Shameful Otaku Secret!

Now 100% less spoilery, more vague

Kaiba, eh?. Well, I’ve already hyped this thing a lot, so let me round out Kaiba’s awesome elements before I review:

Cute animals!

Crazy outfits!

Funny old people!

So cute!

Fanservice!

And it was all made by one of Crayon Shin-chan’s writer-directors, so you know it has to be fun!

I was really going to do the whole post that way, but I wussed out.

Where’s the plot, fuckhead?

I didn’t blog Kaiba episodically, so that makes me at least in one way similar to everyone else in the world. It seemed too easy to spoil something that really relied on not knowing what the plot was in advance. But here you go: Kaiba (or is he Warp?) wakes up with no memories, only a locket containing a blurry picture of a girl he’s pretty sure he may have been in love with. His journey to find her and figure out his own identity, is what Kaiba is about. So you really have to learn as you go, just as the protagonist does. The first time through, it’s very much about uncovering lost memories, hidden conspiracies, and other obscured plot elements. The story is not laid out in advance. Fair warning.

Characters

In the futuristic world of Kaiba, peoples’ memories are stored on chips and transferred around between bodies or stored for periods of time. Whole or partial collections of memories can be erased, distorted, and manipulated. As a result, the very nature of peoples’ personalities gets all mixed up. This is a great theme for the show, but it leaves little that viewers can identify with as far as the characters go. Characters really only further the plot, and sometimes add to that plot’s somewhat-confusing nature.

Animation

As Korasoff says, you’ll either love it or hate it, though I really haven’t talked to anyone who outright hated it. The rounded, bouncy and fluid art style really does belie the very adult nature of the series, which makes everything a little more surreal than it already was. But it’s always consistent, with a little computer enhancement that never gets in the way (think Soul Eater), and no major drop-offs in quality from episode to episode.

It was hard to organize my thoughts, because there’s plenty to say about Kaiba but it all ends up sounding vague because I don’t want to give away the story. I also want to stay away from hyperboles and superlatives. So I’ll go back to the old dangers/benefits system:

Dangers of watching

• Relative inability to identify with the characters – thanks to their mutable personalties and the fact that nearly everyone was working with misplaced motivations.
• Often-confusing storyline – clones abound, bodies are switched, and just keeping track of who’s who is a little tough, but then the conspiracies start coming out and it gets even worse.
• Hazy feel – it’s great for atmospherics, but started to hurt the show when climactic plot points came around and the surrealistic feel overpowered the excitement I should have been feeling.
• Adult themes – lots of sex early on and some uncomfortable glimpses of realism in this weird world make it neither kids’ stuff nor light watching.

Benefits of watching

• Excellent music – not much more to say there, it captures the feel of the show perfectly, and in turn helps define the feel.
• Great animation – it goes with the great atmosphere and music. Aesthetically, this is the total package.
• Intellectual stimulation – if you like philosophizing with classic sci-fi themes, you’ll find plenty to chew on.
• Emotional stimulation – I know I said it’s hard to identify with the characters, at least up until the end, but somehow Kaiba manages to wring a great deal of emotional appeal out of its strange setting. The whole thing has a lonely, mournful feel that grabs you early on — and is infinitely more rewarding than the crying haremette scenario.

Time’s up — make your point.

Ultimately, Kaiba was really ambitious and didn’t always succeed. But I do think we should reward even marginally successful ambition with our praise, lest we get no more of it and instead suffer through endless variations on Strike Witches and To Love-Ru. And you shouldn’t let that ambition turn you off from the show — ambition and pretentiousness are not the same thing, and Kaiba is never pretentious, always understated.

At its heart, it uses the most basic of Frankensteinesque sci-fi premises, which is to answer the question: What are the implications of a particular piece of world-altering technology? So fans of JG Ballard, Masumune Shirow, etc. should really be able to get behind that. The questions of memory and how much memory defines us have been pondered before in plenty of media, but never so deeply in anime.

And speaking of memory, Kaiba will stick in mine long after the next couple seasons are over. Unlike last season’s other highly-lauded show starting with a K, I have every intent of watching this again and I think it’ll continue to look good with time. It was a great watching experience, I’d do it again, and I think you should give it a shot too.

A Town Where It Doesn’t Snow

[If you're not up to speed, check out the new True Tears info page]

Well. I realized as I sat down to watch this that I was super dooper excited. True Tears really is my favorite show right now, and you can bet I’m not throwing out that Trapper Keeper where I wrote “Mike hearts True Tears 4ever” all over in glitter sparkle pen. I still think it’s a fucking farce that Bandai is going to want $40 a pop for two-episode DVDs of what has to be the shortest series in town, just so we can see Crispin Freeman as Jun (mark my words…).

The Obligatory Recap

The pacing continues to be solid, with story developments coming fast enough to hold my attention but no so fast as to lose the feel of the show — nor does it seem like it’s going to run out of steam prematurely.

Shinichiro really seems to enjoy his time spent with Noe, which is ever-increasing. Perhaps he wasn’t just trying to convince himself he liked her, after all. In fact, he’s walking on sunshine, whoah. He’s writing a picture book again, this one’s about Raigomaru the rooster, and Noe couldn’t be happier to hear it. In fact, it even earns Shin a kiss on the cheek.

Speaking of smooooch, the aftermath of the Aiko kiss incident is as expected: while I usually knock the whole “pretend it didn’t happen” thing in dramatic anime, it’s not the show itself that’s pretending it didn’t happen. Shinichiro is actually taking the pretty mature route here. He says he thinks of her like a sister, not to mention he’s not willing to be a party to crushing his friend Nobuse.

Hiromi , suffering more subtle jabs than ever from Shin’s mom, starts to turn (even more) despondent.  While hanging out with cold-ass Jun, she wins a rigged basketball-driven truth or dare type game, and asks him two questions:

1. How many boys has Noe gone out with before? Zero. As Jun starts to ramble on about Noe, Hiromi calls his ass to the table: “Siscon.” I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s been waiting to hear that.

2. Why are you going out with me? And not surprisingly, the cold cold bastard tells her. She slips in a third question — what happens if one side breaks up. His only reply: That would be a problem.

As if by cruel fate, the two pairs meet. Hiromi is not feeling especially charitable, but she doesn’t tell Noe about the Dirty Deal. Instead, she makes a pretty unkind comment about how easily Noe stole Shinichiro’s heart, before immediately realizing how much like Shin’s mom she sounds.

We end with Hiromi deciding to bolt from the house, probably for Shin’s mom’s benefit as much as anyone’s, and demanding that Jun take her somewhere (”a town where it doesn’t snow”) on his bike, despite the danger of riding in the snow.

What we’ve learned, what’s to come

Hiromi is now up to speed with the viewer on just about everything, only Noe is in the dark about the Deal. Let’s hope it stays that way, since Shin seems to really be into her these days. The Aiko-Nobuse situation is looking bleak, but look closely: the next episode preview sees Shin fighting with someone, but it’s not Nobuse. Could he be defending Noe’s honor?

Other interesting bits of the preview include a cop car (motorcycle incident or just Mrs. Nakagami calling in Hiromi as missing?), Shin arguing with his mother (probably over what he sees as her driving Hiromi out), and Hiromi apparently disrobing (eh?).

And furthermore

Can I just take a second to verbally spooge all over this show again? This week’s Magic Scene could be Noe and Shinichiro by the seaside, sure. But I think I’d vote for Hiromi vs. Noe by the chicken coops. The subtle range of emotion in both characters’ faces is absolute brilliance, down to Hiromi’s oh-so-tiny tooth grinding. I’d wager it’s even better than Aiko and Nobuse at the mall. Not to mention, Hiromi’s voice acting is the best on TV. Bandai have their hands full with this overpriced dub, no matter how many Crispin Freemans or Kari Wahlgrens they bring to the table.

At any rate, True Tears is my jam and it’s not disappointing me yet. It’s subtely fascinating and still surprisingly real, so I continue to have high hopes.

Theory of Everything

Well. Let me just start this off by saying that I’m fairly glad the Kotomi storyline is now over. I just don’t care. Fuko’s arc was rife with emotional dirty tricks, but they worked and the wedding episode was both cute and teary. The Kotomi story has reminded me of every reason why I find these shows so repetitive.

We begin with Tomoya continuing to work in the garden while flashbacks bring us back to the story of her parents dying, her godfather searching for a paper, and her subsequent burning of (what she thought was) said paper.

Tomoya apparently stayed away from her birthday party as a kid because he, in all his shaggy lets-help-people naïveté, invited his “real” friends and they made fun of him — not only for trying to get them to go to a stranger’s house, but for hanging out with icky cootie-infested girls. Bummer I called this incorrectly last week, but that still doesn’t make Clannad vastly different from Kanon, and who knows, I might still be right about great silly tragedy in his past.

Regardless — Who had the last laugh, now that puberty hit (for the rest of them, not so much Tomoya) and he almost exclusively hangs out with girls? He should have told them she was rich. Anyway, young Tomoya regrets not going and heads to her house to apologize, then finds the small fire that’s about to become huge and engulf the sobbing Kotomi, who’s already regretting what she’s done.

In the here and now, Tomoya finds himself falling asleep after a couple all-night gardening jams, only to be awakened by Kotomi, who has finally left her house. She clearly digs him — not in a pathetic way like Nagisa, but in the way only she, a girl smart enough to realize that he’s a wasted effort, possibly could. That no-hope, resigned to big-eyed sadness, total moe kind of crush. And there’s the thematic rub: she always waited for Tomoya-kun to come back (if there was any feasible way I could write that in the mocking tone I hear in my head, I totally would). It’s Yuichi from Kanon all freaking over again. What makes Tomoya, the perpetually dopey onii-chan with his old-school Timex Ironman watch, so appealing? Probably the audience projecting onto him. Your inability to make advances on girls will one day pay off in the form of a doting harem, my delusional otaku brethren!

I digress. Without remorse.

The birthday gift-giving from Nagisa and the twins goes well, with a lame hand-drawn “gift certificate” (you know the type) subbing in for the broken violin until it’s fixed, and an all-too-perfect visit from her godfather. What does he have? A suitcase, presumably with the paper in it. Or not?

If you haven’t seen episode 14, stop. Go bootleg it, and come back to me.

Back? How about that fucking internet, man? They got it all.

I have to say, I find the contents of the suitcase to be the unspoken tragedy of this whole storyline. It would make everything worthwhile if I thought for more than half a second that it was intentional. See, she didn’t want the fucking bear. She just said she did because she thought that’s what she was supposed to say. So her father’s dying wish, and the unlikely passing of the suitcase through Clannad’s entire godforsaken earth culminating (even more unlikely) on her birthday, is a sham. That’s really sad to me, far sadder than any of the cutey-love-fest Fuko arc.

Is that why she cried when she saw the bear? The horrific realization that she had provided her beloved parents with a baseless and false sense of accomplishment at their final moment on this mortal coil?

Or is it me being cynical, and she’s crying for the more obvious happy-sad anime reasons? I try to leave my cynicism at the door with Clannad, and I didn’t actually have a cynical reaction, but between Tomoya’s endless love of helping people and his seeming dearth of actual feelings for people themselves, this thing’s wearing me out.

But, I’ll keep coming back. Because as weak as this story arc seemed to me, it only means that one of these should be better.

What’s Next?

I was placing my chips on tough Tomoyo, whose name is just plain too close to the protagonist’s for my taste. But the next episode preview seemed to lean in Nagisa’s direction. That’s good, I guess. She needs a little more exposition if we’re going to keep following her around until the end, which I imagine we will. But I would especially like to see what the twins’ major malfunction is — especially Kyou, who seems to have her shit together so well she must be burying something.

About the Subs

One thing I have no complaints about, still, is the technical merit of this show, except maybe for Kyoto’s glaring lack of ability with feet.

But something technical that really should get some airtime, essential to our current Western experience, is the fansubbing. My hat is totally off to Static Subs and Eclipse Productions, whose subs I have been watching. You can take fansubs for granted sometimes, but here’s the deal: These cats are throwing this stuff up not only ridiculously fast (almost immediately after the show’s Japanese airing), but they are accurate and enjoyable to watch. As the week goes on, more subs start appearing online and this week I actually took the time to watch a couple. Shop around, as it were. And these guys, surprising as it is with their speed, are just plain great.

Don’t expect localization, and don’t expect ADV’s inevitable North American DVD release in the future to resemble it in any way. It’s very literal, and considering they are providing a service rather than actually licensing and releasing stuff, I think it’s their responsibility not to project interpretation onto the script. So, thanks to you — and really, to all the fansubbers out there. They do it for the love, and they do a great job.

Until next week, uh… keep it moe!