The Disappearance of Suzumiya Haruhi

So I just watched this Disappearance of Haruhi movie (that's what it says up there)

Haruhi as a series has gone through an interesting arc. When I first watched the series, my only reaction was 'wow fucking awesome'. There you had this really weird and meta series, told out of order with quirky characters. Sure a lot of its ideas were lifted from some of the pillars of western science fiction, but it's okay to take ideas and recontextualize them. As far as I was concerned, that was a great series.

After that I hit the novels and discovered the uncomfortable fact that they were awful. The majority of the Haruhi novels, regardless of translation quality, are absolute unfiltered shit and the author is a talentless hack. The author tells obscure time travel stories and has characters say things like 'you wouldn't really understand' to paper over the glaring plot holes he introduces. Rather than exploring concepts he introduces, he leaves them half baked and starts throwing in new ones. The whole series is a complete fucking mess and was only made presentable by a really savvy director who knew how to spin lead into gold.

But the one time I would say that the guy almost got it right was in the Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya. After watching the movie version, I am reminded of what the key word in that statement is: Almost.


So the basic plot of Disappearance is that someone (guess who?) has modified the universe so that Haruhi's disappeared and the rest of the SOS Brigade are all normal. Everyone's lost all memory of how things were except for Kyon, who is doing his best to restore the universe to the way it used to be somehow, though as he does so he's confronted by a 'normal' Nagato who quite obviously likes him.

So let's be clear: there's only one genuinely good character in Haruhi.


Mikuru is always just Mikuru, Koizumi never breaks out of his basic 'fruity esper-with-no-real-powers exposition boy' role and Kyon is just an (extra whiny) everyman. Haruhi herself is often described as being an unpredictable eccentric, but she's so predictably and unchangingly eccentric that to me she's just really a brat that's used to always getting her way without fail.

Nagato on the other hand is a character that actually has had some development as a character, or so I thought. She's this alien robot superlady that's confronted with human emotions (particularly her feelings for Kyon) for the first time and having trouble dealing with them. Recipe for success right there. So Disappearance, which is about her, should have been a winner.

It's not. At least not mostly.

The problem with Disappearance is that it's fucking terribly written. The first Haruhi season prospered because for the most part the author's storytelling style was set aside in favour of a more meta approach. This movie was basically a one to one conversion of the novel to the big screen and as a result it is absolutely terrible.


The pacing is a mess. The movie will move between Kyon wallowing in self pity, not knowing what to do, before arbitrarily stumbling on a clue and springing awkwardly into action. A good 30 minutes of the movie is dedicated to Kyon agonizing over whether or not he wants to stay in the peaceful 'normal' universe or go back to the crazy Haruhi universe and each moaning session comes to the exact same conclusion (he wants to go back to Haruhi world, I fucking get it).


The plot is incoherent. So much of the time travel mumbo jumbo is explained away with 'you wouldn't understand' that it just pisses me off. How did the time travelers even remain unaffected by Nagato's time warp? Why does Mikuru Senior know to expect Kyon?

But even beyond that, there's little dramatic unity in Disappearance. Sometimes it's a Nagato love story, sometimes it's about Haruhi and sometimes (when it gets really bad) it plays at being a sci fi thriller. All the disparate elements don't jive together at all and considering that literally nothing is resolved in the story (this is only novel 4 of 10 after all) it's really not a very satisfying film to watch.


Don't get me wrong, there are some great scenes in there. I'll be honest: I really do adore Nagato. The idea of an alien artificial intelligence going through Data's classic struggle to attain humanity (except with the romance angle thrown in) appeals to me greatly. Her character design is spot on and the voice of Chihara Minori is as powerful as it's always been.



Seeing those ideas explored thoroughly, even if it's only for about fifteen minutes in a 180 minute movie, was worth it I think. All of it is sloppily stuffed back into an arbitrary status quo shortly after that, but for that one shining moment Disappearance becomes a good movie.


That moment, however, is fleeting. Every character in Haruhi is stagnant and the story as a whole doesn't go anywhere. Six novels from now, Yuki will still be an android alien intelligence struggling with her human emotions (particularly her feelings for Kyon), with no real progression. Everyone else stays as everyone else. More bullshit is introduced, but the status quo remains uncontested.

And that just isn't good enough. There's more ...

Baccano! - "My, my. This is quite a racket."

I feel that this is a nice contrast to the last post.

Baccano is about two things. The first thing is 1930s New York gangster families that wear awesome hats and hire hitmen to shoot each other. The second thing is magic. Needless to say, it was really fucking good.

More than that though, it's a story that seeks to be innovative. It's not really a single story either, but rather something like three or four really cool stories (each with subplots inside) melded into each other. There are gang wars involving magical artifacts. There's a train that a terrorist group, a bunch of gang enforcers and some bandits try to hijack at the same time. There's an ancient feud between rival magicians. There's a Robber Couple that likes to dress up in weird costumes during their heists. It's a bloody wild ride. The only downside is if you aren't quick-minded you can easily get lost.

The cast is enormous (something like 15-20 characters in a 16 episode series) but everyone's such a character that they all get a lot of development in a short period of time. One of my favourite characters was this guy called Luck who didn't get much face time but made up for it by being so ridiculously laid back about the work he does that he just radiated cool. There is no dead weight on this cast list, which is very very rare.

It's a real breath of fresh air, I think. It's unique, arty (arty is not to be confused with artsy) and smart but never pretentious. It's just about having a lot of fun. Check it out.

Bit more talk after the jump.

Three spoilery things to touch upon:

First: The antagonists were great.


I really thought it was amazing how the villains were all these over-the-top cackling fiends and still managed to be somehow humanized. Ladd, Vino and even Dallas. They all were comically evil on one hand and yet filled with all these believable redeeming features. I think my favourite of the bunch was Vino, who's blood drenched affections will be difficult to forget.

Second: I liked how the magic worked.


There was a coherent and straightforward system for it. No magical surprise bullshit in this. The way that Maiza's character was sort of minimized so that he was really just a side character that was never in the thick of things I thought was an especially good touch. It leaves a lot to be inferred about him, which I think is a positive thing.

Third: Those hats really are pretty cool.


Seriously, why did gangsters stop wearing those things? They're awesome. They should bring them back.

Oh and I should also mention: Isaac and Miria.


Fuck yes. Normally pure gag characters wear thin after a while, but holy fuck I loved those two.

And nothing else needs to be said. There's more ...

Ef - A Tale of Memories

(Before we begin: Note that comments on the site are currently broken)

This was... hm... It's a 12 episode series about uh... artists.

The first storyline is about a one eyed writer girl with a bizarre form of Plot Amnesia that makes her forget all her memories for the day on the thirteenth hour of every day. She meets a dude who tries to give her confidence in her writing abilities so that she can write a post-modern novel about being a one eyed writer girl that loses her memories every thirteen hours.

The second storyline is about a genius manga artist that's trying to balance his publishing schedule and schoolwork. He has two co-dependent girls interested him (a cheerful though somewhat emotional gal and an overly possessive childhood friend) and he has to deal with that stuff somehow.

So... um... I am avoiding the use of the word 'bad' in reference to this, because really that's a bit too harsh. Still, I'm fairly certain that no one I know that I'm on good terms with would like this. But at the same time I'm sure there are a lot of people that swear by this thing and think it's the most deeply beautiful and meaningful thing they've ever seen. It's certainly very popular (multiple recommendations is why I ended up going through it, in case you were wondering). But still... let's talk about this, if you wish.

Let's start with the manga artist. Hiro Hirono.



When artists create fictionalized versions of themselves it usually is an excuse to pat themselves on the back. This is a tradition that goes straight back to that part of the Odyssey where that Bard sings about the Trojan War and has Odysseus in tears because of how awesome his storytelling skills are. That's basically what this guy is. He draws Shoujo Manga which he apparently started publishing when he was like 14 or 15 and while the show never mentions anything about what the stuff was about it is generally understood that it is awesome and that Hiro is amazing.

That in itself is a problem. I've never been a fan of the whole 'look at how awesome my artist character is, you can't see even a hint of what he might create' thing. It's a cheap device. But fine, whatever, that isn't the big issue here. The issue is that Hiro's utter awesomeness transfers to pretty much everything else in his life.

The guy spends his entire story being cool. He spends his time making deadlines and being pursued by gorgeous women. The women themselves are both kind of crazy and vicious, with each seeming to look to destroy the other's self esteem in order to win the artist. But the manga artist is pretty much detached during most of that giant emotional war, as he's just too busy being awesome. His only 'flaw' is that he didn't choose which girl he liked earlier, but that seemed to be pretty much thrown in as it was fairly clear who he would choose from the get go.


It's funny to me that this show plays at being post-modern and artsy so much and yet lapses into the 'stable, responsible and logical male'/'emotional, fickle and irrational women' molds. I don't know anything about who made this or why, but the way this thing was written struck me as base artistic wish fulfillment. And that just doesn't yield a satisfying story.

The second story is about Chihiro Shindou.



The amnesia I described earlier was caused by a car accident (which also took her eye). I know I don't really need to mention how stupid her condition is, but I will anyway. Thirteen hours of memories a day (her memories from before she was 12 are intact) and then she forgets it all. That is not simply not plausible. People might say 'well, it's fiction' but fiction needs to be internally consistent. I could not feel any sympathy for her condition throughout the show because it was just such a silly idea.

And that's a big problem. As I mentioned Chihiro's goal is to write a novel with the help of her boyfriend Renji, who she'll tell what's going on so she can keep on track and keep writing in spite of her memory loss cycle. But honestly, no matter how much she struggled and suffered, the inescapable fact was that it's a stupid premise that I couldn't suspend my disbelief for. Amnesia is an overused trope in any case. It's in everything from Firefly to Gundam. But this is stupid amnesia.


I doubt whoever wrote this doesn't even cared about that, being concerned more for the overall effect. It's 'a tale of memories' after all and so the author has to deconstruct the role of memory in human experience and obviously turning to something crazy like say science fiction to explain reoccurring short term memory loss would have just been so vulgar. So just stamp on 'amnesia' and keep going!

For some people that's probably enough... but me? I think it's lazy and irritating.

Finally, let's talk about the most egregious thing about this piece of work, mainly the art style.



Pretentious.

I get the feeling that whoever was art director for this thing thought that no one could understand him/her in high school. Every once in a while (sometimes more often than others) the scenes would randomly cut to a shot of one of the characters as a shadow or as a purple outline or the background would suddenly change or text would flash by. I'm not sure whether this style is called Impressionist or Expressionist or what... that isn't my area of expertise. But I do know that it was really annoying.


You can say art is subjective, of course, and I acknowledge that. But I think often people mistake novelty value for actual value. Great art would be something like Jin Roh rather than something that slaps a shadow on someone's face. I would even say Kaiji's big noses and weird looks outstrip this thing. All the silliness with photoshop filters and random scene cuts struck me as the product of someone who's really insecure and terrified that no one would 'get it' (though what 'it' is is rather nebulous). There was one scene that I really disliked which consisted of one of the girls leaving messages on the manga artist's cellphone.

That's how it looked like. As she left messages, what she said would write in text across the screen and she kept leaving messages which made more and more messages appear until the screen was covered. It went on for like ten minutes. After a minute or two I just said 'okay, I get it' and skipped the rest of the scene. But that's the junk I'm talking about.

Overall, I can say I got through it which is more than I can say about a lot of things. But generally speaking, I think this is not the way things should go. There's more ...

One Outs - "Please trust me now!"

It took forever for this to be completely subbed. Geez...


So One Outs is a high drama about baseball and gambling. The basic storyline is that a famous baseball player meets a prodigy pitcher in some random baseball field in the middle of nowhere and recruits him onto his team. Said pitcher then makes a deal with the owner of the team that for every out he gets he'll get 5 million yen but for every point he gives up while on the mound he'll pay 50 million yen.

A show with that premise has no business being good, but One Outs was something special. It wasn't so much about baseball as it was about strategy, ethics and attitudes towards money. The long and short of it is that it was really damn amazing.

I'm just going to touch on a few points here...


Baseball is an awful game. I don't like playing it and the very idea of watching it brings me physical pain. That said, I'm really not sure how accurate a representation of baseball One Outs really was. How much thought does a pitcher and batter put into their types of pitches and where they'll swing? In One Outs it's treated as a purely intellectual and psychological exercise. Is that what it's supposed to be like? I don't really think so, but it being presented in that way certainly made the game a lot more compelling.



In any case, Tokuchi's skill isn't really in pitching, but rather in waging psychological warfare. He's good at reading people and will trip up batters with some rather delicious trash talk, though his main thing is to make the opposition terrified. He'll do things like have his team step out to the outfield to make a mockery of the batter and apply psychological pressure. It's often mean and vicious, but man was it good watching.



Let me say that Tokuchi Toua here was an amazing sort of protagonist. The entire show very much revolves around him, but what really struck me is how often he wouldn't talk. You never get his internal monologue or even the slightest glimpse into what might be going through his mind, save for the occasional smirk or puzzled expression. He's just this overwhelming force that sweeps everything before him in a high tide of unknowable talent and intellect.



You can't really grasp his motives... does he want the money? He doesn't seem to really care about that. It's not glory and fame, either... he's just got this strange and silent desire to climb the very highest mountain, no matter how many lesser men he must destroy along the way.

So the long and short of it is that One Outs rocked. Here's hoping for a second season. There's more ...

The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi Season 2 Episode 1 - "Sorry to be late!"

So they aired a new Haruhi episode.

For the longest time, I really thought that Haruhi had some of the most ruthless capitalist minds Japan had to offer at its helm. The massive amounts of Haruhi figmas, crappy video games and merch they released coupled with things like Lucky Star (which is basically a giant commercial for Haruhi merchandise) made me conclude that these people were out to cut the purses of every hapless young man who has ever had a positive thought towards Haruhi.

Recent events have made me reconsider this...

Haruhi appears to be airing in this manner: They're showing reruns of the original series in chronological (ew) order. When they come to a part of the series where there's a story from the original novels to insert, they put in a new episode. Without warning. So last week's episode was the baseball episode. This week's was Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody... and then next week will be that episode where the Computer Society President is possessed by that giant bug. The next new episode will probably be in a month. And then there's another month of reruns between that new episode and the next.

The only reasoning I can think of for this is that kind of schedule is that someone at the studio doesn't actually want anyone to see the new episodes.

Say it with me now: What the fuck.

Anyhow, that aside, let's talk about the episode...



I read Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody over a year ago It's a nice little story that does the rare thing of bringing in all of the characters at the same time smoothly. So often Haruhi storylines will be segregated. There'll be a Nagato story and then a Mikuru story and then a Koizumi story. They don't really overlap in a significant way. What I like about Bamboo is that it manages to do character development for everyone (except maybe Koizumi) with one continuous story.


I've always been of the opinion that Haruhi works a lot better as an anime than it does as a novel. A character like Nagato, whose main feature is pregnant silences, just doesn't work very well when said pause is just the author writing 'and then she was quiet. And without a visual presence, Mikuru doesn't really work either. She's just the annoying useless ditz that Kyon pays WAY too much attention to for some inexplicable reason. Ditzy cutesy chicks are a lot easier to accept with an image than it is through text (which is something the author would do well to learn).



But a lot of other things come across a lot better visually... Nagato mouthing something before closing the door. The novel didn't dwell on her doing that at all, which is a crying shame. That's the kind of scene that you can interpret a couple of different ways and it is left nicely ambiguous.


So all in all, I think I feel comfortable saying that I enjoyed seeing Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody a lot more than I enjoyed reading, which is about the best you can ask for from an adaptation.

Still... Haruhi has some fundamental problems. Mainly: Balance of characters.


The author treats his main characters as equals (sorta... Koizumi certainly doesn't get as much screentime as everyone else). That's a good idea on paper, but it actually turns out to be a really bad one in practice. The reason for this is simple: No matter which way you shake it, an alien cyborg intelligence that has come to Earth to act as an observer does not weigh evenly with a ditzy redhead from the future.

So even though this episode integrated all the characters in a nice and unified way, it only really got good when Haruhi and Nagato had their scenes. Mikuru's scenes were mildly cute but wore thin after a little while. Then Haruhi's bit was great and Nagato's was fantastic. But the problem is they all had more or less equal time.



There's a reason why Lieutenant Barcley was never a regular member of the TNG cast. He's a fun guy and I love his episodes, but if he had as many episodes dedicated to him as, say, Data he would quickly lose his charm. Mikuru hasn't got half of Broccoli's charm and yet she gets put on even footing with Nagato and Haruhi both.

This is why for much as I love Haruhi, I don't have a very high opinion of the author. To be frank: he's a fucking amateur. He has good ideas and bad ideas and doesn't have a damn clue how to tell the two apart and just throws them all at the canvass in a big mess. Occasionally, when he's throwing the right ones, he'll manage to write something completely brilliant. But for a fair chunk of the time, he's just embarrassing himself. There's more ...

Spice and Wolf - "To our profits!"

Spice and Wolf is quite unusual.

It's set in a European-style fantasy world... Society is at a sort of pre-modern phase where harvests have come to be stable, traveling merchants go from city to city and there's a church that insists on religious orthodoxy. In previous days, the peoples of the world used to pay fealty to pagan gods and spirits of the harvest, but that of course died out with the advent of the church.

Sounds like a not-too-unusual brand of fantasy at first, but here's the catch: There's no swordplay to speak of and, with the exception of Ms. Wolf Sage Spirit, there is no magic. Most of the anime is dedicated to haggling, forging business partnerships and just turning out a profit. There really is hardly any action at all.

It is, in other words, something that has absolutely no business being as great as it was.

The premise of the story is that a traveling merchant meets one of these pagan ex-deities along the road, who calls herself a wolf sage spirit. She asks him to bring her north, to her birthplace, for reasons she keeps to herself. The merchant agrees and they begin to travel.

I've found that in any story where you're going to be experimental and try something new, the first thing you need are intensely likable characters. You can't make a show about mercantilism with the Gundam 00 crew and expect success, after all. So let's start with the two mains...


This is Craft Lawerence, the Spice side of the equation.

The first thing most people would notice about Lawrence here is that he's voiced by Jun Fukuyama, aka Lelouch. This is the first time I've really heard Jun outside of his Lelouch role and it took a few moments for me to get my head around the fact that the guy isn't out to viciously take over the world using any and all means.

He's really not what you usually expect from a merchant character. He isn't really all that greedy and he never cheats anyone. He certainly keeps careful track of his money and wants to get rich, but his ambitions are thoroughly wholesome (i.e. he wants to make enough money to settle down, get married and open a shop). It seems that his ideal deal is one where all parties involve profit handsomely and part on amiable terms, with the understanding that further business may be conducted in the future, which gets him into trouble. There's a certain intangible quality to the guy that just makes him thoroughly likeable. His thoughtful mannerisms as he considers a deal and his understated emotions with Horo just make him into the sort of guy you yourself would like to know. It's a rare thing for a character to hit a perfect note, but when one does you always remember them.


This is Horo. As mentioned, she's a Wolf Spirit (which is why she has Wolf ears) who was worshipped by a village for a few generations as a harvest deity, though she herself doesn't make any claims to divinity. She portrays herself as a spirit who just used her powers to help some humans out for a while, until technology progressed to such a level that she was no longer required. She isn't really bitter about this and is in fact pretty cheerful and mischievous throughout the show, but there's a certain unstated sadness to Horo that comes with the knowledge that her time has passed.

She's a bit of a counterpoint to Lawerence (or perhaps Lawerence is the counterpoint to her), in that she is pretty self-indulgent, a bit suspicious and extremely shrewd. Oh, and Geass fans will notice she's voiced by Kallen.


It's really when the two get put together that they really become magnificent. They're rather openly attached to each other, but their relationship is like an incredibly elaborate dance where each is trying to playfully outwit or outdo the other with misdirection and jokes. This isn't the typical anime affair where both parties are just too shy to actually say or do anything about it, but rather that they both seem to have more fun that way. They take a peculiar sort of joy out of making each other jealous and defying each other's expectations ("Why do you want me to stay with you?" "Because you owe me money").

It's a fun thing to see unfold as it goes along. If the show were nothing but these two, I would still highly recommend it.


Where things get even more interesting is in the money aspect. Lawerence sells furs in one town, buys pepper and moves on to the next. Horo helps him out with her sage wisdom (and, very occasionally, wolf magic) and the two are a money-making team. The world they're in is mercantilistic and he has to do things like deal with tariffs, fluctuating currencies, guild regulations and avoid church interference. The show is lovingly researched and structured, but it never gets so obtuse with the financial bits that you lose track of what the hell is going on and the characters make it engaging enough to be pretty dramatic. I never thought I'd be able to cheer for a guy to find a decent price to sell his pepper at, but they somehow pull it off.

There's an old addage that money corrupts that often pervades fiction. It's a literary tradition that reaches back to Shakespeare's Timons of Athens and beyond, so I expected the other merchants to be a pack of jackals... and so I was quite surprised when Lawerence said that he'd testify in a court of law against a company, the immediate response was not 'okay, time to kill you'. It actually took me a moment to realize that maybe the guy just didn't want to profit off of violence and death. Everyone cares about their bottom lines and profit margins, but even when hired thugs are sent out to slit Lawerence's throat in the dark they feel awfully guilty about it. It's a weird portrayal of old world spiritualism and morality combining with modern concepts of self-interest. The Spice with the Wolf, in other words... and I found that really intriguing.

(I feel compelled to mention, since I think I may in fact be one of the few people in the world who is equipped to properly notice this: the scene where Lawerence goes door to door asking friends and business partners for money is, in fact, taken directly from Timons of Athens. I would write a bit about the underlying meaning of that, but I'm already such a nerdy guy so...)

I will be the first to acknowledge that the enjoyment of Spice and Wolf does take a few rather obscure tastes, or at the very least a willingness to give a fantasy concerned primarily with high romance and the tides of commerce a chance. But if you're willing to broaden out your horizons just a little bit, I think you will be well rewarded. There's more ...

The Schemers - "All conditions have been cleared."

I think one of the most interesting things about the whole anime scene is seeing the marketplace of ideas at work. A new sort of protagonist or way of telling a story will be put out there and proven as being good and then, within a few months, you'll have new animes trying to build upon the new concept by trying to make a fresh and interesting take on it. Now this isn't the same thing as stealing, as unlike with Mass Effect, the new owners are making use of technique rather than actual material.

Try to think of the first episodes of Haruhi and Druaga to get what I'm talking about. The idea for the whole misleading-first-episode thing came from Haruhi and then the Druaga people said 'hey, this could work for us' and made that classic 'Jil's dream' episode. By taking a cue from the Haruhi folk, the Druaga people were able to make a complete masterstroke.

One idea that's been making the circulation lately is what I think of as the 'schemer character' and I'd like to talk for a moment about the interesting way in which this has been bounced back and forth...

The most well-known schemer characters are probably Yagami Light and Lelouch, so let's start with them.



Light is, as far as I can tell, the original schemer. If there is some sort of pre-Death Note figure that inspired him, then I am not aware of him.

Light is probably one of the most interesting characters I've ever seen. He's an ordinary upstanding man who believes in things like justice and equality who stumbles across the power to kill a person by writing their name in the book and immediately sets out to make himself into a god. What sets Light apart though is that, while he is a crazed serial killer, he's also in possession of a cold and nearly flawless intellect. He will hatch elaborate and occasionally ridiculous schemes to fool the police and take borderline super-villain-ish pleasure when they succeed. But what is most important is that he is the series' protagonist.

I will never forget the scene where Light was trying to discover the real name of that female detective whose husband he had murdered. How he weaved an elaborate web of lies to gain her trust and then...


Light is consistently portrayed as being a creature bereft of normal human emotion and, because the series is told from his point of perspective, Death Note essentially drags the viewer through the darker and uncomfortable corners of the human mind.

But even through Light's virtues, you can already see the flaw... if he's the absolute sort of evil, it becomes difficult after a while to have any affection for the man. He's just too remote from the average human being. At no point is he an unbelievable character, but he's just still not a character that many people can really relate to.

And that is really what brings us to Lelouch...



(Note that I am talking about the Lelouch of the original Code Geass season, not the second season which ruined the character)

On the surface, Lelouch is a lot like Light. He had a relatively ordinary existence until he stumbled across a tremendous supernatural power that gave him the ability to fundamentally alter the world. There are of course many more differences (Light wants to be a god while Lelouch is more of a conventional conquerer, etc.) but you can nevertheless see how the base of the Light character template is being employed for Lelouch here.

But what makes things interesting is that while Lelouch is cold and ruthless, at no point is he inhuman. One of Lelouch's first acts in the series is to murder his half-brother in cold blood, but that's not really what got my attention about him. Rather, it was this...


When Lelouch recalls what he did later in the day, he throws up. Lelouch justified the murder at the time by essentially saying it was to serve a greater good, much in the same way that Light did when he was on his killing sprees, but there's always a part of him that constantly screams that what he's doing is wrong. Sure he'll hatch Light-like schemes to get the better of his rivals and often destroys those close to him along the way in order to further his plans, but his sins gradually become a sort of tangible burden upon his shoulders. By giving the concept of Light a conscience, Lelouch really becomes a tragic hero in the old sense.

Both Light and Lelouch go down the route of being rather intimate pictures of amoral geniuses though, which is why I find this man to be particularly fascinating...


This is Toua Tokuchi and he's pitcher for the Lycoans. And yes, you read that right.

(It would probably be more accurate to call Toua the successor to Akagi, but I haven't seen Akagi yet so...)

One Outs is a show that really deserves its own blog post, so I won't go too much into the details here, but Tokuchi is the same sort of brutal genius that Light and Lelouch are. The gist of the story's premise is that every time Toua gets an out he makes 5 million yen but for every point he gives up he loses 50 million yen. He obviously never kills anyone (or at least he hasn't yet), but his technique is to wage elaborate campaigns of psychological warfare and deception in order to not only beat but also completely destroy the opposing team.

If you think that sounds stupid because it's baseball, then I don't want to hear it. I hate baseball as much as anyone else, but the point of One Outs isn't baseball.

What's interesting about Toua though when you compare him to Lelouch or Light is that he's completely opaque. He's the protagonist, but the show never presents his thought process or we hardly even get any idea of his motivation. Rather instead, most of the show is told from the perspective of the batters that have to go up against him as they try to second guess themselves. The show is really about what it's like to be pitted against a cold and malevolent human intelligence, rather than to show what that intelligence is like inside.

But again, I'll talk more about it later... I think by now you can figure out what I'm saying.

It's this sort of community of ideas and concepts that keeps the quality of Japanese fiction so damn high. Imagine for a moment if instead of 'hey let's take the basic Star Trek formula, give it a female captain and throw it into a different part of the universe' they had said to themselves 'what actually made TNG so good and how do we take that idea and do a new take on it?' Or imagine if Mass Effect had actually looked at the spirit of its influences instead of just going down the wholesale plagurism route.

If more of that sort of thinking went on over on this side of the Pacific, then I think that maybe we'd have something that's just a bit better than the gimmicky drivel that pollutes our bookshelves and televisions these days. There's more ...

Gundam 00 - "I believed, perchance, that our fates would once more be intertwined!"

I have a strange relationship with Gundam 00. It's got beautiful animation and superb mech design, which is something I'm pretty vulnerable to. I've always been something of an enthusiast for a good mech. Seeing a flying bipedal machine having a midair swordsfight with another flying bipedal machine is just undeniably cool. I have known this truth ever since I first saw Heero fight Zechs in a snowplain when I was 14 and it's still true now with Gundam 00.

But the problem with Gundam 00 is... um... everything else. Fuck, what a mess. So submitted here for your approval is my very own 'Top 5 things I hate about Gundam 00'...



5) The Innovators


There have been a lot of secretive evil organizations in 00's course. It's hard to really keep track... there were those guys that that guy was talking to back in season 1. The Observers I think they were called? Whatever happened to those guys anyway? And then there's that Mei-Ling girl who's always going back and forth... but oh well, even though they're probably being used by someone else, the Innovators have taken center-stage in 00 and it's hard to think of a less credible antagonist.

It's not just that they're a bunch of girly-men... the problem is that they're that particular brand of villain whose egos never seem to deflate a bit after their asses are kicked. "Muhahaha," says the Innovator after it gets blown up once again, "The inferior humans cannot stand against us!" You'd think there'd be a chink in the ideological armour after a while.

4) Saji


The obligatory pacifist-in-a-warzone character. Nothing really needs to be said about him. He's like everything anyone has ever complained about in a Gundam character combined into one thoroughly unlikeable person. And no, his relationship with Louise does little to improve him.

3) Setsuna's retarded backstory



Gundam 00 gave up trying to do political commentary about halfway through season 1, which is something we should all be thankful for. But the damn writers can't seem to resist the urge to trudge through the Middle East a bit while they go along their merry way.

It would really have helped if they had at least done a google search before they dove into it. "Kurdistan was under attack and so I had to kill my parents for the Jihad" makes no fucking sense. Maybe they could have put just a bit more effort into it... made it so maybe Setsuna's parents were collaborating with the Iranians (I think it was the Iranians that invaded the Kurds there?) or... something. Because just making him say 'God told me to do it, so I did!' is about as shallow a reading of Middle Eastern cultures as you can get.

2) Marina Ismail



If you were to put Relena and Lacus into a giant blender, you would probably end up with a bloody mess of torn flesh and shattered bone. If you were to then take this mixture and filter out all the bits that made the two characters above so powerful and compelling and then use the remains to build a new person, you would probably end up with Marina.

I think what bothers me most about her is how passive and weak she is. While everyone else is off playing at war, she's busy being motherly to those stupid orphan kids, spouting tripe about war being bad and, of course, worrying about Setsuna who is forced to fight, even though he only wants to live in peace! Gag.

1) Who else could be #1?


If you can take Mr. Bushido seriously, then something is wrong with you.

Gundam 00 is really just an incoherent mess of bizarre plot devices, wooden characters and random retarded bullshit. But in that intricate web of awful, the Mr. Bushido farce really takes the cake. Back when he was just Graham he wasn't exactly an interesting character, but ever since he put on that fucking mask it's just been unbearable. On and on he goes about fate and the way of the warrior and his thirst for revenge... it's like they took out the manual of cliche anime badass traits and crammed as much as they could under his stupid mask.

Is there a point to this stupid fuck? He's in no way relevant to any of the factions or political groups... he's just there to inconvenience Setsuna by appearing at awkward moments to challenge him to a ONE ON ONE FIGHT. He's sort of like Gary from Pokemon, really. Ich, whenever I see a stupid fucker running his mouth about Bushido's BADASSERY I just want to destroy this world and everything in it.



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