Shameful Otaku Secret!

When the Black Rock Shooter OVA anime appeared, I wasn’t blogging but I managed to write a little piece about it anyway. I still feel like most of my thoughts apply: at the end of the day, huke and the Ordet crew did a capable job of making a finished work of anime from nothing more than an atmosphere, a picture, and a dumb character name.

They did that by taking a very roundabout approach. No one expected a school-life story, completely separate from the abstract checkerboard world of huke’s imagination, with only a tangential (or at least only metaphorical) relationship to it. And with a sub-60-minute runtime, as a bonus packaged with a toy, they didn’t have to do more than that. Intrigue the folks, whet the whistle, stay true to the atmosphere.

The problem with mysterious and intriguing things is that the more we think about them, and the more we explore them, the less mysterious they’re going to be. That’s what mystery is: the unknown. Duh. So what happens when you take that roundabout approach and try to expand it into an eight-episode TV anime? You’re probably going to destroy some of what makes your source material appealing.

As Yoji Enokido could probably tell you, keeping a healthy amount of content relatively unexplored will make the viewer fill in the gaps, and often with a great deal more profundity than the writer could dream up himself. The OVA wasn’t exactly masterful at that, but it was certainly capable. Mari “In the future, every anime will be written by me” Okada has her work cut out for her in somehow expanding that into a watchable plot while maintaining some form of atmosphere.

Already there’s an apparent change in philosophy: Mato and Yomi’s huke-world battle scenes were only marginally connected, and mostly in feeling, to their real-world scenarios. Here in the TV series, we’ve already seen a great deal of correlation in the titular character’s one primary scene. Kagari and her macaroons make an appearance, and her steamrolling attack parallels the real world in both its surprise (tell me you didn’t jump at that scene!) and its helpless, defeated feeling.

So what we’ve seen so far at this early point is a more literal approach to the huke-world vs. real-world parallel. Rather than a voiceless enemy whose motives are probably based in a discomfort over affectionate feelings (the OVA Yomi) it appears that we have someone who’s been made a prisoner of another character, perhaps even forced to fight Mato (the TV Yomi). There also appears to be an effort to wedge more characters into the story, and with them some corresponding colors, which I find a little silly. But probably infinitely more sustainable.

You get a plus and a minus from the sustainability. On the upside, any mundane events and people in the real world — which, let’s face it, are not entirely mundane, just look at Kagari — are able to be translated into dramatically surreal battle scenes in the huke-world. That lets the plot keep going for a while. Even the scenery seems to be a part of this, and I look forward to those intriguing connections. The downside is the death of all those little unexplored gaps in our imagination.

And with a franchise like Black Rock Shooter, I think that isn’t something to just discount. Like Touhou, a more complete world about which I know pretty much nothing, the gaps allow fan-generated interpretation and inspiration, which will disappear and leave BRS as a mundane and standard anime franchise. So… I guess this shit better be good.

Bonus: lol butts