Shameful Otaku Secret!

For those who don’t know, Reverse Thieves set up a secret santa project in which random people picked anime for other random people to watch. My benevolent giver of cartoons, whoever he or she might be, bestowed this lovely OVA on me.

If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, call a horse a horse.

The beauty of a human-emotion based story is that it’s context-irrelevant. Mizuhito Akiyama, the writer of the light novel Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu (Iriya’s Sky, Summer of the UFOs) managed to create a tale of intense pathos and understated love can live inside a saga of manipulation, secrecy, and conspiracy.

I spent a bit of time early on worrying about how Iriya is not a sci-fi story: science (speculative) fiction generally means creating some sort of technology or alien-based situation — plausible or not — and speculating what might happen to humanity in that situation. Iriya, however, follows the pattern of moe-based bishoujo series and eroge: create a cute girl with a terrible backstory and portray the simple inevitability of what will happen. In this case, rather than some vague but potentially girl-killing disease, it’s a potentially girl-killing war between aliens and earth. Or is it?

It’s appropriate then, with this downward path to tragedy, that Toei’s OVA adaptation of the light novels was helmed by Naoyuki Itou, the director of their Kanon adaptation. The sickening sense of the inevitable that Iriya no Sora pushes in its second half is pretty similar to the Makoto arc of Kanon (though I didn’t see that adapation — I’m going by the Kyoto ’06 version).

But it’s pointless to bemoan what something isn’t. Regardless of your opinion of the bishoujo meta-genre and whether it has any place in your precious science fiction fandom, the OVA has its own merits and faults. Aaaaaand… the faults are many.

For one, Toei is not who you look to for balls-out great animation. Their heyday is long past, and even footage of Kenshiro was recycled quite a bit. It’s not awful, not by a longshot, but the CG is uninspired and character designs just aren’t that appealing. Newer guys like Kyoto and SHAFT can make a prettier heroine and a less irritating-looking male lead these days, and Toei’s generic shocks of hair in the front just aren’t doing it anymore.

The bigger problems, which probably stem from the short length of the OVA, are the baffling pacing and forced situations. The events of episode 5 are a bit of an enigma, not so much in the “what?” department, but the “why?” one. If you want to be an apologist, you can just let it be — the story is simple and you probably won’t have an issue following it. But if you really expect events to flow naturally, you’ll feel pretty jarred by a sudden change of heart that just as inexplicably changes right back. Ultimately, these events are water under the bridge in the overarching plot, but taking up a whole 6th of the series with badly conceived plot development makes for a bad ratio.

The good stuff is a little more sparse, and mostly comes from the strength of the original story. It’s nothing new (did I mention Makoto, or maybe inevitability?) but it tugs at the heartstrings at just the right times, and the characters have just enough guts to elevate them above the noncommittal Key-types. Punching, slicing out tracking implants from your own neck with a box cutter, even killing are all possible in Iriya’s world of love conquering all.

In the end, tragedy is inevitable, but it’s not quite that manipulative kind of tragedy from the “cry game” VNs. It’s still rich in moe, an attribute which in my mind will keep this from being completely sci-fi. And with all that pathos and cute-girl factor, I wish the character design was a little more appealing. But overall, you could do a lot worse than Irya No Sora, considering its small time investment and fairly consistent level of enjoyability.

Part of the 12 Moments in Anime 2009, which will be my downfall.

It was written in stone before the series started. It was spelled out a thousand times. It was visible in the faces of all the characters.

Ryuuji and Taiga, your One True Pairing for the year.

So why did the English-speaking anihedron not get it at the time that Toradora aired? Blame shipping culture in general if you want, but that’s facile — besides, shipping’s not going anywhere. There are two more important factors here:

1. Toradora! twisted genre cliches and tropes to create a smarter version of the anime love polygon (it was more a rhombus or maybe a pentagon than a triangle). I suppose that, given the unexpectedness with which it delivered some of its plot points, viewers were led to expect that anything was possible.
2. We’re not used to such wonderful secondary characters. Part of the problem with the polygon or harem is the underdevelopment of the less-true girls — and I don’t mean in the chest. But the overly-cheerful Minori and the overly-crusty Ami didn’t fool anyone into thinking they were the simple characters that they pretended to be. And as a result, they won more fans than the average collection of fetishes that fill out the remainder of a harem.

But in the end, Ryuuji and Taiga made good on their celestially promised destiny. And boy was it wonderful. One of my big beefs with romantically focused anime is the lack of decent payoff for the 20-some episode wait. I want to feel it. If you didn’t feel this one, hang up your hat and give up on the genre.

I’m not sure what first gave me the idea to watch it, but it became apparent almost immediately that it was a good idea. Everyone I talked to seemed suddenly seized by a compulsion to rewatch at least some episodes (in ghostlightning’s case, the whole damn thing in 2 days). No one seemed to have so much as a caveat for me, let alone actual misgivings.

I’m not going to go too much into why it’s made of awesome and win — many have seen it, plenty of blogs praise it even if they don’t agree on the methods, and most people already know lots about JC Staff’s occasionally brilliant skills of execution that can make something as rote as Hatsukoi Limited into a winner and something well written into animated gold. The true strength of Honey & Clover is not its humor, underplayed dramatic moments, or unwillingness to insultingly explain key points to you out loud; it’s the writing, plain and simple. As a fan you’ve probably spent at least a little time justifying why anime isn’t kids’ stuff, but you’re often repaid by archetyped characters bouncing around a high school and crying a lot. Honey & Clover is your true reward. Even the theme that I most wanted to talk about is a little more “mature” than what you normally see: That’s letting go, one of the series’ many central threads that runs throughout. I’m picking ONE because apparently I can write almost 2,000 words about it, so to take on the whole thing would be extreme fucking insanity.

Something atypical for me: I try to leave them out normally, but there will probably be big spoilers.

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