is adept at sewing, which is yet another attempt to show off her secret girly side–a trope which seems to be coming into common practice, thinking back to how Asuna turned out to be a great cook in Sword Art Online. I must admit I’m a little… torn over this type of characterization. On the one hand, I’m all for the idea of girl characters who can be tough and cool and not have to fit into feminine stereotypes, yet also don’t have to reject the idea of femininity altogether and can have decidedly effeminate hobbies. On the other hand, I know that the real intention here is to make her seem like better wife material. It’s a “defrosting the ice queen” scenario, where the main character’s reward for being such a good guy and getting past the girl’s thorny outer layer is that he gets to see the cute, girly side that she reserves for those closest to her. This is one of those weird scenarios where I feel like I could enjoy the character and their personality on their own; but in the context of being a character in a show of this nature and knowing why they’ve been written this way, it only comes off as annoying.

So while Julis is sewing up, Ayato looks around and spots this picture of her with her friends. Now, tell me: was I the only one who immediately thought the instant I saw this picture for the first time that the girl who’s on her left is obviously going to show up later and be a major character? You know, on account of her being the only one who doesn’t have one of the generic hair colors? Now in fairness, at this point I didn’t know about Kirin yet, so I thought that this girl was probably going to be the purple-haired girl from the ending theme–but nonetheless, I’ve seen it labelled as a spoiler somewhere that one of her childhood friends was going to show up later in the series; guys, it’s not hard to tell that anyone with a second’s worth of thought put into their design is going to be important later.

I’ve already talked about Julis’ motivations, backstory, and confusing ideals, so we’ll just skip over all that stuff and head for the end of the episode. Julis gets a letter of challenge from her assailant and Naruto-runs directly into an obvious death-trap, and Ayato jumps off a building; the end.

So episode four starts with Julis arriving at the worst-looking building in the city, and, plot twist, the henchman guy was actually the bad guy. Revealing his true face causes his entire head to transform and grow larger, somehow making him even more generic than before. It turns out that Julis had discovered who the attacker was based on his dialog from episode three; but since her conjecture was based on information that we didn’t have, we probably would’ve never figured this out ourselves. They could’ve probably set this up in such a way that we really end up suspecting this dude if they’d given him like one minute of screen time by now, but as it stands his reveal is greeted with a sort of ineffectual, “oh. really now.”

So this suddenly over-the-top evil guy reveals that his plan is to have Julis back out of the Festa by targeting Ayato. Hearing this, I would’ve assumed that he meant that he had like a sniper with a bead on Ayato right now; but Julis responds that, “all I have to do is stop you right here.” And, uh… I guess she’s right? Like, what was his plan exactly if it came to this–just to fight her and win? In that case, couldn’t he have just done that any time? He seems to think he could beat Ayato too, so back there in the forest, why didn’t he just wipe them both out?

Oh, and Lester is here somehow. Where did he come from? Apparently he was told that Julis had accepted his duel; so was the plan here to have Lester and Julis fight? Then why did Silas reveal himself? If he planned to reveal himself, why did he invite Lester? Apparently it was because he intends to frame Lester for taking out Julis. So why did he invite him to come before Julis would be dead? Is he confident he can take out both of them? This is getting weird.

So it turns out that the perfectly generic cloaked dudes who attacked Julis were actually some robot things that Silas controls. I guess their, uh, skin was attached to those robes or something.

A big dumb fight scene breaks out, and Silas summons 128 robots. I only counted around eighty at most, but who cares. Lester gets shitcanned by a bunch of robots, and then Julis blows them all away with a big fire dragon. She then fights some off with her sword, but gets caught by one and trapped by a bunch of gunners–so she brings her dragon back around and tries to use it as a shield. So this dragon attack is still active, but instead of using it to just mow down all of the attacking robots like she did five seconds ago, she tries to use it as a shield, which doesn’t even slightly work. Surely she ought to know better.

Because of a tiny flesh wound on her thigh, Julis is then easily immobilized by way of a couple of the robots which she was just taking out with attacks such as a kick to the face, grabbing her by the arms and pinning her against a pillar. In another reveal that means nothing to the audience, Julis figures out which school this guy is working for, which sets up that we’ll need to look out for that school’s name from now on. Just, you know, not for the entire next arc.

Ayato finally makes his showstopping entrance, easily laying waste to the robots which grabbed Julis and then carrying her up through a hole in the ceiling. Please keep in mind that not only did all of the robots descend from this hole in the first place, but that we’re going to see them all jump back up through it in a bit–and yet, for some reason, Julis and Ayato are able to carry out an entire minute of conversation in the time that it takes for Silas to pursue them up through the hole. He even asks, “are you done talking?” as if he was giving them breathing room on purpose.

Ayato releases his savage force, and then another big stupid fight breaks out. At some random point amid all the chaos, Ayato determines that there’s apparently 6 types of robots which can be active at once, and that only 16 units out of those are able to move at a time; which apparently is Silas attempting to evoke chess; like, in literally no fashion whatsoever besides how many types of pieces there are and how many of them can move. Is Silas even evoking chess deliberately, because that seems like it’s more of a limitation than an intentional pattern of attack.

And of course, absolutely none of what Ayato says is communicated visually at all. If they wanted to clue the viewer into the idea that there were six different robot types, they probably shouldn’t have segmented them distinctly into eight platoons. After all, the rules of chess are not that there’s eight types of pieces, but you can only move six of them at a time. There’s also nothing about moving all sixteen pieces at once. And, you know, nothing about it resembles this at all.

Let’s just pretend we slept through the rest of this fight–oh hey! It’s the orange wings from the cover art that we talked about in part one! Except, totally different-looking! Cool! Ayato gets a big headache, and him and julis hook up on the backdrop of pretty colors, and Claudia turns out to have heterochromia and says some mysterious stuff, and Classmate Guy is there, and that’s it! That’s the end! I’m done! The first arc is over! I can move on and talk about new things! Like… the second arc! Or the third arc! Hell, the whole first season is done already! Did you know they’re making a second one? Yeah man, we’ve still got all kinds of work to do! I can talk about that other show that’s just like this one; or we can look at some other A1 shows. The Perfect Insider just wrapped up and I haven’t even watched that yet. The future is full of so much potential!

Continued in part nine.

OH WAIT I FORGOT ABOUT THE NEXT EPISODE PREVIEWS, OH MY GOD THEY’RE SO WEIRD, WHY WOULD THEY MAKE HER LOOK LIKE THAT, JESUS CHRIST WHAT THE FUCK WERE THEY THINKING, WHY WOULD ANYONE THINK THIS WAS OKAY?!

Lately, the subject of my feelings towards A-1 Pictures has been coming up constantly in response to my videos, and has been the subject of a lot of argument and misinterpretation. The upcoming 9th part of the Asterisk War Sucks series is almost entirely about my problems with the studio in general–but it doesn’t really dive into how I came to the conclusions that I did about the studio. A lot of people seem to be under the impression that I hate A-1 shows just because they’re A-1 shows, which is weird and ridiculous–why the hell would I just decide I don’t like a studio? My hatred for A-1 comes as a result of not liking their output, and my feelings towards them have come from the long and winding process of watching them develop over the last eight years or so. As such, I think it’ll help for the sake of argument, and for the sake of people not asking me the same questions over and over again, if I just detail my history with the studio in full.

I first heard about A-1 Pictures in 2008, around the time that the first season of Birdy the Mighty Decode came out. I enjoyed that show well enough and watched it all the way through, though I never got around to season 2 in 2009 (but I still want to, and I’ve seen tons of gifs from its fight scenes). I never got around to Big Windup, tho from what I’ve heard/seen of ep 2, it’s really good; and Kuroshitsuji didn’t seem like my thing.

When I started taking interest in the studio was around the time Kannagi came out. I didn’t actually watch more than 1 ep of it, but there was a lot of hoopla over the fact that it was directed by Yutaka Yamamoto (Yamakan) after he’d been fired from Kyoto Animation after directing the first 4 episodes of Lucky Star. A lot of ado was made over how Kannagi looked like a KyoAni show in it’s designs, at a time when those kind of designs were just coming into prominence and becoming controversial. Somewhere around this time is also when Yamakan founded his studio Ordet, and Ordet and A-1 were often collaborating together, so there was a lot of intrigue around what kind of stuff they’d produce.

I skipped out on Valkyria Chronicles and Fairy Tail, but I actually came to be a *fan* of A-1 Pictures in 2010 when they ran their Power of Anime block. Sora no Woto was my favorite show of the year–one of my favorites of all time–and was a really cool original series. They then put out Occult Academy, which was a show that was totally all over the place but ultimately interesting, and Night Raid 1931, which started strong, got really boring, and ended pretty poorly; and I think Night Raid is probably the most representative of what my problems with this studio would eventually be. 2010 also saw the first A-1 and Ordet collaboration on the movie Welcome to the Space Show, which I really loved.

In-between those shows, they started Working!!, which had intrigued me with its premise and characters, but I felt like the comedic timing was always a bit off, and the jokes got stale very, very quickly. I actually picked up the manga and enjoyed it a lot more than the anime, and was reading it along with its scanslations; and I ended up watching the rest of the anime with my brother and not really liking it. We watched all of season 2 together as well, and I didn’t really like that either. By the way, if you want documentation of my feelings on ALL of these shows at the times that they were airing, I blogged about all of them on this very site. The search bar is your friend; the writing probably sucks, tho.

Where things started going downhill with A-1 for me was on their next collab with Ordet on the Yamakan-directed Fractale. Fractale was yet another show with a very strong start and some really flashy visuals, which very quickly became a roller coaster of quality that took a nose dive by the end into complete shit. At this point, all of the A-1 original series had been inconsistent in this way. Even Sora no Woto, which I loved, was kind of all over the place and a little rough around the edges; but between Occult Academy, Night Raid, and Fractale, it felt like everything the studio did was a huge mess.

Right after that, they put out Anohana, which eventually would become crazy popular, but wasn’t really all that hyped at the time. I’d seen the first episode and loved it, and I was already a fan of Tatsuyuki Nagai and Mari Okada (the duo that did Toradora and is now doing Iron-Blooded Orphans), but I never got around to continuing. A few of my friends who had also been excited at the start told me that it really fell apart and got lame in the end, and from what they described of the plot, it seemed like something I’d really hate, so I decided not to bother finishing it.

Blue Exorcist was a case where I’d been really into the manga, and had read the first three volumes, but I absolutely hated the way that the anime handled it when I watched the first episode. It was totally visually unappealing, and didn’t match the great style of the manga, which I’d really wanted to get an adaptation from BONES. I didn’t really attribute the failure to A-1 in particular, as I still didn’t have a total ire for the studio yet, but in retrospect it’s one more thing that pissed me off.

The Idolmaster was the next A-1 thing that made a big splash, and to me was the thing that was most indicative of the style the studio was going for–putting lots of flashy, very modern-looking animation into shows about cute girls (which until this point, were typically not very well-produced if they weren’t from KyoAni) and marketing the fuck out of them. I watched like seven eps of Idolmaster and it seemed like it was always middling between “okay” and “not very good” so I lost interest. Again, I heard from people who did finish it that it kind of fell apart in the long run.

Space Brothers was one where I only watched 1 ep, and it seemed like it was a bit too slow and a bit too ugly for me to take interest–and like something where the manga was probably better (which fans of it seemed to be saying). My brother watched like 25 eps of it and got tired of it for reasons that sounded like they’d annoy me, so I didn’t bother.

Tsuritama, which I actually never finished, was the last A-1 show that I was pretty into and excited about. I’m generally a big fan of the director and I was really into the feel-good tone of the series. I did think that the visuals were kind of wonky, and not as interesting and experimental as the director’s other work, but it was nonetheless a fun and unique series.

So then we have Sword Art Online. At the time the first 2 eps came out, me and my brother had pretty high expectations for it as an MMO anime that actually had action scenes and drama in it; but after 7 episodes I totally lost interest and stopped watching.

Meanwhile, I hated the first episode of Shin Sekai Yori and dropped it immediately–and since this was around the time that I stopped watching a lot of anime for about a year and a half and focused on other things, I didn’t really hear about the hype for the series until long after it was over. Keep in mind, though, that at this point, I still considered A-1 to be a pretty decent anime studio in general.

I never got around to Magi, Servant X Service, Vividread Operation, or any of their other 2013 output, since I wasn’t watching anime at the time, and I’ve never heard any strong recommendations for them from people whom I generally trust. I wouldn’t see any more A-1 shows while they were airing until Nanana’s Buried Treasure in 2014.

Now, keep in mind that Nanana’s Buried Treasure was coming out right when I was getting back into anime, and started making anime videos on my channel. At the time, I had become aware of a massive amount of hype surrounding Sword Art Online, and people started asking for my opinion of the series constantly. Now, at the time it had been airing, my brother had made it 18 eps into the series and thought it was a complete piece of garbage, and had been complaining about it ever since. Early in 2014, my girlfriend T the time had discovered the series and totally loved it, and when I tried to explain to her why I’d dropped it years earlier, she didn’t really get it. Ergo, a few months later, after we’d broken up and a million people had asked my thoughts on the show, I thought fuck it, I’m gonna watch the damn thing and figure out how to put what I feel into words. I ended up hating it way, way, way more than I expected to, and then made a bunch of videos about iT that got really popular and sort of put me on the map. You’ll notice, though, that even in my SAO videos, I don’t really spend a lot of time talking about the studio behind it–I mostly rag on the original writer. It’s only soon after that I really started growing in ire for A-1.

I tried out Silver Spoon around this time, but I wasn’t really into it–in part cause I don’t care for the subject matter or the ethos of the show, and in part cause it was pretty boring. I’m sure this show is probably not all that bad, but it’s really not my thing.

Nanana’s Buried Treasure was the show that finally made me realize I had a problem with the studio, because once again, it was a show that started out really strong, and I was into it, but then I thought it turned to complete shit by the end. You can see my vlogs chronicling this on Digi Does Anime, and in the last one I think I even state how I’ve realized that every A-1 show seems to start off promising, and turn to shit by the end.

Up next was Aldnoah.Zero, which I was pretty disgusted with by the end of ep 2 and dropped. It was all flash and no substance, with a terrible script and plot holes right out of the gate. When the hype train for that show very quickly became a hate train as it went along, with guys like Demolition D and Anime Addicts ripping it apart, I wasn’t surprised, and I started to feel like A-1 was just a studio that made really flashy, tacky shows without any kind of writing chops to back them up.

I sampled an ep and a half of World Conquest Zvezda Plot and wasn’t into it, though I’ve heard good things and still want to give it another try. I sampled an ep of Galileo Donna and wasn’t into it, and everyone seems to agree it’s a pile of shit, so I didn’t bother.

Your Lie In April was one where my friends and I were sampling opening episodes of shows that season, and I found the first episode infuriatingly trite and boring. I really am not into the whole genre of mopey teen drama, and I felt like the visuals were actually pretty mediocre, but had been covered in tons of flashy colors and filters to make them look appealing. A lot of the reviews I saw for the series later corroborated this, and nothing I heard of the show’s praise sounded like anything I’d enjoy, so I didn’t go back to it.

Around this time is also when I started making a lot of videos about Psycho-Pass, and I was getting tons of people in my comments telling me to watch Shin Sekai Yori because of its similar themes. There seemed to be a ton of positive talk about the series, so I gave it a shot, but I struggled through the first four episodes and absolutely hated every single aspect of it. I hate the visuals, directing, pacing, writing, characters, and setting completely. I asked a friend who kind of liked the show whether it was likely something I’d get into in the long run, and they said no, so I stopped there.

When episode 0 of Saekano came out, it completely pissed me off and I hated it. I hate the particular brand of meta where a show just embodies a bunch of tropes, and then calls attention to them like that’s somehow clever, and I hated all the characters. Later on I was convinced to give the show another shot, so I watched three episodes when I was marathoning romcoms in October 2015. I conceded that the show was not badly made, but that I still hate that brand of comedy and all of the characters besides the boring girl.

By this point, I had a pretty full-blown hatred of A-1, since everything they put out was either immediately infuriating, or disappointing by the end. The studio was pumping out like four shows a season, and not one of them was grabbing my attention. I’d heard that the second season of Oreimo was complete bullshit and everyone hated it, so I didn’t bother watching it. Nanoha Vivid was pretty okay if nothing to write home about, and the manga was ultimately a better time anyways.

I didn’t bother with Cinderella Girls since I don’t like idol shows anyways, and I couldn’t even finish the first episodes of Gunslinger Stratos or Ultimate Otaku Teacher (which no one seems to care about anyways). I watched the first episode of Gate and thought it was total garbage–the visual direction and pacing were appalling, and that’s pretty much the point where I realized that, yeah, my problems are really with the studio as a whole.

So then, finally, it was with the first episode of The Asterisk War–seeing this studio hit rock bottom and produce a flat-line 1/10 series with no redeeming qualities–that I decided it was time for me to be “that guy” and start cutting promos on the studio left and right. I liked the first episode of Perfect Insider well enough and I still want to finish it, but I wasn’t surprised when a lot of people told me it fell apart in the long run. I hated Grimgar and I wasn’t into Boku Machi, and if the latter turns out to suck in the end, don’t fucking dare say that I didn’t warn you.

Edited by The Davoo

Text version:

This video is an opinion piece and not a journalistic article. Nothing here should be taken as fact at face value, and I encourage you to research these subjects further before forming your own opinion.

Now that we’ve spent eight long videos thoroughly answering the deep questions of what the hell is wrong with the Asterisk War and other shows of its ilk, it’s time for us to try and tackle the far more difficult and complicated question: why is The Asterisk War popular anyways?

Back in part one, that seasonal chart I was looking at was organized by how many people have each series listed on their My Anime List accounts; meaning that by the site’s metric, The Asterisk War is the fifth most-popular anime series of the Fall 2015 season. Appearing on over 66,000 lists, it is more watched than the second season of excellent and popular sports anime, Haikyuu; the latest season of the very popular Monogatari franchise; A-1 Picture’s own far less awful series, The Perfect Insider; other less-terrible light novel adaptations like Heavy Object; excellent or otherwise interesting original series like Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans and Concrete Revolutio; infinitely more engaging fanservice vehicles like Valkyrie Drive Mermaid; and great sequels such as the new seasons of Gochiusa, Yuru Yuri, and Utawarerumono. The Asterisk War has also been the most popular show on Crunchyroll from pretty much the start of the season–to the point that they sent me a fucking email letting me know that I was missing out on it.

So what’s going on here? If this show is so obviously bad, to the point that I’ve been getting criticized for picking a “low-hanging fruit” by ragging on it, then why do people like it? Well, there’s a very easy answer to that, but I’m sure by now you’re aware that I’m not going to be satisfied with it, so get ready for fifteen minutes of follow-up. The short answer is: because cute girls and swords. The corollary to that being: because no one cares.

And that sounds glib, and I hate when people say it like that, but it’s basically true. You don’t even have to take my word for it–read some of the show’s positive reviews on the sites I mentioned.

“This anime has plenty of action and is fun to watch. The graphics of this anime is really good. The swords look real, and sometimes it makes you forget that this is an anime. Also, if you are looking for an anime with kawaii girls, this is your anime to watch.”

“If you are looking for a very unique anime, this is probably not for you, but I would suggest this to anyone looking for a cool dudes or hot chicks. Looks like the male is basically Kirito and the girl is basically Asuna and I guess that is pretty much all you need to know.”

“An anime with swords is what I like the most and the whole competition and school setting gives me in my opinion a good anime for me.”

“A1 Pictures is known to produce some aesthetically pleasing art, so if you enjoyed Sword Art Online, Gate, or Aldnoah Zero, expect something similar.”

“I find this art style very enjoyable and easy on the eyes.”

“In my opinion, I was pretty interested in it. The art isn’t bad i like the swords. The boobs makes me want to suck on them but yeah. What I’m trying to say is I love this show it makes me wanna find the porno manga version for it and just read it.”

“It’s a truly amazing anime with great and interesting characters. A great plot and story I’m glad I found this! Signed, the amazing 9 year old.”

Most of the positive reviews that I found either outright admitted to the series being generic, or were very defensive about pointing out the minor differences between it and other, similar shows. Even the guy who gave it an 8/10 only gave the story a six. With the exception of the amazing nine year-old, I find it difficult to imagine that anyone watching this series is seriously invested in the characters, or gives half of a flying fuck about the story. People like this show because it fulfills a basic craving that some of us have for cute girls and swords; and I get that! I like cute girls and swords as much as the next guy, believe me; but I still don’t think that this answers the question.

After all, virtually every single anime in existence is inundated with as many cute girls as can be feasibly crammed inside of them; and I’m pretty sure that 95% of Japanese creatives are physically incapable of creating an action-centric piece of media which doesn’t contain a single sword. If these were the only criteria, then every anime ever would be equally popular.

Obviously, something else is going on here; and it’s clear to me that it’s not simply an accident, or that The Asterisk War just got lucky. Sure, luck plays a part in any show getting popular, but you only need to take a look at A1’s track record of success with this kind of show to see that clearly there’s some element of strategy at work here. Like it or not, this studio seems to have their fingers on the pulse of the modern anime fan’s buying habits–and they’re going out of their way to milk that advantage for all that it’s worth. To get to the heart of what this studio is doing right, we need only start with the most common design element among all their works: that damn face.

A1 Pictures have boiled the anime face down to a fucking science. The mouth is a line with a break in the middle that becomes really weird when you stare at it, but otherwise is meant to basically suggest lips. The nose is a miniscule triangle. The eyes come in about six different shapes depending on the character type.

All of the emotions which the face can perform basically come pre-packaged–angry Kirito looks just like angry Ayato, etc. It’s like the design team at this studio just sat down one day and came up with a basic template for a face and then a specific optimal way of portraying each of that face’s emotions; and since then, the entire studio has been working from that template in animating each of their shows. Obviously some shows are exceptions–and we’ll talk more in a bit about A1’s paradoxically broad range of attempted styles–but the point I’m trying to make here is that this studio has created a standard for what an anime face is.

Likewise, the body types featured in most of their shows are what I’d call normal, standard, and sleek. In the last ten years, popular anime has very clearly gravitated towards a style which I would say was most firmly set in stone by The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. In terms of proportions and height, these characters tend to have pretty realistic bodies, even if their busts and the size of their facial features dive into the realm of fantasy. They’ve got these very soft, realistic skin tones, which, with simple two-tone shading, can make the characters look more real than they ever did back in the cel art days; and the use of lots of subtle gradients which are made easy by digital coloring does a ton to make these characters pop off of the backgrounds. Everyone has a pencil-thin outline, too, which makes them come off as less cartoony.

Likewise, the same coloring techniques can easily be used to make background art appear more detailed than it might otherwise. It’s a lot easier to throw some gradients and lighting effects onto the screen and make something look fancy and bright, than it is to actually hand-draw a detailed background and bring it to life.

A1 has figured out how to simulate the feeling of something being well-animated by making things very flashy and having stuff move around a lot. It’s easy to convince an audience that something is cool if it’s moving very fast and if there’s a lot of flashing lights. To prove what I mean, locate a nearby flashlight, then close your eyes and strobe the light back and forth in front of your eyelids. You’ll immediately become disoriented and have no idea what’s going on, but it’s kind of exciting for no particular reason.

None of these things are necessarily bad design elements; they’re just foundational blocks upon which the design of a series can be built. After all, I could say most of the same things about the shows made by Kyoto Animation, which I consider to be the studio producing the highest-quality TV anime of the current decade; but the difference between Kyoto Animation and A1 Pictures, is that KyoAni actually takes those foundational blocks and, you know, BUILDS on them; whereas A1 puts in the bare minimum acceptable amount effort.

But that doesn’t matter–because it works; and it works because it has become standard. I mean that both in the derogatory way that someone might call something “standard at best;” but I also mean it in the congratulatory way that someone might say that something has “set the standard.”

A1 Pictures have basically created what is now considered to be the standard look of modern anime. By flooding the market with a million shows that look exactly the same, they have set the tone of what anime IS in the current decade; and I can’t shake the feeling that everyone else is slowly migrating in their direction. Maybe that’s unfair, since it’s hardly like this studio was the first to do any of what it does; but it certainly feels like A1 Pictures are the most singular driving force behind shaping the cultural understanding of what a 2010s anime looks like.

And I’m not even necessarily begrudging the studio for that, because I totally get the appeal. It’s not like I looked at The Asterisk War and thought, “this show looks ugly;” it’s characters are plenty attractive, and its color design is really appealing. If it’d had some other studio’s name above it on that chart, then I probably would’ve walked in with some pretty high hopes for it in terms of visuals.

It’s not the individual design elements which bother me, though–it’s a combination of the lack of effort in turning those elements into a cohesive overall design, and the homogyny which has resulted from constantly making shows that look exactly the same.

In the process of watching this show like a million times in order to write about it, I have inescapably reached the conclusion that the girls are cute. There are no shortage of adorable little expressions, or tiny memetic animations, or finely-detailed fanservice shots whose appeal I can completely understand. I don’t doubt that a big part of The Asterisk War achieving popularity as both a light novel and as an anime series is because the original illustrations were by okiura, who designed for another, similarly popular series, called Infinite Stratos, which people enjoyed for exactly the same reasons. I’ve hung out in the Asterisk War threads on 4chan, and it’s almost nothing but people posting the cutest faces from whichever girl they like the most and then stating that said girl is, in fact, “best girl.”

There’s something incredibly base and bestial about the way that this series is consumed. It is watched because it is there. Because no number of cute girls is too many cute girls. Because even in a world where there are forty-five new anime shows debuting every three months, a lot of people just really have nothing better to do. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I can’t help but harbor a deeply-driven cynicism towards A1 Pictures. The A in their name is in reference to the fact that they are a subsidiary of Aniplex–which is Sony’s production firm that has had its hand in planning no shortage of hugely popular and fantastic anime with other studios– from Madoka Magica and Monogatari to Fate/Zero and Fullmetal Alchemist, and half of everything else you’ve ever heard of. A1 Pictures is kind of like a factory for producing new shows for Aniplex; and their methodology seems to be just pumping out anything and everything.

Ironically, in spite of how all of their shows look the same, the studio has no sense of identity at all. Most of their shows have totally different main creative staff pulled from all over the place; and when they make something good, it’s almost always because they managed to pull in some good people to work on it. It doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of main staff who just straight-up work for the studio, the way you’ll find a core team of directors somewhere like old Gainax, or Kyoani, or Bones, or SHAFT–studios with extremely distinct identities.

From what I understand, A1 Pictures isn’t even any bigger than Kyoto Animation in terms of personnel count; they’re able to produce so many shows because they hire a constant revolving door of contractors. That’s why you get so many random animation cuts that look kind of cool, but totally different from the rest of the show–because they hire these animators from other studios to do work for them.

But what does any of it get you? There’s a part in episode five where a character is introduced via several animation cuts by Masayuki Nonaka, and it’s immediately evident that the entire style and tone of the animation has changed for these cuts. Besides being really weird in-context, I was immediately wondering why the hell they got this person to animate these random segments in particular. Most of Masayuki Nonaka’s work has been on Doga Kobo shows like Engaged to the Unidentified, GJ-bu, and Plastic Memories. She pretty clearly specializes in animating cute girls doing cute things–usually in lighthearted, cutesy scenarios. She can do dramatic and she can do fanservice, but in general, almost all of her animation cuts in all of the shows she’s worked on have a very distinct character to them and bring their scenes to life. But this stuff… this is just weird. It doesn’t seem like it was really necessary to go so far overboard with these particular cuts, or like Nonaka was necessarily the person for the job. It just seems like they hired her because they wanted to have some flashy animation happen when they introduced this character, and it wouldn’t have really mattered who it was.

I feel like I’m talking in circles here, but it’s hard to get this point across when this feeling is so personal and difficult to describe–but, if I can go on a tangent here, then maybe I can sort of drag you into the narrative with me. In October 2010, an animator working for A-1 Pictures committed suicide. The medical facility caring for him had recorded that he’d been working 600 hours a month. I don’t even know if I can completely trust that figure, if only because that would leave just 4 hours a day to have not been working–which doesn’t seem physically possible to me. Director Daiki Nishimura said in response to this that if it’s true, then it’s not a fault of A-1 Pictures, but a fault of the state of the industry as a whole, and of the poor working conditions for animators in general; and I’m sure he’s not wrong.

When people talk about Kyoto Animation and UFOTable and why these studios are able to produce so much higher-quality TV animation than any other studio, someone always brings up the working conditions. Both studios are known for having in-house cafes where the staff can relax, and for having better pay and benefits than many other studios of their size. These are studios which typically only take on one or two project per year, and who dedicate a lot of time to planning out each series carefully and managing their schedules exceptionally well. Kyoto Animation and UfoTable have neither more budget nor more staff than other typical studios–they are simply run better. In fact, this seems to be at the root of most high-quality anime productions– see the comments from One Punch Man’s director about how the show’s budget is completely normal, and the quality of the animation is entirely the result of having passionate staff work on it.

I’ve made the remark before that to me, A-1 Pictures is like the McDonald’s of anime–and I mean that in every possible sense. It doesn’t seem to me like a place where anyone really wants to work–or indeed where anyone who can afford to would take up residence. Sometimes I can’t tell if the studio is pulling in noteworthy directors just in the name of having them turn out something potentially good with the studio behind it, or if directors go there with stuff that they can’t get approved otherwise because the studio can just crank it out. Their willingness to vacuum up sequels to shows from other studios like Ore no Imouto, Nanoha Vivid, and Persona 4: The Golden certainly gives me that impression.

Everything about their work just comes off so assembly-line to me. By the end of the year, the studio will have cranked out eleven TV anime and one film–none of which are even remotely similar to one-another, yet all of which feel eerily the same. It’s like being in a village where everyone has different bodies but the exact same face: fucking creepy.

It wasn’t even like this from the start, and it’s also not as though A1 isn’t still trying to do interesting things. Back in the studio’s early days, they ran a set of original shows in a block called the Power of Anime, where they generated their best TV series ever, Sora no Woto, along with some lovably strange flops in the form of the watchable Occult Academy and the less watchable Night Raid 1931. Then they put out Fractale and Anohana back to back, and it was like the complete failure of the former and the gigantic success of the latter somehow caused the studio to develop schizophrenia. Around the time that both Sword Art Online and Shin Sekai Yori were both on television at the same time, I think the future of this studio became abundantly clear; from now on it was going to be this weird gumbo of talent and ideas circling the saucepan with an endless supply of terrible scripts and hollow attempts at making shit look modern for the casual viewer.

At the end of the day, even after hundreds and thousands of articles and studies about how McDonald’s is bad for you, and about how poorly their business is run, and about how much it sucks to work there; and after decades of being the punchline in jokes about having a shitty job and being dirt-ass poor; and after one of the most infamous documentary smear campaigns of the 2000s; tons of people around the world still eat at McDonald’s.

Because it’s convenient. Because it’s familiar. Because it’s there. Because it’s pervasive. Because sometimes, no where else is open and it’s 4AM and I’m starving. Because when I’m in a new town and I don’t know where to eat, I can see the golden arches on the hill and at least be aware that food is consumable there. Because sometimes, I don’t want to pay for a nice restaurant. Because sometimes, I don’t want to think that hard about what’s for dinner. Because sometimes, it’s all that I can afford and all that’s nearby. Because sometimes, against my better judgement, I just want it.

The Asterisk War is successful because it looks like anime. It has what you vaguely understand to be decent, up-to-date visuals. It’s got cute girls, and it’s got swords. No one is operating under the illusion that it’s a good show, or that they shouldn’t probably be watching something else. They watch it because it’s there.

Continued in part ten.

Text version:

In Hidetaka Miyazaki’s 2011 masterpiece, Dark Souls, the character who is controlled by the player is an undead warrior, who starts the game rotting away in a prison cell; and who is awakened one day by a key being dropped in beside them. From that point onward, the character is entirely defined by the actions of the player. If they desire to do so, the player will take that key and step out into the world, find the man who saved them and learn of a grand destiny which this man hopes for them to fulfill, and embark upon the land of Lordran, where everyone is undead, time is convoluted, and the fire of life is on the brink of extinction unless someone can restore it to the land. That someone can be you, the player–or, you can, like, do whatever the hell you want.

While Oskar, your savior, hopes that you will try and fulfill the prophesy of the chosen undead and link this dying age of fire into a new one; the next NPC whom you run into–the Crestfallen Warrior–expects far less of you. He’s watched dozens of other so-called chosen undead make the same pilgrimage, only to give up and go hollow along the way. All of the undead are at risk of going hollow–of losing their humanity–as soon as they give up on their journey. Undead cannot die, you see, and will continue to be resurrected until they eventually lose the will to go on.

As a player, you can avoid going hollow as long as you don’t stop playing the game. For as long as you remain determined, your character will fight on towards whichever goal you may choose. You can follow Oskar’s wishes and link the fire–or, having learned of the potential dangers of linking the fire along the course of your journey, you can chose to let it burn out, and become the ruler of a world of darkness. Or maybe you come into contact with an ancient dragon and decide that you’re going to spend your days collecting scales to give to that dragon until you eventually turn into a dragon yourself. Or maybe you meet a giant skeleton man and decide to use his powers to place curses on the worlds of other undead players at the risk of being invaded. You could even take up the mantle of a non-player character who goes hollow, by wearing all of their armor and finishing whatever they were trying to do. The world is your oyster.

Whatever it is that becomes your character’s lot in life, their existence in Lordran is continued only by the player’s interest in playing the game; and the only way to effect a change in Lordran is by beating that game. This isn’t a story which you can pause–seriously, there’s no pause button–it’s a story which just continues on forever until the day you find the ending. If you never get to the ending, then Lordran simply remains in its atemporal stasis forever; and, assumably, your character goes hollow.

Dark Souls goes out of its way to paint the actions of its characters as a struggle. For most of them, going hollow is just around the corner–and, in fact, if you play far enough into the game, then just about everyone you meet in your adventure will go hollow right before your eyes. The player character is someone who fails and is killed again and again, yet continues to rise up and go into battle once more, raging against the dying of the light.

The player strikes at their enemies with desperation, carefully managing their meager endurance as they brave an onslaught of enemy attacks. Each time the player is damaged, they stagger away from the opponent, looking for just the right moment to take one of a few precious drinks of healing elixir, before running back in for another attack. They learn a careful dance of managing distance, memorizing attacks, and knowing how to play to their strengths. When they finally bring the boss to its knees, they gain back a little bit of their humanity–putting the hollowing at bay for a day longer, and perhaps even returning to their human form.

That feeling of struggle even permeates the character’s attack animations. Players reel back with their weapons, putting all of their weight into every strike, like their life depends on it. Some play tactically and poke away at their enemies while carefully dodging and rolling around attacks; while others outfit themselves in massive armor, so that they can take a hit while in the middle of heaving up their ridiculously enormous weapons for an aimless strike. No matter the fighting style, the player always looks like David against a hulking goliath–either frantically running around; hiding behind a wall of magic or defense; or brazenly running in naked like an absolute madman.

Therein lies much of the satisfaction in conquering the challenges of Dark Souls. In the beginning, your character is just another undead warrior–one of many who have come before, and who can barely even wield their weapons against the myriad hordes of deadly enemies inhabiting their world. However, by sheer force of determination and constant struggle, that undead proves victorious against beings of godly power; ones who have shaped the very world which they are trying to save.

But if Dark Souls is a game about keeping your flame alight and striking out against the insurmountable darkness surrounding you, then its spiritual successor, Bloodborne, is all about conquering the unknowable darkness which exists inside of humans themselves.

The character controlled by the player in Bloodborne is a newly indoctrinated Hunter, who starts the game after receiving a transfusion of what the blood minister refers to as “Yharnam Blood.” The city of Yharnam, which the player will be exploring throughout the game, has been built and broken on the back of blood transfusion–a practice which had grown popular for its ability to cure any ailment, but has the unfortunate side-effect of turning men into beasts.

As a method of curbing the city’s beast population, a group of powerful fighters was organized called the Hunters–but in the time between the establishment of this group, and the time in which the player becomes a part of it, all kinds of other crazy shit has gone down in the city, giving rise to many different factions and practices which are carried out by the other characters, and causing the nosedive into the chaotic maelstrom by which the city is now defined.

To make a complex story simple, the downfall of Yharnam’s populace can be attributed to humanity’s insatiable thirst for two dangerous forms of progress: power, and knowledge. The thirst for power is symbolized by blood–a resource with which the city has become drunk, and which has regressed the evolution of man into beast. Whereas the undead in Dark Souls would lose themselves and go hollow when they couldn’t find the will to continue, the populace of Bloodborne loses themselves to over-indulgence and an incurable lust for more blood.

Knowledge, meanwhile, is sought by those who wish to transcend their human nature and to enter into the realm of gods; but their thirst for knowledge leads them into destructive and amoral research–only to reach an answer which the human mind was never capable of understanding. The madmen fly too close to the sun and are burned to cinders, becoming creatures which no longer resemble their former human selves.

Like the player character in Dark Souls, the player of Bloodborne is unable to die–but unlike in Dark Souls, this power only seems to be granted to one hunter at a time. The player cannot die because they’ve been trapped inside of the Hunter’s Dream by the first hunter, Gherman, who won’t let the player go until they fulfill the goal of the one pulling Gherman’s strings, by killing one of the Great Ones. However, the player is not necessarily privy to their ambitions in this game in the way that they are in Dark Souls. This time, many of the characters are trying to hide the truth of the situation from the player, and to guide them along a path which benefits themselves. It is up to the player to uncover the truth of their situation, and to decide whether they will go along with what Gherman asks of them to the very end.

The singular focus on the player character in Bloodborne is very important to defining the key difference between this game and Dark Souls–because in Bloodborne, you are NOT just some random undead who happens to be more determined than anyone else. It is still true that, should your character fail in their journey because the player stops playing, then the hunt will go on forever, and no one will ever escape from the hunter’s dream–but the biggest difference here is that this time, the player character is the ONLY one who can possibly change the world and bring an end to this dream for good.

Whereas the undead warrior of Dark Souls was no different from any other random undead wandering its landscape, the player character of Bloodborne is already in a position above all of the beasts; because they are, in fact, a Hunter–someone who is explicitly trained in the art of dispatching said beasts.

Unlike the undead, the Hunters are powerful and vicious. The weapons that they wield are specially crafted for the task of slaying beasts, and are wicked gruesome and totally rad. Each of them transforms between a light and heavy form with a powerfully cathartic clang, and they wield these weapons with ease and confidence. Many of their weapons are capable of combo attacks, and can be charged up for an ultra-powerful strike. A hunter never seems to struggle to use their weapon–instead, they seem all too eager to rip their opponent to shreds.

Hunters never wear heavy armor–they dress in light, flowing cloths, which appear to be intended more to strike an imposing figure than to offer actual protection. Most of their attire has pieces of flowing fabric that makes them look extra-cool while artfully sidestepping around opponents and making a mockery of their attacks. Using weapons and dodges doesn’t cut nearly as far into a Hunter’s stamina, and their tactics are almost always to get in close to the enemy and to attack them with as much ferocity as possible.

When the Hunter is hit, they don’t back away to heal–instead, they strike back even more viscerally, as they can regain their health by taking it from the enemy. So blinded will the Hunter become with bloodlust, that they will keep attacking and regaining health even for a few seconds after the enemy is already dead. When the hunter does inject themselves with a vial of their blood–which is hardly in any short supply–they continue moving, positioning themselves to be ready for the next attack.

Remember, the fate of the hunter is not to lose themselves to the hollow by giving up–it is to lose themselves to the lust for the hunt, and to forget their desire to escape it. The hunters who can never stop searching for more blood become sucked into the hunter’s nightmare, where the hunt continues on eternally. A hunter doesn’t struggle against the world around them–they struggle against their own inner lust for blood.

The vital difference between the player characters of Dark Souls and Bloodborne can perhaps most prominently be observed when conquering a boss. In Dark Souls, you are granted the message, “Victory Achieved”–formerly, “You Defeated”–indicating your triumph over impossible odds, for which you regain some humanity. In Bloodborne, you are granted the message, “Prey Slaughtered”–indicating that you were the one whom the boss should have feared all along–the true overdog in the battle from the beginning. Moreover, the closest equivalent to gaining humanity from a boss fight in Dark Souls is actually gained from encountering a boss in Bloodborne. In this case, the player gains one insight–a metric of eldritch knowledge which brings the player one step closer to a truth so maddening that it could send them into a killer frenzy if they aren’t careful.

Bloodborne’s player character is someone special–a paleblooded warrior who somehow manages to fight off the beastly influence of the Yharnam blood, and is chosen by the messengers of the dream because of it; and who can potentially consume the eldritch knowledge of the great ones and devour their umbilical cords in order to transcend the hunt once and for all, and be reborn as a great one themselves; or else, find themselves escaping the dream as a human if they decide to let the dream go on, or even hosting the dream if they decide to martyr themselves after freeing the former host.

Both Dark Souls and Bloodborne are absolute masterpieces in the way that they weave the themes of their narratives so beautifully into the mechanics of their games; and in how they can use the same basic gameplay elements in such radically different ways, creating two games which feel almost opposite from one-another in tone and meaning. While Dark Souls was a lot more up-front about the way that its narrative was supposed to make the player feel, I always felt that Bloodborne treated the player like more of a badass, and was meant to convey a sense of bloodthirsty catharsis–which I felt was corroborated once I finally began to understand the narrative; and as a result, I came to love the game that much more.

I’m curious as to which of these power fantasies you find more appealing–the feeling of being an underdog who persists against all odds to conquer the gods, or the feeling of being an unstoppable killing machine who becomes drunk with the lust for more knowledge and power until they surpass even the eldritch great ones. Let me know how you feel in the comments, and stick around on my channel, as I might have more to say about these games in the future. If you want to help me in making more content like this, then consider supporting me via patreon, or simply by sharing this video to whomever you think will appreciate it. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.

Edited by The Davoo

Text version:

Throughout the next three-episode arc, it rapidly becomes apparent that nothing is going to happen in the Asterisk War. Not to say that I necessarily require a moving and complex plot from my anime, given that I’ve enjoyed other, similar light novel adaptations in the past; but considering the dearth of likable characters and interesting ideas in this one, it’s here that I truly understood that I was watching a flatline 1/10 TV series. I even bumped my score for SAO up to a 1.5, because at least that show could imaginably be salvaged. This one just has nothing going for it.

I could easily break these three episodes down in the same detail that I did the first four, but I’d honestly just be treading water. It’s all the same logical fallacies, overly convenient plot setups, bland characterization, godawful fight choreography, forced fanservice, and general bullshit that you’ve gotten used to by now. With all the materials I’ve given you so far, you could probably watch these episodes and write my analysis in your own head. We don’t need five more minutes of me pointing out how the badge that Claudia gives Ayato in episode six is apparently a physical object, even though they were holograms that she could restore with her own badge in episode one–but I had to at least mention that since I set it up in part three.

Instead of going in on every little thing that this arc fucks up, I’m just gonna focus on tackling the big central issue of the show’s new character: Toudou Kirin. And in fairness, I’m not even necessarily going to complain about the character herself, because compared to everyone else in the story she’s a hell of a lot more coherent–and pretty goddamn adorable to boot. Rather, my qualm in this case is about how the show handles and presents this character in just about the most sexist way imaginable. Yep, we’re going there.

Obviously sexism is a pretty fucking controversial topic, especially here on youtube; and I’d like to make it clear that I don’t associate myself with or take kindly to being labelled as a part of any side in the greater cultural debate on the subject. I will also argue that providing an analysis via the lens of feminist theory is not the same thing as being a member of an unbelievably poorly defined group known as feminists. A feminist analysis of something does not mean a feminist analyzing something, but rather analyzing something via the lens of feminist theory. If you wanna know more, just do your fucking research; my point is that you could write a textbook chapter on feminist theory using this arc; so I’m about to go balls-deep into this bitch.

As is the case for most of the important characters in this show, our first encounter with Kirin primarily serves to establish that she is indeed a Cute Girl. Ayato bumps into her in a hallway and knocks her over, and it’s kind of suggested that he sees her panties, though it’s confusing because we don’t actually see them. I wonder if this might’ve been a censored cut which would originally have panned up, but we won’t know until the DVDs come out and I don’t care that much. The camera makes sure that in case we didn’t already notice, she also has really huge tits; and then we listen to her high-pitched, breathy, squeaky voice, and the fact that she childishly ends all of her sentences with “desu.” She seems to be very clumsy and has a twig stuck in her hair–which Ayato points out, sending her into a little cuteness frenzy before some old guy calls her away.

The next time that we see Kirin is right after said old guy has just slapped the living shit out of her; and he’s about to go in for round two before Ayato swoops in and stops his hand, stating that he doesn’t approve of raising a hand to a girl. Turns out the old guy is Kirin’s uncle, and he tries to justify his girl-beating under the logic that this kind of abuse wouldn’t mean anything to the powerful Genestella children. Ayato continues on the defensive, barring his hand in front of Kirin in an odd gesture that both seems to be guarding her while also telling her to stay back while he takes care of this. After some back and forth, the uncle forces Kirin to challenge Ayato, on the basis that if Ayato wins then he will stop abusing Kirin. Kirin herself claims that she doesn’t care what happens to her and asks Ayato to back out, but he refuses. So they get into a big dumb fight, and Ayato just barely loses–though it’s sort of suggested that his loss was partly attributed to underestimating his opponent, and to forgetting that his goal in the match is to protect his badge.

At the start of episode six, we learn that Kirin seems to have some kind of goal which requires her to become the number one fighter at the school, and that her uncle has convinced her that she can only reach this goal by following his strict instruction. Later, Julis expresses her pride in Ayato for his decision to help Kirin, and how she would’ve done the same, and we learn that Kirin is only thirteen years old–which is probably two years younger than the main characters. This comes as a surprise to Ayato on account of her huge tits.

Claudia later explains that Kirin’s uncle is apparently trying to use Kirin as a way of advancing through the school’s parent company and becoming an executive. We’ll just ignore the complete lack of a logical thread connecting those two things. She goes on to say that he probably won’t be able to make it far anyways, because those driven by self-interest can never make it to the higher ranks of the company, which are populated by people who’ve undergone several layers of psychological reprogramming to remove their personal desires. I’m not totally sure how that makes sense for this kind of hyper-capitalist system, but we’ll leave that where it lies.

That night, Kirin shows up at the boys’ dorm to visit Ayato and to thank him for what he did before in defending her. In response to this, Ayato walks over and pats her on the head like a child. The duo goes out for a walk, whereupon Kirin talks a bit about her strict father and his training. Then, in one of the only flashes of actually decent characterization in the entire series, Kirin and Ayato spend a moment fanboying over one-another’s fighting styles. This is the first time that I ever actually felt like Ayato fights out of some modicum of interest in the technique; and Kirin’s passionate analysis of Ayato’s fighting style is probably the outright best dialog in the show. She goes on to describe that her interest in kenjitsu comes from seeing herself as a clutz and a coward, but also as someone who can be of some use to others with a sword in her hand.

While the camera fixates on her bouncing breasts, Kirin describes how her ultimate goal is to save her father, and how her uncle has shown her the path towards achieving this goal; therefore she is willing to put up with his racism and abuse in order to further her own advancement. She then asks Ayato about his training, and the two of them become training buddies–and at this moment, it’s suggested with some definitiveness that Kirin has already fallen in love with him.

Ayato and Kirin begin training regularly, with some flirty moments interspersed in there, and then one morning they get attacked by some tech from a rival school. Kirin figures out how to kill the monsters, but then they destroy the ground and she tries to catch Ayato from falling, only to get dragged into the abyss along with him.

Down in the water, Kirin clings to Ayato’s torso as she is apparently unable to swim. Once again, Ayato finds himself fighting with a girl in one arm, and then moments later creates a platform for her to stand on while he takes care of the bad guy. By making his sword longer. So the duo ends up in their underwear, and Kirin explains her backstory, with her father having killed a guy who was mugging them in self-defence, and being sent to prison anyways because of the racism against Genestella. Seems unreasonable, given that they actually knew for a fact that he was acting to save lives against a criminal, but whatever. Kirin blames herself because she knows that even as an eight year-old she could’ve beaten the criminal, and now she’s fighting to try and buy her father’s way out of a decades-long prison sentence. She also reveals that she enjoys the way Ayato pats her on the head because her father used to do so in the same way.

Kirin explains that her uncle came and showed her the way to save her father, and that this brought her to Asterisk city–but then Ayato tells her that she’s wrong, and that this isn’t the path that she chose on her own; and that if she keeps following this path, then she’s going to hit a brick wall. For now, we’ll leave aside how none of that actually means anything. Kirin cries that she can’t do anything on her own, so Ayato pats her head, and tells her that she’s not alone because she at least has him–so long as it’s a path that she’s chosen herself. Then he sees her naked.

After they get rescued, Kirin’s uncle demands that she not talk to Ayato anymore and slaps her around a bit, but then she decides she’s not interested in doing things his way anymore, parrots what Ayato told her before, and walks away. Kirin challenges Ayato to another big stupid duel as a way of taking her “first true step” or whatever, and this time Ayato changes up his tactics and handily beats her. And when I say, “handily,” I mean he palm-slaps her titty for the victory.

Afterwards, Kirin joins what is rapidly starting to look like a spurned women’s club in the making, and then her uncle comes in to get all pissy with her. She deflects his hand once, but then seems ready to take his next punch for some reason before Ayato jumps in to stop it and to talk about how Kirin is already taking her first steps. After her uncle shouts that he’ll blackmail her by uncovering her father’s deeds, Claudia exerts her influence over him to basically tell him not to fuck with her school’s assets. I’m not sure why she couldn’t have exerted this authority in the first place to stop his abuse, but I guess she had to catch him in a trap or… something; I’m not sure. Kirin expresses her gratitude to her uncle for getting her this far, and then Ayato pats her on the head again and they flirt some more, bringing her arc to a close.

What bothers me about the entire presentation of character that I just described is the disconnect between what the series is actually showing us, and what the rhetoric of the series is trying to suggest–as well as the only reasons which I can imagine for writing the story this way.

Despite all of Ayato’s preaching about the importance of choosing your own path, Kirin doesn’t really make any decisions for herself in this story. All she does is go from doing what one older guy tells her to, to doing what another older guy tells her to. When Kirin claims that she can’t do anything on her own, it’s not like Ayato tells her to find strength in herself–in fact, he pretty much just tells her to rely on him instead of on her uncle. I don’t think we can really call it a meaningful choice that she decided to follow the guy who doesn’t treat her like shit instead of the guy who regularly beats her. She only joined Ayato at the point when she realized that she could rely on him just as easily as she could rely on her uncle–and she even admitted that she only reached this position by way of her uncle’s influence.

Kirin clings to Ayato because he reminds her of her father, whom she clearly admires deeply given that her entire life is dedicated to practicing his brand of swordplay and to eventually rescuing him from his wrongful imprisonment. And you know, if Kirin was really just supposed to be this younger, more childish character who was looking for the guidance of a parental figure and found it in Ayato, then I don’t think this would bother me so much; but the fact is that the story also tries to present her as a sexually mature adult who is capable of making her own decisions. It pushes her as a viable candidate for Ayato’s affection, showcasing a mutual physical attraction between them, while sexually objectifying her for the sake of the audience.

It doesn’t so much bother me that Kirin is only thirteen years old; because, for one thing, this is a cartoon; and, for another thing, different cultures have their own ideas about what it means to be mature, and at what age maturity can be achieved. Regardless of what number is tacked onto her, it’s clear that Kirin has reached sexual maturity on a physical level, and that most of the characters in this story, despite being around fifteen years old, are given the agency and decision-making powers of adults.

However, this isn’t really the case with Kirin. She didn’t come to Asterisk to find herself like Ayato did, or completely of her own accord like Julis did; she came here because her uncle told her to–and she only left her uncle’s guidance because Ayato told her to. I know that the narrative is trying to suggest that her decision to challenge Ayato was her first step towards becoming her own person; but all she’s really doing is clinging to his coattails and following along with his group of friends. What exactly was she going to do if these other characters weren’t there to guide her? What if Saya hadn’t taken interest in her and decided to team up with her for the Festa? By episode eight, she’s pretty much made it all the way to just following Saya’s lead now.

The reason that Kirin’s arc is written the way that it is, is so that Ayato–and, by extension, the audience–can have it both ways. We get to play the role of the paternal guardian to our daughter, slash little sister, slash underclassman, while also being able to look at her sexually under the assurance that she’s totally an adult who’s making her own decisions. Nevermind that we’re the ones making her decisions and fighting her battles for her, and that we completely treat her as though she were a child. We just want to have our cake and eat it too.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking right now: why does any of this matter? Who cares?! It’s just a cartoon! The whole point of it is to act as wish-fulfillment for thirteen year-old boys who don’t know any better. It’s an escapist fantasy. It’s not supposed to be realistic. It’s just meant to appeal to a fetish. And I agree: you are absolutely, one-hundred percent correct.

It doesn’t matter. I don’t even really care. The fact of the matter is that I shouldn’t even be watching this show. I saw the writing on the wall as early as the seasonal chart that this show was clearly not meant for me. I’m not supposed to be here. But I am here. Why?

Well, mostly because way back in the summer season, I made a video about how I dropped like a million summer shows that a lot of people enjoyed, and I got a ton of responses asking why I didn’t like those shows, or why I didn’t give them a chance, or telling me that I should make more videos about why I drop the shows that I do. In response to this, I thought it might be interesting if I took a few shows that I would’ve immediately dropped, and decided to give them that mythical chance. I decided to see what would happen if I actually kept going to see what I’ve been missing by dropping these shows so early on, and then to present to my audience what my experience was in doing so, and sort of allow them to experience the show like I do.

And this is where it’s taken us. We’ve made it seven episodes into the Asterisk War, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I kind of hated the second arc because I was kind of bothered by how the entire appeal of it was meant to be its hilariously sexist portrayal of its new character.

You know, I actually really like Kirin’s character design. I even kind of like her voice. If you made a show with this exact same character, but instead made her into a strong-willed, twenty-something year-old firebrand with the personality of a leader, then I’d probably be sitting here making a video about how Kirin is mai waifu. It’s just a matter of personal taste, really. I’m just not into this whole clingy little girl with no personality or initiative thing.

Can you imagine actually dating Kirin, and how incredibly boring she would probably turn out to be once the sex got old? I guess maybe if you got into swords with her you’d have enough to talk about–maybe get some decent sparring in while you’re still young; could be a fling for a couple of years. Once you save her father though, I wonder if she’s gonna go back to school and learn how to do something more useful, or if she’s gonna try and milk that swordfighting skill for all it’s worth. She’s gotta get old some day. I’m certainly getting there.

But that’s what this anime is about. It’s about immortalizing this idea; this girl who will only ever be thirteen, and only ever be your little sister slash daughteru slash kouhai, who will only ever look up to you and secretly want to ride your crotch, and who you’ll only ever get to actually make it with once the inevitable doujins come out. This is the fantasy that they’re selling–and it just doesn’t really resonate with me. I’m just not buying it. I’m just not interested.

Continued in part eleven.

Also on google drive.

Edited by The Davoo

Text Version:

Ass War episode nine kicks off the last arc of the season by finally launching us into the much-awaited Phoenix Festa! In other words, it’s time for a good old-fashioned tournament arc!

Tournament arcs are essentially cruise control for an action series. All you gotta do is dump a bunch of colorful characters with wacky super powers into a stadium, match them up in combinations that maximize the dramatic tension of their battles, and then hit the go button. It’s an opportunity for the writer to flex their creative muscles by coming up with a bunch of unique super powers, while the audience is satisfied getting to watch a bunch of cool ass fight scenes in a row. It’s not the most unique or exciting brand of storytelling, and it often runs the risk of getting boring if the characters stay in one stadium for too long; but if you take the time to pace out one of these arcs just right, then it’s probably the easiest way to keep an action series running for a long time without having to come up with a more complex and involving storyline.

I’m sure you will not be shocked to learn that The Asterisk War flubs the first stretch of its tournament arc so spectacularly that I’m left wondering if the author had ever actually watched one before. I refuse to believe that anyone could have read or watched Yuu Yuu Hakusho or Hunter X Hunter and failed to pick up on the basics of how to make an effective tournament arc; but then, comparing this series against either of those classic battle manga would probably seem pretty unfair. Instead, I’m going to put a lens to Ass War’s failures by comparing it against one of the few recent A-1 Pictures shows that I actually didn’t hate: Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha Vivid; which launched into its tournament arc at around the same point in the series, and only made it about as deep into that arc as this show did before the end of the first season.

There’s really only a handful of basic elements that you need in order to make a tournament arc fun. Firstly, all of the characters need to have clearly defined reasons for their involvement in the tournament–which, if nothing else, this show actually has covered. Secondly, there have to be some strong dramatic rivalries among the characters–especially between the main character and whoever is set to be their final opponent. Lastly, every fighter needs to have some kind of unique super power and aesthetic, and every matchup has to be about showcasing how the two fighters’ powers play off of one-another.

There’s three different basic types of rivalries which can be used to keep a tournament arc feeling dramatic throughout its run. First off is the young hero versus the big bad strong dude. This is your Yusuke vs. Toguro–your larger-than-life opponent whose power level is so incredible that at the start of the tournament it seems like there’s no possible way that the main character could beat them. This dude will be lurking in the background throughout the entire arc, beating the shit out of lesser opponents left and right and leading us to wonder if the main character can build up their skills enough throughout the early matches to be ready to take them on in the end. In Nanoha Vivid, this character is Jeremiah Sieglinde.

The best way to handle this character is to introduce them either before the tournament begins, or immediately after it starts, and to firmly establish that they’re basically the strongest dude in the whole competition. This works dramatically on two levels: firstly, it keeps us on the edge of our seat knowing that there’s a chance the hero won’t even be able to beat this dude; and secondly, it keeps us wondering just what’s going to happen to our hero for them to be able to get strong enough that they could actually pose a threat to this dude when the time comes. The Asterisk War does not have a rival of this nature.

But the hilarious part is that the character who should fit that role has secretly been there all along. At the Phoenix Festa’s big commencement ceremony, who should be standing right there at the podium but the big bad guy of the entire series! You… surely know who I’m talking about, right? I’m not the only one who recognized that weird ass cheek hair, am I? Well, if you’re confused, then that’s forgivable–you probably didn’t watch that stupid ass opening fight scene as many times as I did, but that’s totally the guy who supposedly killed Ayato’s sister.

The fact that this guy still exists in any capacity at all makes it obvious that he’s going to be important later–and at the very end of the season, we see him mysteriously pick up Haruka’s glasses and say some cryptic shit like how it’s about that time; but if you’re guessing that he’s totally not going to show up at any other point in the arc, and that no one is going to draw any attention to him or point out that he’s the guy from episode one, then you’re starting to get the hang of this by now. As the series is want to do with all of its characters, it just tosses this guy out there and gives him a vague air of mystery so you’ll wonder what his deal is, and then stashes him away for a big reveal to come at some point in season two. Riveting.

So neither Ayato nor Julis ends up with any kind of big bad rival looming overhead during the tournament; and additionally, in one of the single most baffling lines of dialog that I’ve ever witnessed in any anime ever, it is remarked that Ayato is legitimately THE ONLY NUMBER-ONE RANKED FIGHTER COMPETING IN THE CURRENT FESTA.

This is an entirely new level of diminishing narrative stakes the likes of which I’ve never seen before. It actually would’ve been the easiest thing in the world to flip the whole impression of Ayato being an unstoppably overpowered badass on its head, just by reminding us that Seidoukan Academy is supposed to be the weakest school in the city, and that the number one fighters at other schools are probably a hell of a lot tougher than Kirin, who did give Ayato a rough time at least once. Instead, the show seems to go out of its way to suggest that there is not a single combatant in this tournament who is likely to be stronger than Ayato. There’s an after-credits scene in episode eight where Claudia looks over the tournament roster and says that it’s pretty much anyone’s game; hinting that even the opponents that she’s worried about aren’t strong enough for her to lose confidence in Ayato’s victory. I seriously, honestly and truly cannot believe that it’s possible to fuck up a tournament arc this badly this fast.

So the second type of tournament rivalry is the hero versus their best friend. This is your Yugi Mutou vs Joey Wheeler; and the drama writes itself in this match-up–both opponents want to win, but they also want their friend to win; so they decide that the only way to do right by both of them is to give it their all, and to compete even harder than they would have before. Sometimes this match is saved for later in the tournament, and other times it’s subverted by having one of the characters booted from the tournament before they get teh chance to fight one-another. In Nanoha Vivid terms, this would be the rivalry between Vivio and Einhart Stratos–a couple of best friends who are comparable in power level and desperate to prove themselves to one-another in an official capacity. This rivalry is once again absent from the Asterisk War, in spite of having the characters for it right there.

Episode eight was a pseudo-filler episode mostly dedicated to establishing the new partnership of Kirin and Saya before their entry into the Festa. At the start of this episode, it’s established that the pair basically pales in comparison to Ayato and Julis due to their lack of chemistry–but after hanging out and sharing a heart-to-heart moment together, they up their game and start putting out training scores comparable to their friends.

However, in spite of this gesture, it’s simply impossible to take Kirin and Saya seriously as any kind of meaningful rivals to Ayato and Julis. Besides the fact that they’re already playing catch-up in the first place, their role in the overall narrative is so flaccid, and their characters are so dedicated to playing second-fiddle to Julis that a battle between them would almost come across as pathetic. We already know that Ayato can beat Kirin one-on-one, and while Saya has been mysteriously left unranked according to her dialog in episode eight, it’s hard to imagine that she’s any kind of threat to this team either. Kirin and Saya feel like a complete joke across this entire arc, and practically don’t do anything besides get naked at random anyways.

Lastly, we have the most common type of tournament rivalry, which is the grudge match between the main characters and their foils. The bulk of any tournament arc is going to consist of fights between the main characters and opponents of comparable power levels who’ve got some kind of problem with them. Often these grudge matches develop out of the characters realizing that their powers, personalities, and/or backgrounds either clash with or compliment one-another. Nanoha Vivid has a lot of these, such as the battle between Vivio and Rinaldi Miura, in which they become friends by way of fighting because of their complementary techniques; or the grudge match between Victoria Dahlgrun and Harry Tribeca, whose personalities and fighting styles are polar opposites. Episodes nine through twelve of the Asterisk War are focused on one of these grudge matches, while setting up another one in the background.

Outside of all the time they waste on characters flirting and seeing one-another naked, episodes nine and ten are entirely dedicated to establishing the four main teams that we’ll be following in this arc, by way of five quick little battles. A typical tournament arc will often start off with the main characters blowing away some of the lesser opponents in the early matches, in order to establish how those characters compare to their competition. For instance, in Nanoha Vivid, we don’t really have any context into how powerful Vivio and her friends are in comparison to the other fighters in their age group, until we see them plowing their way through the preliminaries.

The Asterisk War gives two of these types of matches to Ayato and Julis and one to Kirin and Saya–but in this case they were largely unnecessary. We were already aware that these characters were some of the strongest fighters in the city because of their ranks–and, thanks to the announcement that Ayato is the only top-ranked fighter in the tournament, we can imagine that most of the other fighters won’t be at his level. At this stage in the game, it would be far more important to establish which fighters might actually pose a threat to our main characters, and to start them all off with some heavy-hitting opponents, giving the impression that the REALLY strong guys are going to be on a whole different level from the ones at the bottom.

Instead, Ayato wins his first match against two randies in a single attack, with Julis watching from the sidelines. Julis herself then duplicates this success against a pair of random cute girls in the next episode. When the press comes to talk to them, Julis tells Ayato that she wants to keep everyone in the dark about their strategies until the end of the tournament–meaning she’s already completely confident that they’re going to steamroll it. Likewise, Kirin and Saya make quick and easy work of their first opponents in-between dicking around for most episode ten. There is no tension in this entire arc whatsoever

Meanwhile, we’re introduced to our first pair of rivals in episode nine–a couple of robots built by the hyperactive girl who showed up in the previous arc, and for whom the tournament‘s rules were changed to allow them to compete. Forgive me for going on a tangent here, but these robot dudes could not more obviously have been based on the robot characters from Phantasy Star Online. I’ve been mentioning here and there all along that this show’s design sense seems to borrow from that game, especially in the look of some of its weapons [the yellow axe], but these things are just outright ripped off from it.

It actually wouldn’t surprise me if these homages to PSO were the direct result of A1 Pictures’ involvement in the series. After all, the studio seems to have a pretty friendly relationship with SEGA; 2014’s Nanana’s Buried Treasure, for instance, featured the titular character actually playing Phantasy Star Online 2 in some of the episodes, and the game itself has featured advertisements for A-1 Pictures shows in the past. Not to mention that SEGA were the ones who made Dengeki Bunko Fighting Climax–a game which features characters from tons of Dengeki Bunko light novels, including Sword Art Online and Ore no Imouto, which A1 Pictures did the anime for. It also featured stuff from SEGA’s Valkyria Chronicles, for which A1 once again handled the anime adaptation. Oddly enough, The Asterisk War doesn’t come from Dengeki Bunko at all, so whatever connection to SEGA there might be here would probably be from A1. Anyways, that’s enough flexing my databrain for now.

The Asterisk War attempts to establish these robot characters as sort of unique and quirky in comparison to what’s typical of the show, but everything about them weirdly falls flat. All that we learn from watching their battle against yet another pair of complete nobodies, is that they’ve got really good defense and they’re also pretty strong. After their match, Saya’s dad calls her up to shout some technical jargon about how they can control more parameters or whatever than any typical human can, but since we don’t know shit about that shit, it doesn’t really tell us anything. The robots also have some kind of comedy duo gimmick going on, where the guy robot is loud and boisterous, while the girl is a deadpan tsukkomi, but all of their dialog completely fails to entertain. Actually, the most memorable moment with these characters is when the guy robot asks his creator why the girl robot is always able to beat him even though he should be stronger; and the creator, not wanting to let him in on the fact that the girl robot is his limiter, lies to him that she literally programmed sexism into their code. It’s a really bizarre sequence of dialog.

That’s all we get out of these robots for now, though it’s pretty clear that the show is setting them up to turn into big rivals further down the line. There’s even a bit of an actual grudge to their matchup with Saya, since she’s kind of pissed off that their creators were dissing her father’s weapons in an earlier episode–though the show forgets to actually tell us whether the robots are in the same bracket as Saya, which might’ve lent some kind of drama to the proceeding episodes. Instead, given that we’ve only seen these robots fighting against random dudes whom, for all we know, could’ve been just as pathetic if they went up against any of the main characters, the robots don’t leave much of an impression, and just seem to be hogging up screen time compared to the rival characters who actually matter in this part of the arc.

So then we’ve got Irene–and yes, that’s how I’m going to pronounce her name–who is the central rival for this part of the arc leading up to the season one climax. Our first encounter with her at the start of episode nine is when this fat guy whom I can’t believe they wasted Tomokazu Sugita’s voice acting talent on, lets her out of some kind of prison and puts her on a mission to kill Ayato. Aside from her sort of outlandish character design, we aren’t given any kind of impression of what she’s like until the following episode, when Ayato and Julis find her in the middle of a street fight, settling an old score with the very same guys that Julis beat the shit out of back in episode three.

Irene has a bit of an attitude and seems to be pretty keen on fighting, but she’s reigned in by her perfectly milquetoast little sister Priscilla–who also happens to be her tournament partner. Compared to everyone else in the show, Irene actually has some decently unique super powers. She wields an enormous weapon called the Gravi-Scythe, which has the power to intensify gravity for her opponents, and also turns her into a vampire. Literally. She’s literally a vampire

Irene’s first tournament match against Lester and his lackey is one of the most poorly-considered attempts at jobbing which I’ve ever seen. For those who aren’t familiar with this concept, jobbing is when you take an established character–usually one whom we’ve seen fighting a few times, and  typically a former rival of the main character who has since become one of their friends, who is supposed to at some point have been roughly equivalent to the main character in power–and then have them get utterly stomped by the new adversary in order to show us just how strong that new adversary is.

If this show had actually made any sense up until this point, then Lester would’ve been a perfect candidate for jobbing. He’s a guy who started off hating the main characters and fighting against them; and then, after fighting with them against a mutual foe, eventually sort of started hanging out with them–or at least, for some reason, Ayato seems to be intent on befriending him. He’s the kind of character who’s just relevant enough to the show’s history that we know who he is, but who’s just inconsequential enough that you’d expect him to lose at some point to a stronger opponent anyways.

The only problem here is that Lester has already been established as a total pushover. He was introduced as some dude who Julis beat three times in a row because he kept pathetically challenging her, and then he got royally stomped by his own lackey, before Ayato showed up and utterly laid waste to that very same lackey. Never once have we been given the impression that Lester could actually hold his own in this tournament, or that beating him could be considered a show of power. And even in spite of that, he manages to put up enough of a fight against Irene that she decides to “get serious” and to show off some of her more advanced abilities against him; which logically puts her closer to Lester’s power level than it does to the absurdly high level of Ayato. But I guess it does make sense for a vampire to try and avoid any narrative stakes.

The last two episodes of season one are the only time that the Asterisk War actually manages to come close to being competent about its structure. Using the hilariously dumb setup that Ayato has to go looking for Saya because she’s gotten lost, Ayato ends up running into Priscilla and rescuing her from a bunch of random thugs–which apparently puts Irene in his debt; so she invites him over to dinner and explains that she’s working for Le Wolfe Academy, and that she’s been hired to take him out; and we also learn from Priscilla that the Gravi-scythe may be slowly turning Irene into a bloodthirsty monster. That’s fifteen agonizing minutes I saved you in one sentence.

This kind of setup is the most simple and effective way to handle a grudge match rivalry in a tournament arc. Simply give the character some kind of sob story which explains why they’re fighting, and then maybe create some tension by getting the main character to empathize with them right before going into battle. While you’re at it, come up with some reason that this battle could make or break this character’s entire life by way of what they would have to do in order to win, and you’ve got drama. The Asterisk War manages to follow this template to the letter–but unfortunately, it only goes as far as literally having the characters explain this shit to the audience, and then wrapping it up with an overly long, sleep-inducing battle scene in the following episode.

Irene and Priscilla’s backstory is the kind of trite garbage that a hack writer could churn out by falling asleep on the keyboard. They come from a war-torn country, their parents tried to sell them off so they ran away, and then the dude from Le Wolfe (who I guess must be a lot older than the other characters) showed up and offered Irene to protect her sister as long as she’d fight for him using the gravi-scythe. This information is presented at nearly the same speed that I just rattled it off, and without any dramatic fanfare or emotional depth to get us invested in these characters.

In fairness, the most interesting thing to come out of this arc is when Ayato pays a visit to Claudia’s apartment and conveniently receives a rude introduction to her secret powers. Claudia explains that her weapon torments her by showing her nightly dreams of different ways that she might die, and that it typically drives its users insane. While this explanation is a little bit out of nowhere, and I don’t think it really adds much of anything to Claudia’s character, the idea that the most powerful weapons in this world come with different bizarre physical and psychological side-effects is probably the closest thing the show has to an interesting idea. I mean, it’s not exactly original, but at least it could be used to develop the characters in interesting ways if we saw their minds and bodies deteriorating over the course of their battles. Of course, what this amounts to in the fight against Irene is simply that after getting hit with a really big attack, she goes into high power mode and won’t listen to reason anymore, so Ayato screams a lot and turns into a Ping Pong character, and then breaks her gravi-scythe. Riveting.

There’s really not much else to say about this arc, given that so much of it is consumed by characters just standing around flirting and wasting time. The scene where Ayato breaks the gravi-scythe tries to be all epic and dramatic by playing the show’s opening theme in the background, but it’s obvious that they didn’t have enough planned for the end of the fight to match the length of the song, so they just dragged out every shot for as long as possible. Our grasp of the characters’ powers is so lacking that the battle comes off as nothing more than a light show–yet it goes on and on for what feels like half the episode just dragging its feet.

Afterwards there’s a little bit of resolution between the sisters, and then we see glimpses of a bunch of people who are going to show up in season two, and that’s about it. If you were to cut out all the stupid bullshit from these episodes and use that time to flesh out Irene and Priscilla’s characters and make them possible to care about, then they could’ve been decent enough adversaries–but instead, their entire story just comes off as a flaccid waste of time.

Funnily enough, I don’t even think that pointing out how badly this arc fucked up handling the most basic formula for a decent shounen action series is the most damning thing that I can say about it; even worse than that is how badly it shits on the overall series narrative. Remember how this was supposed to be a dark and conniving city where everything revolves around these deadly fighting contests called Festas? Well, in the entire course of this arc, not a single person actually dies. In fact, no one even gets critically injured! At one point, one of the commentators mentions that the badges will automatically break if they register you as unconscious, meaning that there isn’t any reason to kill anyone in the first place. I don’t know if this was mentioned in the show itself, but I remember reading on the wiki that this was supposed to be a contest where even the audience wasn’t safe–yet we clearly see in the final battle that there’s an invisible barrier around the stage. At this point, it’s hard to imagine that this competition is any more deadly than, say, an MMA fight.

It wouldn’t even have been hard to preserve the idea of this being a dark and deadly bloodsport without killing anyone, just by having the audience react with disappointment when the main characters refuse to finish someone off. Instead, the crowd never does anything besides cheer for whatever’s going on, even when Ayato ends a match in one move and you don’t get to see anything. And come to think of it, if the city completely revolves around the festas, and all of the schools exist to fight in the festas, and all of the students on this island are here because they have some wish that they want to fulfill by winning in the festas, then why the fuck is Ayato the only number one ranked student competing in the festa? Did none of the other highly-ranked students care enough to give it a shot? Were none of the other schools really trying to win? It seems like nothing that we’ve ever been told about the festas is relevant at all at this point.

It’s kind of astounding to watch the way that this series just keeps on trucking along with complete abandon–never stopping to sort itself out, or to maintain any degree of internal consistency. We’re at the end of the first season now, and the setting has been left in shambles, the dramatic tension has yet to come into existence, and Claudia‘s already asking Ayato compete with her in the NEXT festa before this one is even over; a truckload of new characters have been hinted at, and the second season is already planned for this spring. This story holds up with about as much logic as the fanfiction that I was writing when I was eleven years old–and if this was indeed a middle schooler’s fanfiction, then it wouldn’t be worth criticizing; but considering that this is a published series of light novels which have already been licensed for translation and North American release–and that they’ve been adapted into more episodes of anime than what some of the most popular and high-quality manga adaptations have been able to acquire in recent years, which has also been translated to a worldwide audience and adapted into a Vita game, I can only view this as the absolute pinnacle of cynicism in storytelling.

At this point, I’ve covered pretty much everything worth saying about the Asterisk War in itself; however, I’ve yet to touch on what is by far the most interesting aspect of the context in which the series was released. Namely, that there was a nearly identical series which ran on the exact same day at the exact same time, for the exact same number of episodes. In the grand finale of this epic video book, I’ll be putting that series against The Asterisk War to see if it’s possible to make the exact same show, without managing to fuck it up.

Continued in part twelve.

1988’s Akira is among the most revered and influential anime films of all time, and is today regarded almost as a symbol of a certain time and place in anime history, both stylistically and in terms of overall quality. To this day, it remains one of the most impressive animation showcases to ever come out of Japan, and a lot of its animation staff went on to have long and illustrious careers within the industry.

Given Akira’s iconic status when talking about classic anime, I thought it might be interesting to find out what the animators who worked on that film have been up to over the past decade. I got the idea for this after discovering that some of the most iconic scenes from the first season of K-On–a series which is often used to represnt the modern age of anime in the same way that Akira represents late 80s–were animated by someone who also drew some very memorable cuts from Akira.

From there, I had a look at all of the animators listed for Akira on sakugabooru and compiled all of their work from the past decade into a thirty-three-minute sakuga AMV. It was pretty fascinating to see how many of these staff would continue to find themselves working together over the years, with a lot of them having done work for Ghibli through the 90s and 2000s, and many also contributing to the films of Satoshi Kon, Mamoru Oshii, Hiroyuki Okiura, and Mamoru Hosoda, and also going on to contribute to various parts of the Animator Expo. At some point, it almost became more interesting to find out which stuff these animators had worked on outside of those films, and the random places in which some of them turned up.

In the video, the animators are mostly organized by their level of cotnribution to the film Akira itself, in terms of how much of their work on the film was listed on sakugabooru. Besides that, each individual animator’s work is ordered chronologically. If you’re down to check out this behemoth-sized sakuga AMV, then head on down below and follow the links to all the places where the video is currently being hosted. This video is completely non-profit and was made just for the sake of its own existence, so if you want to download it and upload it to other streaming sites, then feel free to do so, and link them to me so I can put them in my list. Enjoy!

(Note: Maybe don’t watch this at work. There’s some tits.)

On google drive.

On Free Playing.

On Zippcast.

Check out this interview with him that Toco Toco TV posted last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1tiKOsCz2M

Text version:

You might not know his name, but you may be familiar with the work of art director Shichiro Kobayashi. He’s been in charge of the background art for popular and classic anime series like Berserk, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Detroit Metal City, and Nodame Cantabile. If you do already know his name, then it might be for his beautiful work on the dark and striking Angel’s Egg; or the soft and soothing Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou; or maybe for his work with Hayao Miyazaki on films like Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro.

Shichiro Kobayashi has been working with anime since the dawn of time–or at least since the early 70s, with his first widely-recognized work having been on the Osamu Dezaki-directed Nobody’s Boy Remi. It must have been from Dezaki that Kobayashi picked up the technique called Harmonies–high-detail paintings which Dezaki would often use to punctuate the dramatic moments in a show, and which Kobayashi would go on to use in more of his work over the next three decades.

Kobayashi’s style is instantly recognizable, whether it’s in the background of a gritty 90s high-fantasy series like Orphen; or in a goofy moe slapstick comedy from the 2010s like Tantei Opera Milky Holmes. His hand-painted backgrounds always bear the mark of his handiwork very clearly; with their inky, unclean, and almost unfinished look to them. He tends to leave a lot of white space in his backgrounds, and his very distinct ways of drawing trees, bushes, towns, and rocky roads, are easy to pinpoint as visual signatures.

If you’re watching a series that Kobayashi is involved with, you’re almost guaranteed some sweeping cityscape shots, regardless of their level of detail. Lots of his shows take place in small, rustic villages, which he brings to life immediately in his art. Others are set in more contemporary cities, which are always shown in a few super wide-angle shots. Also, this might be a coincidence, but I found that towers and steeples kept popping up in his shows, often in close relationship to a lake. Something almost sexual about that.
By nature of working in anime, he also ends up drawing a lot of schools. Most of them are very old-school, individual three-story buildings; but occassionally you get something crazy like the school from Utena.

Very ocassionally, but more commonly in his older work, Kobayashi would use these parallax background layers to create some really dramatic shots. Nobody’s Boy Remi in particular used so many of these that it became kind of hilarious.

Looking into the works of an art director like Kobayashi was fascinating, because he was so unbeholden to any genre across his career. He could pop up in a high-concept, high-budget film, or in a low-tier early-2000s harem comedy, and still be totally recognizable.

The closest thing to a connective thread in his work is that most of what he did from the late 90s onward was with studio JC Staff; tho he didn’t work with them exclusively.
If I have one criticism of the way that Kobayashi has been used, especially on a lot of those JC Staff shows, it would be that the character designs don’t always look at home in his backgrounds. Sometimes, seeing clean and colorful designs set against these sort of washed-out and soft backdrops could get a little weird, though I wouldn’t necessarily blame Kobayashi for this.

Around five years ago, I remember listening to the commentary on the Simoun DVDs wherein director Junji Nishimura briefly talked about working with Kobayashi. He described him as being so old school that he still did a lot of work on cels, and would even walk into the office with cels in hand and submit them for the show. I always wondered about what kind of person Kobayashi might be after hearing that, and I finally got a little insight into his personality from this interview that Toco Toco TV posed with him on youtube last year.

Having retired from the industry three years prior at age 79, Kobayashi still continues to work on his art and to strive for improvement at home in his incredible home studio. From the way that he talks, Kobayashi seems like a true dyed-in-the-wool artist through and through, who will probably keep going with his art for the rest of his life, and has a lot of deep thoughts about the nature of his craft. I’ll put a link to this interview in the description for anyone who’s interested in it.

Kobayashi’s contribution to anime history on more than 100 shows is staggering, and it’s always fun to be watching an old show and to instantly realize that he must’ve been the art director on it as soon as you see a few trees. If you want to see his work at its best, I’d highly recommend checking out Nobody’s Boy Remi from the 70s, Angel’s Egg and Venus Wars from the 80s, Berserk and Utena from the 90s, and Windy Tales and Tokyo Marble Chocolate from the 2000s. All of them are great shows where Kobayashi’s work really shines.

Stick around on my channel if you’d like to see more videos like this; and if you’d like to support those videos, then consider donating via Patreon, or sharing this video to anyone whom you think will enjoy it. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.

Edited by The Davoo

Text version

At the beginning of the Fall 2015 anime season, a pair of light novel adaptations became the subject of ridicule based on the alarming extent of their similarities: The Asterisk War by A-1 Pictures, and Chivalry of a Failed Knight by Silver Link. Both shows happened to air on the same day, at the same time, and for the same number of episodes. Both stories take place at an illustrious academy which is home to students with special powers, who are put into tournament fighting scenarios and ranked according to their power levels. Each of them features a generic Light Novel Guy protagonist, who happens to walk in on a pink-haired princess in a state of undress at the start of the first episode. Each of these princesses has a tsundere personality and ends up challenging the main character to a fight–with the pretense that the princess is one of the stronger fighters in the school, whereas the main character is a yet-unproven newbie. In both cases, the characters get into a bombastic sword fight–with both princesses utilizing fire magic in addition to their swordplay, but ultimately being defeated by their respective light novel guys and showing some affection towards them by the end of the episode.

The similarities between these shows don’t even come close to ending there–in fact, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the story beats of each series are almost exactly the same, and even occur during the exact same episodes. However, over the course of this video, I’m going to show you how the many subtle and meaningful differences between these shows have dramatically affected their overall quality; and resulted in the seemingly impossible fact that Chivalry of a Failed Knight actually does not suck.

That’s not to say that the series is necessarily good; it’s still a pretty generic, middle-of-the-road high school action series that employs a majority of the same tired-ass tropes as The Asterisk War without adding much of anything new or interesting to the anime landscape. The animation quality is less-than-stellar, and the character designs feel even more generic and dated than those of The Asterisk War–though there is a bit more variety and personality behind each of them individually. Almost nothing about this show is anything that you haven’t seen a hundred times before, and I wouldn’t really recommend it to anyone who wasn’t predisposed to watching it anyways. However, I can honestly say that I think that this show ultimately succeeds at handling its subject matter with an acceptable level of competence. It does not insult the viewer’s intelligence to watch it, nor does it have very many faults which I would find outright distasteful. It’s a strong five to a light six–the bare minimum of what I think could be considered a worthwhile viewing experience; and in being that, it is sooooo much better than the Asterisk War.

The important differences begin as early as the opening scene of the first episode. As discussed in part one, The Asterisk War opens on a very poorly constructed and ultimately pointless action scene that sucks tons of ass and means nothing whatsoever. Chivalry opens on a news report which plays in the background of the main character getting dressed, and which explains the basic facts about our resident princess, Stella Vermillion. This shot follows a trend throughout the show of utilizing weirdly ambitious animation techniques that the team isn’t quite talented enough to make impressive, but nonetheless add a lot of character to the animation.

After the brief introduction of the princess, the show then immediately launches into Ikki, the main character, narrating about the driving themes of the series. Yeah, this one actually has themes! Ikki talks about how there’s a natural hierarchy between those who are born with talent, and those who are born without, and wonders whether the untalented should give up on striving towards what they want to become. We then get a flashback to a strange moment with Ikki in the snow being given words of advice about not giving up even though he’s the weakest one–which we will later learn was the moment that turned Ikki into the man that he is today. Ikki’s voice-over continues as he explains the concept of magic-using fighters called Blazers, and how the Blazers who are approved by the international organization–whatever that is–are known as Magical Knights; and that he is an aspiring magical knight himself. The narration is delivered over footage of him training with his sword, before thrusting it to the heavens, and cutting to the title.

This introduction is pretty barebones, and doesn’t exactly inspire much hype towards what’s to come–but the important thing is that it doesn’t suck. It doesn’t pull us out of the world entirely in order to show us some stupid, disconnected space computer monitors, nor bore us to death with a terrible-looking action scene. It immediately establishes its two main characters in the very first shot; then explains the main character’s ideology as well as how he acquired that ideology; then showcases and explains his powers; and, finally, clues us into his motivations. Less than two minutes in, we already understand who and what this show is about–and what kind of message it will ultimately try to send.

Just like in the Asterisk War, the very next moment involves the main character walking in on the princess naked. This scene is still completely stupid, tasteless, and a major turn-off–however, it is nonetheless far superior to the similar scene from The Asterisk War. For starters, the logic behind it is, if typical, far more sound–Ikki has been assigned to this room and has no idea that Stella lives there, and vice-versa. The actual fanservice shot is more detailed and enticing than Julis’ lack of ass–and in fact, while Stella is even less of my type than Julis, it’s interesting how the series presents her as unquestionably the hot one; she’s even got the biggest boobs! But I digress. Before Stella and the audience have time to get annoyed, Ikki immediately says, “hold on. I know what you want to say, and I won’t make any excuses,” and then attempts to atone for his wrongdoing by immediately removing his own clothes to make it even.

Does this make any sense? Not really. Does Ikki even seem like the kind of guy who’d do this sort of dumb shit in the long run? Not really. In terms of the audience experience, does this incredibly brief glimpse of Ikki’s chiseled body make it an “even” exchange of manservice for fanservice? Not really. But you know… it’s a hell of a lot better than what I’m used to. If nothing else, it caught me by surprise, having come off the heels of another, similar scene in the show I was watching right before, and I think that’s probably the main thing it was intended to do.

From that mercifully brief fanservice scene, Chivalry launches directly into a nearly identical exposition sequence to the one from the Asterisk War–but, as usual, with some key differences. The biggest and most noteworthy change is that this show does not have a Claudia character, but instead replaces her with the director of the school. This alteration is vital, because it speaks to the biggest difference in the thought processes behind each of these shows. The Asterisk War is willing to strain the audience’s suspension of disbelief by having Ayato’s only contact with any authority figure in the school limited to a girl his own age who seems to basically run place–all in the name of keeping every relevant character in the show as a part of Ayato’s harem. Chivalry, on the other hand, introduces the idea that there’s some adult supervision in this society from the get-go–assuring us that the morals of this society haven’t quite been inverted yet, and that we may in fact find ourselves capable of relating to the characters.

The story behind the school is exactly the same as in Ass War–there’s a big inter-high competition which they used to always win at, but in recent years they’ve started going downhill. That’s about all we learn before the scene returns to addressing the whole room-entering fiasco, so let’s take a moment to consider what’s happening here. Obviously Stella gave Ikki the slap; but while it’s not all that clear what went down between then and this office visit, it seems as though the characters’ response to a confrontational situation was, honest to god, to go and alert an adult authority figure. As opposed to setting her apartment on fire like a fucking idiot, Stella actually took Ikki to the principal’s office to have her work them through their spat. I’m honestly a little bit shocked.

Of course, Stella then pulls some similar bullshit to what Julis did, where she frames a sentence in a way that seems rational at first, before revealing that she actually wants Ikki to make amends by killing himself. It’s not quite as jarring and ridiculous as the Julis scene, and doesn’t have the stupid weird dere moments, but it’s the same kind of dialog. Here’s the fun part though–Ikki’s response to her demand for suicide is to deride her for thinking that he’d offer his life for something so stupid. He’s just like, “Jesus dude, all I did was see you in your underwear!” Which is, like, a rational response that an actual human would have! And then, when Stella gets all pissed off and ready to blow the roof, Ikki disarms her by telling her that she’s beautiful, causing her to set off the sprinklers. If you can’t read the symbolism here: she literally gets wet.

So, in the midst of learning the dumbass reason that they have to share a room and watching them argue like the kids they are, we are told that Ikki is, in fact, the lowest-ranked magic user in this academy–and has thereby earned the nickname of the Worst One. However, when the principal suggests that they have a sparring match as a way of settling their argument over Stella’s overbearing demands, Ikki seems rather confident in his abilities, and states that he’s working very hard. This comment strikes a chord with Stella, who reflects before the match about why she decided to become a magical knight–(to be able to protect her fledgling nation)–and on her vow to learn how to control her powers no matter how hard she has to work.

In the lead-up to the fight, we watch a flashback and listen to kids talking in the halls to inform us of how Stella is regarded by her peers. Everyone thinks that her life must be easy because of her natural talent and her status as royalty–which pisses her off because no one appreciates the hard work that she puts into perfecting her craft. What this is all building up to is a fight scene which takes on a bit more meaning than a simple spat over some dumb fanservice; now it’s turning into an ideological battle. Both characters have something to prove: Ikki that he can compete with the best fighters in the school despite his incredibly low ranking; and Stella that her hard work, in addition to her natural talent, has gotten her into the position that she has today.

Just like in Ass War, we then launch into a big dumb fight scene with some pretty lackluster choreography–however, there’s a lot more going on this time. For starters, the color design changes to reflect the tension of the fight, and to put more emphasis on the characters. In spite of both fighters using swords, their weapons actually look pretty different, with Ikki carrying a katana, and Stella carrying a golden, flaming broadsword. After taking her first swing, Stella explains one of the unique aspects of her attack–that it burns at 3000 degrees celsius–and that Ikki would be in trouble if he took it straight on. While this method of communicating the sword’s power to us is kind of lazy, it at least allows us to understand the circumstances of the battle, and whether or not getting hit would actually mean anything [in contrast to the fight from Ass War].

After Ikki spends a while dodging and blocking Stella’s attacks, he compliments her on the training that she must have undergone to master these techniques, and then states that he’s already seen through her attack patterns. He then retaliates and, for a brief flash, we see an image of Stella overlaid onto him as he makes his attack. This ingenious visual cue immediately communicates to us that Ikki is copying Stella’s techniques. Consider that we otherwise wouldn’t have known what Ikki’s regular sword style looked like in comparison to hers to begin with. We now instantly have a strong grasp of Ikki’s technique–that he copies the abilities of his opponents by studying their moves. He even sort of esoterically explains his methodology, by stating that you can understand the root of anything if you trace it back through the branches and leaves.

Ikki then turns the tide after Stella tries to change up her strategy by using a move which is uncharacteristic of her. Again, we only really understand this because Ikki explains it, but at least we do, in fact, understand it. Ikki’s turn-around doesn’t work out, though, as his sword is unable to cut through Stella’s magical force field. This is kind of an interesting moment for each character idealistically: whereas Stella was hoping to use this match to prove the reach of her strength beyond her magical abilities, she ends up in a position to cease victory only because of the strength of those abilities; whereas Ikki, who wanted to prove that he could win against a powerful opponent regardless of his lack of magical strength, is primed to take home the moral victory while losing the match. From this position, both characters have failed at what they set out to do–but then Ikki pulls his magical power out of his ass and manages a victory. His fighting style, it turns out, is all about studying his opponent until the moment that he knows how to beat them, and then unleashing all of the magical ability that he has in a single minute and striking them down.

Later on in the hospital room, Stella demands an explanation for Ikki’s bottomed-out ranking in comparison to his obvious skill. As it turns out, the school’s ranking system is based solely on a student’s level of magical ability–but not on their overall fighting capability; meaning that Ikki’s secret to success is being so physically powerful and mentally skilled that he can compensate for his lack of magical talent. So yeah, he’s an overpowered super-badass who’s already taken out one of the strongest fighters at school–but at least the reasoning is kind of interesting.

Chivalry of a Failed Knight is using what I like to call the “overdog posing as underdog” trope, which seems to have grown in popularity lately, with shows like Food Wars using it to excellent effect. Basically, the idea is to feature a main character who is obviously more skilled than most of the people surrounding them, but is unrecognized within the broken standards of the system. Rather than being on a mission to improve their skills and rise to the top, their battle is really against the structure of their society–and their ultimate goal is to shove the hypocrisy of the system back in its face and make it realize the value of the powers which it fails to recognize.

After the director causes Stella to realize the similarities in hers and Ikki’s goals, she begins to take an interest in him; and then, upon finding him asleep in the room, starts totally checking out his body. It’s kind of an interesting scene for reasons that we’ll get into later; but then, after some bickering that turns into flirting, the kids seem to find mutual camaraderie with one-another and share a totally radical fist-bump before the episode ends.

When the first episodes of Chivalry and Ass War first came out, I put up a tweet that the difference between these episodes was like that between a three-out-of-ten and a one-out-of-ten; and while I’d probably bump Chivalry’s opener up to a four upon analysis, I still think that this sentiment is an important one. So many people would look at the similarities between these episodes and immediately classify both shows as equally generic, uninteresting, and trite. However, I think that there’s a danger in failing to recognize just how much worse the first episode of Ass War is in comparison to that of Chivalry. If we simply group all of these things together as meeting the same bar, then I think it drags the overall standard of what can be considered acceptable downwards. I think it’s important that when something is really THAT terrible, then we can parse just how much worse it is than something comparable but better.

If the difference in quality hasn’t been made clear enough already, it rapidly becomes increasingly apparent as each series continues. Similarly to the same episode of the Asterisk War, episode two of Chivalry mostly serves as an introduction to Stella’s love rival–yet another frigid loli with a childhood connection to the main character and a cool-toned hair color who immediately starts fighting over which girl gets to ride the dick. But whereas my complaints with Saya being introduced in episode two were that she was irrelevant to the plot and had a completely unexplained connection with and interest in the main character, Shizuku suffers from none of the same problems.

From the very beginning, she narrates about her attitude towards Ikki–whom, as it happens, is actually her brother. Having been attached to him all of her life, she witnessed the way that their family and the society that they were a part of had treated him as a lesser being–and she gradually grew to hate those people, while becoming more and more enamored with her brother. Her motivation to shower Ikki with affection is pretty much the entire basis of her character–and while this makes her come off as fairly shallow, especially in the beginning, she plays an important role at this stage in helping us to learn about Ikki’s backstory; and she will continue to play an important role in the long run as a support character.

One of the things that never made sense to me about Saya was the way that she’d act so possessive of Ayato–fighting over him in front of his face and demanding his affection–yet would never just come out and confess her feelings or take a more provocative approach in her flirting. Shizuku cuts right through all that bullshit by instantly shoving Ikki to the ground and making out with him the moment she sees him, before ringing out all kinds of justifications for why it’s okay for her to do this with her brother, and outright stating her attraction to him publicly.

Understandably, I could see a lot of viewers getting annoyed with the fact that a little sister character exists in this series at all, given the ridiculous proliferation of the little sister who’s in love with her brother trope. However, I personally can’t help but respect the fact that this show doesn’t try to have its cake and eat it too in the way that so many other anime try to. When Ikki first mentions that his sister is coming to this school, Stella asks him if she’s related by blood, and then says that she approves of her arrival as long as that is the case–which is the show’s way of being self-aware about the nature of its tropes. The twist, then, is how in spite of Shizuku actually being Ikki’s honest-to-god sister, she turns out to be one of the most forwardly sexual characters to ever belong to this archetype. It’s a fun little bit of playing around with tropes, while both giving us a more obvious reason for Ikki to not be attracted to or seek out a relationship with this member of his would-be harem; and, in the long run, paying off in a decently handled character arc.

Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t to say that I wasn’t annoyed with the scene that introduces Shizuku in the first place. I still can’t stand these unfunny, minutes-long scenes where the main girls just stand around bickering like idiots over who the dick belongs to. However, I think it’s important to call attention to just how much more effort was put into keeping this scene interesting than what we got out of Ass War. Aside from the fact that straight-up making out with Ikki is more provocative and arresting than any of the flirting from that show, we also get moments of expressive animation–like when Shizuku is anticipating Stella’s statement about her relationship with Ikki, and her entire body becomes dark and shrouded with ice; as well as moments where they actually attempt some comedic timing, like when Shizuku and Stella both make snappy insults at one-another, and then we pan out to see their contesting powers explode from the space. Plus, there’s a little bit of extra spice thrown into their rivalry, since Shizuku’s elemental power is to manipulate water–which, as she phrases it, can put Stella out. Sure, the fire and water dynamic is about as generic as they come–but it is, in fact, a dynamic.

Shizuku isn’t the only character introduced in this episode with an obvious parallel in the Ass War–we’ve also got a homeroom teacher with an immediately identifiable quirk; though this one is a lot more bizarre. The gimmick of a teacher who tries to come off as young and cute in spite of her age is one I’ve seen a few times [Hidamari Sketch and Nourin], but in this case, the schtick is that she tries to act cutesy and energetic in spite her sickly appearance and voice, and the fact that she’s constantly puking up geysers of blood. O… kay. Unlike the teacher from Ass War, who only gets like five speaking lines in the entire series, Yuri-chan here is actually relevant to the story, in that she’s the one who helped Ikki to get into this school and to be able to take classes in the first place; and we’ll be seeing a lot more of her as one of the few adult characters who’s actually looking out for him.

This show also has its own newspaper club member, which is about as close as it gets to a parallel to Ass War’s classmate guy–but in this case, she’s an incredibly cute girl, which makes her automatically superior to that asshole with the hoodie. She’s honestly not any more relevant to the story though, and is there mostly as a representative of the student body existing outside of the important characters.

This episode also briefly introduces us to one of the more interesting characters, who actually doesn’t have any immediate parallel in the Asterisk War–an honest to god trans woman named Alice who turns out to be Shizuku’s roommate. Alice doesn’t get much exposure in this episode, but she’ll be around to play a supporting role as the one who often listens to the problems of the other characters and gives them advice, and eventually guides the development of Shizuku.

Aside from introducing all of these new characters, the real point of this episode, and what makes it so much better than episode two of Ass War, is that it fills in more of the details of Ikki’s backstory and motivations and solidifies the tone of his narrative. We learn that Ikki comes from a very distinguished family with a long history of producing top-tier magic users, of which he is the weakest offspring. As such, the family has made an effort to sweep his existence under the rug, and has tried its hardest in coalition with the former school director to keep him out of this prestigious academy. However, thanks to the new director changing the rules and deciding that the school’s ranking system will be based on overall ability as determined through tournament fighting from now on, Ikki finally has a chance to prove himself; with the ultimate goal of hoping to one day be strong enough to inspire hope in a weakling such as himself in the same way that his grandfather did when he told Ikki never to give up when he was a kid.

Learning of Ikki’s motivations and the nature of his isolated upbringing makes him even more relatable to Stella, and she quickly finds herself wanting to support him, and falling deeper in love with him by the second. The episode then rounds off on a surprisingly forward fanservice scene, with Stella getting very blatant in her flirtation and sexual interest in Ikki. Once again, I actually find this aspect of her character interesting, but I’m still not quite ready to talk about why–so once again we’ll push that aside for now and talk about it later.

Episode three of Chivalry is probably the worst in the series, but for pretty different reasons compared to the Ass War episode that it parallels. Like that episode, it revolves around Stella going on a date with Ikki; but in this case, they end up with Shizuku tagging along as well, making it sort of like a portmanteau of the similar scenes from episodes two and three of Ass War. All of the characters in this series have exponentially better fashion sense than Julis or Ayato, with Ikki and Stella looking smart and far less out-of-place than Julis’ weird gown, while Alice outfits herself and Shizuku in some decently trendy fashions.

The first part of this episode consists mostly of obnoxious flirting–but at least it bothers to drop some lines into the mix which flesh out the characters. Towards the start, Ikki and Stella actually have a conversation about something which is neither directly relevant to the plot, nor sexually charged–making the connection between them began to sink in a little better. Ikki later talks about how surprised he is to see Shizuku opening up to someone in the way she does with Alice, and we get a lot of basic insight into the kind of person that Alice is.

The second half involves an action scenario in which the people in the mall are held hostage by a bunch of dudes with guns, led by some asshole magic user. This whole scene ends up being kind of ridiculous and out of nowhere, but it beats the hell out of chasing hooded dudes through the forest; since this hooded dude not only has a much more decorated hood, but also reveals his face and his unique powers as the scene continues. Unfortunately, this scene also involves the bad guy forcing Stella to take off all her clothes, in a sequence which is way too obviously meant to be titillating for the viewer in spite of the disgusting circumstances of the situation. At the very least, Stella herself seems to give less of a shit about this treatment than Ikki does, and stands with bravery throughout the scene, never becoming just a victim; but still, kinda gross.

If there’s any reason for this scenario to happen around these characters, it’s mostly to show us the dynamics of their fighting techniques, and to establish their moral compass as a group. Alice and Shizuku are both very careful with their planning and timing, to the point that Alice prevents Ikki from moving when Stella is in trouble so that he doesn’t interrupt the plan. Shizuku’s power is used for a defensive trap, whereas Ikki and Stella are more about rushing in and getting the damage done. Stella’s fire is even completely impervious to bullets–which makes her objectively better than Julis.

We also learn about the ridiculous but kind of awesome way that Ikki’s magical technique works. Apparently, he can pretty much reroute the synapses in his own brain to focus all of his concentration on a single point, by blocking out things like color and detail in order to hone his reactions and speed. It’s worth mentioning as well that Ikki doesn’t hesitate to sever his opponent’s arm, which is more brutal than anything that happened in the supposedly deadly tournament held in Ass War’s dark and violent city.

More importantly, though, the end of this scene introduces us to the asshole who’s going to be Ikki’s first opponent in the school-sanctioned tournament battles. This guy is introduced by having him easily take out the remaining bad guys whom the main characters had just been struggling against, suggesting that he might’ve been able to resolve the situation by himself from the beginning; and characters who were just established as powerful remark on how they couldn’t even sense his presence. He then mocks Ikki for apparently having run away from a fight they were supposed to have a year ago, and generally comes off as a massive cunt.

Right away, this dude is already a better antagonist than anything we got out of the first season of Ass War. Not only do we have reason to believe that he might be even stronger than any of the main characters, in spite of how powerful they’ve proven themselves to be already, but we also know that Ikki ran away from him in the past, suggesting that he fears this opponent. Not to mention the guy’s a total dickbag, so we’ve already got plenty of reason to hate him–and the grudge between him and the other characters is clearly running strong. This dude might not even remotely resemble a unique or interesting antagonist, but the fact that he comes off as threatening at all makes him a hell of a lot better than what we’ve had before.

So episode four rolls around, and just like before, it’s mostly centered around a big fight scene with our first primary antagonist–being as it is the end of the first volume of the light novels; but it’s the differences in the buildup to and payoff from this fight which sell this one as actual drama, instead of whatever the hell was going on with that fake chess metaphor bullshit. It starts off with Stella steamrolling her first fight in the knockout matches by sheer intimidation; followed by Alice and Shizuku talking about the quick work they made of their own opponents; while Ikki is cooped up in his room, watching a video of the bad guy’s last fight over and over again, and losing his shit.

There’s an important setup going on in the background here that you could easily miss if you aren’t paying attention. Back at the start of episode three, when Ikki and Stella were talking about their battle tactics, Stella remarked on how she prefers not to look into her opponents too much, but to consider her options in the heat of battle; whereas Ikki does extensive research on his opponents as a means of trying to decode their fighting styles. As a result of their differences in mindset, Stella doesn’t recognize how Ikki is actually getting really paranoid and shaken up about this fight, because she thinks he’s just doing his research as usual. For the next ten minutes, we see Ikki trying to match his determination against his fear, as Shizuku points out his untied shoelaces, while the mysterious and hilariously named teacher side-character Saikyou Nene is impressed with his lack of hesitation in confirming his intent for battle.

All of these things exist exclusively for the purpose of building tension–a concept of which the Asterisk War is woefully unaware. Even though everything we’ve known about Ikki so far suggests that he’s monstrously powerful–and even in spite of the fact that he only ran away from this guy a year ago because he would’ve gotten into trouble for fighting back, Ikki is nonetheless terrified of this opponent; and that’s more than enough to create some drama for the upcoming fight, whether we really believe that he has any chance of losing or not.

So the fight breaks out, and right away the opponent has some pretty interesting powers. He somehow spawns like a whole forest out of the stage, and his schtick is that he can turn invisible and fire arrows from a distance. There’s obvious symbolism here–even though this guy has been given the nickname of “the hunter” for his lack of knighthood in combat, and even though his technique is indeed terrifying and deadly, it is also cowardly. His tactics revolve around hiding and attacking from a distance, and he clearly gets off on picking on a defenseless opponent. This guy is a piece of shit right down to his powers, which makes him someone that we really want to see get his ass kicked–and that desire is compounded by the fact that he beats the living shit out of our main character.

For minutes, Ikki is just getting brutalized, while this guy laughs it up and plays to the crowd, who still sees Ikki as a powerless nobody. He whips the entire stadium up into a frenzied chant, and Ikki is more and more demoralized, giving in to his fear and failing to react to his opponent’s moves on time. All the while, Stella’s up there in the stands, realizing that she didn’t even notice how distraught Ikki was before, or just how painful his situation of being labelled as the worst one really is. She gets up and silences the crowd with an impassioned cry, and demands that Ikki get up and be a man, stating that he’s not allowed to be anything less than a badass in front of her. In this moment, both Ikki and Stella pretty clearly realize something–that they are totally in love.

Ikki is filled with determination. He gets up, recognizes what he’s been doing wrong, and finally solves his opponent’s moveset. He hulks out, puts the fear of god into the hunter, and soundly kicks his ass, to the astonishment of a newly turncoated crowd. Then he passes out.

Later on in the hospital room, Stella’s fallen asleep at his bedside. Outside the room, Shizuku is already realizing that she’s going to be the loser in this love triangle, and Alice gives her a shoulder to cry on over it. Ikki wakes up and he and Stella have some flirty dialog, before Ikki drops the bombshell that finally puts this show over into the realm of being actually pretty okay. He confesses his love for Stella, she reciprocates, and they kiss. Ladies and gentlemen, we are four episodes into a light novel adaptation, and light novel guy and light novel girl are officially a couple.

This was the moment when the conversation online surrounding Chivalry of a Failed Knight and the Asterisk War took a very subtle turn. This was when both the popularity ranking and overall score of Chivalry quickly started outpacing those of The Asterisk War. This was when people started talking about how Chivalry was kind of refreshing by comparison, and when the conversation about the similarities between the shows turned into the conversation about why Chivalry of a Failed Knight was better.

What happened in this scene wasn’t just a breath of fresh air for a light novel adaptations–it was a breath of fresh air for anime, period. I can probably count on one hand the number of anime with romantic elements in them, in which the main characters hook up by the end of the fourth episode. It doesn’t even really matter who these characters are, or what their relationship is like–this is such a big change from what I’m used to that it’s immediately interesting.

What this scene makes apparent is that the goal of Chivalry of a Failed Knight is not simply to be a generic light novel. It is not to follow the trends as closely as possible, play everything safe, and never try to do anything different. Instead, the series has goals of its own. Yes, it is operating very comfortably within the conventions of its genre–but it also has intentions of making a name for itself, and feeling like there might be some reason for it to exist–some niche for it to fill. And for that reason, this was the moment when it became apparent to everyone paying attention that yeah–this show is definitely better than that other one.

I’ve still got a lot more to say about the comparisons between these shows, but this video is already long as fuck, so we’re going to have to split it in half, youth novel movie adaptation style. Stick around for the grand finale of this monstrous series in The Asterisk War Sucks Part 12B. See you then!

Edited by The Davoo

Text version:

Back when I was talking about the last two arcs of The Asterisk War, I kind of just glossed over episode eight. Funnily enough, episode eight is probably the least offensively terrible episode of the series, in spite of also being an anime-original filler episode. It follows the new partnership of Kirin and Saya as they realize that their teamwork is rather lackluster due to their lack of personal chemistry. After talking to Ayato and Julis about it, they decide to hang out for the rest of the weekend and get in some good old-fashioned bonding. It’s worth mentioning that in this cafeteria scene, we learn that Ayato has developed a sort of fan following as a result of becoming the number-one fighter at school after beating Kirin.

The first half of the episode follows Kirin and Saya on a little shopping excursion, as Saya seeks an illegal weapon to purchase for her father. The second half has the girls visit a pool so that Saya can teach Kirin how to swim, and get into a dumb fanservice battle with some rich girl in a g-string. After all that, the girls have a moment together wherein they briefly share the most meaningful conversation in the entire show, with Saya offering Kirin some reassurance and guidance on how to have more respect for herself. They then talk about Ayato and how cool he is for a little bit before the episode rounds off on showing how their bonding has made them better team fighters.

It’s not difficult to imagine how this episode came about. There probably wasn’t quite enough material to turn the second volume of the novels into a four-episode arc, so they came up with an excuse to make a pool episode and to get Kirin and Saya into swimsuits. Considering the pretty lackluster animation and artwork throughout most of this episode, it was probably made as a way of saving money, as it’s common practice in the industry to save on budget by making an episode out of panning shots of girls in bikinis at the beach or pool.

Chivalry of a Failed Knight contains a similar filler episode–but in a different part of the show, and with a very different function. It is still very much a pool episode, largely existing in the name of getting its main characters naked–and the dip in art and animation quality reflects this. It is also set in-between major arcs, just like the Ass War episode–with the biggest difference being that it’s in episode five, between the first and second arcs, as opposed to the second and third.

Whereas Ass War’s filler episode focused on fleshing out the relationship between its largely irrelevant side characters, Chivalry’s is dedicated to fleshing out the newly-minted official relationship between its main characters; the focus here being on how, in spite of having hooked up more than a week ago, the couple hasn’t actually done anything romantic together yet.

Just like in Ass War, the early part of the episode establishes that Ikki has taken on a bit of a fan following after his previous victory–but the significance of this is vastly different. Considering the way that Ikki was treated by his classmates up till this point, this radical shift in his reputation is pretty important to his character arc. This fanclub becomes an entire subplot wherein Ikki starts training his classmates on how to become better physical fighters–which is what leads the characters to the pool scene in the first place, as he ends up holding a training class there.

All throughout the episode, Ikki and Stella continually fail at communicating with one-another, and we mostly follow along with Stella as the strain of the situation really starts to put a damper on her perspective of their relationship. At the episode’s midpoint, both Stella and Shizuku are paired off with other girls to talk about their feelings towards Ikki. Shizuku’s is possibly the more interesting conversation, as she asks Alice whether she thinks it’s wrong for her to feel attracted to her brother, and Alice provides some surprising reassurance about how she should pursue whatever feelings she finds to be genuine. Meanwhile, Stella, lamenting over the lack of physicality in her relationship, is convinced to confront Ikki about it–and eventually, their paths converge as the director cleverly hides them under a waterfall fountain together.

The conversation which follows is better than The Asterisk War in its entirety. Ikki and Stella continue to misunderstand one-another in ways that only a couple of dumbass teenagers could, and then get into a bit of a spat which almost leads to breaking off their relationship. They argue and argue and get more and more confused, as it becomes apparent that what’s really bothering each of them is that the other’s lack of making a move has caused them to think that they don’t really love them. After a moment’s contemplation, they both agree to just state their true feelings outright–and of course, what both of them really wants is to kiss the other. And they do–twice–as the director brilliantly turns the waterfall into a place not just for cutting the main characters off from the rest of their classmates, but also for brilliantly lighting their first romantic scene together.

Watching the main characters of a light novel adaptation hook up by the end of episode four was pretty satisfying in itself, but this scene is really what clinches it for the experienced viewer. If you’ve been through something like, say, watching Shana confess her feelings before the final battle of the first season of Shakugan no Shana, and then starting off season two with Yuuji not having actually heard what she said, and Shana being too afraid to repeat it, setting their entire relationship back to square one–then you may have been skeptical of just how meaningful it was for the characters to hook up before. After all, episode four of Ass War was pretty suggestive of the main characters hooking up, but the rest of the show never budged an inch on making them a real couple, since it wanted to preserve its harem.

Chivalry of a Failed Knight makes it very clear in this episode that this is a proper otp relationship; and that this is NOT a harem series; but is, indeed, a romance story. And while the characters and their feelings are rather juvenile, they nonetheless come off as genuine–and resolve in a way that, for a kid watching a show like this as a wish-fulfillment fantasy, would probably be incredibly heartwarming. This scene lets us rest assured that the bullshit and misunderstandings are out of the way for now; and instead of having to run the usual gamut of annoying cliche scenarios where the main characters’ relationship doesn’t seem any more significant than the flirtations of the other girls around them, we might actually get to watch this relationship continue to make progress over the course of the show, and to see the romance take on some depth.

All of that out of the way, it’s here that we launch into our second major arc, during which the parallels to The Asterisk War somehow manage to become even more staggeringly evident than ever before. Once again, we are introduced to a shy swordsman girl from a different grade level of the school, who quickly strikes up a bond with the main character over their mutual interest in sword techniques. Said sword girl has found herself in a situation wherein she is regularly being abused by someone as a result of something which happened to her father, and wherein she is trying to fight in the name of absolving her father’s past deeds. Both daughters have learned how to fight from their fathers, and are largely copying their father’s sword techniques. Both girls are at some point touched by the main character, and later compare the feel of his hands to those of her father. Both end up training regularly with the main character, and eventually end up getting him wrapped up in their business. Both shows have scenes wherein the girl ends up fighting the main character in a stadium, and both end with the main character causing the girl to change the way that she lives her life. As usual, though, it’s the details which make all the difference when stacking these shows up against one-another.

In spite of all the similarities which I just mentioned, Ayatsuji Ayase is treated very differently by the narrative in comparison to Kirin. For starters, Ayase is actually an upperclassman in this case, and doesn’t carry any of the little sister/daughteru baggage that Kirin did. She is consistently treated as someone who stands on equal footing with Ikki as a human being; and while Ikki does end up changing the way she thinks in the end and resolving her situation, this never comes as a result of Ayase being a victim, or incapable of making her own decisions.

Whereas Kirin was fighting because of her father’s wrongful imprisonment, and was following the guidance of an abusive figure, Ayase is fighting for revenge on her father’s honor against the guy who put him into a coma and took over his dojo. The biggest difference in how these goals are portrayed, is that Kirin and her father were both presented as victims of circumstance, whereas Ayase and her father are both in their situations because of their own decisions. Ayase’s father lost a battle that he agreed to and, as Ikki causes her to realize, actually enjoyed–and ended up in his coma as a result of his hubris as a fighter. Ayase herself takes to her quest for vengeance in spite of the fact that her father was always telling her to be a protector of the weak, and not not let herself fight in the name of hate, and all kinds of Yoda shit like that.

By far the biggest difference between the arcs of these characters is the fact that Ayase actually betrays Ikki in an effort to beat him during their tournament match. In spite of everything that Ikki did to help her in improving her sword technique, Ayase cheats him by forcing him to use his Ittou Shura power–which he can only use once every three days–on the night before their match, by throwing herself off of a building, knowing that he’d try to catch her. She even cheats during their match by activating invisible traps which she’d set around the stadium the night before using her special abilities. All of this serves to enhance the drama of their match threefold: not only is Ikki fighting against a friend who betrayed him, but he’s been severely hamstrung by the limitation of his powers–something which actually exists in this show. And yeah, of course he wins anyways, because he’s an unstoppable fighting machine–but he does it purely through tactics and his ridiculously superior instincts and reflexes; not pulling a random surplus of power out of his ass.

Back in Ass War episode seven, the whole conceit that fighting against Ayato was Kirin’s way of taking her “first steps” never made much sense to me. I guess the idea was that she was choosing this fight without her uncle’s permission, but I didn’t really understand the significance of the fight itself. It just seemed like an excuse for Ayato to prove that he would’ve won if he’d taken a more tactical approach to their match-up, and for him to take her spot as number one in the school.

Ayase’s take-away from her match with Ikki is a hell of a lot more relevant to her character arc. In spite of all the shit that she does to betray him, Ikki forgives her for everything, and even goes out of his way to allow her to cheat by convincing his teacher to turn a blind eye to it. By beating her without using underhanded tactics and at a huge disadvantage, he makes her realize the gravity of what a shitty person she’s allowed herself to become, and convinces her that it’s time for her to change, and to remember what her father tried to teach her. It’s certainly a more meaningful way to inspire change in his opponent’s mindset than just by telling her that she’s wrong, and being a lot more convincing than the guy who regularly slaps her in the face.

The last episode of the arc revolves around a big fight between Ikki, and the guy who took over Ayase’s family dojo, and who bashed a bottle over Ikki’s head during his introduction a couple of episodes ago. This guy has a pretty stand-out character design that makes a quick impact, and his personality is a bit more unique than that of the last bad guy. He’s a dojo-hunting swordsman who takes sadistic pleasure in getting the chance to bring prideful swordsmen to their knees, but he actually uses more legitimate tactics even than Ayase herself, and is as passionate about the heat of battle as any of the main characters.

There’s a lot of dialog throughout this fight, wherein Ikki realizes how much fun Ayase’s father must have been having while fighting this guy, and how much fun he’s having himself. By the end of it, even the bad guy seems like he might’ve had a slight change of heart towards Ikki, and we’ll be seeing little hints later that he might be relevant again in the long run. More importantly, this fight scene is actually pretty entertaining in its own right, with the enemy once again having a very unique weapon and set of powers, and the animation team kicking things up a notch with their creatively dramatic coloring. All things considered, it’s a pretty okay fight scene.

And that’s the end of the arc. Ayase’s father wakes up, with them now mutually understanding one-another, and her role in the show is over. She doesn’t tag along with the main characters, clinging to light novel guy’s coattails and joining an inevitable spurned women’s club–she’s just done with her part in the show. Both Ayase and Ikki actually made it through this entire three-episode arc without showing any physical attraction to one-another, or flirting at random, or suggesting that Ayase is in love with him. They simply maintain a mutual respect for one-another and develop a normal friendship.

Even though there’s a fanservice-y scene wherein Ikki feels up her legs while teaching her a sword technique, during which she is understandably embarrassed, he apologizes over it afterwards, and neither one seems to take it sexually. That night, Stella even asks Ikki about it, and he reassures her that his affection is for her exclusively, and they have a little romantic moment over it. So yes, the show actually, in complete self-awareness, decided to center an entire arc around a female character with no romantic subtext whatsoever. I’m impressed!

Moving on to the show’s final arc, the parallels between Chivalry of a Failed Knight and The Asterisk War become a bit less intense. A lot of that is because the Asterisk War moves into its big tournament in this arc, whereas Chivalry is still building up towards its own big interhigh battle; and only lets us know which students will be participating in it at the very end of the season. There are still a number of similarities in the way that these arcs are structured, and those similarities are still an excellent lens into how this show does all of the same things better, but a lot of the noteworthy parts of these episodes are pretty unique to this series.

Episode nine is mostly just a bunch of setup for things to come, sprinkled within a lighthearted slice-of-life plot that’s meant to cool us off after the last two episodes of fighting. Ikki and Stella go off to a training camp with the school’s student council, and at some point Stella gets sick, so Ikki has to take care of her. This eventually leads to an amazingly lengthy and detailed fanservice sequence–but one which I honestly don’t have any problems with. I mean, if you’re not into this kind of shit in the first place, then I’m sure it doesn’t have a lot to offer, but I can’t really bemoan too much a kind-of-intimate scene between a pair of lovers who are actually capable of admitting to and talking about their sexual interest in one-another.

And, in fact, that’s actually how this scene progresses. Ikki pops a boner after seeing Stella in her underwear, and Stella asks him if he wants to have sex with her. After giving it some thought, Ikki says that he feels like he can’t have sex with her before getting married, because that’s just what he’s comfortable with. Stella feels a little bit guilty over the fact that she didn’t feel the same level of restraint–and while, in the context of my own beliefs versus those of the show, I do find it kind of upsetting that Stella is made to feel guilty over her own sexuality, I still think that this is an interesting bit of characterization. All throughout the series, Stella has always been pretty forwardly sexual towards Ikki; and in this scene, the show actually admits and addresses it. Suddenly, it doesn’t feel like Stella’s actions all this time have just been the show’s way of forcing fanservice into its character interactions–Stella’s sexuality is actually an important aspect of her character, and the cause of one of her inner conflicts.

Now, I’d be really hard-pressed to say that this show doesn’t use fanservice in some pretty disagreeable ways. There’s plenty of panty shots, that opening scene, the part where Stella was forced to undress, and a scene in episode ten wherein Saikyou Nene grabs Stella’s tits at random. I also think that the show itself promotes a pretty traditionalist mindset when it comes to sex, as one of its main characters wants to wait for marriage, and the other one feels guilty over the fact that she doesn’t–and while I’m going to address the resolution of this conflict at the end of a later episode, I’ll just say for now that traditionalism wins out in the end.

Nevertheless, I think that in this scene, Chivalry of a Failed Knight at least starts to ride the line between being a show which features sexuality, and being a show which comments on sexuality. In this scene, the sexuality becomes more than a way to entice the audience, and becomes a way for the audience to connect with the characters on sexuailty as a topic. And you know, considering how this show is clearly meant for teenagers and is loaded to the brim with moralizing, it’s hardly surprising that its characters are going to have a fairly milquetoast and juvenile relationship. The stuff that I said about how Ayato’s sexuality was governed by what works for the audience could still be applied here; but at least in this case, they made it work for the characters as well.

So while this is all happening, the b-part of this episode has Shizuku taking a trip back to her family’s house, which mostly seems like it was meant to jog our memories about what a bunch of assholes they all are, since one of their underlings is going to be the villain of this arc. The episode ends with Ikki and company getting attacked by a bunch of golem puppets, and the introduction of the student body president–a lightning user so powerful that she can break the show’s aspect ratio. (Y’know, I really can’t decide if that effect is goofy and terrible, or totally kickass.) We also get a quick hint as to who sent these puppets after them, but that won’t be relevant till later.

Episode ten focuses almost entirely on Shizuku–and the way that this episode is structured to fit in with the rest of the arc is actually kind of brilliant. From the beginning, the biggest role of Shizuku in this story has always been to provide insight into Ikki’s home situation. This episode opens with some flashbacks into the siblings’ past, wherein Shizuku recounts how she fell in love with her brother, and became determined to reimburse him with all of the care that her family never gave.

The whole first part of this episode is all about building up Shizuku’s emotions, and having her stake those emotions on this huge battle against the student council president–whom, as we’ve seen in the previous episode, is a total badass. Over the course of this very long and explosive fight scene, filled with all kinds of creative interplay between the characters’ powers, the focus remains on Shizuku almost exclusively. The president barely says a word and mostly just keeps unleashing attacks, while more and more emotions are piled onto Shizuku, and her part in this fight takes on more and more meaning. It turns into this big, long, protracted struggle with everything riding on the line; and at the end of it, Shizuku–loses.

Remember all that shit I said back in part eleven about how The Asterisk War doesn’t understand the concept of jobbing? Well, this is how you do it right. We already knew that the student council president was strong–we were shown as much in the previous episode. Likewise, we’ve been given evidence to the fact that Shizuku is a badass both in the past, and over the course of this incredibly long battle. The match really could’ve gone either way–we had no reason to think that Shizuku was more likely to lose, especially when the whole episode was making it look like this was to be her big moment in the spotlight. Even at the end of the fight, we don’t necessarily yet understand what the purpose of this match was in the context of the arc as a whole. Near as we can tell, this was just a very tragic turnout for a character who wanted to prove herself. It’s only at the end of the arc, when the class president is revealed as the final opponent whom Ikki must overcome to make it to the inter-high battles, that we realize how Shizuku was totally jobbing.

So the setup for the last two episodes is pretty similar to the last two of Ass War. In both cases, there’s a fat businessman trying to get the main character taken out of the running by a trump card fighter, while the fighter herself has a little sob story in episode eleven, befriends the main character, and then fights him in the climax in episode twelve. However, the biggest difference in this case is that Chivalry doesn’t really put any focus on the student council president beyond assuring us that she’s a good person who will totally be friends with the main character in the long run, but for now needs to stand as his big final opponent. Instead, the focus here is pretty squarely on Ikki, as the fat businessman is his father’s second-in-command, who is willing to go to any lengths to get him kicked from this tournament.

The bulk of episode eleven takes a very sudden and dramatic turn, as the business guy manages to snap a photo of Ikki and Stella sharing a kiss, and runs with it to the media, publicizing it as a princess being corrupted into a relationship with some lowly powerless nobody. Through some pretzel logic, he manages to get Ikki incarcerated for weeks on end in a crazy-looking prison cell, wherein they treat him like garbage, but still force him to participate in all of his school battles, leading up to his big final match against the student council president.

This entire scene is presented as a trippy, fucked up fever dream, with really striking and unique color design that many fans referred to as, “pulling a SHAFT;” which is a pretty accurate way of putting it, and leads me to a subject that I feel the need to address: studio Silver Link.

I’ve developed a bit of a reputation over time as a guy with a serious bone to pick against studio A1 Pictures–and I certainly am that guy; but you know, there are some A1 shows that I really like, such as Sora no Woto, Tsuritama, and Welcome to the Space Show. But funnily enough, for a very long time, Silver Link was a studio that just never managed to connect with me. It’s not that I’ve ever really hated any of their shows–they made a lot of stuff that I like about as much as Chivalry of a Failed Knight–acceptable, strong five to light six shows like Baka to Test, Nourin, and Non Non Biyori (which I know everyone else loves, but whatever). I liked Watamote, and, while I haven’t finished it, I’ve liked what I’ve seen of Yuri Kuma Arashi (which is kind of a given since it’s an Ikuhara show), but this studio has never really made anything that I loved.

Silver Link has always come off to me as a little studio that could. They take on pretty middle-of-the-road adaptations that aren’t likely to impress from the get-go, and while they’ve never really had the level of quality or polish in their animation to put them on par with any of the more recognized studios, it always feels like they at least try to make their shows stand out a little.

Almost everything which Silver Link puts out is directed by Shin Oonuma–a director who used to work for SHAFT as an assistant on a ton of Akiyuki Shinbo’s shows, and who made his full directing debut with ef ~a tale of memories in 2007–a show that I loved. Studio SHAFT has always been known for the fact that they make up for their tiny personnel count and animation budget by making their shows as visually striking as possible, with Shinbo’s personal stylistic trappings pervading all of the studio’s output.

In a lot of ways, Shin Oonuma is like Akiyuki Shinbo-lite. Whereas Shinbo’s directing style doesn’t allow for a single frame of normalcy in his shows, and it can take a lot of concentration to parse the dense wall of visual stimuli, Oonuma takes a more reserved approach, and only busts out the insanity when it’s time to make a visual statement. In the same way that Shinbo’s influence is ever-present on the works of SHAFT, Oonuma’s seems to be the same on Silver Link–and while I personally am a much bigger fan of Shinbo and SHAFT’s style of visuals, it’s in moments like these where I really appreciate that Oonuma has continued in the studio’s tradition, and knows how to use this kind of trippy, artful coloring to really make a scene stand out.

Ikki’s incarceration is a hard sell. It comes out of nowhere like halfway through episode eleven, and only lasts up through the start of episode twelve–so for it to have any dramatic impact at all, it had to be portrayed in a way that really makes the drama sink in. And oh man, does it ever sink in. Yes, the hyper-dramatic coloring makes this whole thing come off as heavy-handed; but it had to. If it didn’t, then all of this would’ve come off as a pointless diversion, instead of the grueling, intense trial that it’s intended to be. And it kinda pays off–because even with this relatively mediocre material, and the relatively mediocre talents of the animation staff working on it, the tension which this sequence is meant to convey is easily felt by the viewer–and that’s exactly what it needed to be.

Episode twelve is basically just one gigantic build-up to a few minutes of payoff. Ikki turns the emotional tide after receiving his girlfriend’s encouragement, and, against his father who doesn’t believe in him, the society that’s trying to hold him down, and the weakness which has seeped into his bones from weeks of malnutrition, he stands among the cheers of his allies, and emerges onto the field of battle with his head held high. Just like in Ass War, the opening theme plays over a slow montage of characters powering up and preparing to strike–but in this case, it is coupled with artful visuals in line with the tone of the series, and the entire match is boiled down to just one attack. All of the tension of the last episode and a half is offloaded with needlepoint precision into a single moment–and the victory goes to Ikki. And here’s the payoff–Ikki and Stella legitimately get engaged. Yep, that’s what I meant that tradition would win out in the end; but since we’ve already established marriage as the winstate of this relationship, I’m okay with this as the finale.

Whenever I think about the positive aspects of Chivalry of a Failed Knight, I end up remembering  myself at age thirteen–the age when I first got really, seriously into anime and was watching everything I could get my hands on. Thirteen year-old Digi was not a very critical viewer–he would watch just about anything as long as it had cool action scenes–especially if it involved swords. But while young Digi wouldn’t have been able to explain what made certain shows his favorites, outside of how cool the fights were, he nonetheless did have favorite shows. Out of all the things that he watched and thought that he liked, there were certain ones that stood out in his mind, and which he continually remembered for years to come–whereas other stuff that he read and watched and had no complaints about very quickly disappeared from his mind over the years.

I try to imagine my thirteen year-old self watching both The Asterisk War and Chivalry of a Failed Knight. I’m certain that he would’ve said that he liked them both. I’m sure he’d remember all of the places where there were fights in the Asterisk War, and that he would’ve thought that the swords were pretty cool–but I’m willing to bet he would’ve forgotten the names and faces of all of the characters a week after finishing the show, and resold all his DVDs by the time he was fifteen.

But when I picture my younger self watching Chivalry of a Failed Knight, I think he really would’ve loved it. I think he would’ve loved how all of the characters had really unique and interesting weapons and powers, and he would’ve spent all of his time in math class drawing pictures of swords for the characters to use and coming up with all of their abilities. I think he really would’ve looked up to Ikki for his intelligent strategies and for researching his enemies; and that he would’ve had a huge crush on Stella, and hoped to one day have a relationship just like that of his own; maybe he even would’ve learned something about sexuality from listening to them talk about it. He would’ve thought that the fifteen-minute fight between Shizuku and the student council president was the coolest fucking thing that ever happened; and the trippy visuals of Ikki’s incarceration scene would have blown his mind to shit and convinced him that the series was a masterpiece–at least until he was eighteen and finally sold the DVDs.

The appeal of shows like The Asterisk War and Chivalry of a Failed Knight is not difficult for me to understand. When I was growing up, my favorite characters were always the ones who reminded me of myself. I idolized child geniuses and anyone who was kicking ass while they were still a kid, because that’s the way I saw myself. I thought swords were the coolest thing in the universe, and I wanted to own a katana so badly that it was tearing me apart. By the time I was fourteen and ready to admit to myself that I was into girls, I’d be reading shit like Negima and Chobits and drooling over all the fanservice scenes. I get it. I was a fourteen year-old boy once, and I still remember what it was like to be one, and I can still find it in me to connect with those emotions even now.

The reason that I’ve chosen to break The Asterisk War down in such ridiculously extensive detail, is because I want you to understand that being a show for fourteen year-olds; being a dumb light novel adaptation; being a harem show; none of these are what makes this show bad. You can make a show with all of the same basic elements as this, without insulting the viewer’s intelligence in the process. You can pander to a demographic of preteen boys, while still giving them a show that they’ll actually give a shit about for ten seconds after foolishly dropping all their money on it.

I think that most of the people who watched both The Asterisk War and Chivalry of a Failed Knight would agree that the latter is the better series (as no shortage of comments on my videos can corroborate); and I’m glad to see that the show’s MyAnimeList score was able to pull up pretty far ahead of that of The Asterisk War. But the fact that these shows are still thought of as being around the same caliber, or even that their opening episodes were compared so heavily without many people pointing out Chivalry’s superiority, was a little bit worrying to me.

I don’t think that every anime needs to be a masterpiece, or even that they necessarily need to be good. I understand that every series has its own purpose which it’s intended to fulfill–and that sometimes that purpose is just to kick out some shit that might get a few kids to buy a few books and keep some adults at their jobs. But I don’t want to live in a world where we’re lumping in something cheap that came as a result of being made in a sweatshop with something cheap that came as a result of being made by a small, local business–if that metaphor makes sense.

If shows like the Asterisk War continue to be successful, then it will continue to perpetuate the cycle whereby churning out a constant barrage of cheap, shitty, heartless adaptations of low-tier light novels is a viable business decision. What I hope that I can inspire in people is that they might ask a little bit more from their entertainment. I hope that people start asking for shows to be made with a little bit of care, by staff that actually seems to give a shit and to be good at their jobs; and that we can support companies who do good business and, maybe even take care of their employees. There’s not a lot of money in the anime industry right now–but if we can keep it going to the right places, and into the hands of the right people, then maybe the industry can transform into something better. But that’s all pretty heavy-handed and idealistic.

At the very least, I hope that in watching this series of videos, you’ve started to think about what the lower five numbers of your ten scale really mean. To seriously consider whether all of those kinda generic harem shows are really all just mediocre, or if, on closer inspection, some of them are actually gigantic pieces of shit. If I can convince someone that there’s a meaningful difference between a one-out-of-ten and a two-out-of-ten, then I think I’ve done my job.

Thanks again for watching everyone, and I really hope that you enjoyed this obscenely massive video series. I started writing this under the idea that it was going to be a video which is the size of a book; and at just over fifty-thousand words, I was right on the money. Thank you for all the wonderful support in keeping these videos and my channel running, and for everyone who started donating to my patreon or increased their pledges as a direct result of this video series. One last thanks for watching; and I’ll see you in the next one.

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When I was growing up, there was this show called Yuu Yuu Hakusho, where the main character saved a little kid from getting hit by a car, and then died–so when the Winter 2016 anime season started off with someone almost getting hit by a truck in Erased, and then someone actually getting hit by a truck in A-Jin, and then the main character getting hit by a truck trying to save a girl in Konosuba, I started to feel like maybe this set piece was getting old. But then it turned out that the guy from Konosuba had actually died of shock in front of a slow-moving tractor, and then the doctors and his family laughed at him in the hospital for being such an idiot–and I decided that maybe I had to reassess my opinion.

Konosuba had a lot of surprises in store for me in that first episode. It introduced this like bitchy goddess character who I thought was just there for domination fetishists at first; but then the main character basically tricked her into being his partner, and she fucking straight-up cried like a baby for like thirty seconds. I was so ready for her to act like one of those arrogant tsundere types that I just couldn’t stop laughing the whole time while she was crying; and then I realized that I am a truly sick and twisted individual.

But the moment that really sold me on Konosuba was this nearly two-minute montage of the main characters working as menial laborers. The joke here is that after joining an adventurer’s guild and thinking that their journey through this video game-like fantasy world was about to begin, the characters instead end up doing basic handyman work to repair a part of the town wall. Where the scene becomes special, though, is in the fact that it just keeps going. The characters get locked into this job for weeks on end. They find themselves getting good at it, making themselves comfortable, getting drunk with their work buddies, and even throwing up in an alleyway.

It’s one thing to have a simple little joke about how doing guild work turns out to be hilariously unglamorous; but the way that this scene takes that ball and runs so far with it goes full circle from parody, into becoming something which feels strangely genuine. There’s a real sensation of the passage of time here, and it feels like of the both characters actually undergo an entire arc. By the end of that one scene, they’ve already gone from basically hating each-other, to some level of genuine camaraderie; and it’s completely believable thanks to a combination of the facial expressions, the amount of subtle detail in the backgrounds and in how the characters act, and because of the sheer amount of time which seems to pass over the course of the montage.

The driving theme behind all of Konosuba’s comedy is to lampoon the tropes of role-playing games via this goofy, uncool fantasy world, wherein it turns out that being an adventurer kind of sucks when you remove the abstraction of video games. But while the parodical elements of the series are funny on their own, what really sells it for me, is how it doesn’t skimp out on bringing its derpy fantasy world to life. For instance, in episode two, the main characters take on a quest to kill a bunch of giant frogs, which is already pretty funny–but then Kazuma starts narrating all these facts about what the frogs eat, and why they have to be eliminated, and even that they supposedly taste pretty good; and now, suddenly the giant frogs aren’t just a gag, but an actual part of this world where the story takes place. The joke then pays off even further when we actually see them eating one of the frogs in the pub later; and then again when their new party member remarks that, while the frogs are very smelly on the inside, they are also strangely warm and comforting.

In spite of the show’s overall tone of irreverent silliness, Konosuba is rarely content to just throw out a random joke and then move on. Instead, every stupid thing that happens continues to be relevant to the story going forward, snowballing into even more ridiculous hi-jinks as the series continues. For instance, right after the aforementioned remark about the inside of a frog’s stomach, Megumin cons Kazuma into letting her join his party by complaining loudly that he’d gotten her covered in goo and then abandoned her, causing the nearby townspeople to look on in disgust. Then, in the next episode, a masochistic knight approaches Kazuma about joining the party, having heard the rumors about his sadistic treatment of the other girls. It’s this nonstop chain of cause-and-effect humor that just gets funnier and funnier the more it builds on itself.

Another thing that I love about Konosuba is that the characters are all just kinda dumb. None of them are ever built up to be cool or intelligent beyond an average level at best; and at worst, they’re all completely useless and not even all that good-natured. Their few moments of success only barely offset their constant failures; and they mostly grow to like each-other just out of happening to be in close proximity to one-another for so much time–just like real friendships!

It helps as well that all of them are backed by stellar vocal performances. Most of the cast is comprised of up-and-coming actors, who all sound like they’re having an absolute blast giving their all to these roles–and the chemistry between both the characters and their actors makes all of the dialog a blast to enjoy.

I even kind of love just how derpy and unclean the animation tends to be. I love that all the girls’ boobs are always flapping around at random, even though they aren’t really drawn to be all that cute most of the time–almost like the show is making fun of its own sleaziness. I have no idea if any of that was intentional, but there’s something really down-to-earth and funny about a show full of dumb characters who all look kind of wonky and terrible. Whether it’s off-model or goofy looking or whatever, there’s no denying that the show oozes with character in its aesthetic, and that the team behind it seems at least to be having a lot of fun with their work.

Konosuba is one of the most genuinely hilarious anime series that I’ve seen in the last few seasons, and probably the most fun that you can have with a currently-airing show if you’re still a half-decade behind on Gintama. The show is available on crunchyroll, and if you don’t have an account there, then I encourage signing up with this link that has my name on it–because if you do then I get five dollars, with which I can continue to pay for my own crunchyroll subscription. In all seriousness, though, it’s always nice when a show like Konosuba comes around to make me feel like whatever I pay for that subscription is totally justified.

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If you’ve watched enough different anime shows to count them on one of your hands, then you’ve probably noticed that a lot of them are pretty derivative. Guys are always walking in on girls while they’re in the bathroom, or falling all over their titties; girls are always acting like they hate the guy and beating the shit out of them, even though they secretly wanna suck his dick–you know this shit. It doesn’t even matter what decade of anime you’re watching; you could be on Urusei Yatsura from 1981, and realizing that nothing has ever changed.

These jokes are so old, that the joke of calling attention to how stupid the jokes are, is almost as old as the jokes themselves. The other day I was watching a fuckin’ shoujo manga adaptation from the year 2000 and a girl gets walked in on in the bath and yells, “what is this, an anime?!” –you get the picture: shit is ancient. But the weird part, is that you get this scene in Phantom World where the dude tries to avoid accidentally groping a girl, and ends up with his face in her panties instead, and I’ve seen people with the nerve to call this subversive. What the fuck?

See, I know what it looks like when this trope gets subverted, cause I watched this 21 year-old cartoon called Gundam Wing, where the main character falls on his girlfriend’s boobs, and she just stares at him for like half an hour before asking him to get the fuck off of her. The tables are turned on the viewer here because anime has taught you that this scene is supposed to be funny, and that the girl is supposed to slap the guy in the face; but instead, they treat the scene like it’s really happening to these characters in real life; and it’s just kind of awkward and quiet, before the girl has a perfectly reasonable response. Then, just to make sure you got that they did it on purpose, they throw in this whole scene in the last episode where you get to see what Gundam would be like if it was just like every other stupid ass harem show; and it fucking sucks! Then the creators realized that even though they solved anime forever back in episode five, everyone was still making the same bullshit tired-ass cliches, so they released two entire godawful comic books about life in the Harem Gundam universe, and made a gazillion dollars off of their dumbass fans.

About a decade after that, a whole bunch of people who watched Gundam when they were little kids, but didn’t want to work for slave wages drawing cartoons when they grew up, invented a new kind of anime book called a light novel; and they were super excited to prove both how smart they were, and how much anime they had watched, by exploring the medium through its meta.

The first light novel that anybody read was the The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya; and Kyoto Animation was so excited after reading it that he immediately made an anime out of it, which everybody loved. Haruhi Suzumiya was about this girl named The Melancholy, who was desperately trying to convince herself that she was living inside of an anime, and that she was secretly god; without realizing that she was living inside of an anime, and that she was secretly god. Trust me, it make sense in context. Most of the jokes were about how even though all of the characters were supposed to represent anime cliches, and The Melancholy was convinced that they were anime cliches, the truth is that they were actually more complex and multi-dimensional characters who were putting on the facade of being dumbass teenagers in order to appease their autistic god. Trust me, it makes sense in context. Just like Grandpa Gundam, Haruhi also had a whole part where it showed what the world would be like if it was just some lame-ass slice-of-life anime; which also got turned into its own comic book and another anime series–cause fuck the entire concept of irony.

A couple of years later, this psychopathic sentient logo that reads NISIOISIN decided that it had to one-up Haruhi Suzumiya and create the most self-indulgent, asinine, up-it’s-own-ass monument to the concept of meta in human history; and therefore wrote the Monogatari series. In the first chapter of Monogatari, this weightless crab girl staples the main character’s cheeks together and calls herself a “tsundere,” which is a word that people had heard before, and therefore it made them laugh. However, the joke which NISIOISIN was trying to tell was apparently lost in the admittedly rather difficult translation–because the entire point is that crab girl isn’t just some copy and paste anime cliche. She’s actually a fully fleshed out character with serious trust issues stemming from her realistically troubled childhood, who acts aggressively towards the main character out of legitimate defensiveness; and then warms up to him after he proves himself to be trustworthy, before forming an official (if questionably functional) relationship with him early into the story. While bits and pieces of her personality do correlate with the tsundere cliche, the purpose of writing this line into the script was to draw attention to just how shallow and unhelpful that term can be when describing an actually realized character.

So Haruhi and Monogatari made a hundred million billion dollars, and pretty soon there was a huge tidal wave of light novel authors crashing over Japan, with everyone hoping to cash in on the success of this whole “meta” thing. Somewhere in midst of that maelstrom emerged the Little Sister show–one of the four horsemen of the anime apocalypse. At first, the Little Sister show was also about taking an anime cliche and making it realistic, by reminding everyone that in real life, your little sister hates you, and complains if you don’t constantly do shit for her; and that the only way to get back at her is by shacking up with her hot goth friend. The Little Sister show had a lot of fun things in it, but there’s this moment in episode three where the main guy falls on his little sister’s boobs, and it started sinking in that maybe this show wasn’t quite as self-aware as first thought. Then you fast-forward to season two and WHAT DO YOU MEAN HE BROKE UP WITH KURONEKO AND FUCKED HIS SISTER–I’M DONE, I’M FUCKIN’ DONE!

So now meta anime is suddenly fuckin’ everywhere, and all of it completely misses the point. You’ve got this scene in Saekano where the girl says to the other girl, “hey, stop practicing your tsundere act and get over here;” except that the girl is actually, literally a tsundere. They’re just pointing out that they did the thing that everyone else does, except they also want you to know that they did it. Give ‘em a gold star, A for effort, team, we did it!

That’s why there’s nothing subversive about this guy trying not to grab this girl’s boobs–because his face still ends up in her panties anyways. They didn’t change the basic meaning of the scene, they just called attention to the fact that they were doing it. It’s like if someone was pissing in the middle of the street and everyone was staring at him, and then he yelled out, “I’m pissing in the street!” And everyone was just like, “oh, well, at least he knows what he’s doing,” and went back to shittweeting. Just because that guy admits that he’s pissing in the street doesn’t make him a functional individual; and calling attention to the fact that you’ve put a bunch of stupid bullshit in your anime series doesn’t stop it from being stupid bullshit.

Now, this isn’t to say that it’s all bad. Last season we had this wacky, farcical version of a light novel about being trapped in a light novel about being trapped in a video game called Konosuba, and it was fucking hilarious; even if it wasn’t necessarily making some deep commentary on the laziness of anime writing. But I’m still sick and tired of all these goddamn light novel adaptations that people treat like they’re so fucking clever just because the author watched a bunch of anime and said, “hey guys! Isn’t anime totally like THIS!” And then literally did the exact same thing that every other anime does. Stop it.

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So the finale of Erased has come and gone, and a lot of people seem to be disappointed with how the show turned out–at least going by all the messages I’ve received on Twitter about how I was right from the very start. I’m honestly less surprised by the fact that the show didn’t turn out to be all that great, than I am by the fact that so many people expected it to be great in the first place, considering how much evidence there was to the contrary. And no, I’m not talking about muh A1 Pictures and muh director of Sword Art Online, though honestly those are perfectly reasonable sources of suspicion; but rather, how I never really got what about this series was supposed to be impressive in the first place.

One of the first things that put me off about ERASED was the voice of the main character, Satoru, who is played by an actor named Shinnosuke Mitsushima. Satoru is Mitsushima’s first voice acting role, and it’s pretty obvious that he was chosen for the part so that he wouldn’t sound like a typical anime character. After all, Satoru is a jaded twenty-nine year-old man who finds himself perplexed by the attitudes and lingo of the younger people around him. What bothers me about Mitsushima’s performance, though, is that he’s the only character in the show who doesn’t sound like an anime character. Everyone else is played by regular voice actors who all sound like they’re probably around the same age as Mitsushima, but playing characters all over the age spectrum. In fact, the voice actress who plays Airi, the seventeen year-old girl by whom Satoru is so flummoxed, is actually two years older than Mitsushima–whom, himself, isn’t even twenty-nine years old.

If the goal of giving Satoru such a non-anime-sounding voice was to make the show feel more grounded and realistic, then the series immediately falls short by not giving the same types of voices to all of the other characters. Other shows like FLCL and Kare Kano have reached wonderful results by going out of their way to hire non-voice actors and child actors to give a more natural feel to the dialog, so it’s not like there isn’t a precedent for this. But I think it’s more likely that Satoru was given this voice specifically to make him stand out from everyone else. After all, the show is called “a town where only I don’t exist,” and since Satoru’s adult voice mostly ends up narrating over the story of his child self, having such a distinct voice helps with separating the narration from the dialog. But this just brings me to an even bigger issue which permeates every element of the show’s design–and that is, beating the viewer over the head with the point.

Erased does not like to assume much on the part of the viewer’s intelligence. Not to say that it necessarily thinks you’re stupid, but it definitely wants to make sure that as many people as possible will get the point of what’s going on, and therefore overexerts itself with making everything as overt as possible. It feels like the director was constantly asking himself, how can I make this point in a way that you’d have to be blind, deaf, and dumb, not to get it?

How do we represent the main character’s time travelling powers activating? Have the screen go weird for a second and blast this obnoxious Transformers sound effect over it. How will the viewer be able to distinguish the parts that are in the past from the parts in the present? Letterbox all the scenes from the past–it’ll look cool and cinematic that way too. How do we codify the various themes of violence throughout the show? Make sure that everything related to violence is spot-colored red–the universal representation of violence. How can we clue the audience into who the villain is going to be, so that they can feel smart for figuring out before the big reveal? Make him blatantly creepy and hide his face in the shadows every time he comes on-screen.

Now, I’m not saying that every single viewer was definitely going to catch all of these things, but I have to wonder what the point is of loading a show with symbolism if none of that symbolism is going to be remotely subtle. At some point it all stops being subtext and comes around to just being the text itself–and maybe that’s not a bad thing, but what I want you all to really ask yourselves is just, what is any of this in service of?

Erased doesn’t really do anything with its themes of abuse. Its characters don’t realistically act like victims of abuse, and it doesn’t really comment on the topic of abuse in any meaningful way. The whole time travel power barely matters outside of the setup for what kind of mystery story this is, and it doesn’t have very clearly defined mechanics, nor is it played with in any interesting ways. Satoru being a failed manga author turned jaded pizza delivery boy doesn’t contribute anything to his ability to navigate this murder mystery, and his arc is completely uninteresting. I don’t think anyone was impressed with how that murder mystery actually turned out, either, considering how let-down everyone was once the big reveal actually happened. So what in god’s name was the appeal of this show, anyways?

Over the course of the Winter season, I’ve seen a lot of talk about how Erased is “well-directed,” and I just can’t get behind that notion. Erased has cool shots in it, yes, like this shot where Satoru first enters the classroom in episode two. It has cool transitions, like this one where Satoru gets shoved out of frame in the classroom, and then reappears in the frame out on a riverbed. But are these little moments of stuff looking kind of cool the same thing as good directing? Does any of this really contribute to the narrative in any meaningful way?

When people talk about director Tomohiko Itou, they tend to bring up the fact that he worked as an assistant director on Mamoru Hosoda’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Summer Wars, which are fantastic–and fantastically directed–films. There’s a bit in Erased when Satoru first gets sent back into his childhood, which is visually represented in a way that’s nearly identical to how Makoto would travel through time in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

Now I’m not saying it’s inherently bad that this scene in Erased uses something so clearly influenced by Mamoru Hosoda’s work, but I can’t help but feel like its use is significantly less meaningful in the context of this series. If you were to compare, say, the stuff that Mother’s Basement has broken down in his What’s In A Scene videos for this show against the stuff that Every Frame A Painting broke down in his analysis of a scene from Mamoru Hosoda’s Wolf Children, you can really get a sense of what excellent directing looks like in comparison to directing which is merely a step above functional. No offense Geoff, I still love you.

Erased is far from a bad-looking show, and I’d even say that it’s one of the better-looking things to ever come out of A1 Pictures. It has moments of really exemplary animation, like when Satoru’s mom is making dinner for him in the second episode; and, again, some of the shot compositions are pretty cool looking. But there’s also plenty of shots that are just kind of stilted and awkward, or don’t seem to have the same level of thought put into them. There’s even weird inconsistencies, like how the place where Satoru’s mom gets stabbed is different from the place where her wound appears to be in the proceeding shots. Erased is hardly some kind of masterpiece of visual design, and, while, again, I’d never call it ugly, I don’t even think it’s as well-directed or visually impressive as better shows from the same season, like Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu.

But all of this is kind of skirting around the issue at the heart of this series, and the reason that so many people got so excited about it in the first place. After all, the main driving force behind the popularity of this series is its premise. It’s a time travel murder mystery with an atypical main character for anime, and that’s more than enough to grab a lot of people’s attention. But if you ask me, you only need to look a few notches up on that “Top Anime” list over there on MAL to find a show that did the same thing exponentially better from the very beginning: Steins;Gate.

In the first episode of Erased, we’re introduced to this mopey, boring guy in his late twenties named Satoru, who may have been emotionally stunted by some kind of traumatic event from his childhood; and, on an unrelated note, has a power that forces him to repeat moments in time in order to prevent fatal accidents. We meet his coworker, Airi, whose personality is that she’s a seventeen year-old girl, as well as Satoru’s hot-ass mom, who apparently hasn’t aged in twenty years for some reason. Satoru’s mom gets stabbed, so he gets sent back in time to when he was a little kid in order to prevent that from happening. All of this is all fine and good as the premise for a show, but what none of it tells me is whether or not this show is going to be any good.

Am I eventually going to care about Satoru? Is he going to undergo some kind of emotional arc that will make him a likable or relatable character? I can’t tell. Is Airi going to be relevant in the long run, or was focusing on her so much just a total waste of time? Hard to say. Will I eventually really want Satoru to solve this mystery because his mom is the only character who seems like she might be kind of cool? Maybe. But for now, I’m really running on blind faith in the fact that this premise is capable of working, in the hopes that at some point, everything is going to have a big payoff. I’m under the assumption that by the end of the show, all of this is going to be really interesting, or to create some kind of emotional response in me; but I have no real evidence to the idea that any of that is going to be the case. After all, by the end of that episode, I didn’t care about anything that was happening–so why should I assume that I’m going to eventually?

In the first episode of Steins;Gate I was introduced to a bunch of eccentric and highly entertaining characters whom I cared about immediately. I didn’t even care what the premise of the show was–in fact, at first, I wasn’t even sure what it was. This show had such entertaining dialog, such captivating visual quirks and sense of tone, and so much promise in the way that things might eventually turn out, that it seemed impossible for it to be anything but amazing. Steins;Gate was the fastest show that I ever added to my favorites list–after just four episodes–because the show was already so good by that point that the rest of it could have been total shit, and it still would’ve done so many fun and exciting things that it’d be worth remembering. And of course, lo and behold, the story did indeed turn out to be totally great.

It would be kind of unrealistic of me to suggest that I don’t see how anyone could enjoy Erased, even from an early point in the series. The concept of being sent into the body of your younger self is kind of inherently interesting, and the idea of how Satoru’s adult mind and child body effect one another comes up in small ways which might spark the imagination. Plus, Kayo is like a pure distillation of everything that activates a viewer’s desire to protect someone, and she happens to be voiced by one of my favorite actresses, who at some point in history was able to convincingly perform a child character because she actually was a child at the time, but that time has long past.

Honestly, though, I dislike pretty much everything about this show. I can’t stand how the kids often talk like adults, and generally seem to understand themselves and the world around them better than anyone their age should be able to. (I happened to be watching Figure 17 around the same time as this show started, and the portrayal of children in that show just blows this one out of the water with its realism). I hate how cartoonishly sadistic Kayo’s mother is, and how being abused has somehow made Kayo more mature and intelligent than the other students in her class. I hate that Satoru is kind of an idiot, who just falls into the routine of his child self naturally, somehow being at once an amazing actor and a terrible detective. I found it impossible to give a damn about the story, most especially the mystery, and I had no interest in any of the characters. Even more than that, I hated the sound design, and the constant use of loud, annoying dramatic noises every time something slightly important happened. And no, I wasn’t that impressed with the OP or ED, either, nor the soundtrack which is identical to every other Yuki Kajiura soundtrack.

Around the time that Satoru first returned to the present, I felt like all of the dramatic tension completely melted away with the scenario growing more and more difficult to believe; and the pacing of every episode just somehow managed to feel worse than the last. I hesitate to use the word pretentious, since I don’t really know the creator’s intentions, but the fact that this show presents itself as such a serious, adult mystery, but has a primary female character who does little more than be a cute loli whom the supposedly twenty-nine year-old main character keeps hinting at falling for makes me feel like this isn’t all that different from your typical dumbass anime series–it’s just packaged itself in a way that’s less blatant about its stupidity.

I’m sure that for a lot of people, Erased is generally their kind of show, and that it wasn’t difficult for them to maintain interest in the story while waiting to see if it would turn into something exceptional; but for me personally, getting through it was nothing but a slog. I saw no reason to buy into the idea that it was going to be good eventually, and knowing that it didn’t end up amounting to much just made the earlier episodes feel that much worse in retrospect. I put myself through this show even though I knew it wasn’t going to be good, so that I could write this video to show you all how the signs were there from the beginning–so that maybe some of you might change your viewing habits before you get burned by shows like this in the future. If a show’s only selling point is that it has the potential to be interesting in the long run, then there’s not much reason to have faith in it happening. Most of the really great shows tend to be great from the very beginning, and those are the ones that are worth getting excited about. Incidentally, if you want a mystery/suspense thriller that revolves around solving a mystery from the main character’s childhood that’s actually really, really good, I highly recommend the manga 20th Century Boys.

That’s all for now–stick around on my channel if you want to see more videos like this, and consider supporting me via patreon if you want to help me to make those videos. I’ll probably talk about some shows that I actually love in the near future, and the upcoming Spring season actually looks pretty promising, so I’ll be looking forward to the chance to talk about those shows as well. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.

Mother’s Basement on scenes from ERASED:

Every Frame A Painting on scenes from Wolf Children:

Edited by The Davoo

Myriad Colors Phantom World is a sequence of highly entertaining animated gifs, which were released in twenty-two minute chunks over the course of the Winter 2016 anime season. It is an exceptionally well-crafted internet meme, with attractive character designs, vibrant colors, and flashy animation that loops into itself very easily. Ishihara Tatsuya and his team at Kyoto Animation have proven time and again that they are possibly the best in the entire world at creating anime gifs; and this intense memetic potential has lead to worldwide attention for much of their work. Unfortunately, there are some people out there who choose to view this gif collection as if it were an actual TV show–and those people tend to find themselves woefully disappointed.

It’s difficult not to be impressed with the level of detail that Kyoani seems predisposed to loading into their animation. From the opening of the first episode, wherein a sequence of optical illusions is used to set the tone of the series, I love how the mascot character’s hair falls to the sides of her face after posing for the classic vase illusion; and just how playfully the entire scene goes about pushing her into all of these examples. There’s a clever little fourth wall break when she peels the main character’s eyeballs open to wake him up, followed by a creative sequence of the world becoming progressively less pixelated as the character stumbles around.

But a question which I found myself asking early and often throughout my time watching this series was, “what is this all in service of?” Or, as they say back at home, “what’s the point?”

Haruhiko explains that the human brain is kind of iffy and imprecise in its ability to perceive reality, as exemplified by all of these optical illusions; and how a slight change in someone’s brain chemistry may cause them to see things which they had never realized were there all along.

Later in the episode, we learn that in this show’s universe, a gigantic virus leak has altered everyone’s brains in such a way that they can now see and interact with formerly invisible entities known as phantoms, which apparently are the explanation for all of history’s folklore and myths and stuff. Also, now there’s kids with superpowers.

What I don’t get here, is how the concept of altering the human brain is thematically related to the fact that the brain is already imprecise in its perception. The interesting thing about illusions is how they show us that, in spite of having certain visual information right in front of us, our brains are tricked into misinterpreting that information because of how they attempt to compress it. Changing the way that the brain works and causing it to perceive something totally new is pretty much besides the point, and does not effectively tie into the motif of illusion.

For that matter, breaking the fourth wall doesn’t really connect to either of these motifs. You could make the case that calling attention to the unreality of a story is kind of like shattering an illusion; but again, it’s not quite the same thing as having your brain tricked, nor having it changed.

Now, you could say that the theme of the series is tricks of perception in general; but the whole pixelation thing doesn’t really relate to anything. At first, I thought that this scene was meant to convey the way that we can’t quite fully process colors when we first wake up, and that Lulu banging the clock into existence was a really clever representation of Haruhiko’s eyes coming into focus on that object; but the rest of the room’s transformation isn’t from Haruhiko’s perspective, and makes it seem like he lives in some kind of weird digital fantasy world. None of this imagery is ever used again, so I still have no idea what it was really meant to convey.

Over the course of the first episode, none of the motifs which are introduced have any real connection to one-another, nor any real relevance to the overall story. Haruhiko is struck with a case of jamais vu at one point–which is another brain trick–for seemingly no reason at all. Neither of the phantoms that the characters do battle with in this episode have anything to do with illusions or mind trickery; one is a big monster that fights Mai in hand-to-hand combat, and the other is a bunch of possessed telephone poles which force the cast into a game of limbo. None of the characters’ powers are connected to illusions or mind tricks, either: Mai summons elemental powers by groping herself, Haruhiko makes record-breaking speedpaint videos and posts them to youtube, and Reina is Kirby–the most objectively perfect creature in existence. He’s completely round; he’s pink; and he eats everything. Kirby is the shit!

Now, it wouldn’t be unreasonable at this point to assume that Phantom World might be going for a Kekkai Sensen-esque melting pot of crazy powers and ideas; but the monster-of-the-week formula which emerges over the course of the proceeding episodes seems to be going for a more focused approach.

Every episode opens with Haruhiko reading a random wikipedia article which is tangentially related to the plot, and then establishing whichever main character the episode will be focused on. Where the series goes awry is in how tenuous the connections between the stories, themes, and characters usually turn out to be.

Monster-of-the-week storytelling is kind of difficult to do well, because it doesn’t leave a lot of time for the viewer to get invested in the situations and characters. Most of the time, the backbone of a decent episodic series is in developing a strong, likable, and versatile protagonist in the first episodes, and then throwing them into a series of fun scenarios. Take, for instance, one of the most widely viewed and beloved episodic anime series of all time–Pokemon.

Ash Ketchum is a very easy protagonist to understand and relate to. He has the incredibly broad goal of becoming the world’s greatest Pokemon trainer, and he’s very passionate about being the very best, like no one ever was. His first companion on his journey ends up being an unruly brat of a Pikachu who won’t listen to anything he says–but after Ash bravely throws himself in front of a wave of attacking Spearow in order to save him, Pikachu realizes that Ash is a pretty cool guy, and they develop a powerful emotional bond. At this point, the relationship between Ash and Pikachu has a bit of weight to it, and each episode is about taking these characters whom we understand and relate to, and throwing them into simple scenarios involving other goal-oriented characters with their own related stories.

Just about every strong monster-of-the-week series–from lighthearted stuff like Cardcaptor Sakura, Precure, or Digimon, to more out-there stuff like Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders or Casshern Sins–tends to start off by establishing the goals, personalities, and relationships of their main characters before launching into their episodic adventures; so that we know exactly why we want to watch them. Usually, the series then proceeds by creating scenarios in each episode which are related to the specific goals, personalities, struggles, and abilities of our main characters. For instance, in Heartcatch Precure, each episode usually establishes a problem which one of the main characters is facing in their own lives, and then presents an adversary who represents a more extreme version of that same problem, through whom the main characters will learn some kind of lesson that they can apply to their own situations. Phantom World instead seems so enamored with sharing all of its random article Wikipedia knowledge that it forgets to give its characters any goals or personality.

In the first episode, it’s established that Mai works as a phantom hunter because she lives alone and she needs the money; but this aspect of her character doesn’t seem all that connected to her personality. For one thing, I’m not even sure how someone who can barely afford to eat because they always fuck up all of their missions nonetheless manages to be in peak physical condition with big fat titties. Her ability to summon elemental powers by groping herself doesn’t connect to her personality or aesthetic in any meaningful way; and for that matter, I don’t even get why she dresses in that garish yellow sweater vest thing. Sometimes they show her in track shorts or other gym clothes, which makes sense, since she’s supposed to be athletic or whatever, but this yellow vest thing is a complete mystery to me. No one else wears anything like it, and all of them are about fifty times more appealing by virtue of not searing my eyes out of my skull with this hideous outfit. Seriously, that yellow vest thing is like 50% of all of my problems with this show. I don’t understand how that design got approved at any stage in development.

Over the course of watching this series, I could never get a read on whether Mai was supposed to be particularly smart or stupid, or what kind of interests or skills she has outside of being fit and fighting monsters, or if she has any kind of long-term goals. Every once in awhile it’s very mildly suggested that she might have some kind of affection for Haruhiko, but she doesn’t even fully commit to the whole tsundere thing. She’s just kind of bland and unmemorable outside of the crazy stuff that her tits get up to.

Episode three opens up by introducing the theme of memories, and suggesting that it would be nice if human memories could be copied and backed up in the way that computer memories can. This episode is focused on Mai, and how she remembers herself as having been a shy and kind little girl, but then in the end it turns out that she was remembering her childhood wrong, and she was actually a total brat. There’s really no reason that this episode had to be about Mai, and her personality and abilities don’t bring anything to the table in connecting to this theme. There is a bit wherein Haruhiko copies her muscle memories in order to learn her impressive fighting abilities, though this concept is played so fast and loose that it’s not even really interesting; but again, I don’t get how Mai herself manages to add anything to this theme. You could’ve done this idea with any of the characters without really changing anything.

It’s not so much that I expect every episode of every series to have perfect synthesis in their thematic ideas and characterization; but I just don’t get what’s supposed to be carrying an episode like this. I certainly don’t give a shit about Mai, since she hasn’t done anything so far besides grope herself, shake her tits, and punch some monsters, and nothing about this episode did anything to change my perception of her, or to cause me to care about her place in the story. While the episodes about Reina and Koito manage to give them a little bit more backstory and relevancy to the themes of the episodes, this entire series never manages to give me enough to go on with any of its characters to make me feel like I want to follow them on these adventures; nor does it present its themes with enough depth to make it worth watching for those either.

The series only gets even more asinine once it runs out of main characters to give their own spotlight episodes to. If each one had been an engaging character portrait which really got me wanting to see them in other scenarios, in the way that something like The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya or Durarara made me want to keep watching those characters forever in whatever random scenarios the story could put them in just because they were so much fun to watch, then this wouldn’t be a problem. But instead, after five instances of pulling a random backstory element out of a hat towards the back of each episode before ending on a tacky, unearned moment of sympathy, the show then totally goes off the rails into a series of disconnected, unfocused adventures. Around the point where an episode was comprised of one-third repeatedly explaining Schrodinger’s cat, one-third everyone turning into cat people for the sake of cuteness, and one-third a bunch of random trippy shit happening for no adequately explained reason, with the cast just along for the ride, it sank in that this series was going nowhere fast.

Now, at this point in the video, you may have been staring at all of this gorgeous animation and thinking that maybe this show is worth checking out just for the visuals alone; to which I would respond, “…eh?”

Don’t get me wrong, I think that the animation in this series is exceedingly technically proficient, and that most of the characters are extremely cute; and that the constant use of depth-of-field shots and digital processing which are characteristic of Kyoto Animation are always impressive.

I’d even say that sometimes the visual direction is really clever and funny–like in this scene where the main characters think that they’ve just successfully beaten the limbo Phantoms, and then they turn around to see the bar dropping to a lower level, with really spot-on comedic timing. I love that whenever Reina overreacts to Haruhiko accidentally perving on her, she does these really specific and realistic-looking martial arts moves on him. There’s also this great bit in episode two where it’s been established that there’s a phantom which takes pictures of girls when they’re changing clothes in the dorm, and we keep getting just brief glimpses into the situation in the room, usually through the phantom’s photographs, while Haruhiko keeps getting thrown out the window and reappearing in the hallway outside. The timing here is pretty funny, and makes this encounter feel like a ridiculously protracted struggle which we’re only watching an abridged version of.

Unfortunately, there were only a few moments in the series which brought a smile to my face like this, and most of it left me either scratching my head, or wishing things were different. For instance, the first episode has this big action scene where Mai is fighting off this giant phantom, and while the combat is really well animated, it keeps cutting away to show what Haruhiko and other characters are doing, and it’s set in this kind of boring location with all these ugly dust clouds. It just ends up feeling a lot less interesting and cohesive than it should, and gave me the feeling like all of this great animation was being wasted on such a boring scene.

By the end of any random episode of this series, I’d always find myself struggling to remember what I’d just watched, or how the hell it managed to spend twenty-two minutes on such a bare-bones story. I think I zoned out through the majority of Kurumi’s episode, and by the time she turned into a magical girl, I really had no idea what was going on anymore.

The show often tries to go for these trippy, Alice-in-Wonderland-esque Phantom World scenarios; but it handles trippiness in the blandest, most unimaginative way possible. In episode four, there’s a world that’s supposed to look like a child’s fantasy, with everything drawn in crayon and the people being rabbits, which is all meant to represent a cute girl’s psychological hangups or something. Then, just two episodes later, we get taken to a world where there’s a bunch of talking teddy bears and big mushrooms everywhere and everything looks like a children’s book, which is all to represent a cute girl’s psychological hangups or something. It’s just two slight variations on the exact same type of generic trippy landscape right in a row. Then, in episode seven, we get one of those protracted scenes of the world going all topsy-turvy, but all of it is totally random and disconnected. It’s like a really poorly done version of the trippy part in the school from Urusei Yatsura Beautiful Dreamer, with a total lack of new ideas in how to handle a mindfuck scene.

As nice as the animation, character designs, and colors look on their own, the overall package is just kind of bland and unmemorable. All of the colors are bright and vibrant, but there’s no sense of personality or charm in the way that the show uses them. Kyoto Animation is known for the fact that each of their shows has its own distinct color palette to match the tone of the series–from Tamako Market’s poppy, adorable pastels, to Tamako Love Story’s earthy, rustic, and nostalgic tones. The aesthetic of Phantom World is… bright? Shiny? Tacky? It’s just whatever.

Likewise, I can’t seem to get a read on what kind of tone or personality the series is supposed to be going for. Most of the time it’s an irreverent comedy which throws caution to the wind on making sense and goes for over the top silliness. My favorite moments in the show were things like the infamous Mai boob shaking scene in the first episode, just because it seemed to so thoroughly embrace its own ridiculousness–but it never really returns to that level of stupid brilliance. Most of it is pretty middle-of-the-road–pushing lots of fanservice onto the screen without ever really being sexy, and lots of information into the dialog without ever really being smart.

And then there’s the parts where the show makes totally hollow attempts at getting moody and sympathetic. Towards the end of the first episode, the characters suddenly all feel sorry for the telephone poles they were playing limbo against, and semi-dramatically remark on how they hope that they can find a way to serve humans in their next life. What the hell? Why? Who cares about the damn telephone poles? The show occasionally dives into melodrama, like in Reina and Koito’s spotlight episodes, but it always feels really flaccid and token; like this was the requisite minimum level of characterization required to make the audience feasibly give a shit. Maybe it really was enough for some viewers, but I personally was left sorely wanting for more.

None of the characters have any chemistry together, nor do they have any meaningful connection to the type of series that Phantom World is; and as a result, it’s hard for me to imagine that the author of Phantom World really cared all that much about the characters to begin with. It seems to me like the reason Haruhiko was written to be this huge nerd with an infinite wealth of random trivial knowledge, was so that the author could write a bunch of stories utilizing his infinite wealth of random trivial knowledge–but in the end, he never managed to actually explore any of his ideas in any kind of meaningful or inventive ways. Instead, the show is about as engaging as… actually sitting around reading random wikipedia articles all day, while hitting random post on sakugabooru on a separate monitor. And at least while doing that, you can listen to your own music, instead of the incredibly bland and generic high-pitched electronic soundtrack backing the show.

I would be hard-pressed to accuse Myriad Colors Phantom World of not having anything going for it, or even of being a particularly bad show. It’s not that it outright sucks, so much as that there’s hardly any reason to bother with it. Just about every other Kyoto Animation series has just as much gorgeous animation and just as many attractive character designs and pretty colors as this one; and all of them have either more interesting characters and stories, or better use of irreverent, beautifully-animated comedy. Every garden-variety magical girl show I’ve ever seen handles the monster-of-the-week formula better than this show does, and I could get my fix of lighthearted but trippy alternate universes just about anywhere. I’m just not sure there’s any reason to be watching this show unless I’ve truly and honestly seen every other worthwhile anime series, and for some reason am not interested in rewatching any of them.

I’ve still got a bit more to say about this show, particularly in how it handles its light sprinkling of meta elements, but I’m going to save that for another video which covers more shows than just this one. Stick around on my channel if you’re interested in seeing that, and support me on patreon if you’d like to help keep this channel going. I’ve just started offering new reward tiers on there involving commentaries and behind the scenes posts, so check that stuff out if you’re way into my content. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one!

Edited by The Davoo

Text version:

Were I to explain in as few words as possible what is the appeal of art, I would state simply that art communicates. Storytelling, for instance, is a means by which emotions, thoughts, and imaginations are packaged into narratives and moved from one mind into another. Illustrative art and photography can tell stories, or can simply relay an understanding of aesthetic sensibilities; illustrations in sequence can be combined with words and strung into long-form narratives containing a continual progression of ideas; music can evoke feelings with an immediacy that words are not often capable of; and film allows us to edit and compile the elements of many other art forms into an amazingly specific presentation of ideas.

Animation, then, is a style of film which allows us to take that specificity to an even greater extreme, because it is not limited to capturing images which exist in reality. Whereas the greatest power of photography over illustrative art is that it is less abstracted and more intimate with our understanding of reality, the power of illustration is that it can reach deep into our psychological interpretation of reality and allow us to communicate ideas which we understand beyond what is represented in the world around us.

In theory, the appeal of animation isn’t very different from the appeal of live-action film, and the lines between the two keep getting blurrier as technology allows us to combine them into one package; and if you were looking at the works of Hayao Miyazaki and Satoshi Kon, then you could pretty easily say that the appeal of anime film is the same as the appeal of any other film. But it’s probably for this exact reason that many anime fans consider these films to be relatively unhelpful in explaining the appeal of anime; because the appeal of anime really isn’t the same as the appeal of other films–and the reason for that is entirely cultural.

You see, idealistically, a film could be anything. A film could be four seconds long and shot on a cell phone, or a film could be a ninety-hour epic created over the course of twenty years that tells the entire story of the universe. But in practice, that’s not what film is. Film is an old enough and respected enough medium that it does enjoy some flexibility in terms of length and narrative style, but you don’t get a lot of high-budget films that aren’t in the range of eighty minutes to two and a half hours long. You don’t get a lot of short films that have the personnel and means behind them to present their story with expensive visuals and all-star voice acting. And that’s because in every culture on our planet that produces art, that art is reliant on money.

If we lived in a post-scarcity world like Star Trek where all of our needs were met, and every individual could basically do whatever they want, then the scale of your art would only be limited to how long your life is, and how many people you can get on board with creating it. You’d still be limited by the constraints of reality–like, you can’t chose to write a live-action movie about a 12 year-old boy that takes five years to film, because that boy is going to age–but nonetheless, you could do whatever you want in the confines of possibility. But since we live in a world wherein everyone has to make money in order to survive (unless they become the beneficiary of someone who can take care of them), then art is heavily influenced not only by the imaginations of the artists–but by their ability to create something consumable for the paying audience.

In the long century of film’s evolution, the medium has become closely tailored to the monetary needs of its production. You can’t make a high-budget movie if it’s not going to recoup that budget–and therefore, you have to make something which is going to appeal to a high number of people. If you want to make that ninety-hour passion project, you’re gonna have to work on it all by yourself while carrying a regular job on the side, because no one is going to waste their time helping you to make it if they’re not going to be compensated for their effort. And since the skillset which allows people to make a lot of money is largely different from the skillset which allows them to create highly specific art, there aren’t a lot of people out there dumping massive funds into passion projects at a loss just for the sake of their existence. Art is limited by the culture surrounding it.

This brings us to the one medium of long-form filmmaking which does exist in mainstream culture–the TV show; which, nowadays, is hardly ever on TV anymore, so we might as well start calling them “film series” or something. Even more so than regular films, TV series have been very strictly regimented to reflect the most populous, easily consumable and broadly appealing types of storytelling possible. Episodes are almost always the same length, no matter what kind of show it is, genre conventions are usually followed to the letter, and the budgetary limitations of a series are directly proportional to what size and type of audience the work will have. Evolution within the medium occurs very slowly, reflecting massive shifts in the cultural landscape of the world around them–and risks taken are very small, and dealt with very gradually.

This, finally, brings us to the subject of animation, and to the massive cultural divide which has made Japanese animation so appealing to a growing worldwide audience. You see, like any other kind of TV show, animation in the west has been very strictly regimented to fit a certain kind of audience. Even now, as Western animation has been experiencing a sort of golden age, with more and more shows embracing continuous narratives, broader demographic appeal, and more diverse subject matter, Western animated TV shows still inescapably fall into the genres of comedy and action.

While we do have shows now like Adventure Time and Rick and Morty and Moral Oral which are able to present a more complex range of emotions and dive into more diverse themes, these shows are still by and large episodic comedies. Even though Avatar the Last Airbender and Gravity Falls and Steven Universe have been involving more complex ongoing narratives across their episodes, they still operate under the umbrella of an episodic comedy series that can be easily picked up and enjoyed by new viewers along their run. Western animation is slowly becoming more diverse, and that’s something to be celebrated–but when you take a look at the animation which has been coming out of Japan for the last forty years and compare it to the progress which we’ve made so far, it’s easy to understand the specific appeal of anime.

If you want the perfect example of what anime is capable of that simply has not happened in Western filmmaking of any kind, you need look no further than the most world-renowned Japanese television series of all time: Dragon Ball. Between the original series and its even-more-popular sequel, Dragon Ball Z, there are 444 22-minute episodes of the series in total–bringing it to over 160 hours of film; which all contain one single, continuous narrative.

Dragon Ball Z is often made fun of for the length of its major battles, and that’s totally fair. The pacing of the series could be a hell of a lot tighter, and there have been other long-form anime action series which manage to tell the same kinds of stories with better overall presentation. But the quality of the show’s construction notwithstanding, the fact that Dragon Ball Z is capable of dedicating entire season’s worth of episodes to individual, protracted battles is precisely the point of its appeal. What Dragon Ball Z has that no other film series in the world has managed to match outside of its own culture, is an absolutely incredible sense of scale.

I can’t really explain to you exactly why or how it happened–I suspect the list of reasons is as long as the number of days in human history–but the fact is that in Japan, it’s not uncommon for a single, continuous story to be told by the same artist in piecemeal across several decades. Whether it’s a grim, adult-oriented fantasy series like Berserk, which has been running since the late eighties, or a light-hearted adventure for young boys which has published over eighty two-hundred-page collected volumes like One Piece, these kinds of stories exist in Japan. This isn’t to say that just any story would be allowed to continue for such a long time–these stories still need to appeal to a broad audience in order to continue, and as such there are still a lot of commonalities among the stories which manage to go on for an exceedingly long time; but nonetheless, this is a style of narrative which actually exists in Japanese comics and film.

And that’s not the only kind of storytelling which is unique to Japanese animation. Nowhere else in the world will you find fifty episodes of meditative, low-key, some might even say boring episodic adventures through a beautifully drawn rural countryside where nothing all that exciting usually happens. [Mushishi] Nowhere else will there be the same number of episodes dedicated to young girls sailing around a Martian Venetia, quietly learning about life and coming of age without any kind of action. [Aria the Animation] Nowhere else will twelve episodes of college ennui be unloaded in a visually esoteric blend of metaphors, high-speed dialog, and creative use of repetition. [Tatami Galaxy] Nowhere else will a high school full of hot girls beating the shit out of each-other be used as a metaphor for the history of cultural imperialism [Kill la Kill]; and those are just the things you can get without even trying. Once you’ve explored so deep into the medium that you can appreciate its own limitations, and how it comments on, subverts, and plays with those limitations, you’ll find yourself lost entirely in a grand metanarrative the likes of which you could never imagine lurking under the surface of those wacky kung-fu cartoons from that faraway island country.

The appeal of anime is, simply, that anime has a lot more going on with it than any other kind of film. Anime has its own limits, and those limits may eventually become intolerable to those who want the medium to do specific things that it doesn’t do enough of; but the fact that I can’t think of a single anime story which has an accurate stylistic parallel to any Western animation besides the ones which are directly taking influence from it, speaks volumes to the level of creativity which the medium has achieved.

The reason that anime is quickly growing in popularity throughout the world, is because anime has given us something that we never would’ve known we wanted. Whereas TV series have typically been so carefully tailored to fit the needs of the broadest possible audience, anime has provided us with a huge variety of very specific art pieces, which are able to communicate with us in ways that we didn’t previously know were possible. Anime represents what I believe to be the rapidly emerging future of film–a far more decentralized approach to the form and function of the medium, which is able to appeal to smaller, more specific groups of people. While the marketing techniques of anime have still yet to adapt well to the modern internet age, I think that Japanese animation is predictive of how art is transforming in the current technological era–and for me personally, that’s exactly what makes it so fascinating.

Thanks again for watching everyone; if you enjoyed this video, then please share it to anyone that you think will appreciate it–and if you want to help me to make more of these videos, then consider supporting me on patreon. If you watched this video because you’re new to anime and you’re trying to understand it better, then I recommend checking out some of these other videos of mine to get started on exploring the medium in greater depth. I’ll see you in the next one.

Edited by The Davoo

Text version:

In the many years that I’ve been hanging out in anime fan communities, it seems like one of the hardest things for new viewers to deal with is the overabundance of boring, generic main characters who often seem to be built around either working as stand-ins for the audience, or as wish fulfillment for teenage boys. I’ve seen countless message board recommendation threads asking for shows with interesting protagonists, or otherwise trying to list everyone’s favorites; so I thought it might be worthwhile to start up a series which celebrates some of the cool and interesting protagonists that are out there, and to discuss what makes them work so well.

One of the traits which has slowly come to annoy me over the years in anime protagonists is the need to constantly explain themselves. A lot of characters seem to be defined less by their personalities and actions, and more by some kind of hardline code of conduct that they’ve made for themselves, and which they feel the need to reiterate constantly. This tends to be especially true of light novel characters, who are usually the first-person narrators of their stories, and who tend to have some kind of very specific worldview which their actions are largely based around.

While I don’t think that it’s unusual for real people to have a personal set of ethical guidelines, or to make decisions based on their beliefs, I think it can be boring to present a character whose actions always follow a specifically defined pattern, as real people tend to be a lot more flexible and undefinable. It’s possible to make these kinds of characters interesting by showing them to be hypocritical in their actions and then criticizing them for it [Banquet of Kings, Fate/Zero], but it can also be pretty boring when this is done by having a character constantly do heroic things in spite of having a cynical attitude, because it tends to run into that chuunibyou effect of just being a normal person who thinks they’re different from everyone else when they really aren’t.

But while I could spend an entire video talking about characters who are interesting because of their hypocrisy–and I probably will at some point–today I want to talk about characters who I like because they don’t really have any personal guiding ethos–or, if they do, then they aren’t capable of putting it clearly into words.

My favorite running joke in One Punch Man is how Saitama is constantly cutting people off when they start talking too much about their backstories, ideals, and personal codes. He doesn’t care about why the bad guys are doing what they’re doing–he sees someone he has to punch, and he punches them. Likewise, he doesn’t care about the personal pathos of his fellow heroes, or about the highly systematized hierarchy which they’ve organized themselves into. He is a hero because it’s something that he enjoys doing, and because it’s something that has to be done. Cutting through all the bullshit surrounding the simple act of fighting bad guys is the prevailing joke of the series, and what makes Saitama so entertaining to watch.

Similarly, Monkey D. Luffy from One Piece has a tendency to voice his open disagreement with both his enemies and friends when they present their backstories and worldviews. He isn’t willing to simply accept others people’s ideas about themselves or the world around them, and he will blatantly ignore their personal desires in order to fulfill his own. Luffy doesn’t feel much need to explain or justify himself–he just does whatever he wants, and everyone else is along for the ride.

Matoi Ryuko from Kill la Kill is another character who doesn’t seem to care much about the reasons behind her actions aside from what gets her closer to the goal of avenging her father. Anyone who gets in her way is a nuisance, whether they’ve got a good reason for being there or not; and it takes a while for her to develop some self-awareness about the things that she values over the course of the series. Tenjou Utena from Revolutionary Girl Utena is a similar character, mostly acting as a mirror and foil to the far more opinionated supporting cast surrounding her, before eventually coming to realize her own ideals later into the series.

But as entertaining as these characters are, I’m even more fascinated with characters who probably wouldn’t be able to tell you why they do the things that they do even if you asked them. For instance, a huge part of Guts’ character arc in Berserk is becoming aware of the very idea of purpose after a lifetime of being forced to do whatever he could to survive and not really giving a shit about anything. Not long after realizing his desire for purpose, he ends up finding it in a quest for revenge; but over the course of that quest, he begins to discover more things that he cares about, and which he’s willing to fight for beyond himself.

A character with a similar personality, but a lot less luck in coming to understand himself, is Ichise from Texhnolyze. Ichise is presented almost as a symbol for the raw animalistic nature at the core of humanity, as he doesn’t seem to have any real ambitions or self-awareness beyond doing what he has to do to make it through life, and acting on his momentary basic desires. Many of the other characters, who all have their own goals and ideas about the world, tend to be fascinated with him, and to end up using him and tying him up in their own personal schemes. I don’t want to spoil how the series ends, but the way that things end up for each of the main character sends a pretty strong message about human nature, and what all of those desires and instincts ultimately amount to. As an aside, if you want to know what the main character from The Stranger would be like as an anime character, I think Ichise would make for a pretty decent comparison.

Another character who doesn’t really know how to explain herself, but for totally different reasons, is Shiina Tsubasa from Figure 17. Tsubasa is a shy, awkward little girl, who finds herself unable to deal with trying to communicate with others; and the series does an impressive job of conveying all of the things that she’s feeling without having her explain herself–because she simply wouldn’t have the words to do so. Instead of monologuing about how she doesn’t know how to talk to people, the series just presents long, awkward scenes of her failing to talk to people, and allows the audience to understand it on their own. This aspect of the series is mostly prevalent in the early episodes, before Tsubasa basically gets cloned, and the super-outgoing version of herself begins guiding her through life and giving her a chance to open up and start expressing herself; but the way that the series leads into her character growth is kind of genius, and is a way that I’d like to see child characters presented more often.

What I really love about the kinds of protagonists which I’ve just described is that they aren’t necessarily easy to connect with immediately–but in trying to connect with them, they tend to drag the viewer deeper into their world, and to make the viewer work to understand them. Most of the people that we meet in real life don’t introduce themselves by rattling off their backstory, and might not have a distinct code of ethics which they follow at all times. Getting to know someone is really more about observing their actions and getting into the rhythm of how they perform themselves; eventually coming to form your own idea about who they are.

While I think it’s pretty easy to get behind characters like Saitama, Guts, and Luffy because they have a tendency towards doing really cool and badass stuff on the regular, I think it can also be rewarding to try and get to know a character who maybe doesn’t seem all that relatable at first; but who might teach you something about yourself and how you and others communicate by learning about them. After all, I think that’s a huge part of what makes all of the characters in Neon Genesis Evangelion so effective. Each of them puts up their AT Field and tries to keep themselves away from one-another–but once you peel back their layers and see what they’re really like, you find a deeply flawed and human core that speaks to you more than any amount of kicking ass could ever do–and makes it so that when they do kick ass, it’s that much more gratifying–because it reminds you that even with all of your flaws, YOU could kick ass too; and you feel like celebrating the fact that your friends whom you’ve come to know and love are overcoming their personal demons.

Have you ever found yourself gradually connecting with a character whom you might not have fully understood at first; or simply loved watching a character precisely because they weren’t always acting on the basis of a specific self-image? Tell me about it in the comments, and be sure to share this video to anyone whom you think would appreciate it. If you want to help me to make the next video, then consider supporting my channel via patreon as well. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one!

Edited by The Davoo

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If you’ve seen Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away recently enough to remember any of it, then I’d like you to participate in a little game with me–either in the comments, or just in your own head. I want you to try and see if you can describe in as much detail as possible how the main character, Chihiro, makes it from this bridge, to Yubaba’s office. Feel free to pause the video right here and think about it for as long as you need to. All done? Here’s my description from memory, not having seen the film since writing my analysis of it last January:

Chihiro holds her breath, making her invisible to spirits, gets halfway across the bridge before gasping, and then Haku rushes her the rest of the way super fast. He pulls her around to the side of the bathhouse and instructs her on where to go, then leaves. Chihiro then cuts through a small garden, skirts around the corner of the building, and winds up on a very treacherous stone staircase. She follows it to the bottom and enters through a heavy door, leading into a hallway which goes to the boiler room, wherein she hangs out for a while with Kamaji and the soot balls. (I could describe this whole room in detail, but I don’t have time.) She then heads through a small sliding door into the basement workrooms, heads up a few flights of stairs, and emerges onto the second floor of the bathhouse. She follows Lin down the halls and then gets crammed into an elevator with a giant radish man and taken to the top floor. After emerging into an ostentatious hallway, she is magically carried through a long series of doors until finally arriving at the office.

Yubaba’s bathhouse is one of the most memorable settings in any of the films that I’ve ever seen–and I think a huge part of what makes it so memorable is the fact that I completely know my way around it. Even though it’s a place that I’ve never actually been to–in fact, it’s not a real place a all, at most having borrowed elements from Japanese bathhouses visited by the production team–(which only makes it that much more impressive that studio Ghibli was able to portray it in such intimate detail)—I feel like I’d already know my way around the place if it were real and I were able to visit.

So how did Miyazaki and his team accomplish this? How come I know my way around this place so much better than I do the settings of so many other films? Well, simply put, the journey through this setting is uniquely coherent. From the moment that Haku finds Chihiro in the crowded streets of the spirit city, to the moment that he stops to give her instructions, the characters consistently run across the screen in the same direction, through a series of wide-angle frames with tons of visible background details, allowing the audience to maintain a sense of space and direction across the entire trip. Chihiro continues moving in the same direction until entering the boiler room–and because we get to spend a lot of time in this room, we end up seeing it from every conceivable angle until we know the layout of it perfectly. Once we’ve completely familiarized ourselves with this place, Chihiro is then once again lead in a series of very coherent lines across very wide-angle, high-detail backgrounds through several locations, until she gets trapped in a tiny elevator, wherein we finally have breathing room for a facial close-up.

In the entire span of this journey, the frame is very rarely on anything other than Chihiro; and the only times that the focus shifts away are when Chihiro spends enough time in one spot for us to acclimate ourselves to it. As such, we constantly maintain our sense of location, and never have to readjust in order to understand where a scene is taking place. It’s only after the bit in Yubaba’s office that we finally get a cut which doesn’t take us to the moment or location immediately following the previous one–and by this point, we have a pretty solid grasp on where we are. From here, the film is able to launch into its almost vignette-like midsection of small stories without ever having to regale the viewer on how they made it to each location.

Leading a character through the setting of the story might seem like a pretty obvious way to acclimate the viewer to that location, but it’s kind of amazing how rarely it happens–or how difficult it can actually be to do it if you don’t put in the effort. To give you an example of what I mean, I recommend watching the first fifteen minutes or so of the first episode of Garzey’s Wing. Aside from being one of the greatest fifteen minutes of anime ever made for all of the wrong reasons, this entire sequence is like a crash-course in how to completely lose and disorient the viewer on where the fuck they are and what the hell is happening. The clips which I’m showing right now are, in fact, not edited at all–this is a sequence of visuals ripped directly from the show, in exactly the order in which they occur, during which the main character is teleported from his world into a fantasy world. The entire three-episode OVA is like this–and while this is a very extreme example, I think that even a lot of mainstream anime, and a majority of mainstream Hollywood films, often fail to present a coherent or memorable location between shots, and therefore end up feeling like a meandering clusterfuck.

I think it’s rather telling that the first volume of Miyazaki’s manga masterpiece, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, is packaged with a fold-out map right after the cover page. Without this map and others shown throughout the volumes, it would be difficult to understand the relative locations and sizes of the story’s warring nations–or the sheer scope of the Sea of Corruption which threatens to swallow the entire world. While I won’t pretend that I was always completely aware of exactly where each beat of the story took place in relationship to one-another, because there’s a lot of flying involved, it’s pretty obvious that Miyazaki found the geographical locations of his fictional lands to be of high importance to the nature of his story–and at times, checking back on these maps could be pretty helpful in getting my bearings.

What inspired me to write this video, though, was the first episode of Miyazaki’s directorial debut, the 1978 TV series Future Boy Conan. One of the things that struck me early on was how quickly and completely I was able to understand the layout of the small island which Conan grew up on, and how as the situation grew more complex and action-oriented over the course of the episode, I was always able to tell exactly where the things were happening in relationship to one-another. This could be attributed to a combination of the opening flyover shot of the island, the way that characters would enter and exit locations heading in the same directions, and the huge amount of detail put into each stationary shot. Also interesting is that when the villains leave the island, they very clearly leave in a line leading from right to left–so when Conan leaves on his journey after them, he heads off in the same direction.

Thinking back on Miyazaki’s work, I can remember quite a few locations which stuck with me in much the same way. From Ponyo, I could tell you exactly how to get from Sousuke’s house, to the nursing home where his mother works on the neighboring island hilltop. in about as much detail as I could the scene from Spirited Away; and I’m sure that many of you could easily tell me how one might go about breaking into the castles both of the Sky, and of Cagliostro. On that note, let me know what your favorite Hayao Miyazaki setting is down in the comments below, or if you can think of any other film settings which you know so well that you could find your way around them without a map. Share this video to anyone whom you think would appreciate it, and support me on Patreon if you’d like to help me with making more videos like this. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one!

Edited by The Davoo

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A lot of manga is rightfully celebrated for featuring highly detailed, illustrative artwork, which shows off incredible technical ability, while potentially bringing the world of the story to life and making it feel more fleshed-out and realistic. However, I think it’s taken for granted by a lot of readers that more-detailed illustrations are automatically better, when this isn’t necessarily always the case. A perfect example of where I think a manga was negatively impacted by the beauty of its own art, was the little-known five-volume series, Stray Little Devil.

Without a doubt, every panel of this manga is impressive to look at. The characters are adorable, and their world is one of epic fantasy, with no shortage of sweeping, memorable vistas and huge, action-heavy art showcases. The only problem here is that for the most part, Stray Little Devil is a quick and breezy cute girls comedy series.

If you’ve heard anything about the craft of humor, then you’ve probably heard that it’s all about timing; and when it comes to manga humor this couldn’t possibly be more true. In fact, the entire genre of 4-panel gag comics is pretty much built around structuring how the punchlines fall in with the four-panel format. Figuring out the speed and rhythm of how the reader is going to look at each image is integral to selling the punchline.

It makes sense for comedic manga to be relatively sparse on detail, because the technique is about controlling the pace of the reader’s eyeballs. Each image has to be tightly constructed around delivering just the right amount of information so that the joke will make sense at the end.

A massively detailed image is much harder to control, because it is most likely going to give the reader pause to take everything in. When a hyper-detailed illustration appears in an action or adventure series, it’s usually meant for the reader to linger there for a while, and as such is usually meant to instill some kind of complex or grandiose emotion in the reader.

Stray Little Devil packs so much detail into every little panel that it ends up grinding to a halt much of the time, and the cadence of the humor completely falls apart. It can be difficult to tell what a scene is trying to focus on because there’s so much happening visually; and as a result, while the setting feels incredibly rich and alive, the story, characters and humor end up falling sort of flat in comparison.

None of this is helped by the publication of the series into weirdly small graphic novels which squish all of that detail into an even more constrained space. I don’t know if this was only done to the North-American publications, but all the scans which I’ve found online seem to come from that publication, so if there’s a bigger version then I haven’t seen it.

All of this is a shame because the artwork really is gorgeous on an illustrative level; and it’s easy to see the appeal of the story, which is almost squandered by the difficulty of reading it. I feel as though this series would’ve worked much better in animation, wherein every panel would really have the space to breathe, and the timing would be managed by how long each image was on-screen rather that by how fast the reader makes it through each page. For this reason, I find it kind of hilarious that the same artist was later given the manga adaptation of Gurren Lagann, which was a series with phenomenal visual flow that didn’t really translate well to manga form.

King of Bandits Jing is another series which had confusingly detailed panels in its original manga artwork, and many critics praised the anime adaptation specifically for being able to bring the world to life in a more coherent and approachable way. It would be difficult for me to say whether I personally liked the manga or the anime more, since a lot of the manga’s best parts weren’t covered in the adaptation and the production values were less than amazing overall, but it does make me think that I would kill to see Stray Little Devil brought to animation with such a vibrant color pallette. The closest thing I can think of to having exactly the look that I’d want the series to have is Astarotte’s Toy, though that series didn’t have the same problem with its source material.

I’m very curious as to whether anyone else has had this problem with a manga, wherein the images were so detailed or complicated that it ruined the flow of the panels or ended up being kind of incomprehensible. If you’ve seen anything like that, then tell me about it in the comments below, and if there’s any topics in the vein of panelling and structure in manga which you’d like to hear me talk about, or any series which you find interesting for how they succeeded or failed in terms of overall design, feel free to suggest them. Check out all the stuff on screen for more of me, and as always, thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one!