Shameful Otaku Secret!

Hey guys. Been pretty busy lately, trying to steadily pump out posts but after seeing this recentAsk John(thx owen), I remembered I had a post I’ve sitting on since winter, in which I talked about Ga-Rei Zero. Short story is, I dug it.

Well, the holidays got me sick. Not fun. But being bed-ridden was a great excuse to do my first legit series marathon in a very long time. I chose the supernatural action thriller Ga-Rei Zero. There may be minor spoilers, but considering the bulk of the story is laid out within a couple episodes, there’s not a lot to spoil in this series.

Story

Ga-Rei Zero is the origin story of the Ga-Rei manga, showing the path a young girl named Kagura took to become a powerful exorcist in a world full of demons and government “spiritual defense” organizations. Told mostly in flashback, Zero recounts the love she shared for 3 years with her surrogate sister Yomi.

There’s not much way to talk about this series without talking about the bizarre beginning: The non-traditional structure is a make-or-break point for Zero. By starting somewhere near the end, telling in flashback, then finally joining the two ends, writer Katsuhiko Takayama (also series writer for ef) constructed a horrible ode to inevitability that anime doesn’t deal in often, and some people just aren’t gonna go for. I can think of a live-action parallel: In Scorsese’s Casino, Robert De Niro’s character dies in a firey car bomb in the first couple minutes. The ensuing movie is entirely a flashback, and three hours later you remember: oh, yeah. He dies. Ga-Rei Zero takes an even more desperately depressing approach. Scorsese aimed to shock you with your forgetfulness, but this series constantly twists the knife to remind you what awaits.

On a superficial level of motorcycles, government demon-fighting teams, heroes-turned-bad, and depressive mood, Zero strongly resembles Blassreiter. It has a few key traits that separate it, though: half length, devotion to standard anime-“isms,” superior animation, and more personal themes of love and individual destiny versus Blassreiter’s focus on faith and duty.

Characters

I really wish Kagura were a more interesting character, but in truth that goes for most of the characters of G-RZ. Rather than a complex collection of emotions, they often feel like they’re just a product of the things that happen to them throughout the series — can you honestly say there are many people out there who wouldn’t have taken Yomi’s route, given the absolute emotional and spiritual pummeling she suffers?

That said, their generic qualities might serve to make them more sympathetic (same question applies here), and as the climax approaches, it’s hard not to feel for Kagura and, to a degree, Yomi’s erstwhile fiancé Noriyuki.

Technical

There isn’t a whole lot to say here. Nothing animation-wise, or audio-wise, went over-the-top for execution, but it’s appealing and more than solid the whole time. Character designs and overall style project a Production IG vibe, but maybe that’s just because Kagura = Saaya (Blood+) to some degree in my mind and it colored everything else. Fight scenes are well-directed and there’s no slippage in the high quality over 12 episodes.

Themes

Amidst all the standard anime junk — dead mothers and distant fathers, swordfighters in seifuku (not complaining), a world of improbable science-meets-magic — Zero manages to raise some interesting points. It’s really too bad that it spends a lot of time broadcasting those points through viewer proxies, dramatic monologues, and its lovely Engrishy tagline, “Would you kill someone you love, because of love?” Not that I expect the average anime to stop holding its viewers’ hands, but Ga-Rei Zero teased that it was going to give me lots to chew on, then took that away by outright verbalizing almost all of it.

While the show really wants us to ponder the question of whether Yomi overcame the Stone’s power or it just granted her true wish, what’s the difference? Either way, love tragically triumphs over greed and revenge, not that it helps anything. In hindsight, it’s kinda like the Haibane Renmei question of intent, except with damnation in place of salvation as the end result.

The Y Word

If you’ve read anything on blogs about Ga-Rei Zero, you’ve probably heard the word yuri tossed around a few times. In fact, ANN’s page lists “yuri” as the only theme. Glad I wasn’t watching it for that, or the other themes of “senseless suffering,” “inevitable tragedy,” and “sweet swordfighting” would have really distracted me.

But you can feel the sisterly love, and it really has to be ramped up for the horrific result to be felt. In the end, out of 4 hours of series there are about 30 seconds worth of anything that could be called yuri. There is one mouth-to-mouth kiss (a sort of Lady and the Tramp thing with Pocky), but that scene is there for a reason: it’s paralleled later, with horribly sad (if slightly overplayed) results.

So don’t watch this for yuri anymore than you’d watch it for guro — there’s enough blood, bathing, and shortness of skirts to cover your perverted needs, but it’s just not that kind of show. You’d have to be pretty depraved to get your jollies from something so damn depressing.

Bottom Line

Ga-Rei Zero caught me with its surprises in the first couple episodes, but after those were over, it continued to entertain and satisfy with good animation, cute girls with swords, and my ultimate anime fanservice, ludicrous tragedy (geez, maybe I am an extremist after all, clearly some people are not up for that and I guess I can’t blame them).

1990s OVAs full of tits, blood and total apocalypse fed my early fandom, and while this isn’t strictly an update to that it does provide the same kinds of thrills with a little more depth, a lot more heart, and a modern edge. Plus, it’s a lot better than Mnemosyne. Take its 12-episode length into account, and it’s hard for me not to recommend Ga-Rei Zero to anyone who likes their anime dark, action-heavy, and depressing.

Dig into almost any decent writing just a little and you’ll find traces of mythology. Ancient myths touch on universal truths, because the old-timey people used stories to explain the things about the world they didn’t understand. Kind of a no-brainer then, that the stuff still resonates with us even in the age when we know it’s not Apollo pulling a chariot across the sky with the sun, and we aren’t gonna literally believe Daedalus and Icarus biting it while flying on wax wings. Of course, there are a large number of people who believe varying degrees of literal interpretations of the Bible, which only proves the point further.

Somewhere in the shady lands between tales we see as truth and those we see as bedtime stories for old Greeks lies Gnosticism. Actually first posited by some cats from Greece, this heretical and mystical form of Christianity (there are spinoff non-Christian forms as well) puts a very different spin on the world-view that you might be familiar with. It’s sort of what Kabbalah is to Judaism, and the two connect in many places, but it’s far less widely accepted by the traditional set (did I call it heretical yet?)

Here’s the shortened version of a few of the key Gnostic concepts filtered through the anime Ergo Proxy — any similarities are definitely not coincidental. Any Gnostics out there, gomen for my clumsy simplifications of your religion. Bullet lists and some possible spoilers follow. I tried really hard to keep them out, but then there wasn’t anything to talk about… ON with this.

Who’s who

Ergo Proxy doesn’t have a 1:1 correspondence of mythological figures to its own characters. You could say one of two things about this:

1. The writers of Ergo just pasted some Gnostic names onto their opus in an attempt to sound deep, after learning that “a flawed creator creating flawed creations” was a Gnostic theme.
2. They decided to let their own Creator — not to mention the Proxies, Re-L, and Vincent — fill numerous spots in mythology at once.

Ergo’s storyline is a complicated (some would say convoluted) and sometimes abstract one. Since it’s not always literal, that abstraction points me more toward #2. Plus, I like to give writers the benefit of the doubt.

Monad vs. Yaldabaoth the Demiurge

To Gnostics, the most fundamental belief is that the creator of this earth is not a true god, but a “demiurge.” This is Yahweh, Allah, Jehovah. That’s where the heresy comes in. This being’s very existence is basically a mistake, but it was powerful enough to create the material universe — and the little beings who populate it. Now, these folks aren’t bad, and in most Gnostic teachings Yaldabaoth isn’t either, but there are two truths here:

1. A flawed creator can only create flawed things. The Statues actually tell Re-L that they’re all the flawed products of a flawed creator. This theme continues to trickle down to the AutoReivs, the flawed creations of humans.
2. We, as fleshy beings, are prisoners of a material world. In this case Romdo is analogous to our own universe, in which we live perfectly happy lives until we acquire a glimpse of Gnosis (meaning knowledge, called “truth” in the anime). At the point where you know, your soul’s desire for more knowledge supplants your ability to be happy in slavery. All of its equivalent domes, represent potential similar planes of existence. Yes, both The Matrix and They Live are bigtime Gnostic flicks, according to some.

The one in Gnostic myth who brought Gnosis and saved us from this prison of slavery is Christ, but more on that in a second.

Some Gnostics break it down further, where the Demiurge was served by beings called Archons who did his laundry. In this case, I think there are two possible routes:

1. The proxies are in fact Archons to The Creator, who is the primary Demiurge.
2. The Creator is the real and truest God, known as Monad, while the Proxies are various Demiurges. Each domed city in this case would represent a material universe like our own.

Either is likely, but either way the central theme is what’s important: the Demiurge stands as gatekeeper to the realm of Light, and thus true God and Gnosis. I think that’s obvious in this case, since the Proxies rule over the false realities of the domed cities.

Sophia (Monad)

Monad is represented by numerous æons — emanations of God, also semi-analogous to traditional Christian angels — who come in pairs of descending importance. On the lower end of that, in the realm of Light, is Sophia and Christ.

From Wikipedia, paraphrased from the Gospel of Thomas (part of the Nag Hammadi), here’s what happens when the pairs operate independently of each other:

When an æon named Sophia emanates without her partner aeon, the result is the Demiurge, or half-creator, a creature that should never have come into existence. This creature does not belong to the pleroma, and the One emanates two savior æons, Christ and the Holy Spirit, to save humanity from the Demiurge. Christ then took the form of the human Jesus, in order to be able to teach humanity how to achieve gnosis; that is, return to the pleroma.

Well, that says a lot about the other Monad — the one in the anime — who is inexplicably tied to Ergo, and of course it says plenty about Vincent and Re-L as well. Vincent is the obvious Christ-figure of the story with his return to Romdo in earthly form, and when he and Re-L come back to Romdo again, they occupy the same body for a time.

When things start to both confuse and click simultaneously is when Monad Proxy herself returns to Romdo, but as Daedalus’s creation, a false Re-L. The names are obvious here, with the literal translation of her untimely end from the Icarus/Daedalus myth, although I think it’s only marginally related. But If Monad is Sophia to Vincent’s (Proxy) Christ, and Re-L is somehow also Sophia to Vincent’s (human) Christ, then that would tie them together fairly well.

What’s it mean?

There’s far more to cover in Ergo Proxy besides these three loose Gnostic parallels — for instance, the cogito virus, whose purpose bears a funny resemblance to another semi-Gnostic cartoon’s Human Instrumentality Project.

But regardless of whether I ever tie it all together, the point is the same as why Gnosticism still has an appeal as a religion (though please don’t consider this as anything other than and endorsement of an anime):

It values knowledge, thought, interpretation, and freedom of intellect over the material, the easy, and enslavement. it eschews easy answers in favor of learning for ones’ self.

But unlike this material existence, at least I’m able to do it a second time in hopes that it’ll make more sense.

Here goes the rest. Hard to top Mazinger, I know. At least for this old fart, but here goes. I’ve added a new portion to my thoughts, what the inevitable downfall of the series will be!

Basquash!

Pre-airing thoughts: I don’t like sports. Never have. To me the fact that I was always a scrawny dork who was never any good at them was the reason I ended up an anime fan to begin with. Eyeshield, Slam Dunk, Hajime No Ippo, none of these ever really held any interest for me (although I know Riex and Choujin shake their heads when I say that about Ippo). But Basquash! has something they don’t: Shoji Kawamori. Does that mean the basketball players all sing? Probably not, but they do ride mecha, so we’re halfway to something.

duckies

First episode thoughts: Wow. Kawamori or no, this was cool. Mr. Macross’s studio of choice for the past couple installments, Satelight, may have even upped the ante from their impressive start of Macross Frontier. The look actually reminds me of Manglobe’s sweaty, sunny setting of Michiko & Hatchin, but of course with a stylishly futuristic wardrobe department. Dan seems to be a decent Black Star-esque protagonist with a good seiyuu and a “[insert thing] Mask” alter ego. Then of course, there’s lots of really well done CG of the “bigfoot” mecha whose cockpits are all 50s hot-rod-looking cars. I guess that’s the rock and roll angle of Kawamori’s designs. All in all, a fun ride of an opening with lots of great action and sufficient boobs to hold visual interest. Everything moved so fast, it was actually hard to get a screencap.

Careful! Lest these things Gainax all over the cockpit

What will go wrong: Kawamori isn’t the story or script writer, although the whole idea and design is his. So he can’t blow the ending by forgetting to think one up until he’s writing the last episode. Satelight can, however, do what they must have done with Frontier. That is, they could animate the 5 most important episodes first and fill in the rest with whatever tiny amount of cash they haven’t blown. For every hyper-impressive visual tour de force like this one, let’s hope there aren’t three all-out shitfests to follow.

Eden of the East

Pre-airing thoughts: I can’t say as I had any. I didn’t know anything about this series other than it’d be animated by Production IG, and would have music by Kenji Kawai and… Oasis.

First episode thoughts: From the looks of it, Eden of the East is going to shape up to be a bit of a shoujo romance with a twist of intrigue, much like last year’s Library War. I don’t think I’m alone in saying that that series lacked in both Libraries and War, but the romantic aspect was really not too badly done. So far, my ability to believe everything in episode 1 was strongly tested, but I am always ready to put that aside in the name of setup as long as it doesn’t go too far. After all, the premise of armed librarians was pretty fucking hard to swallow too, but it turned out that didn’t matter.

George Washington's Phallus looms ominously over our Japanese protagonist. Coincidence? Or symbolism?

In the end, it barely mattered what I didn’t believe because the execution was staggering. Facial expressions and body language effortlessly pulled off without all that Lucky Star/A-1 pictures simplification of design. CG integrated near-seamlessly into the slick cel work, and the traced photo backgrounds didn’t put me off at all (except for the fact that I have to go to Dulles airport next week). The Oasis OP was marvelous — even though I’m not a fan, the slick Western rock added a level of polish that really helped the full experience — and the cut-paper stop-motion ending sequence even better. OH! Also, they hired English-speaking voice actors to do the American parts. Nice touch.

What will go wrong: There won’t be enough Eden, or East. Saki, who looks a little like Itazura Na Kiss’s Kotoko, will turn out to be just as pathetic. And strangers will give up their hard-earned pants without question when I flash my balls at them.

Saki

Pre-airing thoughts: There is a series on Crunchyroll. I pay for Crunchyroll. Maybe I should watch it.

This is right, isn't it?

First episode thoughts: Gonzo? Well, they can make it work when it counts, but they seem stretched pretty thin this season. Possible Yuri? OK, I’m listening. Loudmouthed fanged loli eating tacos? I dunno, I’m losing interest. Mah Jong? Whoops. Gone.

Screencap not available. Artist's rendition of Saki.

Also, already watching one show with a lead character named Saki.

What will go wrong: I will actually watch this. That would be a problem. I have better things to do. Like go to the taco truck down the street. It kind of pains me to think of what a taco would taste like in Japan, which is why no matter how large a weaboo I become in some parallel world, I will still never go there for any extended period of time.