「シュタインズゲート・瓦礫と助手」/「huke」

Even though the track record for anime adaptations of Nitro+ games has been abysmal, I couldn’t help but hope that Steins;Gate would turn out well. After all, it’s the best visual novel ever or something according to Japan. And if it didn’t pan out, I guess I’d just fall back on the visual novel with huke’s pretty art.

And as I was watching it, I thought it was pretty funny and all. I was still trying to figure out why Japan loved this thing so much. It wasn’t until someone mentioned something about 2ch jokes that I think I got it.

So I’d known that Steins;Gate was about time travel, based on the synopsis. What I didn’t know was that the story was basically based on the John Titor story. And it the connection wasn’t superficial either. It wasn’t just, there’s a guy calling himself John Titor from the future on 2ch. A lot of details, like the IBM 5100 and the mechanics of time travel and divergence numbers, are taken straight from the story. You can think of Steins;Gate as one giant John Titor reference.

This is fascinating to me, because even though I’m not intimately familiar with the details of the John Titor story, I’ve been on the Internet long enough to remember this whole thing. It’s kind of weird to see something that was sort of the early-web version of an internet meme be used as the skeleton of a more fleshed-out story. I guess something like Densha Otoko would qualify as well, but I think there’s a lot less you can do with it to make something unique like Steins;Gate.

This whole aspect of Steins;Gate got me because I am a nerd and nerds friggin love references. I mean, look at any Shaft anime. But yes, Steins;Gate has tons of references and where there aren’t any, it’ll just create memes. For the most part, these references are all internet memes. If it’s not part of the John Titor mythos, they’ll be working in a 2ch meme. And then there’s stuff like EL PSY CONGROO and tutturu~ which seems like it was designed to be spammed across the internet.

The characters themselves are exactly the same kinds of people. After all, they encounter John Titor on 2ch. What kind of people read and post on 2ch? Daru and Okarin are really obvious otaku. But Mayuri seems relatively normal, except that she works at a maid cafe in Akiba and buys doujin at Toranoana. Okay. Even the most respectable and well-adjusted of the cast, Kurisu-TINA, is a closet VIPPER.

So I guess what’s special about Steins;Gate isn’t that it’s just a good story about a bunch of friends who fall into some time travel conspiracy. It’s that it’s a good story about a bunch of friends who are just like the people watching it who fall into a time travel conspiracy based on an internet urban legend.

「一面の花」/「k野」

I’d been hearing about how awesome Heartcatch Precure was so I’d always intended to eventually watch it. The art was fantastic and I’d seen some great clips of the fights. The problem is that when I found out about it, it was already really far into the 50 or so episodes. So once I got a ton of time after I graduated and was looking for a show to watch, I figured it was time. After all, I rolled through Cardcaptor Sakura pretty quickly.

I’ve been thinking about whether I’d put Heartcatch at the top of my magical girl list, but I think it ends up coming second to Cardcaptor Sakura. Still, this means I think that Heartcatch is pretty damned good. I think it’s a better magical girl show than Madoka or Nanoha and I friggin love those two shows.

What makes Heartcatch so great is that it’s just good. It has a great cast of characters, the story is wonderful, and the production is stellar. Most importantly, it’s just a magical girl show. It isn’t magical girl with lasers. It isn’t magical girl with zombies. It is what it is and it stands toe to toe with all of those magical girl and x shows, where x is something that makes it more palatable to people who need an excuse for why they’re watching shows for little girls.

And Heartcatch is girly as hell. Yeah, the Cures might be throwing some punches around, but the show is tripping flowers and fashion. You can attempt to reframe Nanoha as scifi and talk about intelligent devices and stuff, but the Cures spray perfume to transform. At this point, Nanoha’s pretty much decked out in mecha gear in Force. Meanwhile, this is a show with tambourines and those spinny things that look way too much like their only function is to sell toys.

There’s also the characters’ boundless optimism and energy. There isn’t anything that’s especially dark about is show, even the villains are kind of goofy. Everyone’s got dreams and everyone’s fighting to protect their dreams and it’s terrible that villains use the uncertainty in people’s hearts against them. Here, the objective isn’t to seal away some rogue magics or befriend the opposition with lasers, but to restore people’s hearts.

The other Precure series are going to have a tough time measuring up to the Heartcatch bar, but I hope they do.

「ガンバスター」/「タガナー」

It’s quite illuminating to watch Gunbuster and recognize things that I’ve seen before scattered throughout so many shows just because they decided to pay an homage to this. The obvious case is Gurren Lagann, where certain little things are straight up ripped out from this show. Another case would be Lucky Star’s Bun Guster track. At many of these points, it was like a light flipped on in my head and I went ohhhhhhhhhhhh.

What’s more impressive is that even though this is one of the oldest shows I’ve watched, it still felt new. It was kind of like when I watched Utena for the first time. In this case, the time dilation stuff added a really interesting dimension to the entire plot. While Gurren Lagann relies on physical size alone to give it that grand sense of scale, here, time and distance are used as well. It’s not on the same scale physically, but it definitely matches in the sort of awe you feel when you watch it.

This all makes Diebuster quite interesting as well. While it’s a “sequel”, it feels very different. There are some callbacks and some of the same themes, but it’s largely doing its own thing. I spent a lot of time trying to figure it out and how it connected to Gunbuster but it just ended up giving me all the answers I was looking for. I don’t think there was the same sort of awe as when I watched Gunbuster, but it was more like ‘wow, that’s pretty neat’.

But comparing these two to Gurren Lagann makes their similarities a lot more apparent. Both are about a girl who look up to a girl who’s very successful as their role model. Both of them eventually surpass their role model and achieve their dreams through hard work and guts. And then both of them save the world together with the mentor they’ve surpassed.

Watching these was kind of exciting because everyone loves Gurren Lagann and the question is whether Gainax will be able to top it. I imagine everyone who watched Gunbuster and Diebuster must’ve thought the same thing, that surely they can’t top THIS. I’m glad that they’ve proven us wrong twice now.

「静雄無双」/「巖本英利/旧PNス・タンリー」

I’d planned to write about Durarara!! during the whole twelve days of anime thing, but I dropped it at the last minute to make room for Utena and Star Driver. But now, you’re going, wait a second, there was no Durarararararara!! this year, how can it be a special moment in anime for this year?

Well, you see, it turns out a chunk of the light novels was decently far along. I went through books four through six, which, if we allow ourselves to dream a bit, would correspond to the second season. I liked the anime, but I think everyone is in agreement that the second half is weaker, although whether it was still good or terrible is up for debate. The nice thing about the three books immediately after is that the focus is not on Anri or Kida, so you won’t have to worry about them being a downer in your anime about crazy and exciting things in the big city.

So it should please everyone that a second season of the anime focuses much, much more heavily on everyone’s favourite really angry guy, Heiwajima Shizuo. The fourth book goes back to the Durarara/Baccano standard of telling a story with about a thousand different threads somehow coming together at the end. The fifth and sixth books form one story in which Shizuo is the focus in the same way that Mikado, Anri, and Kida were the main characters of their respective arcs. We’ll also see some familiar faces. An interesting thing about the fourth book is the return of some characters that you may or may not remember and the introduction of several new ones.

Shizuo was a really great side character before. He shows up, gets trolled by Izaya, and proceeds to destroy things, usually with other things. The focus that books 5 and 6 puts on him is great because it develops him from the guy that can be described by the previous sentence into a legitimate badass. I feel like he’s always been thoughtful and that his only real problem is getting pissed off really easily, so I enjoyed watching him put his talents to use in a more focused way.

The thing that I enjoy about Ryohgo Narita’s stuff is his ability to launch a million seemingly unrelated characters and plot threads and be able to tie them together. The one-volume version of that is very neat to read through, but I have a feeling that there’s some longer term stuff that he’s set up in the early books that will come back in a big way and there are already hints of that at the end of the sixth book. This isn’t unlike the Haruhi series, where seemingly inconsequential details come back later in an earthshattering way, although, here the pieces are bigger, I guess.

Really looking forward to that second season.

「ありがとう放浪息子」/「神田川」

The main problem for the characters is some variation of that, isn’t it?

Anime is full of traps and when you sit back and think about it, it’s kind of like, wow, they’re everywhere, aren’t they? Which, if you think about it, is kind of strange that Hourou Musuko feels so different from everything else. I mean, it’s an anime about traps.

An easy description of Hourou Musuko would be that it’s about gender and sexual identity and it does it realistically, unlike the usual fetish or comedy treatment. But what’s more interesting isn’t just that it examines these things in a realistic and mature manner, but that it starts from square one. These are children that are dealing with these things.

So we have these kids and we’re watching them struggle with it on their own. If they’re lucky, they meet someone to struggle along with. Maybe they’re doing okay for a while. Suddenly, things change, and they’re in middle school and have a whole new slew of bullshit to worry about. There’s never really any rest from these things, there are no answers and the kids just have to keep on growing up and dealing with crap that comes their way.

That the anime chose to focus on the middle school parts was something I found kind of unfortunate. Yeah, it’s really exciting that there’s a ton of relationship drama here, but I thought a nice thing about Hourou Musuko was that it took the time to take a look at the slower parts of the characters’ lives as well. Of course, it worked out that the particular slice that they chose to animate has some sort of closure, so that was nice. But just like how the manga starts long before the anime does, now the manga has gone beyond where the anime ends and everyone’s in high school.

Just like with Usagi Drop, we’ve had our fun times watching these kids grow up, but that’s not going to last forever. I don’t know whether this mangaka typically focuses on long term things, but I’d really like to see where this crew ends up in five, ten, or more years down the road.