YourMessageHere's Blog

Back to YourMessageHere's Blog

Some of my tags are a bit...obscure.  Here they are explained, from most positive to most negative.

That gentle feeling - sometimes you get the sense that there's been a great deal of care and love behind something, and a great effort has been made to let you feel that care yourself. Even if something isn't that good overall, or if it comes across as overly artificial, sometimes this is still quite a powerful feeling.

fantastic storyline - Basically, I value narrative most highly of all passive entertainment attributes. If it has a great story, it can be forgiven almost anything else; and if other attributes are good too, all the better. This usually means something that has an overarching plotline and tends not to be overly episodic.

Sense of universe - One of those things that really uses the strengths of animation to its own advantage, creating a world that is completely unreal, but has all the internal consistency and visual/narrative themes that make it feel very real.

miles better than it has any right to be - A thing that surprised me by being way better than it might appear on paper. It shouldn't work...yet somehow it does.

remarkably classy - this tag indicates not so much that it's remarkable that the thing is classy, more that the level of its classiness was remarkable to me, either because I knew nothing about it going in and was pleasantly surprised, or that it significantly exceeded my expectations.

strong women - My big fetish. Strong (in willpower, rather than in musclepower), independent female characters are the kind I like best, and can cause me to forgive a lot of other failings when done well.

Outgroup protagonist - I noticed that many things I watch and enjoy have one or all of the main characters who are permanent outsiders. By this I mean that they are in some measure fundamentally defined by what they are not and can never be - so, included in this is anything about vampires, sentient robots among humans, or girls-with-guns. Otherwise, these anime include a permanent change to the protagonist/s, frequently death or something like it, after which they have to come to terms with being forever on the outside of something they were previously part of. The least common version is a protagonist who actively chooses to be forever 'the Other'.

just so NICE - Something that produces that squishy happy feeling, the one that certain lighthearted things give you that has a powerful ability to cheer you up and make you feel a lot happier than you might otherwise have done if you're down, or just relax you and fill you with happy otherwise.

WTF factor done well - As is well known, anime is at times a surprising form of media. It can be adept at using viewer confusion extremely effectively in service to telling the story, giving you a sniff of something amazing, piquing the interest and drawing you in. This is the WTF factor, as in "I don't know WTF just happened but it was cool, I want to know more!"

I LOL'd - This made me laugh; that is, it's not that it's a comedy, it's that it is an actually funny one, which is far more important.

Cut down in its prime - Something of which too little exists, either because it just wasn't finished, or simply because it is high in quality yet low in quantity in a proportion that suggests there deserves to be more of it than there presently is.

giant stompy robots - Mecha is an overused, fuzzy term nowadays. Let's be clear. Large humanoid machines that people ride in and control, which they use to recklessly charge about, break stuff and fight each other: this is an extremely cool idea. Japan knows this, which inherently makes it significantly better than Hollywood right there. However, it's also a very complex concept in a way, because it's very personal and very subjective, and thus very easy to make it feel much less cool just by a few little details or design quirks.

'classic' i.e. made without CGI - CGI has revolutionised anime, and it has revolutionised expectations of anime too, making this a bit of a double-edged sword. While one can look at an older animation, study how it used to be done and marvel at the skill of these hand-drawn and hand-animated scenes when in an analytical mood, it can impact one's enjoyment and make things look unpleasantly dated if all you want is uncomplicated entertainment.

Dodgy art style - Something that seems outside of what I feel is a normal art style belongs behind this tag. Dodgy is not intended to necessarily be a bad thing - the point is that the art style itself jumps out and grabs your attention because it's unusual or somehow quirky. Sometimes this is great, and makes something otherwise fairly uninspiring feel fresh, while at other times it is a terrible move that makes a thing that could be interesting pretentious and unpleasant to even look at, and at still others it makes you think about what you are seeing in a totally unexpected or unusual way.

mecha that has feeeeeeelings - It's virtually an unwritten rule of anime that mecha aren't just piloted like any other machine; it has to hurt. But quite often this goes into reverse; the mecha have personalities and feelings too, which need to be considered in order to continually allow the pilots to pilot them. Sometimes, this is a good idea and contributes well to a plot, but more often is lazily used, be that for clumsy moral effect, as someone's excuse for just not being very good, or artificially prolonging a storyline.

Thing that is like another thing but not as good as the thing it is like - There's so much anime out there. Some of it is marvelously original; but for each of those, there's at least one thing that tries to various degrees to copy, borrow from or evoke something else. Occasionally, this works. Usually, it just seems lazy.

I know this is rubbish but I cannot stop watching it - Some things are curiously magnetic. However implausible, divergant, unoriginal, formulaic, predictable, filler-infested, convoluted, episodic or gratuitous they become, your investment of attention is by now great enough that you can't just give up. But the worst of it is, you know that you're only watching out of your hope that somehow, at some point, the problems will be ironed out and everything will be good again - and deep down, you know that's just not going to happen.

POWAH OF COOL!!!1 - This is a complicated concept, yet it is simple to grasp. We see it all the time in heroic characters; they're apparently normal people, and whatever happens to them would kill any normal person, yet they survive. They happen to be in the right place at the right time, over and over. No-one should be able to do what they just did. It's not that they're skilled, nor that they're lucky, nor their equipment. It's the Powah of Cool. Cool Powah enables them to get there and foil the plot in the nick of time, to destroy umpteen enemies in record time without a scratch, to survive the unstoppable super attack of death. The Powah of cool enables you, in the face of overwhelming odds, to grit your teeth, go "RAAAAAAAH", the enemy pile in, and suddenly, you've won - because it would be cool for you, and doing it will make you look cool (whereas not doing it would make you unremarkable or even foolish, and probably dead). Logic, consistency and common sense are not applicable or even relevant when you have the Powah of Cool. NOTE: usually, this is a bad thing. However, just sometimes it does in fact fit the style or tone of the thing; Black Lagoon, for example, is full of it, yet because of the over-amped, Hong Kong action feel of the thing, is still pretty enjoyable by and large.

classic Japanese sexism - Japan has so many fascinating cultural quirks of its own, and yet seems to have adopted so many familiar western ideas, it's fascinating to discover Japanese social rules. However, by far one of the most prominent things that people dislike about everyday life in Japan is just how sexist the society appears, to western eyes and ideals.  There's a lot more to this issue than that, of course, and it would be naive to label Japan as 'a sexist country' without learning a lot more about their own take on the issue, but this can sometimes be a seemingly unbridgeable gap. I find sexism by far the most reprehensible of the -isms that people in general are prone to let slide, so this grates on me at an instinctive level, even though I know there's more to this whole issue than meets the eye. Things with this tag display this side of Japan, where men go to work and women are expected to cook their dinner ready for them when they eventually get back home, where men are protagonists and women are there to look nice and agree with them, or possibly need rescuing, where men command and women obey.

WTF factor done badly - while the WTF factor can really draw you into a story, to succeed, it must by necessity walk a fine line between telling you too much and losing the mystery, but tediously acting like it was still mysterious, or telling you too little, and confusing you so much that you lose interest in finding out more and end up just wanting it to go away and leave you alone. This is something that fell off that fine line to one side or the other.

Total Logic Bypass - Often found in close proximity to WTF factors, this is basically an indication that something important happens because a decision is made that no sane person would ever make. For absurdist stuff like Excel Saga or Furi Kuri, this is great and should be seen positively. For nominally real world stuff like Toradora!, this is why I dropped it after one episode of serial idiocy stemming from one person's totally logic-defying behaviour. Oh, and just because it's a comedy doesn't mean it's necessarily excused from making sense. If you want me to invest affection in your characters, they need to behave somewhat like people capable of normal thought processes.

Sudden Catastrophic Ambush of Morality - everyone's seen this happen somewhere. Maybe it was simply an out-of-character moment of "You can't do that, it's wrong!", or maybe its as devastating as the finale of certain series where a character does not kill another one despite it being the only sensible thing to do and most of the series being about their quest to do so. This occurs simply because the invariably aggravating character who acts as the moral voice of the show arrives In The Nick Of Time to go "NOOOOO!" and lay out some absurd, absolutist moralising rhetoric such as "you'll be no better than them if you do it!", that completely ignores all the loads of people who have already been killed in order to get to this point. Basically, that's a Sudden Catastrophic Ambush of Morality (it's accidental but fitting that its acronym is SCAM). This has a really negative effect, and is a symptom of weak, ill-considered plotting. At best, it spoils an episode, or makes you like a character less; at worst it can sour your opinion of the whole series.

dreadful DVD dubtitling - a particular problem shared by otherwise superb overseas Ghibli releases, but not limited to them. For the uninitiated: dubtitling is where the subtitles are lifted from the dub script, not a translation of the original language. Sometimes this just means the lines aren't accurate translations, which isn't much of a problem unless you're learning the language. With Ghibli releases, though, there are often extra bits of dialogue inserted on the English track, e.g. in establishing street scenes; these are faithfully reproduced in the subs, even though no Japanese dialogue can be heard. I think it says a lot about Disney that while it adheres to the letter of the famous 'no cuts' policy, it manages to betray the spirit of it by trying as hard as possible to eliminate all the quiet that forms part of the beauty of original Ghibli works; the standard of voice acting on the English dub is a highpoint of the industry, but the philosophy behind the dub direction is far from that. The dubtitling is simply a more obvious facet - it's distracting, unnecessary, lazy and disrespectful, and there's no excuse for it.

...actually this sucks - you probably know the feeling; as you watch something, the realisation slowly creeps across your brain as you watch more and more of it that, basically, it's crap. By the time you finish the episode, you feel fundamentally, irrevocably less well disposed towards it, and enough of this can and has caused things to fall off 'watching' and into 'dropped'.

Dammit take it away! - this, I found terrible enough that I could only stand to watch one installment of it before I abandoned it.