T w e n t y S i d e d

I’ve had very little luck looking for good anime on my own. Aside from Ai Yori Aoshi, every time I’ve tried a series about which I know nothing, I’ve been disappointed. I’ve been depending on Den Beste to do my filtering for me, which is sort of lame on my part.

Now I’m looking at Last Exile, and I’m tempted to go off on my own again. I like the OP. The series is not too long (seven discs). The art style looks good. So it passes my first-round elimination filter. It has a very Final Fantasy feel to it, (at least in the OP) which is a big plus in my book.

Problem is, as far as I can tell nobody has seen it. If they did, they didn’t think it was worth writing about. Either way, that’s bad.

Alexander Doneau at Anime Pilgrimage doesn’t have anything on it. Den Beste doesn’t list it. J. Greely at .clue can’t help me. Don McClane has not reviewed it at Mixolydian Mode. It’s highly rated at Netflix, but I’ve long since concluded those people are raving mad.

If anyone has any non-spoiler comments on this series, please drop a comment.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

fledgling otaku posed a question in the comments of this post. He was asking about “fan service” vs. “geek service”. I started to write a response, went off topic, and then realized that the comment thread is already miles long. So I’m just going to move the discussion to a new post. This hits on something I’ve had in my list of stuff to write about for a while now anyway, and this gives me a good excuse to set it all down.

Personally, I don’t mind fan service as long as it is part of a good story and interesting characters. I watch anime with my wife, and she doesn’t mind it either – if the story is good. Fan service for its own sake isn’t something either of us cares to watch, but I think that’s true of most fans.

Newcomers are sometimes shocked at fan service. (I was) It’s certainly unexpected to American viewers who grew up with the idea that cartoons are for kids. But after seeing quite a bit of anime I’m noticing that the Japanese have very different ideas on what should and should not be shown, and in some ways are more reserved than Americans. For example, despite the more lax standards the Japanese have towards nudity or revealing clothing, I can’t think of a single series where the characters actually had sex. I don’t think it has ever happened in any show I’ve watched, not even off-camera. Nobody talks about, or admits to, having sex. Compare this to many American shows where we don’t see the characters naked, but most of the sub-plots involve complex stories of who’s having sex with whom. Even American dramas aimed at young adults and teens (90210 or Dawson’s Creek type stuff) have webs of changing partners and continuous infidelity. I find this to be endlessly tiresome, so for me Anime is pretty refreshing and a lot less objectionable.

Another amusing thing about this is the way the Japanese handle the for-television shows where nudity is required by the story. Instead of using scenery to obscure the forbidden parts they sometimes simply leave them off. I’m thinking now to Ai Yori Aoshi, where the characters are built like Barbie and Ken when we see them “naked”. It’s an interesting way to handle things. Of course, it’s only possible using animation. You couldn’t get away with that in a live-action show. (ewwww)

We’re going to be watching Najica Blitz Tactics in a week or so. It looks enough like the excellent Noir to capture our interest, but the series is also notorious for its copious supply of panty shots. We’ll see how the balance plays out.

For my own site, I try to keep things more or less family friendly. My kids are sometimes in the room when I’m writing, so I don’t post stuff I wouldn’t want them to see. So, no Ecchi. Mireille and Kirika in short skits is fine, but I’m not going to be posting Mahoro deploying her brassiere launcher. I don’t think I want to try to explain that one to the kids. Or anyone else.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I’m thinking back to disc 2 of Sugar, A Little Snow Fairy. In one episode, Sugar writes a message in crayon for Saga and shows it to her. But she writes on a treasured piece of sheet music that belonged to Saga’s deceased mother, so Saga gets upset and doesn’t read the message right away. She carries the paper around with her, and looks at it later, and yet she still doesn’t read it. She’s old enough to read a message this short without any problem, just by glancing at it.

Later she shows it to Salt and Pepper and they look right at it and read it to her. They tell her it says ” Sorry Saga “, which she should have been able to read herself.

I can only conclude that the only reason she didn’t read it is because she couldn’t, and the only reason for that is that it isn’t in her native language.

Looking at the letters, they are not German (the story takes place in Germany, I think) or indeed any other European language. They don’t look very Japanese, either. In fact, they look kinda… made-up. So, is it:

• A pretend European language, or faux-German? (Like the way Americans might make fake Japanese by drawing squiggles that look Japanese to them.) Unlikely. It shouldn’t have been hard for the animators to translate a two-word message into German. They went all the way to Germany to do research for the series, so I don’t think they would glaze over a detail like this.
• A language I don’t recognize? I don’t think so. The language looks quite pictographic, but it also looks much too long for the information it contains. Also, the message seems to change shape a bit and is always partly obscured, so I expect we aren’t supposed to examine it too closely. In any case, this doesn’t explain why Saga couldn’t read it.
• A special made-up Fairy language? This would explain why Salt and Pepper could read it and Saga couldn’t. This seems most likely, but why would Sugar expect Saga to be able to read Fairy writing?

BUT: Then I get to disc 5 and Elder has a cookie for Ginger:

So what we have are characters who live in Germany, speak Japanese, and write in gibberish on paper but use English when writing on cookies. I’m sure I’m just reading to much into this, but I can’t help feeling like I’m missing something.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.