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While it’s common knowledge that all K-On lovers are Satan-worshipping shoplifters who steal spare change from the homeless, I am not without sympathy. Being an evil person myself who enjoys mugging charity workers working for St. Vincent de Paul in my spare time, I can’t help but see myself in their shoes. If you like K-On, I understand. I will not question the hole in your Mio body-pillow, nor will I question the lipstick on her face, nor the seven kilograms of cocaine hidden in the walls of your home. I am a very accepting person. We live in a very accepting society. The internet ... is a very accepting place. We only tell you to kill yourself once a month. We’re very nice people. And K-On is a very nice show. It has a great number of very nice made-up people in its made-up world.

Yui Hirasawa is as dumb as bricks, and the main character. Yui is joined by Mio, a responsible, well-meaning, pretty Japanese girl whose innocence is gradually eroded and work ethic ground to dust by the three stooges surrounding her. Mio’s childhood friend Ritsu is the band’s drummer, and she’s energetic and lively and so on. And there’s also Mugi, who is rich. And! Also! She has a lot of money. These cookie-cupcake Christmas characters comprise the main cast of the show, and for the first couple episodes they do various normal things in a supposedly cute way, and then they play a tooth-decaying, ear-castrating melody. Then they’re joined midway through by Azusa, and then they do the same thing again, only this time Azusa is with them, and Yui says ‘Azunyan!’ every few minutes like the 47-chromosome wonderful human being that she is. From time to time, through the revolving door of their Mickey Mouse club-house, their club supervisor does her very best to corrupt their innocence with her cosplaying fetishistic desire to dress up Mio in as many marketable costumes as possible. Moe, apparently.

I liked watching K-On. It’s a very comfortable experience to view these girls, animated lovingly by Kyoto Animation, sit and talk and walk around, and buy guitars and eat cake, and live a kind of life that is out of reach of reality. It’s a very nice story about how picking up a new hobby can help you meet new people and transform your life in a way that you’d never imagined.

Violence, threats of violence, various very bad things happening for no good reason, a hard focus on everything bad in the world, a hard focus on how everything good in the world is a scam, and that happiness is a lie, and so on and so forth. Basically, Inio Asano.

Oyasumi Punpun’s excessive fatalism isn’t very believable, doesn’t do the story or the people in the story any favours and it makes them hard to like. Punpun’s the protagonist, the reader will be sitting in his head for the majority of the manga. He’s not a good person, (no such thing in Asano’s world) but ... he’s understandable in his actions through the story and extorts a good deal of sympathy from the reader. Story follows him through his life as a grade schooler up to his early twenties. Nothing of much substance occurs throughout his life, which has led people to categorize Punpun as a ‘slice-of-life’ manga, a generous act of charity that attempts to excuse the vast, dead spaces of boredom present everywhere in the story. First signs of life only start to emerge around twenty chapters in, when Punpun’s uncle delves into his past with a girl he meets.

Punpun has multiple digressions of this nature that pad out that pad sad bad nad cad dad chad jihad out what would otherwise be a straightforward narrative. They’re a welcome change of pace because the main narrative is so aimless and boring and goes nowhere forever, but these side stories have little connection to the plot, so in the case of the Pegasus cult for instance, where the story being told is more boring than the main narrative (hard, but not impossible), enjoyment grinds to a halt, and you get the feeling that Asano is just messing around and around and around and around and riverrun past eve and adam from michael bay to verve of snore.

When Asano actually tries to convey something of substance because he doesn’t try most of the time let’s be real, it results in memorable that I can’t really remember displays of talent, an example would be the big, imposing, photorealistic pages of Punpun walking through the city here’s what it looks like:
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The pictures look impressive, they support the melancholy atmosphere of the story in an effective manner. Looking at Punpun in these drawings (center right), you can clearly get a sense of his isolation and alienation. Delving deeper into the visuals, Punpun’s unconventional character design allows for further innovative storytelling by being able to morph his shape, something Asano does to heighten the dramatic tension of certain scenes and/or express Punpun’s current emotional state, to good effect
Example:
✘ ˵ ╹ ◡ ╹˶ ✘

For some reason along the way every so often Saint Asano decides to stand at his pulpit and deliver some sermons and I do not like this because he says things that I think are wrong. Whenever Asano does so, whenever he expresses an opinion through one of his characters, he preaches in such an assertive and self-righteous manner that I’m automatically inclined to disagree with him, even if what is being said is, to a certain extent, correct. It’s exasperating to read much like my hunger strike reports sent to the Taliban, because it’s exasperating to see something simple be blown up needlessly into something complicated, and it’s exasperating to listen to a question that is being asked not out of personal concern but out of a sense of obligation, which is what Asano’s societal musings end up feeling like.

Main issue I had with Punpun was boredom. There’s not much of anything in its story or characters to latch onto emotionally. The characters are unlikeable, and the story is largely uneventful. I’m not a fan of the attempts at surrealism, because they aren’t rooted in reality, and I view them as sort of a cop-out. I’m even less of a fan at the attempts at realism, because it presents a distorted view of reality that’s impossible to buy into. Naturally, I know, it’s a story, a manga story at that, so I know there’s always this pressure on the author to make something big and something shocking happen and present the world as a darker place than it actually is – and I actually liked these parts of Punpun, they’re the only parts that left any lasting impression. The two parts I have in mind – the storylines involving Punpun’s uncle and the pottery class, and the concluding section of the manga, starting from Punpun meeting a certain someone’s mother – are gripping to read okay they’re not really gripping but I feel bad criticising him all the time. There is some real audacity in the scenes that transpire during these segments. At the same time though, the showcases of sharp violence are at odds with the thought-provoking atmosphere that Asano seems to want to cultivate.

Don’t know why Asano tries to portray himself as someone who creates manga that are different from the rest of the escapist, juvenile shonen fantasies. If he really believes it, he should just let his work speak for itself, in my opinion. Especially no need for him to go out of his way to de-rail his own plot by using the Pegasus cult to criticise escapism. A needless detour in a story already filled to the brim with needless detours. Take a step back and examine the content in Punpun: most of what’s he’s created is as juvenile and as lowbrow as the manga he criticises and without the redeeming, life-affirming messages that these manga export. There is no way Asano should feel as if he’s in the position to act as judge jury executioner on the entire shonen manga population when half the time his manga doesn’t even meet his own standards, but that’s probably why he feels the need to assert that his manga is better, it comes out of insecurity, because he knows that the gap between him and the rest is not as big as he would like it be.

I understand how Asano can provide solace to his readers (not really) and why this work of his is beloved (again, not really), because by expressing the effects of a life of isolation and unhappiness through the violent and sad actions of his characters, Asano shows the reader that they’re not alone, he feels the same pain they do, though I don’t think this is the right way of going about things as its pretty shallow, as in it doesn’t get at the source of the character’s, of Punpun, and of Asano’s unhappiness, and consequently does not get at the source of the reader’s unhappiness, which makes the whole affair pointless to sit through. If there was more honesty and sensitivity in Asano’s writing here, or if there was more of a solid resolution to the story’s many plot points and struggles, it could’ve justified the long and hard slog to read it all and get to the finish, but there is not. All the way along it is filled with self-loathing and bitterness and resentment with the usual contradictory spurts of narcissism that endear you even less to the story and its characters. Not that its badly made, its just not enjoyable.

Tengoku Daimakyou adapts a manga made by the same author of Soredemo something-or-other (And Yet the Town still Moves). That show, adapted by Shaft, had a very good last episode that rips off ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, or pays homage, depending on your point of view. Being one of the few anime episodes that made me feel something other than indifference, I thought very highly of And Yet the Town Still Moves. On closer inspection its not very good, not very bad, not really much of anything, which goes to show how a good last impression can work wonders for your perception of something’s quality. ... His latest work to adapted, Heavenly Delusion, concerns itself with two people. One’s named Maru (silver-haired boy-man) and Kimiko (ginger-haired girl-boy). They’re looking for a place called ‘Heaven’ – that’s the ‘Heavenly’ part of the title. The ‘Delusion’ refers to you, the viewer, and your belief that you’ll find something to enjoy here.

Alongside this excuse for a plot that the manga industry employs on an endless basis is another story concerning children who live in a nursery and don’t initially know the difference between men and women. They also have superpowers, because, I guess, maybe, probably, it could be said, perhaps. No, there is not a point to this particular story, because the show doesn’t last long enough to connect the two stories together. I’m sure in the inevitable season two it’ll all come together, but knowing this is adapts a manga, a conclusive and satisfying ending is unlikely to ever happen anytime soon. You could read the manga to see it out, much in the same way that you could ingest a bottle of nails. Something you could do.

Half of the story is sitting around waiting for the other half of the story to pick up where it left off. The latter, better half is the half you start out with, with Maru and Kimiko searching for Heaven. Maru has a vaccine that can help a sick person there and wants to deliver it. They live in a world that has gone off the rails a little bit, an alternate timeline where Liz Truss managed to last a little longer than forty-four days as Prime Minister. They fight monsters every couple episodes known as Hiruko/Man-eaters, they’re the main threat, but obviously the people are the real threats, the real monsters, real deep, for real.

People commit suicide and rape others in the show, not necessarily in that order. Despite this, the show is not very dark, and is generally unserious. More like a comedy, with various dark happenings occurring whenever excitement levels drop too far. A couple fake-outs, some big reveals, the usual tricks of the trade employed with manga narratives, the same smoke and mirrors used to distract the viewer from the fact that the story is going nowhere and never will go anywhere, the never-ending nowhere journey to the middle of nowhere, to Heaven supposedly, but it could be the centre of the Earth for all you or I know. If I were an arbiter of good taste and a protector of moral sanctity, I would rain down many criticisms upon Heavenly Delusion for its flagrant abuse of shock-value as a means of holding attention, but as the entire point of watching seasonal anime is to inflict as much mental pain upon yourself as possible, I will instead praise the show for driving the knife in just that bit deeper, for dropping my standards ever closer to the ocean floor.

If I cared about production values, and animation quality beyond a certain point, and sound quality beyond a certain fidelity, and all the various boring professional work that I shouldn’t take for granted yet take for granted anyway, I would point out to you that Heavenly Delusional is on the better end of the seasonal scale, that its general animation quality surpasses the television standard, but really, I doubt this will affect your enjoyment all too much considering how little there is to the story.

Enjoying Heavenly Delusion requires you to be in a certain frame of mind. Being under the influence of prescription drugs and/or alcohol will help you get there. Soberly examining its many minutes is not a tedious task, nor is it tiring, nor does it require much mental strain, or effort. Nevertheless I never found it to really enjoyable, which, on a sub-conscious level, was exactly what I was looking for. I knew what I was getting into here, so I can’t really complain about the par-for-the-course quality. It’s a very average, very inoffensively decent effort that executes its many clichés in an entirely acceptable manner. I was just hoping that there would be a strain of originality somewhere in its mass of cobbled-together ideas.

From what I can tell, this is a music video, because there’s a video and there’s music. It’s by the ‘I see fire’ Aldonoah zero guy, Hiyokui Sawanonecares, produced by him, and sung by some woman presumably. There’s a story, some vague, I don’t know, love beats war message to it, the music’s alright, its kinda shit but I mean its pretty inoffensive. It’s vacuous and innocuous like every pop song ever created. The visuals are aight. Feeling a light to decent Activision lawsuit on this one.

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Rudy is sad. Sighs a lot. Depressed. Carbon clone of Eris complains to him. Her black surrogate mother says no stop complaining. In this darling introduction, our story begins in earnest. Rudy has a vague goal to look for his mother and the author has a vague goal of reaching Hogwarts but he doesn’t quite know how to get from A to B in a smooth way so he wastes our time with a bunch of overreaching psychological moments that look to be of dramatic importance, judging by all the motion effects and sound effects bleeding into my eardrums. Rudy and his new gang of ... nobodies get into a big fight, and finally the animation, which was lacking in quality, picks up and we get a cool slow-motion shot of all them doing cool action magical stuff, and upon seeing this Rudy is filled with determination to live life a with a little more life, and the first episode ends on this optimistic note.

Second episode’s more of the same, with a new character introduced who’s named Zeke or something. Hot-blooded Guilty Gear player. Mains Sol and likes spamming DP on wake-up. Honest Rudy gets insulted for his desire to play the honest ground-based footsies Guilty Gear is known for, because I don’t know dude, its getting pretty boring and we need to force some conflict somewhere.

I don’t understand this trope, if I can even call it a trope, or what you even call it in anime, where one character pops up and seems to have psychologically profiled the main character to the point of knowing them better than they know themselves, despite never actually having met them or having been seen to have met them. All we get between Soldat and Rudy is a glare from Soldat and then we’re right into Soldat soul-reading Rudy and pinpointing his flaws like he’s known Rudy his whole life. Stupid, lazy, contrived and forced. People don’t act this way in real life to strangers, even when drunk, and even if they were to make assumptions like this they wouldn’t make them with such accuracy. Really stupid.

Meanwhile, a blizzard occurs. Rudy goes out to save Eris 2 and does so with such ease and swagger that you wonder how he managed to struggle with those bears in episode one, if he can just turn on killaura and walk through a hoard of enemies like he’s taking a leisurely stroll.

Finally things start to move in episode three. In a way its bad, because it introduces the “can’t get it up” plot point, which, as you’ll learn, is the main motivation to why Rudy wants to go to school. As stupid as it sounds, maybe even stupider. Results have yet to be compiled, but it might be in the top five stupidest things of all time. Rudy tries to get with Sara (remembered her name finally), can’t get it up, and so decides to get drunk, where he runs into Soldat and then breaks down. If Rudy were a realistic character I would care a little more about this scene. He cries about people leaving him and stuff and I mean sure okay but I don’t care. Soldat and Rudy stumble out, Rudy meets Sara and gets too honest and calls Sara something or other and Sara gets big mad and then Rudy tries to kill himself. This action is also a suitable entry in the top five stupidest things alive contest.

Rudy attempting to commit suicide here is has to be the most blatant piece of melodrama ever contrived on television. Gets a second chance at life, talks all through the first season about how he’s going to make the most of his second chance at life, and then leaps at the first excuse to end his life, all because of some girl who we met two episodes ago rejected him and said he was a bad person. The mental fortitude of a sandcastle. But at least now though the story can finally start going places, with Rudy joining up with Soldat. Surely [C] this [L] will [U] be a [E] long [L] and [E] productive [S] relationship [S] that’ll last for more than one episode.

Rudy kills a dragon at the start of episode 4 just in case you weren’t already aware that the guy is literally unkillable. Everyone’s favourite character, the elf whore, returns and tells Rudeus that his mother is okay, thus ending a multiple, season-spanning plot-point in the most anti-climatic way possible. We get some comedy in the form of Elsanise Dragonborn being a whore and some fanservice in the form of Rudeus doing push-ups, presumably for all four female fans who watch this show on a weekly basis, shoutouts to them I guess. Finally God shows up.

I hated God at first. I thought he was the laziest and most transparent plot device in history when he showed up in part two of season one, and I thought he ruined the show with his existence alone. However as time has gone by, I’ve realized that God is a necessary evil, and that one more unrealistic element in an unrealistic story doesn’t ruin the story so long as it makes some sort of sense in the plot. At least God provides us with a potential reason as to how Rudy got reincarnated, and being the Man God or whatever, it makes sense as to why he’s on Rudy’s side and wants to help him. He also gives a sense of scope to the story, the idea that Rudy is merely a pawn in a much bigger chess game between gods. I’m sure the author will fuck this up down the line and continue to focus on the bad erotic comedy but there’s potential here, at least, for something interesting to develop, out of what I thought was just a lazy attempt to justify the coincidences occuring on the Demon continent.

Rudy leaves after getting God’s plan and hops out to Hogwarts, where I’m sure something will happen maybe possibility jesus the story’s moving pretty slow. Rudy reunites with Sylphie here. Sylphie, known as Fitz this season, is the next visual novel heroine after Erin for Rudy to romance, and again, while it’s a good execution of an unrealistic personality, it still is, at the end of the day, unrealistic and therefore not all too interesting. Really, you can categorize all the the woman in the show, or at least most of the woman, into archetypal roles sterilized and sanitized from any and all originality. Logically speaking the mechanical parts, the semantics of their boxed-off personalities, they run like clockwork, but the thread that ties it together, and makes it more than the sum of its parts, realism, originality, sincerity, whatever you want to call it, it isn’t there, for the supporting cast. They’re more like dolls for Rudy and by extension the author to toy with, mess around, and live out sexual fantasies with. The men fare a little better, since sex/lust doesn’t come into it and distort things as much, but there’s no real notable exception that dispells the mist of unreality that hangs over them all. They may, at times, speak like real people, act like real people, reason things out, think things through, ponder, speculate – but personally, I’m not convinced, I can’t suspend my disbelief that what I’m seeing is real.

I didn’t watch past this part so like y’know whatever I’m sure it was as middling as the rest of the show. Kind of shame, since this anime was the first and only seasonal anime to really grip me with its story and not have it be an effort to watch all the way through. Yeah its pedo-bait and whatever, and morally repugnant, but I mean it was still enjoyable to watch. Can’t say the same for this season. It just sucks.

Horimiya causes the sort of boredom that causes people to believe in hell just so they can have something to look forward to. To describe what happens in Horimiya would be like one of those zen koans because watching the show all the way through and not watching it is the exact same thing.

To find enjoyment in Horimiya would be to find enjoyment in watching paint dry. Characters are bland, flavourless, flat, and uninteresting. The show’s animated by Cloverworks. Like everything Cloverworks touch, it is absolutely hollow. I don’t like wishing ill-will upon anyone, but if Cloverworks were to go bankrupt, I don’t think ... anything of value would be lost. The story’s the usual misunderstandings, fights over the girl, the boys kiss and make up and make up aimless conversations that go nowhere, with a lot of bad comedy that isn’t unfunny but isn’t funny either. I don’t think there’s anything egregiously wrong with the show but the story has no objective. It’s not the romantic development between the two leads, since that wraps up without much fanfare. It’s not the school, since the place is too boring. It’s not the people in the school either, they’ve got nothing going on in their lives. There’s no conflict, no stakes, no direction, no message, no spark of creativity, and still better than Oregairu, that’s crazy.

Anime began in the late 18th century and was invented by Walt Disney. One-hundred and thirty-two years later Haruki Murakami, head of Toyota and designer of the album cover of KanYe West’s 4th sophomore album, The Barter 3, stole the Krabby Patty secret formula required to steal children from money and set up Studio Ghibli. He was soon fired by his employees, numbered six total, and was replaced by Mamoru Oshii, who went on to create FLCL, a six-episode OVA featuring David Beckham in the leading role. Oshii won seven little Oscars for his debut and was later arrested for child exploitation, where he would ... spend the remainder of his days complaining about how no one was around anymore to make the anime that he wanted to make. The anime he had in mind was Futakoi Alternative, and was originally conceived on a napkin in a coffee shop in a series of ideas which would form the basis of Pixar’s greatest hits in the years to come.

The show was made by ufotable, a studio who are very easy to hate, because they have a trademark style that shortcuts the need for consistent, high-fidelity animation. Well-known for layering every show they make in a heap of digital lighting effects and shaders, giving everything a kind of glossy, smooth sheen, giving a kind of unwholesome feeling that what you’re staring at is obscured in fog and isn’t as real as you’d like it to be. Futakoi Alternative however, comes before the digital deep-frier era, before ufotable sold their soul to the Nasuverse and decided to make Fate for the rest of their existence, or this was the narrative anyway, before they made Demon Slayer and sold out even harder.

Futakoi Alternative could be considered really bad if you were very harsh. The setting is impossible to take seriously, they’re driving motor-cycles up walls, shooting the mafia, basically all nonsense. Then the writer sits down across from you, literally – he literally came into my house, and sat down – he was taking food out of my refrigerator, he was eating yoghurt, I asked him about it, he said: “It’s rude to speak with your mouth open”. He was then explaining to me the conceit of his novel because like every terrible writer, he just couldn’t keep his mouth shut about the process of how he wrote it, because to him it was like magic, but I obviously couldn’t care less. He was explaining to me the idea behind writing Futakoi Alternative as a serious story, and he had one reason or another, I wasn’t listening, and then he started drinking milk straight out of the carton, not even opening the lid, he pulled out a machete, and lopped off the top of it, and started just guzzling it, and getting milk all over himself and the floor, and was generally just making a real nuisance of himself. I went to call the police, but he’d done something to the electricity, so I had to endure listening to him explain the plot of Futakoi Alternative, and the underlying meaning of the twins in the show. Sara apparently represents the desire to have an older sister to depend on while Soujyu represents the desire to have a younger sister to dote on. I told him he was just rehashing what was written in the introduction to SubaHibi but then he claimed that he wrote SubaHibi. At that point I didn’t really know what to believe in.

Something about Futakoi Alternative’s plot structure is very contrived in how it is set up. The happy, comical moments, the only good parts of the show, are treated as mere fluff to the supposed real meat of the story, which is this contrived and very boring slow-burning who-cares quote-unquote tragedy about these girls who are condemned to an arranged marriage to a rich heir of some made-up rich company, and this is all linked to a World War 2 criminal organization who produce squid-human immortal hybrids in an attempt to take over the world, and it takes way too much time for it to be resolved, and it tries to play to your nostalgia of the prior fun moments despite these moments existing only to evoke a sense of nostalgia later on, which makes these happy moments feel very disingenuous and insincere. To provide a similar example, it’d be that scene in Oyasumi Punpun, where all the kids and Punpun are staring up at the beautiful night sky: a moment designed explicitly to evoke nostalgia later on, something impossible to buy into because of how contrived and insincere it is from the get-go. You’re not going to want to shoot yourself after watching these scenes, but it is very easy to be indifferent to Sara and Soujyou’s struggles and not care about them bawling about Rentarou this and Rentarou that like they’re behind on their apartment payments.

So basically because of this I consider Alternative to be badly written, but I don’t mean that as an insult. There’s a certain artistry to bad writing. It takes a lot of effort and goodwill and knowledge and effort to write something mediocre. With something mediocre, you know that the effort has been put in. Mediocrity isn’t something you luck into. It’s achieved with guts, courage, hard work, and determination. A mediocre writer can look back on his mediocrity and say that at least they did something today, and yesterday, and the day before, which makes tomorrow seem better, and not so uncertain, because they can always do tomorrow what they’ve done today, which is the same mediocre drivel they’ve been churning out before. While this may seem bad, being condemned to mediocrity is not as bad as it seems. Much like dyslexia, there are far more famous people with the condition than you’d realize.

The way in which I’ll choose to frame the film at first is in this particular way. The plot isn’t explained in this way in the film, its hardly explained at all, but here’s how you could choose to look at it. Char Aznable, the main villain, is seeking to end his rivalry with the main protagonist, Amuro Ray, as a means of getting back at him for killing the only woman he really ever loved, Lalah Sune. To do this, he needs to contrive a great enough threat for Amuro Ray to take notice and take action, so he takes the most obvious and ... blunt approach, and threatens mass genocide and total extinction of all life living on Earth. In order to rouse a great enough force to pose a great enough threat, Char Aznable takes control of a space colony called Neo Zeon, which he can do due to his status as the son of Zeon’s founder. By preying presumably on the racist tendencies and inferiority complexities of the human population living in the space colonies around Earth, he provokes them into believing that the destruction of Earth is a good thing and in their best interests, for the gravity of Earth weighs humanity down as a whole and stops them from evolving, or something like that. Essentially though its one whole big con, Char Aznable couldn’t care less, so long as he has a big enough stage to fight Amuro Ray. In a way, this also provides a metacommentary on the film’s main idea, which is to bring an end to Amuro and Char’s rivalry, no matter how contrived the means.

If you choose to disregard this theory, the film’s plot is stupid. Unbelievable to believe that people will willingly genocide an entire planet just because someone ordered them to. There is no prior reason as to why these people want to go to war, no discontent, Zeon seems pretty prosperous, but they are the bad guys so they must be bad I guess. It is difficult to tell whether Tomino is a genius here or an idiot, with Quess being a pretty good example. Is she meant to be taken sincerely, or is her frivolous irrational behaviour satire? Quess is an funny character if taken ironically, but if she’s meant to be taken seriously, you really begin to question the intelligence of the person writing the script. The same can be said for Char and his motivations. If he truly couldn’t care less about what he spouts, then he becomes a hilariously sympathetic character for the lengths he goes to bring some sense of closure to his life. Threatening to make the Earth unhabitable just so he could kill the guy who accidentally killed his girlfriend takes a great sense of wit on the part of Tomino, to cast an almighty superman ruler of a country as the pettiest man alive. Even more so when Char’s sense of honour is so sensitive that he willingly gives away technology that will help his mortal enemy just so he can have the satisfaction of knowing that if he beats Amuro, he had beaten him fair and square. But if Char truly believes what he says about the Earth weighing people down and being a burden on human evolution, he goes from being a someone recognizable as a human, to the personification of Satan himself. There is no way a man can be so evil as to believe that killing billions of people is a good idea, it makes no conceivable sense, though I admit the idea is funny, in an exasperating sort of way, but it does change how good the film looks in retrospect.

The film’s perceived quality drastically hinges on believing in the idea that Char is doing a con job on everyone around him. Part of me wants to believe that this is the biggest cope of all time from the oldheads who enjoy the film, because part of me wants to tear down the notion that the film is a masterpiece, because while the film is good, there are some pretty glaring issues. The first is that characters are killed off too easily, that their deaths are pretty meaningless and have little impact. May be the point, but it doesn’t change the feeling. Second is the ending. Doesn’t have the impact it feels like it should. Probably because Newtype energy has always felt to me to be the most half-assed ill-defined thing imaginable, capable of doing literally anything the story needs it to do at any particular moment. I like the concept of Newtypes, but there should be defined limits and proper explanations for how it works so that when it kicks in it doesn’t feel like a cop-out. There should been a bit of foreshadowing implying that it was capable of the feat at the end, but really, this is a minor complaint. What it comes down to are the characters, particularly Char. I don’t buy the theory that Char is doing it out of pettiness, I think he's written genuinely, in that he genuinely believes that destroying Earth is a good idea. There are too many lines in Char’s exchanges with Amuro for the pettiness theory to hold water, he advocates and insists far too strongly for the destruction of Earth for someone who has no belief. It makes no sense as to why Char would keep up the act of pretending against Amuro. Is he scared Amuro would run away if Char told him the supposed truth? Its not like Amuro would have a choice by that point: things were too far gone: he would have to fight Char regardless. If Char really was doing it all just to have one final fight with Amuro, wouldn’t he have revealed it to Amuro at some stage? May argue that by telling Amuro he gave him the frames, he more or less implied it, but that could easily be waved away by Char just having an abnormal sense of justice.

Essentially, I’m unwilling to believe that Tomino is capable of that sort of subtlety, just based off the four films I’ve seen him make. I think the people who love his stuff are giving him too much credit in this regard because of his ability to convey the emotions of his characters in a powerful way, and so they assume he’s a genius in all other aspects of writing as well. Either way you choose to look at it though, it doesn’t really change the experience of watching the film. It was the first Gundam show I watched, so you can take my word that it works as a standalone piece of cinema. Surprisingly very engaging considering its age, I wasn’t bored at all for most of the film, though I felt things started to flag a bit before the end. It has its flaws, but they’re easily forgiven, and regardless of how you choose to perceive the story’s events, it is an undeniably genuine piece of entertainment. I’ll probably watch it again.

Oregairu, for a while anyway, was the darling of many a video essay dissecting something or other about the anime’s main character Hachiman, who many people find to be relatable, I guess, because, I don’t know, he’s cynical. It starts off as what seems to be a satire of a romantic comedy, which then turns into a sort of vague critique of youth and Japanese high-school society, before ending as a kind of tragedy. If this type of story progression makes no sense to you, its because it doesn’t make sense. The second season rolls around and the story’s about as aimless as ever until ... the introduction of Hachiman’s underclassman Iroha; from there, the story finally manages to assume some sort of identity as something you may see in the harem genre. A revolving door of love interests come and go Hachiman’s way and spend time with him one-on-one while the thin, bare excuse for a plot plods along: a story where nothing seems to happen and everything seems to take up far too much time. There is still a service club, they still apparently help people, but now it appears as though Yukino is against wanting to spend time with Hachiman. There’s something about co-dependency, but it is never outright explained why the relationship between Yui, Yukino and Hachiman is viewed in such a way, especially by someone like Yukino’s sister, who anyway, for an adult, is taking an unbelievable interest in the goings on of second year high-schoolers. I get that the threesome are all too awkward to outright express their feelings for one another, and that it’s trying to be subtle instead of outright explaining everything, but since the whole situation is so unrealistic it’s impossible to tell most of the time what is specifically being implied. I’m sure it’s not helped by the fact that the anime cuts out portions of the light novel, regardless, it’s a baffling amount of needless complexity that’s never really fully explained. This isn’t helped by the characters who are all also needlessly complicated and unnecessarily abrasive, and the situation certainly isn’t improved by the ending, which ties up no loose ends aside from who wins, something which was already apparent from the start.

So much of Oregairu is so muddled that’s its difficult to find a place to start. The plot, which was always non-existent, remains non-existent to the point of irrelevance, but then if I were asked to point out to you what is relevant in the show I’d have a hard time coming up with good examples without defaulting to Hachiman, but even with him, there doesn’t seem to be much going on. Hachiman is apparently looking for something genuine, but what this genuine thing is, even the author doesn’t know. I assume that the genuine thing is a genuine relationship or a genuine friendship, or something like that, but he was friends already with Yui and Yukino before, and remains friends with them after his speech, so it’s difficult to tell what exactly he means and how this differs from merely being in a romantic relationship with either Yui or Yukino. Yukino, the primary love interest, is curiously absent for a large majority of the story. What happens with her doesn’t ever seem to be very relevant unless it relates to Hachiman, and when she predictably wins against Yui, it happens without much effort on her part, despite Yukino doing almost nothing all season to win Hachiman’s affection. Apparently this has something to do with a Yui bias within the studio adapting the light novel to anime, with them choosing to include scenes with Hachiman and Yui rather than with Yukino. Supposedly, this is true, but I don’t really see it as a relevant criticism against the adaptation, since anyway, between the two, Yui always struck me as the better written character.

Wataru took his sweet time writing Oregairu and I don’t blame him. I had a hard enough time trying to finish watching something so boring, so I could only imagine how boring it was to write it. The story’s main issue is a lack of a driving force propelling events forward. There is nothing to latch onto: no direction forward towards a goal, and no direction home towards a satisfying ending. The lack of focus ends up making everything feel aimless. Events happen, but they don’t go anywhere. Storylines start and end, but they never connect to form a whole. Hachiman and Yukino fall in love, but despite everything they’ve been through, they could’ve just as easily have confessed their feelings in the first episode, considering their circumstances at the start and the circumstances at the end are more or less the same. Despite making friends with Yui, Yukino remains an outcast. Yui remains friends with both Yukino and Hachiman despite basically being rejected. You’d think surely, at least, Hachiman has changed, since people treat him kind of differently, and that his personality has sort of taken a turn for the better – and at the end, he rejects his essay, the introduction to the first episode of the first season, he rejects his belief that youth is a mistake – but there’s nothing else offered in return, there’s no counter-argument to all the things he’s said before, no alternative view-point. Hachiman’s assertions still stand, more or less, and he stands at the end with Yukino, despite never really changing, despite never really maturing, despite nothing ever happening at all.

I kind of just get the feeling that past a certain point there’s no one who actually likes the show and that everyone who says they like the show are just saying that because they want to believe it themselves, they want to like the show despite the show resisting any and all attempts at enjoyment. They want to like Oregairu because they see themselves in Hachiman, they think Wataru Watari is a guy just like them who has gone through the exact same experiences as them, has been maligned, bullied, neglected, so on and so forth, they’re looking to him for a solution, a resolution to their problems, closure of some sort. So in a way, though I don’t really care, it is sort of a shame that things end so tepidly, because if there was more of a solid conclusion I think it would’ve made a lot of fans happy. Obviously I was never one of them, not because, as I wrote earlier, that the author’s worldview is wrong-headed, it was always more so because it was written without a clear aim. The story is essentially entirely filler, stalling for time until the necessary events have supposedly taken place for something of true interest to occur, but what ends up happening is that the narrative ends up stalling forever, or what feels like forever, trapping the viewer in a sort of fictional purgatory, where they mistakenly assume that eventually something of interest will happen in the future, despite nothing of interest ever happening in the past. At one point I tried to remember why exactly I was here, watching an anime I had no interest in, watching a medium I’ve long grown tired of, when I realized that, much like Hachiman, I too, was searching for something genuine: a genuine waste of time.

Nise gets backlash mainly because of its perversion but saying “yeah im not comfortable watching a girl and her older brother becoming sexually aroused through the act of toothbrushing” is too honest and straightforward so this negative energy gets deflected into the story and the characters and whatever, and its true in a way. Compared to Bake the stakes are way lower and the story is way harder to take seriously, less concise as well and so on. In the greater context of the Monogatari series this is par for the course but I’d understand if you came from Bake expecting more of the same ... and end up disappointed. Comparing Nise to the rest of the series though, Nise has a number of points going for it. It’s the prettiest the (tv) series gets and it still has the same music Bake uses, without the overuse of that one track in tension sequences (you know the one) and the toothbrush scene and the bathing scene are funny in their degeneracy. The world would be worse off without Shinobu bathing with Araragi and Araragi brushing her sister’s teeth guarantee you – alri im lying, but the series would be worse off though.

Cus let’s face it nothing in the series is really worth rewatching besides Bake and Nise. The stories afterwards are just kinda phoned in like I don’t really care about Second Season or Hanamonogatari or Ougi or even Kaki. You watch these because you want to see the characters more not because the story’s anything good. It is good enough but let’s be real no one cares about the overarching plot the audience’s just waiting for Hanekawa to say ‘I only know what I know’ so they can punch the air in triumph, in holistic dominance over the world, record it, save it as a ringtone, as an alarm, god bless.

Every monogatari after Bake is too disjointed and too by the numbers and it doesn’t really feel as well thought out or planned out. Even Kizu, while visually it’s the best work Shaft have done the story is – not that its lacklustre but its not a highlight. Broadly applies to the series post-Bakemonogatari, its just work for these guys, they put in the effort, but for Bakemonogatari there was passion there. Some of that passion does carry over to Nise but its honestly wasted. I kinda feel bad for the voice actors who thought that the series would continue to be as serious as it was before, before realizing they had to moan into the mic. But at least there’s still some passion there, its missing in every other instalment, the rest of the series feels superfluous because of that.

I mean this is just the usual issue of the story outrunning its initial scope and the writer having to scramble for ideas. In Nisio’s case he does a better job than most because he has a flexible world to work with and knows how to structure a detective story well but its no longer about the human element like it once was, instead the focus is on the supernatural, or if it is about the human element/some form of emotional strife, it revolves around a shitty character that no one cares about its Nadeko im talking about Nadeko fuck Nadeko not to be racist but I genuinely hope she gets hit a truck.

Have a happy hanukkah Hanekawas, we know what we know, we had to pay dearly enough for it.