lastnameEver's Blog

Anime Relations: Kubikiri Cycle: Aoiro Savant to Zaregotozukai

This right here, is the most pointless shit ive ever written.

[in relation to Nisio’s three day claim] …Now, I’m a little sceptical about this claim. The novel is around 400 pages. To put this into perspective, Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, a largely autobiographical novel, took three weeks of constant work to amount to around 287 pages (its between 250 and 300 or thereabouts) [It’s actually 281 pages, but it starts on page 3]. We’ll be generous and assume that the first draft of On the Road was longer (which is true) and amounted to, say, 500 pages (which is a guess), and that Kerouac took a few breaks and didn’t work on Saturdays and Sundays, and worked 8 hours a day, for fifteen days. 8 by 15 is 120 hours of time spent writing 500 pages, which amounts to 4.16666666667 pages an hour. Page 134 of the Penguin’s Classics edition of On the Road has 36 lines of words on the page and 11 words on the first sentence and since I’m too lazy to count out each word individually I’ll just say that amount to 396 words per page. For convenience’s sake, we’ll round down 4.16etc. to 4 and 396 to 390 words per page since that’s probably more accurate. That amounts to 1,560 words an hour for Mr. Jack Kerouac, for 120 hours, 8 hours a day non-stop, for fifteen days, with breaks on the weekend.

Now, does this even sound doable? Well, 1560 is 26 words per minute, which is well, well within the typing rate of even your grandmother, and even on the old-fashioned typewriter that Kerouac used. Thinking about what to write next probably wasn’t too big an issue since Kerouac was writing purely from memory rather than from imagination, and since the guy’s a devout follower of Thomas Wolfe he probably didn’t care too much about being precise in his descriptions. 26 words per minute sounds plausible within these considerations, especially if you take the estimate of 500 pages originally and drop it down to 400 pages.

Now let’s consider Kubishime Romanticist. 412 pages in total. Page 4, one of the wordier pages, contains 214 words altogether. Using Kerouac’s scenario, 8 by 5, 40 hours to write 412 pages with 214 words each, which amounts to 2204.2 words an hour, 36.7366666667 a minute. But wait, Nisio said he wrote it in three days. Well, then let’s say he worked 13 hours for two days, and 14 hours for one day. Simplifying the calculations further, let’s say he wrote 400 pages, and each page on average was 200 words. 10 pages an hour, 2,000 words an hour, 33.3* words a minute.

The question to ask is not whether or not you can do this, but rather whether or not you think its possible someone else could do this. Writing for 13/14 hours a day means you can get 8/7 hours of sleep and still have 3 hours left over for meals and breaks, which is plausibly enough time to recharge your batteries and prevent burn-out over a three-day stretch. When you factor in the fact that Kubishime Romanticist was written just after Kubikiri Cycle was finished, it was likely that Nisioisin was on a high afterwards (Hemmingway describes being on a high after finishing The Sun Also Rises, which is what propelled him to write The Torrents of Spring, so its not like I’m totally making this up.) Finally, allowing for the increase in typing speed brought about by keyboards (Nisio definitely owned a computer, even in 2001, considering his knowledge of coding shown in the books), and the greater speed that typing in Japanese probably brings, and the fact that the novel is written in a more slapdash manner than anything else in the series, I think its safe to say that, yes – Nisioisin is telling the truth. He really did write Kubishime Romanticist in three days.

Anime Relations: Hurricane Live! 2032

Fanfiction, it’s fanfiction. The original comic wasn’t even that good anyway, but a straight adaptation would’ve been preferable to what was given, because what was given was straight up, fan-fiction, and I didn’t even read the original comic until after I watched the show, and I still got the impression that it was fan-fiction. Hard to see why Scott Pilgram was so popular to begin with. None of it was offensively bad but if it wasn’t popular I’d have no reason to read it. The film wasn’t all that great, and the volumes after volume 3 feel like an entirely different comic than the one it was set out to be. I don’t really understand from a quality perspective why the thing is highly regarded. From a relatability perspective I get it, in a logical sense, but not really deeply, because the whole thing to me seems very shallow. Scott Pilgram is dating a high schooler. Meets Ramona Flowers, a girl whose defining trait is that she dyes her hair, and now he’s magically in love with her. In the anime, when they kiss, literal sparks fly, and this is seemingly the cue as to why they are destined to marry each other. In the anime Scott literally takes off, he leaves, he’s absent for a good five episodes, and we follow around Ramona as she does very little and interacts with the cast who also do very little while the viewer meanders around in their little do-little world waiting for the next episode to play so that they can procrastinate further on the work they’re supposed to be doing.

Scott possesses a sort of intangible charm which magically attracts various girls to him despite being a do-nothing kind of guy, a shallow sort of charm that, like everything in his universe, you sort of just have to take for granted as existing despite their being no proof for it existing in the first place. Dialogue is realistic enough at the start but then it kind of starts petering out into just flat exposition in the later volumes, where the realism is then slogged down into this lazy kind of mixture of colloquialism and dictionary English. Fight scenes aren’t really all that great. I like that the backgrounds are hand-drawn, it gives off a kind of rare aesthetic that’s only really nice in comparison to the photo-realism of every other manga background currently circulating in the presses.

I’ll give it to the comics, they are readable. The plot’s got a pretty strong pull at the start, but then as I mentioned, after volume 3 things fall apart at the seams and it all gets very aimless, like the motivation that kick-started the project was more or less expended by that point and the guy didn’t want to work on it any longer.

The comic is filled with terrible people and they’re all pretty likeable until they start realizing that they’re terrible people, which kills the comedy of it all. There’s no one to root for in Scott Pilgram. Probably because there’s nothing to root for. Because nothing happens. So why is it popular?

Because there’s romance right at the beginning. There’s a girl and a boy. There’s a certain amount of realism in the setting, and in the dialogue. There’s plenty of references to other media, mainly video games and music. The art style is something appealing. The story has a clear structure, goal, and end-point. There’s action, there’s fight scenes, there’s a certain amount of fantasy, but not enough for it to be too distracting, and there’s a certain amount of irreverance in the humour, and there’s enough humour, and there’s enough banter between friends to provide enough material for the vast majority of the non-reading public to project themselves and their own friend groups onto the characters and into the world, and its not too challenging to read and its quite comfortable to read as well because all the characters in the world don’t have a clue what they’re doing and that gives them a certain amount of confidence in themselves because they, at least, can look at their own lives and go ‘well at least my life isn’t as aimless and as terrible as the lives these guys live’ and feel better about themselves as a result.

The above reasoning is a mixture of cynicism, punting, and genuine belief. If something like Scott Pilgram were to come out now, it wouldn’t be popular, because it wouldn’t be original, and I guess that’s all it really counts for, all that matters is that Scott Pilgram is original, despite it being a hodge-podge of aimless ideas cobbled together from various other sources. Extremely shallow, but since the vast majority of people are as shallow as the comic is, they don’t perceive how shallow it is, so it becomes popular because there’s a lot of stuff to look at, and its comfy and its escapism basically, easy escapism. I’m not passing judgement on the people who read it, its just an observation. But it is shallow. There’s no other word for it.

The anime’s a ball of nothing by the way but its eight episodes so its not the biggest waste of time in the world.

Anime Relations: Chainsaw Man

The popularity of anything, once it reaches a certain critical mass, begins to divorce itself from the content fuelling the enthusiasm. Something can be so popular, people find they get more enjoyment talking about it than they do out of reading, watching, playing it. It becomes a social event, a conversation starter – “have you watched so-and-so?” – “did you read such-and-such?” – and then opinions are shared and then agreements and disagreements , and all of a sudden, the subject matter doesn’t matter anymore, the joy instead is found in the person talking about the subject matter, and the joy in talking to this certain person, or group of people. And so if this common ground between you and the rest of the world starts to disintegrate slightly, or if it comes under attack, there’s naturally a very vicious reaction, as it’s not just the subject matter that’s being criticised, the criticism also threatens to compromise the mental territory used by people to ease their social relations. If this territory is devalued and picked apart, it triggers a sense of anxiety which manifests itself in a lot of the unsavoury behaviour you see on this site against the people who review anime and manga – death threats, put-downs, provocations, insults, and so on.

Naturally, in order to provoke such a response to begin with, the piece of media has to be sufficiently popular enough for people to care about it being attacked, and the type of popularity it holds. There are two kinds of popularity – popularity based on position, and popularity based on merit. Popularity based on position is diegetic, as common as air, as natural as water. Political leaders, historical figures, William Shakespeare, the Bible – things that people possess an awareness of without having an interest in the thing itself. Criticism of these things isn’t likely to stir a reaction. An attack on the capitalist system of America, for example, in an everyday setting will yield one of two reactions – “well obviously its bad” – or – “huh yeah wow that’s bad I guess so anyway there’s this great pizza place I went to last night.“ Due to the position-based popular thing’s ubiquity in everyday life, its seen as common, something to be taken for granted, and nothing get worked up over for the common person. Popularity based on merit does not enjoy the same privileges. This type of popularity starts off with nothing, and has to build itself up, and until a certain period of time passes – maybe years, maybe decades, maybe centuries – that built-up mass of popularity is constantly in doubt and subject to keel over at any moment, like a geriatric grandfather celebrating his 117th birthday. As a result, the believers in this myth – the true, zealous fanatics – fiercely defend the validity of its existence, as, in a roundabout way, that myth is part of what defines their humanity. In order for this myth to persist, a lot of factors have to work together. I’m not going to pretend as if I know the secret behind it all, but I have a hunch as to what makes a popular anime or manga, and through misdirecting the reasoning behind its popularity, maybe I can point in a direction that uncovers that truth.

For anything to be popular, the myth it expresses has to have an outer shell which is simple to grasp, and an inner body capable of stimulating various complexities of thought. It has to possess a relevancy to the present, hold nostalgia for the past, provide a glimpse of the future, and speak in a universal language, with a clear message that holds a unique meaning for each recipient. Basically, the people have to be able to rally around a core idea that’s really cool. Why, for example, do so many people believe in religion? Because gods can do anything, and everybody wants to be able to do everything. People look up to and believe in gods, because they encapsulate a myth strong enough to ward off the inevitability of death. Which, at its core, is why Chainsaw Man is so popular, because Chainsaw Man can’t die, he can do anything, basically he’s a god, and, as proven by the equation stated previously, if you’re a god, you’re bound to become popular, because everybody wants to be a god. In other words, the idea of being Chainsaw Man yourself and living in the world he lives is what fills that inner body of complexity that’s hidden inside the comparatively simple shell of a shonen comic book serialization.

Did the author have this in mind when he created Chainsaw Man? Absolutely not. The reasoning behind the formation of the idea and reasoning behind the belief in the idea always have two completely separate paths of development. Understanding why Chainsaw Man is popular does not mean you can automatically make something as popular as Chainsaw Man – in fact, the self-consciousness of knowing what makes something popular may compromise any potential originality.

Anime Relations: A New Journey

Definitely looks like it has a trillion, billion dollars in its budget, never seen 3D animation look good outside of a film outside of Arcane, does have its quirks though in how the animators animate facial expressions when people are speaking, there are scenes where the facial expression don’t match the tone of voice the voice actor is speaking in, the scene with Ecco (or Ekko I don’t know) is talking to Vi at the treehouse comes to mind – it’s really amateurish, but all the lighting effects and filters look too good for the show to look bad. Animation talent’s spread kind of thin though, a marked difference in the scene with Ekko versus Jinx as opposed to most scenes in the show. Directing’s kind of poor too, some shots are clearly done for the aesthetic appeal of how it looks with zero thought put behind it, like with the scene where one half of Vi’s face is behind bars like alright you could probably bullshit some reason but it would require some English teacher levels of stretching the truth, but its not just that, its also how the scenes flow together, its not done very well. You can tell the team behind Arcane are kind of new to the whole animation thing because the shots don’t blend together very well, its very apparent that each part of the episode was done by a different group of people. Rather than it being one cohesive package, its like a bunch of individual scenes were strung together loosely, they’re in chronological order but in no other order.

Vi is so badly written, not her character, her dialogue. Almost ruins the show. Every line she speaks is verging on passing on second-hand embarrassment, and she’s basically the main character, so awkward how she manages to be the most unlikeable character too. In contrast, her sister, Jinx is the best part, the only inspired character in Arcane, the only person with any magnetism, schizophrenically shuffling around like a heroin addict, bringing energy to a lacklustre cast of characters, no one else compares. Jayce the scientist is this lukewarm buff guy who is very soft and resorts to suicide too easily. His partner Victor is a little more likeable but has the deck stacked way too far against his favour to where it becomes a farce – he’s a cripple, on top of that he’s dying, on top of that he kills someone with his magical cortex thing, and then also tries to casually commit suicide, and is just as casually stopped, kind of hard to feel bad for him when his misery is exaggerated to such a degree. Silco is a pantomime villain, Vander exists only to die, the black girl and her part to play is unnecessary, same with her mother, could’ve been written out of the script entirely and the plot wouldn’t change a bit, and Ekko’s sole personality trait is being black. There’s no contest here.

There’s a lot of stuff that’s just casually mentioned that’s really heavy in reality and isn’t treated with the proper due diligence. The attempts at suicide are presented as a stroll in the park, the poverty of the undercity is not properly conveyed either – its easy to tell the writers have little to no idea what living in poverty is like, the psychology of it all, etc. – transitions between scenes are too casual too. Some scenes are also unnecessary, didn’t need to be there. The fights between Sevica and Vi serve no purpose other than to be set-pieces for action.

The action is good. The show is at its best when the visuals are talking and not the characters.

The characters are not bad, they’re just cliché. Not a single one of them can be related to a genuine person, but in terms of being pieces in the machinery of the story they play out their part as designed, and are unlikely to shatter the viewer’s suspension of disbelief, unless we’re talking about Vi, where every word she speaks causes my soul to wither slowly.


The story’s nothing special but its nothing poor either, like the characters it’s a cliché set-up. You have the poor and the rich, each are divided, the story forms around the conflict between people of the two sides in their interactions with each other. Surface-level magical elements and scientific aesthetics mix with Disneyland slums and polished gutters, some barely bearable dialogue that tries too hard to force a quotable line down your throat – works only once –

Silco tells a woman –‘I would’ve killed your son for this, but I suppose we’re ahead on that account,’– after this woman’s just learnt of her son’s death a few minutes ago. Cold! Imagine saying that in real life to someone. To be fair imagining any of the dialogue being spoken in real life is a difficulty.

Best scene in the show is the fight between Jinx and Ekko. They got a bunch of rappers and also Imagine Dragons, who sing their usual corny overblown bullshit ‘OoOooOoO the miseryyyyyyy/Everybody wants to be my ene-MeeEeEEeE/Spare the sympatheeeeee’ more like spare me my eardrums and shut the fuck up – warbling like a drunken crow high on Benzedrine.

Pusha-T and Denzel Curry are the two big names… the two rappers… both phone in their performances but it’s the nice sort of phoning in its like a phone call from your mother, it’s a nice sort of phone call. Denzel’s song with whats-her-name backs the fight between Ekko and Jinx. The start of the fight and how it syncs with the music is very cool, the cocky shit-eating smirk Ekko gives to the camera and the little laugh Jinx gives after cocking her pistol with her bare shoulder and face in the frame – it just is cool, it’s got style. The pocket-watch swinging back and forth with Jinx positioned in the background, and the transition between her current self and her younger self is very nice, but the fight is almost completely ruined right after by the shitty running animation Ekko does, where it looks like he’s just running in place, looks really goofy and dumb, undermines the energy and life and grit and conviction of the segment as a whole, and I’m saying it’s the best part – right, okay...

If Arcane was more like that fight scene and less like a mechanical cliché factory, I would’ve enjoyed it immensely. In terms of a second season, I’m not really sure if it’ll get any better or worse. There’s potential but I don’t see the story getting any better. Probably give it a pass. If Caitlyn becomes the main character I’ll watch it. Caitlyn’s very pretty. She speaks with a posh British accent. She has very straight hair. Her hair is blue. She has a dumbass line where she calls herself an outcast. Yeah, on second thought –