T w e n t y S i d e d

I just now finished watching the Sugar series and the additional “special”. Fantastic series. Lots of other people have been writing about it recently, and I’ve been avoiding reading their thoughts until now. I’m eager to read what I’ve been missing, but I think I need to let it all sink in first.

A Little Later: Many people commented that the additional episodes (the summer special) were really required for proper closure. From the Chizumatic review:

I finished the last disc of the regular series and thought it ended well enough. I didn’t think it needed more. (Although I didn’t really take time to think about it)

But after watching the summer special I can see it really does offer a fuller ending. It answered questions I hadn’t thought of yet, mostly because I watched the end of the series and the special back-to-back. It was all very satisfying and very rewarding.

The next day: I think the only part that didn’t work for me was the “piano chase”. It was bit contrived and went on WAY too long. This town had been firmly established as being fairly level all along, and at the start of the piano chase the thing goes downhill for a long, long time. The town would have needed to be on the side of a very large hill for that to happen. Plus, with all that weight on those tiny wheels, those cobblestone streets should have shaken the sucker apart long before it ever got to the drawbridge. I lived on a steep brick street when I was a kid, and let me tell you: That piano would not have survived the trip down the hill ONCE, even if it hit a stack of fluffy-puffy pillows at the bottom. That much weight on those narrow legs on a flat piece of wood with tiny wheels over cobblestone? Going up and down hills all over town? For crying out loud. The thing wasn’t even out of tune when it finally stopped.

It was odd that they resorted to Three-Stooges level comedy for that episode. They hadn’t really done anything like that before, so it felt like it didn’t fit. It was like having ten minutes of Scooby-Doo inserted into Snow White.

It didn’t ruin the series. I still love the story and was still quite impressed with the ending. It was charming and thoughtful. In fact, right after that point in the story are some of the most impressive character moments. Greta’s decision was surprising, but it fit. Same goes for the way Saga acted afterwards. That was a big moment for those kids, and the result was very satisfying.

Still later, but just one more thing: A favorite moment for me was at the end when Saga is playing the piano in the shop again and we see the shop owner at the coffee house, having a cup and listening to her play. All this time I wondered where he kept going every afternoon. It seemed so unlikely that he always had an errand to run right when Saga came by each day. Now we learn that all this time he’s been doing this on purpose, just to hear her play while at the same time not being exposed as a softie. I love that he never speaks. They get a LOT of mileage out of a character with no vocals and only one facial expression.

Brilliant.

Okay, I’m done now. I hope.

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.

Big O had me hooked right from the start with some interesting ideas, and then failed to follow through. Or at least, it failed to go where I hoped it would. There are several conflicting ideas in here, and I would have liked the series a lot more if it had just picked one and done it well. No real spoilers here. I’m going to mostly talk about what I thought I was going to see.

Side note: I watched it cold. I didn’t know what it was about, who the characters were, or even what genre I was dealing with. Because it came through Netflix and I didn’t pick it myself, I didn’t even know what the box art looked like.

The story opened up with an interesting premise: It takes place in Paradigm City, a domed but othewise very Gotham-style city that seemed to be more or less isolated. Many years ago everyone in the city lost their memories all at once. Nobody knows why or how. They eventually put things back together and life is more or less normal now, but here you have an entire city that lost their identity and had to find themselves a new one. The implications are pretty astounding.

The story follows “Negotiator” Roger Smith as he takes various dangerous jobs. He looks a bit like Bruce Wayne, has a butler that looks a LOT like Alfred, and lives in a very gothic building that is not dissimilar to Wayne Manor. His first job has him recovering a one-of-a-kind android who looks like a young girl but is very strong, deadly, humorless, literal, and without emotion. Oh, and she has (I’m not kidding) a DVD-style disc tray built into her forehead.

Near the end of the first episode I noticed that it wasn’t going where I thought it was going. I was hooked by the amnesia idea, and I was anxious for the story to get back to it. I was still trying to get a handle on what sort of story this was when a huge robot started stomping around the city. I’m thinking, “Wow. This is a toughie. How is Roger Smith going to get rid of it? Talk it into going away?”

Then Roger shouts into his watch, “BIG O!” and a massive Robot comes out of the pavement right where he’s standing. He gets in, and the two robots punch each other for a while. They have trouble doing real damage to each other, but they give the surrounding city a real pounding.

So for me the series started out with this idea about mass amnesia, then forgot all about it and drove us right into anime cliche’ hell. We went from interesting sci-fi premise to Batman ripoff to Cliche Robot Girl to Mechas having a Godzilla-style brawl in the big city. This series is like frankenstein’s monster: There are a whole lot of seperate ideas crudely sewn together and animated without thought to what the consequences might be. As you might have guessed: The end result isn’t pretty.

Did I mention there is also a sexy woman who is so mysterious we don’t even know why we should care about her? Or the goofball religious iconography? Or the Joker-looking villian?

I stopped watching around disc 4 or so. Maybe the story got better, but it was already such a mess I didn’t want to hang around and find out.

Having said that, I still love the idea of an isolated city where everyone lost their memories, and where almost all other records were lost. What sort of effect would that have on they way people interact? What would their culture be like? How would they go about even choosing names for themselves? What would it be like if everyone had to choose their own name? If the online world is any indication, guys would be named stuff like, “DaReapaMan” and “Ph3arless”. Maybe they would name themselves after mythological creatures or heroes. It’s a very safe bet nobody would name themselves Roger Smith.

What do you do with all the money in the bank now that nobody knows who owns it, or even who owns the bank? How would people decide where to live? Would they roam the city, trying their key in every lock? What do you do with the people in prison now that you no longer know their crime or the length of their sentence?

But no: The whole memory loss thing is just a plot device used to explain why people don’t know about the mechas or where they came from. To me, this is a sloppy plot device. Everyone loosing their memories is a much bigger deal than giant robots. The mass amnesia, not the robots, would be the central story of the city.

Imagine how people would act in that moment when their memories go. You’re riding an elevator with a woman. You look at each other. Who is she? Your sister? Wife? Boss? Nemesis? Someone you’ve never met?

What if a woman found herself standing over the body of someone who was just shot to death, and she was holding a gun? Did she do it? Or was this a friend, who she was rushing to help? Perhaps the two of them were undercover cops together? Maybe they were lovers. Maybe one of them is a burgler.

What about the guy who is in prison? Now he’s forced to wonder what he did to get in here? Murder someone? Steal a car? Fight city hall?

I could go on like this forever. This premise generates an endless number of facinating situations that could lead to great stories. Unlike in Big O, where people just shrugged and muddled on, I think this event would have a huge significance to everyone. They would, at the very least, have a name for the day. It would be something simple, like “day zero”.

Roger Smith would be some sort of investigator, working a few years after this event. Each episode could have someone coming to him for help. As in, “I have this picture of a woman in my wallet and I wonder if she has a picture of me. Maybe we were married. Help me find her.”

His clients would tell their versions of Day Zero in flashback, and then Roger would go about trying to help them. Sometimes he’d learn things they didn’t want to know. Sometimes he wouldn’t be able to help them at all, and the mystery would remain.

As the story progressed, we would learn more and more about the events before Day Zero. We’d get little glimpses of the pre-amnesia city and how it worked. There would be clues and dangers and occasionally there would be people who seemed not quite as lost as everyone else. There would be secrets and battles and eventually the end of the series would explain the events that led to Day Zero.

All of that would be a lot more exciting than the robot punching thing they have going.

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’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.