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Asuka Langley Sohryu’s arrival in episode eight of Evangelion completely changes everything. All of a sudden, this slow-burning character drama full of psychologically broken kids trying to find the motivation to fight for the sake of survival blows open into this silly, action-packed, brightly-colored fun time, wherein a teenaged odd couple learns how to play DDR so they can drop a synchronized Inazuma Kick on a giant monster to the backdrop of classical music. It’s almost startling to watch unfold, and sounds like an insane writing decision on paper. Right when our main characters have found the resolve to act heroically and start kicking ass, they get thrust into this ridiculous middle school romantic comedy, and the already bizarre robot battles take a downright goofy turn. So why did GAINAX do this, and how did they manage such an incredible tone shift without completely throwing the audience for a loop? Well, a hell of a lot went into it–and looking at all of it stacked up together, their methods were nothing short of impressive.

For starters, before diving into episode eight, we have to look at what was done in the previous episode to set us up for it. Whereas the first six episodes focused primarily on Shinji and his struggle to find resolve, culminating with his turn to a more protective side in episode six, episode seven was the first borderline side-story in the series, and the first to focus more primarily on another character.

However, in the background of that episode, we got to see Shinji subtly beginning to change. We saw him expressing a much wider range of emotions, and doing so much more openly; taking a stand and making demands of the people around him and asserting himself. Shinji has started to stabilize and come out of his shell at this point, allowing him to more easily communicate with the people around him, and to feel more comfortable in his current home.

I mentioned back in episode two how Misato’s house was meant to be established as a sort of home base for the series, and how we were meant to move into it exactly as Shinji did. Likewise, episode seven is the point at which both Shinji and ourselves have become comfortable here. The episode starts off by focusing on Shinji and Misato’s everyday routine, and the story of the episode is a side-mission that has little connection to the main plot of fighting angels, giving the whole thing a sort of slice-of-life feel. Even when the action starts, we don’t get a single word of protest from Shinji about piloting the robot to help with the situation; by now he’s gotten used to his role as a pilot as a normal part of his life.

This is what brings us to episode eight, which immediately departs from the home base that we’ve become accustomed to. Misato tells Shinji in the helicopter that she thought he might get bored of seeing the same mountains every day–almost like she’s speaking straight to the audience that the point of this scenario is to change things up a bit–to take us out of the comfort zone which we’ve become accustomed to by the end of episode seven.

By this point, Shinji only resembles the quiet, paranoid and high-strung person that he was at the start. He goofs around with his friends on the helicopter, and stretches his arms out on the deck of the ship like he’s making himself at home–he’s totally gotten used to the way that his life is.

And then we meet Asuka–an explosion of color and personality packed into one tiny little girl. Just think about what we’ve seen and where we’ve been up until now: aside from Misato, this series has focused largely on dour characters inhabiting a post-apocalyptic city locked in the mountains; and now, we’ve got this red-haired firebrand in a yellow one-piece standing against a bright blue open sky in the middle of the ocean. This couldn’t be farther from what we’ve had so far.

Asuka is a foreign object in the Eva universe–literally, she’s a foreigner to Japan, and the series makes sure you know that by having her throw random English and German words into her speech and complain a lot about how strange Japanese culture is. She is the polar opposite of both Shinji and, especially, Rei, and brings everything to the show which had purposely been left out before she showed up.

Remember back when Shinji fell on Rei’s breast and she didn’t say anything, but then she slapped him because he badmouthed Gendo, and it was like this huge subversion of the middle school pervert trope? Well, the very first thing Asuka does is slap the hell out of all the guys when the wind blows her skirt up and they see her panties–which Touji childishly responds to by pulling out his dick. We’ve never really had this before.

You could have been forgiven for forgetting entirely that Shinji and Rei were middle schoolers in the first place, or that Eva is on some level a middle school anime–at least until Asuka shows up and starts arguing over test scores and reputation, and even somehow turns the class president into a recurring character. Whereas Rei and Shinji largely blend into the background at school, Asuka stands out and draws so much attention to herself that we realize just how many students actually attend this school.

Up until now, Shinji’s arguments were always one-sided and passive-aggressive. He did what adults told him to, wandered aimlessly, and didn’t know how to communicate with kids his own age. After Asuka shows up, he starts arguing all the time over basically nothing, and growing more opinionated and assertive with each new episode. It’s pretty funny too, to watch Asuka run up against the wall that is Rei, who can’t be convinced into argument with anyone. Their first interaction, when Asuka blocks the sunlight that Rei is reading by, so Rei moves over into the sun, aggravating Asuka, summarizes their entire relationship in these episodes perfectly.

Oh, and remember how Shinji only started piloting the Eva willingly after six episodes of convincing, and how Rei only pilots it out of a sense of obligation? Well, Asuka straight-up WANTS to pilot the Evangelion–and not for anyone’s sake but her own. She does it because she’s passionate about proving her worth, and she ties her self-worth entirely to her ability to pilot the Evangelion well–which is why she takes it as such an insult when it’s suggested that she might not be needed, or that Rei could do her job better than she can.

Asuka’s completely new approach to piloting the Evangelion brings a totally different tone to the robot battles. Whereas Shinji and Rei’s actions always felt like a painful struggle, Asuka’s fights are just plain old fun. She jumps around like a maniac, taking time to strike cool poses in her robot and to smile in the middle of battle. It’s no mistake that Unit 02 is introduced through one of the most memorably staged and exciting mecha battles in anime history–and one which bends the logic and believability of the story about as far as it can go. Thought redirecting all of Japan’s power into a rifle was crazy? How about a giant robot playing hopscotch on aircraft carriers right before shoving two battleships into a monster’s mouth and blowing it to pieces?

Speaking of that plan, which Misato had a hand in orchestrating, the writers of this show did something brilliant with how they got Asuka’s presence to dominate everything else for these two episodes–they introduced Kaji at the same time. Aside from slivers of information about his personality, history, and intentions, Kaji is primarily a mysterious presence in the series at this point–but none of that really matters right now, because the reason he’s here is so that he can take the focus away from Misato.

Until now, Misato has been the most consistent authoritarian presence in the series, operating both as Shinji’s caretaker and boss, and as the person who gets shit done when the chips are down in both episodes six and seven. However, the appearance of Kaji immediately brings out all of Misato’s weaknesses; and for these couple of episodes, especially episode nine, Misato is largely relegated to a position of losing control. She still gives instructions to Shinji and Asuka, but her overall presence is lessened over the course of these episodes, while Asuka seizes the reins on dominating the entire cast for screen presence. Misato and Kaji’s relationship will continue to be developed and made thematically relevant over the course of the series, but for now it’s hard not to imagine that Kaji’s presence is mostly a means of distracting what was formerly the strongest personality in the series, while another, equally powerful personality hogs the spotlight.

So, alright, we’ve got a sense now of exactly who this character is and what she did to change the nature of the series, as well as what GAINAX did to maximize the impact of her character’s arrival; but that still doesn’t answer the more important question of why the studio did this. Why get seven episodes deep into a series and then completely change its tone by introducing a character so fundamentally at-odds with everything established up until that episode? Well, simply put–because that’s the point.

Evangelion has been duly noted for incorporating a smorgasbord of social and psychological themes into its narrative–but if I could be so bold as to boil everything the series does down to one central idea, it would be the study of interaction. Eva sets out to explore both the ways that humans are shaped through their interactions with one-another, as well as the way that those interactions will ultimately shape the fate of humankind. In the process, it goes into detail about what it means to act as an individual, and how different individuals are interpreted by and communicate with one-another, as well as what it means for people to have their individually molded by others, or to lose that individuality altogether. All of this is spelled out at length in the last two episodes of the series; but long before that, it’s explored in the show’s very structure.

Shinji Ikari doesn’t have much of a personality at the start of Evangelion. He is an island–an individual largely devoid of interaction, and therefore only slightly molded by the people around him. From the beginning, we see how his father’s attitude has brought him to his current position; but since his father has walled himself off from Shinji, we can’t expect his influence to be felt directly for a while.

Instead, Shinji is shaped by Misato to become someone who decides that he mustn’t run away. Then, he’s shaped by Rei to become someone protective, with a sense of responsibility. And now, he is being shaped by Asuka into someone who can be outspoken and assertive. Every person that enters Shinji’s life changes his attitude in subtle ways, which in turn alters the nature of his actions as well as the nature of how those actions are presented.

Episode three’s angel battle is horrifying and sad, because Shinji is terrified and no one knows how to deal with him. Episode six’s angel battle is epic and triumphant because the teamwork of Shinji, Rei, and Misato overcomes impossible odds while bringing a new, more protective side of Shinji to light. Episode nine’s angel battle is goofy, insane, and hilarious because the chemistry between Asuka, who pilots the Eva for fun, and Shinji, who has to adapt to dealing with her wild attitude, creates a personality that can’t be tamed by the self-doubt and fear which would be crushing Shinji on his own.

Asuka changes everything because Asuka is different from everyone, and therefore changes the way that those people interact. When Shinji sees this beautiful girl his age in all her unguarded sexuality, it kickstarts his libido, and now we’ve got him revealing his more perverted and lustful side. When Shinji has someone accosting him for no reason, who is not only his own age, but not in any kind of position of authority over him, he has a chance to get angry and assertive. When Shinji is paired up with someone who can actually be as emotionally fragile as himself from time to time, he even finds himself in a position where he’s supposed to be the strong one giving advice, even if he ends up being less effective than Asuka’s own motivation. The arrival of Asuka means that Shinji and everyone else now has to deal with Asuka; and in doing so, the nature of their actions make an enormous shift. (In Misato’s case, the same thing happens more in response to the appearance of Kaji.)

Holding off on Asuka for seven whole episode was a pretty ballsy move on the part of the show’s creators. Taking the show’s most energetic, attractive, imminently relatable and likable character and completely holding off on introducing her throughout seven episodes of fairly glum and sober character establishment probably wouldn’t have sounded like a very good business decision; and the prospect of scaring off the audience who’d grown accustomed to the style of Evangelion up until this point only to wind up with such a massive tone shift must have been terrifying. But all of it had to be done, because the most important aspect of Asuka’s arrival is that it changes everything. If she’d been around from the beginning, then her influence over the tone and the character interactions would have been enormous right from the start, which wouldn’t allow us to see how the other characters would’ve been changed by her arrival. The way that Asuka changes everything is massively important to the themes which lie at the heart of the series–and it’s for that reason, I think, that this incredibly bold decision managed to pay off in such a big way.

It helps, of course, that the writers also signposted their intentions so well throughout these two episodes. Aside from Misato’s comment about leaving the mountains, episode eight gives us a ship captain, designed after the same trope as the captains from Macross and Nadia, complaining about having to babysit a bunch of kids. Episode nine has Fuyutsuki growing embarrassed and impatient with the children, which Kaji lampoons beautifully with his remark that adults don’t like to be embarrassed. It almost reads like a fuck you to any critics of how ridiculous this episode gets, delivered by the most cool and collected adult in the series. Even the show’s ending theme changes for these episodes into a far more upbeat and fun rendition of the previous song.

Eva wanted you to know that it was doing this on purpose and that it had a plan–and it never forgot to work in those subtle moments of depth and discomfort which kept reminding the viewer that they were indeed still watching Neon Genesis Evangelion. It dances its way through what could have been a series-destroying shift in tone with unparalleled grace in a manner that few other shows could ever achieve–and all of it adds to just how memorable and massive of a presence Asuka manages to establish for herself in the span of just a couple of episodes.

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Has 2015 enjoyed the greatest summer season in the history of anime? A better question might be: was there any competition? Up until 1998, the concept of a series starting in the summertime was practically nonexistent; and up until 2013, the summer season usually sported as little as half the number of new shows beginning compared to Spring and Fall–since it used to be that a lot of shows were 26 episodes long, and most of them started during those seasons. Nowadays, we’ve got just as many new shows coming out no matter what the season is–possibly because 26-episode shows have gotten to be so much more scarce.

Whatever the cause, 2015 just had the biggest Summer season in anime history–even out-counting the Spring season for the first time ever–and a lot of it was pretty solid. I can’t say that any one show this season could top the best of previous years–but what Summer 2015 did have is possibly the largest concentration of pretty good shows that I’ve ever seen in a single season before. Let’s see how fast we can run through my impressions of them–not including shows that continued from spring such as Food Wars, Baby Steps, and Gintama, or sequels to shows that I’m still watching the first seasons of, such as Gatchaman Crowds.

Wakako-zake was a cute little short-form series about an office lady voiced by Miyuki Sawashiro going around to different restaurants and trying Japanese food and liquor combinations. The hilariously pretentious attitude which she took towards eating correctly made it a fun watch, but my lack of familiarity with any of the dishes kept me at some cultural distance. If you’re into Japanese food and slice-of-life, then check this one out–it will barely take up half an hour of your time.

Wakaba Girl’s episodes are a tad longer at around twelve minutes, which might actually be the ideal length for this kind of sugary-sweet, cute-girls-doing-cute-things type show. It felt like a weekly medical injection for people with low blood-pressure, metaphorically speaking, and comes from the same original author is Kiniro Mosaic, which had its own second season this year. I don’t think I’ll remember anything about this series a year from now other than that it’s gimmick was a refreshingly and lovably stupid rich girl main character, and that it was entertaining enough for me to watch the entire thing.

Jitsu wa Watashi wa’s approach to romantic comedy was decidedly standard and traditional, especially in comparison to its summer season contemporaries–but it’s strange, ugly-cute character designs and heartfelt, almost innocent approach to its characters and comedy gave it a comfy and sort of endearing feel. I’d be shocked if I remember anything about this show other than the character designs and the general concept a year from now, but if you’re down to blitz through some inoffensively standard anime romcom fare, then you can do a hell of a lot worse.

Sore ga Seiyuu is the kind of show that I was destined to watch, not only as someone with an interest in how anime is produced, but as someone whose job is basically an extremely unprofessional version of the voice acting work performed by the characters. It goes without saying that you should watch this show if you’re into seiyuu (tho in that case you’ve probably already seen it), and it’s worth watching as a guided tour of the voice acting industry for anyone with an interest in the subject. Otherwise, I’d have a hard time recommending it since the narrative and characters aren’t particularly interesting; but for me it managed to be highly inspirational, and the episodic guest appearances and anison karaoke in the ending themes were a hell of a treat.

Akagami no Shirayukihime is among the most heart-stoppingly beautiful TV anime that I’ve ever seen thanks to superb color and setting design which I’ll probably remember for much longer than I do what actually happened in each episode. This shoujo fantasy romance felt like an extended prologue to a series yet to come, which may very well be exactly what it is; and depending on where things go from here it could turn into an excellent series in the long run. I was endeared to all of the characters by the end and highly satisfied by the central romance–more so by far than what was provided in the countless romcoms that I’ve been marathoning lately. Having said that, the lack of any real plot so far and general slowness of the series has left me wanting for more before I can regard it as much more than a very pretty distraction that reinforces my love for director Masahiro Ando. I’ll be looking forward to the second season which is apparently starting up next Winter.

Durarara!! technically aired the second part of season two or something–not that it really matters. I’ve gotten way past the point of having any idea what the fuck is happening in this show anymore, but it’s still enough fun that I don’t think I’ll ever stop watching it. You couldn’t possibly ask me to summarize what happened in either part of season two, but I think I enjoyed the second one more in general, if only because it had the chance to flesh out a lot of the new characters and plots which the first part introduced. I guess I’ll be looking forward to part three.

Shimoneta’s boring world where the concept of dirty jokes doesn’t exist was one of the most ingenious settings for a raunchy comedy series that I’ve seen in awhile, with an unexpected undercurrent of social commentary on how censorship turns a society into a bunch of ignorant lunatics; kind of playing out like the opposite extreme version of the film Idiocracy. Even the lengths to which the series was censored and the complaints that it received in its broadcast ended up playing well into its narrative themes. While its concept and humor were great, though, it’s characters came off half-baked, and the lack of a palpable sense of progress in the narrative made it harder and harder to care about the series as it went on. It’s hard to imagine watching another season of this if it doesn’t have some new tricks up its sleeve later on or tries to flesh out its central cast–but for now I enjoyed what I got enough to be satisfied.

Prison School is an absolute riot, with a brilliantly stupid premise that sells entirely on its execution; from the mostly-realistic-but-then-there’s-Andre character designs, to the style of “straight-faced comic insanity” that the main characters in Bakuman would be losing their shit over if they saw it. I’m aware that the manga is supposedly better, but the anime series was fantastic in its own right, with a vocal cast and soundtrack which could easily justify its existence, alongside continued proof of Tsutomu Mizushima’s brilliance as a comedy director. The opening theme was awesome, the high-tension, endless-series-of-stupid-plot-twists narrative was awesome, and I’m definitely excited to see if this show will get renewed for another season, or if I’ll have to read the manga.

Gakkougurashi was possibly the most unique and fascinating take on the genre of cutesy high school slice-of-life anime which I’ve seen in my eight years of enjoying it, all thanks to its suspenseful undercurrent of tension which insistently pervades, yet never jarringly intrudes upon, its surprisingly touching high school narrative. For now, I don’t want to give away too much about what gives the series its highlights, so I can only encourage that if you’re a fan of this genre and want to see it taken in a totally different direction from what you’re used to, then you owe it to yourself to check this series out. It’s certainly one of my favorites of the year so far.

Here’s a list of shows that I dropped which I didn’t think were all that bad, but which I didn’t have enough invested in to finish, which will remain on-screen until I finish the rest of this sentence. Here’s a list of shows that I dropped because I outright disliked them, which will remain on-screen until I finish the rest of this sentence. That about wraps up my impressions of the Summer 2015 anime season, which may or may not have been one of the best Summer seasons in anime history. Let’s hope that the fall season can bring something good to the table as well!

Dailymotion link (in case youtube goes down)

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Over the past month or so I’ve been constantly watching romantic comedy anime, and in the process have come to some conclusions about what elements can make or break a series within the genre for me. These rules may or may not apply to you as well, though I think all of them could be seen as fairly universal elements that most people would appreciate.

#1. Establish what I might like about the characters up front.

It’s pretty difficult to become invested in a romance story if I don’t particularly like any of the characters. This might seem kind of like an obvious facet of storytelling in general, tho I think it’s perfectly possible to make a good story with a protagonist that you’re not necessarily meant to root for, or wherein the characters aren’t necessarily good or righteous people. However, unless your romance series is a hardcore drama about dealing with a toxic relationship, it stands to reason that I’d rather watch a romance between several good, likable people than I would between a bunch of assholes or people that I don’t care about.

Sakurasou Pet na Kanojo is a series with elements of romance, comedy, and drama, which I found myself putting down after a handful of episodes upon the realization that the story had already started diving into its drama before I had actually managed to care about any of its characters. The early episodes establish how each of the characters has a unique talent or attribute of genius–excepting the main character whose crisis is jealousy over everyone else’s talents–but it never really establishes any of them as good or interesting people. Once they started getting dramatic over their various personal hang-ups, I found myself emotionally left behind–as though I’d been expected to care about this drama simply because of its own existence. I suppose this wouldn’t be impossible if I found the drama to be particularly compelling, but it would’ve been downright easy if I’d been invested in the characters already.

Sakurasou felt like it was more concerned with using its characters as tools to talk about its themes of genius instead of treating them as people whose life story just happened to be one that evoked those kinds of themes. An excellent series which managed to have similar themes to Sakurasou while also telling a great story full of imminently likeable characters was Honey and Clover–but to use an even more potent example of how much power there is in likable characters, I want to discuss a series which doesn’t really have any particular theme at all: Kimi ni Todoke.

The opening episodes of Kimi ni Todoke may be a bit saccharine for some people, but they go out of their way to establish all of the main characters as exceptionally good-natured and decent people, while also inviting us to understand their general life problems. The main character, Sawako, is largely avoided and ignored because she looks like Sadako from The Ring, even though she really just lacks the social skills to communicate with anyone thanks to a lifetime of failed attempts to do so.

Sawako falls in love with an befriends a classmate named Kazehaya–unaware that he’s developed feelings for her as well–and Kazehaya helps her to improve her social relationship within her class and to make her first real friends in the form of Yano and Chizuru. It’s only after several episodes of establishing Sawako’s friendships with each of these characters and solidifying the group’s dynamic and chemistry that the first real dramatic conflict arises with some other girls spreading rumors that Sawako is using and abusing her friends. By the time this conflict emerged, I was already invested enough in Sawako’s friendships and how they were affecting her character that I wanted to know how the conflict would be resolved. I’d even go so far as to say that I made it through two whole seasons of Kimi ni todoke largely based on the goodwill which the series bought from me by intriguing me to the characters in those early episodes.

#2. Give the characters lives outside of their romance.

Unless your character’s dream is to be a stay at home parent for the rest of their lives, they should probably have some life goals outside of earning the affections of another character. Even if the series isn’t meant to explore those elements of a character’s life as much as it is the romantic elements, it’s important to at least introduce conflicts or aspects of the characters’ personalities which exist outside of that romance, especially because one of the most interesting things about relationships is how they affect the lives of the people involved.

I really wanted to like Ano Natsu de Matteru–a gorgeously-designed and animated romantic comedy which featured one of the most adorable childhood friend characters around. Unfortunately, said childhood friend makes for the perfect example of how to write the worst kind of romantic heroine–the kind whose only personality trait is that she loves the main character.

In seven episodes of this twelve-episode series, I did not learn a single thing about Tanigawa besides the fact that she was in love with the main character, and that the other guy in her group was in love with her. Both of these loves were unrequited–the main character’s affections were directed at an alien girl who fell from the sky, leaving Tanigawa to walk around flustered over whether or not to confess her feelings across the entire show.

The biggest issue here is that I have no real reason to root for Tanigawa over anything. I don’t expect her to win out in this romance; and since she doesn’t really have anything else going for her, I can’t really cheer her on in any other aspect of her life either. Even if she did hook up with the guy, I don’t have any sense of how this would change the two of them or what their relationship would be like, unless she really does just want to become a housewife.

A series which handled this very same type of character far more skillfully was ef ~a tale of memories, with the character Kei. Like Tanigawa, Kei is romantically obsessed with her childhood friend, Hiro; but unlike Tanigawa, Kei is a star basketball player, able to rebound on her passions and even to possibly find new love after her inevitable loss to the new girl in Hiro’s life. A large part of ef is even about deconstructing what Kei actually plans to do if she and Hiro ever hook up, by having her love rival, Miya, perform the kind of wifely activities which Kei always imagined herself performing, without ever realizing that she wasn’t any good at.

But in Kei’s case, it’s pretty clear that the series was more intent on analyzing her loss in the relationship as a childhood friend character, rather than how being in a relationship might affect her everyday life. A recent anime series which did a great job of establishing its characters’ personalities and lifestyles outside of their romantic relationship was Akagami no Shirayukihime.

Shirayukihime depicts the growing relationship between a strong-willed herbalist on the run from being forced into marriage by one prince, and the other prince who quickly grows romantically attached to their powerful friendship. It’s pretty easy to imagine each of these characters having lived their entire lives without ever meeting one-another. Shirayuki would have continued with her passion for herbalism regardless of anyone she met, and Zen would’ve continued to perform his duties as a prince while hanging out with his retainers on the side.

However, this isn’t to say that the relationship between the characters doesn’t change anything about them. Shirayuki slowly learns how to rely on others and to not bottle up all of her anxieties while trying to work through everything on her own, and Zen realizes the need to prioritize the things that he cares about in life, and to strike the right balance between fulfilling his duties as a prince and fulfilling his desires as a human being. In spite of the many challenges which their relationship brings into their lives, there is a sense that this relationship is ultimately improving both of the characters, even if they could have possibly lived their entire lives without ever meeting. This kind of brings me to my next point…

#3. Make me want the characters to be together.

Nothing is more effective for getting me involved in a romance series than having a personal desire to see the characters end up and stay together. There’s a pretty broad gradient in terms of how well different shows accomplish this, and it’s kind of rare for them to completely and totally fail unless the main characters are a bunch of unlikeable shitty pervert otaku like most of the cast of Saekano or your average harem series. I can only think of one show which managed to really fail at this without having unlikable characters, which was Bokura wa Minna Kawaisou.

Kawaisou is a weird case, because its main character’s romantic interest is not only one-sided, but incredibly distant. He’s got a crush on this classmate named Kawai who happens to live in the same apartment complex as him, but she’s barely even aware of his existence and completely unaware of his personality throughout the beginning of the series. In spite of being in love with her, the main guy really doesn’t know anything about her and spends much of his time curious about what she’s like; but the series itself doles out the details of her personality very scarcely over the course of their rare interactions–and she doesn’t even seem very interesting. The main guy doesn’t have any real personality outside of being comically victimized by most of the people in his apartment complex, and altogether the whole thing left me wondering if I was really supposed to care at all about whether or not these characters ever made any romantic progress.

Meanwhile, shows like Toradora, Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches, and Lovely Complex have me rooting for the main characters to get together before the two of them have even fallen in love with one-another yet. These are series in which it’s clear that the main characters are able to function better as people when the other person is around–be that in the unsubtle way that Taiga would have questionably been able to make it through life had she never met Ryuuji, or the subtle ways that Yamada manages to bring out Shiraishi’s personality and give her something to look forward to, while Shiraishi gives Yamada a powerful support boost from the sidelines.

Most of these romantic comedies don’t give a lot of follow-through on what happens with the characters once they actually get together, but a series which started off with a couple getting married and then made me want to see them together forever was Danna ga Nani. This series takes a casual approach to its romance, once again portraying characters who could not only have easily lived out their entire lives without ever meeting, but whom we could imagine being better off in other circumstances–yet we see the countless ways that both of them help to improve and comfort one-another and end up really loving their time together, in possibly one of the most realistically-portrayed yet endlessly heartwarming love stories that I can think of.

#4. Something has to make progress, romantically or otherwise. (Unless that’s the joke.)

By far the biggest knock that most people have against romance in anime is that it take forever for anything to happen. This problem is far-reaching and often excruciating, but I don’t think that the problem is simply a lack of romantic progress. Plenty of romantic series manage to remain interesting by showing how the characters change and grow either in pursuit of their romance, or as a result of being around other characters in the show, regardless of whether they’ve managed to hook up already or not. I don’t feel miserable waiting for the romance in Toradora or Shirayukihime or Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches to be actualized, because I already can see how the characters are being affected by the progress in their relationship as it is.

Where romantic stories become painful is when I feel as though I’m sitting around waiting for something to change. A lot of the times, this happens in a romantic comedy or harem series as soon as the jokes get old. Characters will come inches away from finally revealing their feelings, only to comically misunderstand one-another and continue on with their frustrations–and that can be fine as long as the series is still funny and endearing in its own ways. Shows like Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun even seem built entirely around making fun of the idea that the characters will never end up together, and constantly manages to base fresh jokes around the comic misunderstandings of its main characters.

But when things go wrong in this department, oh boy do they go wrong. I can think of no better example than the second season of Kimi ni Todoke–and I guess you could say I’m going to spoil it, but this is the kind of spoiler that may save your life. It’s made clear from the very beginning of Kimi ni Todoke that Sawako and Kazehaya both love one-another–and based on their personalities, it’s impossible to imagine that anything is going to stop them from ending up together. The first season manages to dodge the issue of when they’ll hook up most of the time by focusing on other things: be those Sawako’s personal development, or her conflicts with other girls who are in love with Kazehaya, or the romantic side-stories of her friends. At the back end of the season, it seems like everything else has been dealt with and put aside, and all that’s really left is for the main characters to finally hook up; but, after three episodes of teasing, they don’t.

And then we get season 2. Even though the first season has put us in a position wherein the main characters are totally sure of their feelings and pretty clearly just one confession away from becoming a couple, the series drags its feet for eight more agonizing episodes by introducing all kinds of totally artificial-feeling conflicts in the name of keeping the couple apart. A guy shows up who’s interested in Sawako, Kazehaya for no reason gets all self-conscious about his feelings, and then, in one of the most stunningly infuriating moments that I’ve ever witnessed in a romantic series, both of the main characters manage to confess to one-another, while misinterpreting the other person’s confession as a rejection.

All of this treading water felt so in-my-face and like such a waste of time that by the time the main character were together, I didn’t even care anymore. So much of my good will towards these characters and their romance had been drained by the cruel way in which the series went about prolonging their inevitable relationship that I was just pissed off at all of it in the end. The last three episodes of the season actually did make progress and get things going again, but they should have happened eight, if not ten episodes earlier when it would have made sense narratively, instead of putting everything on hold in the name of squeezing out some unnecessary drama.

#5. Don’t forget that this is anime.

A vast majority of romantic anime is adapted from manga and light novels, and romance is not exactly the flashiest genre in terms of action, so it’s understandable that a lot of these series rely on dialog and narration pretty heavily to get their points across. But really, for a romantic anime to stand out as a romantic ANIME, as opposed to a vessel for drawing attention to its likely more narratively detailed source material, it needs to put the medium to use. How can it do that? By doing something like this:

[scene from Kimi ni Todoke ep 8]

This moment conveys the emotions that Sawako feels for Kazehaya purely through sound effects, music, animation and color design. We don’t need a narrator to tell us what’s going on, because we can feel it just by looking and listening.

Even a show that leans constantly on its dialog and narration can use the medium to its advantage in portraying a romantic scene. Take this confession from episode five of Bakemonogatari:

[scene from Bakemonogatari ep 5]

Senjougahara’s pose, Chiwa Saito’s performance of her strange english dialog, and the gorgeous golden light sparking in contrast with her deep purple hair all creates a moment that pops and is memorable forever in a way that it couldn’t have been if it were only text. There’s a reason that the Senjougahara figma comes with this as one of its poses, as advertised right on the box.

For one more example, Tamako Love Story is an anime-original film which is notable not so much for how it handles specific moments, but for how it handles its overall sense of pacing and tone. The film is very deliberately paced and drawn with nostalgic, intimate colors which actually look quite different from the brightly colorful TV series that it’s a sequel too, all in the name of creating the mood that it wanted for its romantic story. The equivalent to this is certainly possible in careful writing or illustration, but the exact tone and feeling of this film is something which I don’t think could be captured outside of its medium.

#6. Give me some conflict in the relationship.

This one is more of a bonus. I don’t think that every show needs to explore the conflicts which its characters may face from one-another or from external forces as a result of their relationship–especially if most of the series is spent just getting the two of them together–but I do think that reaching this stage can make a romance far more interesting.

I was actually pretty bothered by the lack of conflict in the central relationship in the early episodes of Ore Monogatari, which sees its main characters dating by episode three, and then conveys them as essentially perfect people who can do no wrong to one-another to the point that it strained the believability of the series a bit for me. I know that there is more conflict later into the series, but I’ve been more intrigued in the past watching conflicts in the relationships of other anime couples than I was while watching these characters being perfect for one-another.

Danna ga Nani once again works as a great counter-example here, as its main characters do make an exceptionally good couple, with their personalities seeming to compliment one-another, but they also run into a lot of questions about how their relationship can hold up under the weight of their lifestyles. The husband is kind of a skeevy otaku who can’t always keep himself employed, while the wife has a bit of a self-destructive streak and isn’t always sure if her life is going the way it should be. When the two of them find out that they’ll be having a child together, they have to take the conflicting parts of their relationship into consideration and work to compromise their faults and protect the stability of their relationship, which makes for some impressively compelling characterization in a series of three-minute comedy episodes.

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So, those are the six biggest things that I want to see out of anime romance. Not all six of these elements are required for a series to be worthwhile, though all of them are preferred; and I think that the best of the best are the series which get all of them right. If you want to see that kind of coherence in action, then I recommend checking out the late-90s Gainax series, Kare Kano. This show managed to establish lovable, interesting characters right from the outset, each of whom has a lot going on in their lives, yet is unmistakably affected and improved by their involvement with one-another. Their relationship is compelling and manages to make progress at an unusually satisfying pace, without ignoring the conflicts that arise both from one-another and from the people around them, while director Hideaki Anno and his team at Gainax do what they do best at making sure that the imagery and sound design push the emotions of each scene up to the next level. Kare Kano has its own problems that result from production issues in the later part of the series, leading to a very unsatisfying conclusion; but nonetheless, I think the series at its best managed to do everything right in creating the kind of romantic comedy that I want to see more of.

I hope you enjoyed this video everyone, and that if you want to see more content like this, you’ll consider supporting me via patreon or paypal, or simply by sharing this video to anyone that you think will like it. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.

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Hideaki Anno. If you’re capable of naming three or more anime directors, then he’s probably one of them. You’ve heard of him because he created and directed Neon Genesis Evangelion–one of the most influential, infamous, and acclaimed anime series of all time. If you hang around in anime communities or watch and read a lot of analytical content, then you’ve probably seen him quoted, misquoted, speculated about, praised, and derided countless times in equal measure. What you may not have been treated to much of, is the big picture. Who is this guy? What’s his deal?

Now, obviously, I am not Hideaki Anno, nor have I ever spoken to the man. I don’t even live in his country nor understand his language. Everything that I’m going to say about him is speculative as a consumer of all of his work and all of the information about him that I could find in English, and should be taken with a dash of salt. I’m going to try and paint a picture of Hideaki Anno as a director and, on some level, as a person, by way of how I understand him–based on his work, his statements, and the way that he is presented by those closest to him. Hopefully, if nothing else, this will give you something to think about, and shed some light on just what this guy has been trying to do creatively over the last thirty-five years.

For an anime director, and for a guy who doesn’t do a lot of interviews, Anno’s career and personality have been impressively well-documented. Studio Khara–a studio which he founded–contains a pretty extensive bio page detailing his entire life as an artist on its website. His early career was mostly characterized by his being one of the co-founders and main creative forces behind Studio GAINAX, whose formation has been extensively documented not only by its members, but metaphorically in the OVA series that they put together called Otaku no Video; and in the semi-autobiographical manga-cum-TV-drama-series Blue Blazes, which was written by an artist who went to college with the founding members of GAINAX and observed their formation from the sidelines.

In 1999, Anno starred in an episode of a TV series called Extra Curricular Lessons with Senpai, in which he was brought in to teach a sixth grade class at the elementary school that he once attended on how to make animation. In the process, the kids ended up going to Anno’s hometown and meeting his parents and people he grew up with to get an idea of what he was like as a kid.

After Anno married popular manga artist Moyoco Anno in 2002, she went on to write a single-volume manga series about their married life called Insufficient Direction in 2005, which was later adapted into anime in 2014. All told, there’s more secondhand information about Hideaki Anno in existence than there is of possibly anyone else in the anime industry–not to mention that he makes cameo appearances in shows like Shirobako, giving further interpretations of his character; and all of it creates a pretty clear portrait of what he’s generally like.

If there are three things which every single account of Anno’s personality have made abundantly clear, and which are vitally important to understanding his work, then they are as follows: firstly, that Hideaki Anno IS otaku. Not just AN otaku, he is one of THE otaku, to the point that he was legitimately one of the earliest people to popularize the term as something that people called themselves, and to refer to himself as such openly. Secondly, that Anno is extremely socially awkward and most likely, on some level, autistic. I’m not making that up, Anno himself has made statements to the effect that not only might he be autistic, but that anyone working in animation might be autistic on some level as well; and I would say that this comes through both in the way that he’s portrayed in others’ work, as well as in some of the characters in his own writing that he relates himself to, such as Shinji Ikari. Lastly–though this may not be quite as important to grasping his work–Anno has a very low opinion of himself, in addition to having grappled with depression for a lot of his life. It would seem by many accounts that Anno became a lot more stable after getting married, but he’s certainly never been one to speak very highly of himself or of his own work.

Anno’s career path working in animation was more than a little unusual for the time, starting after his acceptance into an arts college in 1980. While Anno had been deeply invested in animation and tokusatsu shows and had been drawing manga since middle school, he was by no accounts a diligent student, and didn’t really think much of himself as a talented individual. If anything, it seems as though Anno’s talents, having manifested in his work producing a fan-made live-action Ultraman film for school using himself as Ultraman, and doing key animation work for Superdimensional Fortress Macross as an understudy, got him scouted by his peers.

Anno ended up working on the classic Daicon animations with the small team put together by Toshio Okada in the early 80s and discovered the joys of working with a team and being given directorial powers, thus leading him into the career path of an animator. His first work to get him recognized was when he answered an ad by Hayao Miyazaki over at studio Ghibli which was looking for key animators in the course of the tumultuous production of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. Miyazaki was so impressed with Anno’s animation that he handed him some of the biggest cuts in the film, and the two have seemingly enjoyed a friendly relationship ever since.

After bouncing around doing key animation work at different studios for a while, often sleeping in those studios as well, and at some point getting kicked out of college for failing to pay his tuition, Anno found himself at the formation of GAINAX working on the Royal Space Force film; before taking up his first directing job on Gunbuster when the OVA series found itself without a director early into production.

The image that I get of Anno in the first decade of his career, is that of an immensely talented but totally directionless guy who just kind of managed to fall into a job as an animator; and, eventually, as a director. Bear in mind that most people move through the anime industry by going up ranks in the production chain, often starting as key animators, before becoming episode and animation directors, and eventually working their way up to a major directorial position. You could say that Anno did this to some extent, but compared to most people, he didn’t really do a whole lot of work in his early career, and bounced between studios and productions to an usual degree. The fact that he became a director so early on could most probably be attributed to the way that Gainax was founded, being as it was one of the only anime studios which didn’t form by breaking away from an older, existing studio, but just kind of sprung up on its own by way of hard work and guts.

I think this is important to understand, because it explains why Anno never seemed to be willing to sit still across his career, and gives perspective both to his influences, as well as to some of his infamous quotes. Hideaki Anno was never really just an anime guy–he was always big into special effects work and live action film, along with other mediums outside of animation. It just happened that the best connections he made and the places that needed his talents the most at the time were anime studios. All things considered, it really wasn’t all that far into Anno’s anime career that things started going south for him.

Not long after finishing Gunbuster, Anno was given Nadia: the Secret of Blue water as a project handed down from a TV network after having originally been conceptualized by Hayao Miyazaki. Given that Nadia is a loose adaptation of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, it isn’t difficult to imagine that it might’ve been a World Masterpiece Theater concept, given Miyazaki’s involvement with that series throughout the 80s, and given the overall style and tone of Nadia.

Whatever the case, Nadia’s production turned out to be hellish for Anno, as he found himself with little creative control over the project thanks to its producers, and the plot and production totally went off the rails in the later episodes, ending in sort of a trainwreck. Around this time, Anno and his team at Gainax tried to launch all kinds of projects which were never able to get off the ground, including an ambitious sequel to the Royal Space Force which crashed and burned after years of work in the early 90s.

This is the period in which Anno fell into his infamous depression which mythically spawned the creation of Neon Genesis Evangelion–but I think the entire image here is rather fascinating. If the journey had ended here, then Gainax would have been just a very ambitious group of young animators who somehow went beyond the impossible for a brief and glorious period before totally imploding along with the rest of Japan during the economic collapse of the 90s. However, by some completely insane stroke of luck, they managed to make Evangelion.

Believe it or not, I think it’s often UNDERstated just how much of a big deal the existence of Eva really was. To put it into perspective, Eva was practically the genesis of the new idea of original TV anime. Up until the mid-90s, TV anime was basically never created without an existing source material, unless it was being made by studio Sunrise in order to sell robot toys. All of the big, original ideas were relegated mostly to OVAs and films–which were booming throughout most of the 80s, but became difficult to find the budget for in the early 90s. Franchises like Gundam and Macross were supported by their ability to sell endless robot toys, as were the more child-oriented Sunrise shows like the Brave series; but while Evangelion did indeed feature some of the most memorable and kickass robots of anime history, it’s plain to see that Eva was cast from a different mold compared other original TV anime that existed at the time. (Plus, there’s only like three robots that would actually make decent toys.)

And that, as it would happen, was the entire impetus behind creating it. Anno and the producers who funded Eva thought that what anime needed was a big, original TV series that wasn’t based on any pre-existing work to help revitalize the medium from its slow decay over the course of the early 90s–so that’s exactly what they set out to make. Anno was given carte blanche to do whatever the hell he wanted with the series for once, and he seemingly brought in every talented person he’d ever caught wind of to put their marks on the series in one way or another. Eva was designed out the gate to be a big deal, and while it wasn’t necessarily much of one through the early part of its airing, it most certainly became one in the long run.

It’s hard to imagine that the Be-Papas boys would’ve broken off from Sailor Moon to go make Revolutionary Girl Utena, or that Sunrise would’ve given Shinichiro Watanabe permission to do “whatever he wanted” with Cowboy Bebop, “as long as it had spaceships in it,” or that someone would’ve greenlit Serial Experiments Lain or Martian Successor Nadesico, had Evangelion not become the whirlwind success that it eventually was. While it might not have done much for Anno at the time, and in fact he fell into an even deeper depression immediately after Eva finished airing, his intentions of revitalizing TV anime were totally successful, and a whole new era of animation really did begin with the release of this series.

Were I to simplify what I think Eva did that was so special as to be such a game-changer for the medium, I believe that it represented a focal point at which everything that came before collided, and then took one step further.

Evangelion was what it was because of whom Hideaki Anno was at the time. He was a hardcore otaku–so he took elements from all of his favorite shows, like Space Runaway Ideon, Mobile Suit Gundam, and Space Battleship Yamato–and others from his favorite manga such as Devilman and Getter Robo–and others from his favorite tokusatsu films, such as Godzilla and Ultraman–and he tossed in the influence of live-action sci-fi films such as 2001 A Space Odyssey–twisted it all up in his own obsessions, from power lines to infrastructure, and in his mental hangups, from his depression down to his inability to communicate with others–and he packaged it all in an unforgettable presentation with as much talent behind it as might’ve existed in TV anime at the time. In short, the man created a goddamn masterpiece.

But, like any masterpiece, the series was entrenched in problems. Anno and his team were constantly reworking and rewriting it, even during production–at times because it was not finished, and at times because of things like a sarin gas attack on a Tokyo subway that forced them to change the nature of a major subplot. Their show got too graphic for its timeslot and had to move later into the night, while the production was falling behind schedule and crumbling in their hands, forcing them to resort to more and more recap footage, and eventually to scrap their incomplete work on the last two episodes to create entirely new ones from scratch–resorting to an insane, rambling, esoteric monologue set to practically zero animation.

It’s in this period of Anno’s history where a lot of his complicated and controversial quotations come from. Anno was adamantly defensive of the last two episodes of the Eva TV series, even though it’s obvious that they weren’t what he intended them to be. You can see unfinished key animation from End of Evangelion right there in the next episode preview from episode twenty-four–it’s not like they planned to end the series on a total clusterfuck.

Taking time away from the series and watching it bloom into success afforded GAINAX the opportunity to expand on the ending and to bring it to even bigger life with The End of Evangelion–so, in a way, the failure of the last two episodes may have been a blessing in disguise. If you watch his wording when Anno defends those episodes in an interview from 1997, he says that they were indicative of himself at the time and what he was going through, and that he likes them for that reason. I think that Anno was glad in the end that there were these variable versions of the ending which represented both the ideal, and the painfully real versions of what was going on with the series at the time.

Anno has been called a troll for the way that he said things like how Evangelion has no meaning; but you can find quotes from the same period which more suggest that Anno was hoping for the audience to find meaning for themselves rather than seeking it from him. Time and again, Anno says not only of Eva, but of art in general, that its purpose is to communicate–and that he wishes for people to be able to gain an understanding of him through his art. For someone who doesn’t really know how to communicate with people directly, he tries to speak through visual mediums; and he deems his success to be in how well his viewers understand him. In a sense, I wonder if it would even be depressing for someone to ask him what he means by something, when his entire hope is that he’s communicated his meaning through his work.

Some of his quotations indicate that he was more satisfied with the response that Eva got than not, though he would incorporate the death threats which he received from some fans into the End of Evangelion film itself. He would regard the production of Eva as something like a musical improv session in some interviews, even though the actual story of the series is solidly airtight through and through. And in spite of how he called the show meaningless at some point, Anno wrote a pretty lengthy piece about the themes of the series when he announced the Rebuild of Evangelion in 2006; but this video is getting long, so we’re gonna have to talk about that more in part two. Thanks again for watching.

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The next part of Anno’s career can be potentially confusing if you don’t look into it right. In 2008, he is credited for directing Kare Kano, of which he infamously left the production after creative disagreements with the author of the original manga. He is also credited in 2008 for directing the live-action film Love & Pop–but listing them this way, as they are on Wikipedia, is actually misleading. Anno launched into writing and directing Love & Pop immediately after finishing work on End of Evangelion, and the film was released early into 1998–its creation having been spurred by the advent of digital camcorder technology, allowing Anno to get into live-action directing on the cheap without having to pay absorbent film costs.

Love & Pop is a fascinating little movie, and it’s easy to imagine why Anno would’ve wanted to make it after constantly running into production issues with anime over the course of the past decade. The film was clearly shot on the cheap and quick, and Anno went totally off the rails with his creative freedom, to the point that nearly every shot in the film is totally weird. At a glance, it would be simple to deride this film as some cheap arthouse fluff by a crazy anime man who doesn’t know what he’s doing with an actual camera–except that after about 20 minutes or so the film actually gets pretty good and kinda makes sense.

If Love & Pop convinced me of anything, it’s that when Hideaki Anno looks at a script, he seems to imagine every single line as having its own totally distinct shot to go along with it. It never seems to occur to him that he could shoot something in a standard way, or by conventional means. It’s possible even, though unlikely, that he just doesn’t know or understand the conventions–but I think if his animation work is taken into consideration, it’s more likely that Anno tries to visually communicate the emotions of every line in his script with as much weight at the words themselves.

Even if a lot of shots the in Love & Pop are clearly just meant to look weird and fun, it never seems like there’s a shot that Anno didn’t think about how it would be presented–for better or for worse. Perhaps the freedom of the third dimension was something slightly excessive to be handed to someone like him–and to his cinematographer who would go on to work with less-hyperactive yet equally experimental films like Bright Future–but nonetheless, I think it speaks to Anno’s strength of vision that his directing stands out so much in every medium.

Perhaps the fervor and energy which Anno brough to Love & Pop had yet to subside by the time he came to work on Kare Kano, because his shot compositions and the energy of how each scene flows together was even more uniquely breakneck in the early episodes of that series. Even if Anno eventually came to disagreements with the producers and with the author of the manga and ended up leaving before it was over, putting the production in a catastrophic state into the hands of his understudy, Kazuya Tsurumaki; I nonetheless believe that for what he did with it, Kare Kano was every bit as strong as Evangelion in its presentation, and is personally one of my favorite anime series of all time. To many anime fans, though, it would seem as though Hideaki Anno went quiet after leaving the show up until the announcement of the Rebuild of Evangelion.

Of course, the truth is nothing of the sort. Anno went right back to work on another live action film, with what I’d like to imagine was an “okay, fuck anime for real,” mindset after all those production issues, and released Shiki-Jitsu in the year 2000. I have to confess–I haven’t seen this film because I straight-up can’t find it. Even in this period, though, Anno was no stranger to GAINAX. He gave his voice to Naota’s cat in Kazuya Tsurumaki’s FLCL that same year, and did some storyboarding and cameos over the next two years for the studio’s Mahoromatic and Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi. In 2002 he directed the spastic anime commercial short Anime Tenchou with Hiroyuki Imaishi, and it was around this time that Anno actually started working to try to get the Rebuild of Evangelion project moving. Yes–in 2002.

Like most of what Anno involves himself with, the Rebuild project didn’t get off the ground at first, and wouldn’t do so until years later. If you think about it, especially knowing how early on it was being planned, the idea behind the Rebuild movies makes perfect sense. Even if Eva was one of the biggest and most influential anime of all time, it was still wrought with crazy production issues, and was kind of an unwieldy, confusing mess a lot of the time. The impetus to recreate the thing now that it was big and famous and could potentially pull as much money and talent as it needed to be all that it could be is pretty obvious. I would even say that Anno’s intentions of using Eva to propagate the evolution of animation was no less relevant at this point than it had been in 1995–but we’ll get back to that momentarily.

2002 was also the year that Anno married Moyoco Anno–who, as I mentioned before, would later draw a manga about their relationship and how much of an otaku Anno is. It’s worth mentioning that in 2004, when Moyoco’s famous magical girl series Sugar Sugar Rune was being adapted to animation, her husband actually did some storyboard and key animation work for the series, even though it wasn’t even remotely tied to anyone he’d ever worked with before. I just wanted to point that out cause it’s kind of adorable, and makes for a hilarious, “what the hell,” moment if you look at this part of career without knowing that his wife created the series.

Anno popped his head up a few more times as a storyboard artist on Diebuster and as a supervisor on the Re: Cutey Honey OVA, while also writing and directing a fucking hilarious 12-minute live-action film called Ryusei-Kacho, which is available right here on youtube and you should drop everything and watch it immediately after this video, it is awesome.

Having seen Ryusei-Kachou, Anime Tenchou, Diebuster, and Abenobashi, Hideaki Anno’s next live-action film–a GAINAX-produced tokusatsu adaptation of Go Nagai’s classic Cutie Honey manga which released alongside GAINAX’s own anime OVA series–makes perfect sense. Watching this film, I would just as easily have believed that Hiroyuki Imaishi or Kazuya Tsurumaki had directed it themselves. (At this point I’d have a difficult time even determining whether Imaishi and Tsurumaki developed their styles more out of working for Anno, or if they were seriously rubbing off on him.)

Whatever the case, Cutie Honey is a spastic, hilarious, carefree cartoon romp full of crazy visuals, adorable fanservice, and awesomely bad special effects. While it may not have the depth of character that Anno’s TV shows are known for, this film remains an excellent showcase of his talent for creating striking, memorable scenes that flow beautifully from image to image, and is a lot more cleaned up and coherent than his previous live-action work. I honestly kind of love this movie, and I think it fits into the overall Anno and GAINAX catalog just as sensibly as anything else they’ve ever made. It even has Mayumi Shintani playing one of the villains, whom you may recognize as the voice of Haruko, Nonon, and Shibahime, given that she almost exclusively voice acts for GAINAX series. I didn’t even mention earlier that Megumi Hayashibara, who voiced Rei in Evangelion, made cameo voice appearances in Anno’s previous films; but what I’m getting at here is that Anno’s live action work wasn’t all that far removed from his anime work–especially in the case of his Cutie Honey film.

After the release of Cutie Honey, it would seem that Anno really put his nose to the grindstone on trying to get the Rebuild series into development and establishing Studio Khara. For a while, his only appearances in the media were through random cameos in a handful of live-action films. It wasn’t until 2006 that the Rebuild films were finally announced, with the first of the planned four-part series coming out in 2007.

Now, once again, it would seem to a lot of people that from this point forward, Anno really didn’t do much of anything besides work on the Rebuild films for like ten goddamn years–and this isn’t as incorrect as it was last time. More so than trying to follow Anno’s career path from this point forward, what I’d like to try and pull apart is for what reason the Rebuilds have been presented in the way that they have been, and to what benefit.

A lot of Hideaki Anno’s infamous quotations have accused the anime industry of stagnation. He has often accused animators and directors of looking inward too much and only being influenced by other anime, instead of pulling influences from outside mediums–which is something that he’s consistently done throughout his career. He doomspoke the industry’s inevitable collapse, though later clarified that he was too harsh and mostly meant that things would fall apart if they failed to evolve. (Again, keep in mind this person’s difficulty with communication.)

These statements from Anno are nothing new–he was decrying the past decade of anime as early as 2002. In his mission statement about the Rebuild films in ‘07, he stated among his desires that he wished to fight the trend of stagnation in the industry, and to connect today’s exhausted Japanese animation industry to the future. Where these statements become strange and a little confusing, is when you stack them next to a series of films that are mostly just a remake of a twelve year-old TV show, which have themselves taken over eight years in production.

It’s hard to imagine that the Rebuild films have stayed in production for so long purely out of taking as long as they do to make; not when they’re so profitable that there are entire Evangelion stores, theme parks, extensive brand deals, and more money being made through Eva-themed pachinko alone than through any other facet of the franchise put together. There is a series–a SERIES of Eva pachinko VIDEO GAMES for the Nintendo DS. There is an Eva horse racing commercial. There is a market for Eva collectibles which is more comparable to a Sanrio character than to a typical anime series. And studio Khara itself often has a hand in producing these things, such as creating fanservicey new animations for the pachinko machines.

Evangelion is an industry in and of itself, and what better way to keep that industry running than to keep the hype alive for as long as possible? Instead of relapsing your hype train with bi-yearly reboots like Spider-Man does, you can keep an entire market afloat by blue-balling the patrons for the main attraction while billing them out of every side-show on God’s green Earth. Now of course, I don’t mean to imply that I think they could’ve released these films as quickly as they wanted to had they chosen to do so, but I can’t help but find some suspicion in the way that this project has continued, unbroken by any of its directors or the studio behind it working on any other major pictures, for over eight years now.

But I don’t necessarily mean to imply that Anno and his team are doing this out of greed. To make money, sure, but let’s return once more to Anno’s mission statement–to revitalize the dying anime industry. If you’re watching my channel, then it’s highly likely that you’ve heard me talk about the dismal state of anime funding, especially for original programs along the lines of Evangelion. Less money means less work for talented people, and less room for newcomers to get started in the industry. Animation is constantly understaffed because the industry is staggeringly underpaid. In light of all this, if someone wanted to give work to as many talented and/or young people in the industry as they possibly could, then what better way to do so than by dumping as much money into it as you can get your hands on?

In the past three years, Hideaki Anno’s intentions with the Rebuild films have seemingly become more clear. In 2012, Anno opened a museum dedicated to tokusatsu miniatures, which he saw as a valuable medium which was sprouting death flags thanks to production costs, and the increase of CG in special effects work. To commemorate the museum’s opening, he co-created an eight-minute short film with longtime friend and fellow GAINAX co-founder Shinji Higuchi, who’d spent most of his time since the 80s becoming a big-name special effects director in the world of tokusatsu. The short was produced by Ghibli and shot using miniatures, and featured a God-Warrior from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind descending on and destroying Tokyo. In 2016, Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi will be teaming up again to direct the next live-action Godzilla film from Toho studio, resurrecting the series after ten years of dormancy.

Towards the end of 2014, Studio Khara began releasing a bi-weekly series of short films entitled the Animator Expo, with Anno and Miyazaki attached as producers. Every episode of the expo features a different staff, with just about every noteworthy freelancer in the industry showing up across its run, alongside a swath of newcomers. If anything had ever seemed intended for the express purpose of injecting life into the industry of original animation, it’s the Animator Expo.

As much fun as it’s been having Anno pop up in random places, like as the voice of the main character in Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises, it can be a little sad to see one of anime’s greatest living directors get tied up with one series of movies for eight years–especially one as controversial and argued-over as the Rebuild films. It doesn’t help either that he took Kazuya Tsurumaki along with him, whom I suspect is more or less the more prominent creative force behind the films as he’s done even less outside of them in all this time. However, it stings a little less to see how they left GAINAX in the capable hands of Hiroyuki Imaishi, who cranked out some of the studio’s best work ever before branching off to form his own, even more outlandish studio in the form of Trigger. Even as a husk of what it once was with all of its big names gone, GAINAX itself is still keeping decently afloat, and they just put out an original series that a lot of people liked this year.

If there ever was a time when Anno’s career and personality seemed to be perfectly in alignment, though, then that time would be right now. Hideaki Anno IS otaku. Not just AN otaku, but one of THE otaku, to the point that he cares more about the state of the anime and tokusatsu industries than almost anyone else, and wants to see them blossom into further potential. After twenty years of being dicked around by producers and rarely getting things his way creatively, he became a producer himself, putting budgets into the hands of the industry’s most bold and audacious creative talents and letting them do as they please.

In Hideaki Anno’s afterword for his wife’s manga about their relationship, he goes on and on about how nicely her manga is able to communicate its feelings, and even goes so far as to say that it does a better job than his own Evangelion. You could easily write this off as Anno being cute for his wife, or as being overly humble–but at the same time, it totally seems like the kind of thing that he’d say in complete honesty. Anno has never liked himself much–he’s never been that confident in his creations on a personal level, and he’s always harbored a deep admiration for the work of others. If anyone was the right kind of guy to be funding other creatives and pushing their work over his own, it was this guy.

Once again, everything I’ve said here is speculation, and should be taken with a dash of salt. I don’t know Hideaki Anno any more than anyone else who’s watched all of his films and read all of his interviews, and it’s entirely possible that I’ve misinterpreted some of his intentions. Maybe the Rebuild movies really have just taken that long to make, and maybe his plans weren’t so grandiose from the start. Maybe he’s a little more confident than he lets on, or maybe his interviews are even more honest than I realize. Having been a fan of his work for as long as I have, and having read about him as much as I have, though, I feel like this portrait of his character makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t know if this is what Anno intended to communicate about himself, but it’s what I interpreted about him–and I hope that in sharing this interpretation, I’ve helped some of you to understand him a little better yourselves. Thanks again for watching.

Video sources:
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Extra-Curricular Lesson with Hideaki Anno: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh0qbJAQhgk
Daicon III and IV Opening Animations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-840keiiFDE
Otaku no Video
Blue Blazes
Insufficient Direction (manga on crunchyroll; sign up with my link, I get paid! https://crunchyroll.com/digibro )
Shirobako (on crunchyroll; sign up with my link, I get paid! https://crunchyroll.com/digibro )
Nissan commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbNE57Q-qBI
Megazone 23
Anno’s Ultraman film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJZBt6wTNe0
Superdimensional Fortress Macross
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnaemise
Top wo Nerae! Gunbuster
Eguchi Hisashi no Nantoka Naru Desho: http://sakuga.yshi.org/post/show/17634/animated-effects-eguchi_hisashi_no_nantoka_naru_de
Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water
R20: Ginga Kuukou (Route 2-: Galactic Airport): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv5jdTDlnV8
Mobile Suit Gundam
Revolutionary Girl Utena
Cowboy Bebop
Serial Experiments Lain
Martian Successor Nadesico
The Vision of Escaflowne
The End of Evangelion
Does It Matter What Evangelion’s Director Says? (Idea Channel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVm65tlhqw8

Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou (His and Her Circumstances)
Love & Pop
Shiki-Jitsu (Ritual)
FLCL (Anno also storyboarded that trippy part I used, didn’t mention)
Anime Tenchou: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm83UPreMbE
Evangelion 1.11 You Are (NOT) Alone
Kantoku Fuyuki Todoki (Insufficient Direction) (manga on crunchyroll; sign up with my link, I get paid! https://crunchyroll.com/digibro )
Sugar Sugar Rune
Top wo Nerae! Diebuster
Re: Cutie Honey
Ryusei-Kacho: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCVg49Ff9m4
Cutie Honey
Nihon Chinbotsu (Japan Sinks)
Evangelion 2.22 You Can (NOT) Advance
Evangelion Store: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ar81fnbwcA
Evangelion Theme Park: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1Lk4CO4vYQ
Eva Schick Commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDn1QoTVt2U
Eva Pachinko game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjMnTWwvqrE
Eva Horse Racing Commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV36QPB0pew
Eva pachinko DS game
Why Good Anime Is Hard To Make
Nihon Animator Mihonichi (Animator Expo) Intro: http://animatorexpo.com/opening.html
Tokusatsu Museum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3unlD_XIhQ
Giant God Warrior Appears In Tokyo: https://vimeo.com/64987176
Girl (Animator Expo): http://animatorexpo.com/girl/
The Wind Rises
Evangelion 3.33 You Can (NOT) Redo
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (on crunchyroll; sign up with my link, I get paid! https://crunchyroll.com/digibro )
Kill la Kill (on crunchyroll; sign up with my link, I get paid! https://crunchyroll.com/digibro )
Houkago no Pleiades (Wish Upon the Pleiades) (on crunchyroll; sign up with my link, I get paid! https://crunchyroll.com/digibro )
Extra-Curricular Lesson with Hideaki Anno: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh0qbJAQhgk

Further reading:

Studio Khara’s biography of Anno: http://www.khara.co.jp/hideakianno/personal-biography.html

Nearly every conceivable quote from anyone involved with Evangelion about Evangelion has been collected in this gigantic source list: http://www.gwern.net/otaku#section

Most of all the key animation work Anno did: http://sakuga.yshi.org/post?tags=hideaki_anno+

A neat little interview between Anno and Go Nagai in which Anno brings up his Devilman influence a bunch: http://devilman.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Painocus/Interview_between_Nagai_and_Hideaki_Anno

Go check out my gaming channel if you haven’t yet: https://www.youtube.com/user/VABHermitSociety

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/Digibrah
Donate: digitalboyreviews@gmail.com
My Blog: https://myswordisunbelievablydull.wordpress.com/
My Anime List: http://myanimelist.net/profile/Digibro
Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/Digibro

Text version and links:

What would happen if you took some random side-character from a relatively obscure series of pornographic video games, came up with an elaborate official fanfiction about her turning into a magical girl, and then expanded it into a detailed, multi-generational sci-fi narrative spanning over a decade of TV-shows, manga, video games, and books? You’d get the incredibly bizarre history of the Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha franchise–something which could only ever have been a product of otaku culture, and which has remained emblematic of what that culture is like for a bit over eleven years now.

The story of the Nanoha franchise began around the turn of the century, at a time when visual novels (usually erotic) were becoming a bigger part of otaku culture in Japan; with the works of studios such as Key, Type-Moon, and 07th Expansion gaining notoriety, and their anime adaptations later bringing attention to visual novels in the Western anime fandom as well. Alongside the cusp of this trend were the three Triangle Heart games, released between 1998 and 2000; each of which were similar but standalone games about love triangles involving people who were weirdly proficient at martial arts. While the series was popular enough to warrant three manga tie-ins, a three-episode OVA, and two “fan-box” releases, the series would probably have been completely forgotten by time if not for the little sister character from the third game, who would go on to dwarf the popularity of her older siblings.

Takamachi Nanoha was a minor character in Triangle Heart 3, and made a brief appearance in the first episode of the Sweet Songs Forever OVA in 2003; but her legend really began on the Lyrical Toy Box in 2001: a fan disc which included Nanoha being portrayed as Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha for the first time. Masaki Tsuzuki, the writer of the original Lyrical Nanoha short and scenario writer of the Triangle Heart games, would then go on to write every single installment of the Nanoha franchise from there on out, starting with the thirteen-episode TV series, Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha, in 2004.

In retrospect, I don’t think it’s difficult to conclude that the original Nanoha TV show was kind of terrible; however, I also don’t think it’s difficult to appreciate how the show managed to be successful as a time and place thing, or why it’s still remembered fondly by a lot of people today. After all, Nanoha was the original magical girl show aimed squarely at young adult, otaku audiences–seven years before its director, Akiyuki Shinbou, would go on to bring the “magical girl show for adults” concept to mainstream acclaim with Madoka Magica.

What the original series did so right was to strike at an empty niche just begging to be filled. It hadn’t been unknown in the past for young adult male anime fans to get into magical girl shows which were primarily aimed at young girls–but in 2004, the action-oriented magical girl franchise Futari wa Pretty Cure had just started its monolithic run, and begun to attract more otaku viewers to the genre in the process. Between the broad otaku market for shows about cute little girls, and the rising popularity of magical girl shows among that crowd, it was only a matter of time before magical girl shows aimed at otaku started gaining traction–in fact, the similarly adult-oriented magical girl series Uta-Kata aired in the very same season as Nanoha. Putting this show into the hands of one of anime’s masters of fanservice, fresh off the heels of directing the OVA adaptation of the original porn game, along with four of the weirdest, most intense hentai OVAs in history, meant that Nanoha would be hitting right for a fetish strike zone.

It should come as no shock to anyone who’s seen any iteration of Nanoha for me to claim that loli fanservice is in the blood of franchise. Nanoha’s transformation sequence gets her even more naked and much more sexualized than what’s typical of magical girl shows, and she even has nipples added on in the film version. I don’t think it’s impossible to watch and enjoy Nanoha without approving of this fanservice–(or even without noticing it)–but I do think it would be silly to deny the influence which loli fanservice has had on the show’s success in the otaku community.

Perhaps even more obviously, a huge aspect of the show’s initial popularity involved the character Fate Testarossa and her then-newcomer voice actress, Nana Mizuki. Innocent Starter, the show’s opening theme (performed by Mizuki) reached number nine on Japan’s Oricon Weekly Singles chart, and sat around the top of popular anime song lists for a while within the Japanese fandom. Fate’s design–a strange mix of badass and way too sexy for her age–was also popular; though–and everyone rolling their eyes at the reasons for this show’s popularity up until now may be shocked to hear this–what really sold her character, and the series as a whole, was her narrative arc.

The story of Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha begins when the titular character saves a cute ferret mascot from being attacked by a monster, and is eventually given magical girl powers to help it in collecting twenty-one scattered magical artifacts called “jewel seeds.” The first three episodes read like repurposed Card Captor Sakura scripts, produced by staff who were less talented in every possible regard. Not even a hint of intrigue manages to pop up until episode four with the appearance of Fate Testarossa–a rival magical girl who kicks Nanoha’s ass and takes the jewel seed, and remains adamant about refusing to share her intentions with Nanoha.

After several episodes of Nanoha trying to communicate with Fate ending in repeated skirmishes, things suddenly get weird. In episode seven, their fight is interrupted when Nanoha gets forcibly transported onto a spaceship by Chrono Harlaown of the Time-Space Administration Bureau… whatever that is. We also learn that Fate has been collecting the jewel seeds in service of her psychotic evil scientist mother, who chains her up and whips the living shit out of her for not working fast enough.

As it turns out, Fate’s mother is an intergalactic criminal from a planet which was ruined after she got fucked over by bureaucracy while operating a power plant or something, and her daughter was killed. She cloned said daughter, thus creating Fate, but is tormented by the knowledge that Fate isn’t her real daughter, and tortures Fate into searching for jewel seeds that so she can harness their power to revive the original. Meanwhile, Nanoha’s ferret friend is actually a person who can transform into a ferret and is also an alien dude, and the Time-Space Administration Bureau has all these other colorful characters who seem like they’re the actual cast of another, completely different show, and are trying to stop Fate’s mom from causing like a wormhole or something.

The part that matters is that Nanoha overpowers Fate with her friendship-powered laser beams and helps her to realize how fucked up her situation is, and to make a heel-face-turn to help the good guys in defeating her mother. In the end, the good guys win (though not without some heartache), and Fate and Nanoha get to proclaim their friendship with some very thick homosexual subtext before Fate has to be taken to space jail to attend her space trial or something. The end.

While the sheer madness of watching this magical girl show turn into one about space-time police and abusive familial relationships is sort of novel–and while Fate’s arc is… well, it’s an arc–I don’t think there’s a lot of merit to the story of the original series. Its writing is ungodly repetitive, its episodes are paced like the longest, hardest shit you’ve ever taken, and, with the exception of a couple of strange, very Shinbo-like scenes, the entire thing kinda looks like garbage.

In 2010, the original TV series was adapted into a feature film, which helped massively to alleviate some of the show’s biggest faults. The opening arc was truncated significantly, and the animation was brought up to standard quality across the board (albeit nowhere near matching the level of any high-tier anime film productions). Most notable is the big battle between Nanoha and Fate, which was retooled into an impressive sort of magical girl aerial dogfight, capped off by the most massively gigantic laser beam attack this side of Dragon Ball Z.

However, even this touched-up film version is hard to recommend to anyone but fans predisposed to enjoying it. At over two hours long, it manages to still be way longer, way more repetitive, and way slower than it needs to be, and in no way holds up well to rewatching. Besides the big fight scene, the only really noteworthy part of the film is the finale, when Fate and Nanoha finally, essentially, confess their love to one-another.

As the conclusion to the preceding film, this bit might seem pretty weak; after all, Nanoha and Fate have barely any personality to speak of at this point, and their relationship seems like nothing more than the enemies-become-friends narrative typical to the kind of kids’ shows that Nanoha was built around. However, it’s when you come back to this scene after witnessing what eventually becomes of this couple in later installments–how they actually become one of the most long-standing and functional gay couples in anime history–that it takes on some meaning as the sweet start of a beautiful friendship.

It didn’t take long after the original series’ conclusion for tie-in merchandise to start popping up left and right: besides the opening and ending singles and the soundtracks, a set of three drama CDs were released in the following year, along with a novelization of the series by the show’s writer. Exactly one year after the debut of the original series, its direct sequel, Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha A’s began its TV run; and that’s where things start to get interesting.

The most noteworthy fact about Nanoha A’s is that it’s actually pretty good. Depending on who you ask, it could even be called very good. And it’s not as though it takes a radically different direction from the original series, or that it doesn’t work as a sequel–it actually works so well as a sequel that it almost justifies the existence of the original show while laying a solid foundation for the franchise as a whole to take off from. But what’s funny about it, and what inspired me to make this video series in the first place, is that Nanoha A’s is not very good in the modern sense of the word. It’s not very grounded or believable or complex or deep or well-paced or written, or any of that stuff that today’s critics seem to look for in anime. What sells Nanoha A’s is just simply its effective, classic drama–and how that drama is delivered with boatloads of heart.

Narratively, Nanoha A’s is essentially a war story that doesn’t chose a side. It presents us with two opposed groups of fighters; each of whom has something to protect, and who are driven into a battle that they’d rather avoid. On one side, we have the entire cast of the first season (Nanoha and Fate now working part-time for the Time-Space Administration Bureau) trying to capture and contain the power of a mysterious cursed artifact known as the Book of Darkness. On the other side, we have the four guardians of the Book of Darkness trying to protect the book’s unwitting new master–a sickly girl named Yagami Hayate–by powering up the book to its full potential so that Hayate can gain power and cure her illness.

Unlike Fate’s mother from the first season, who’d just kind of gone off the deep end into the realm of destroying the universe, Hayate’s guardians have a little bit more nuance as characters, and their mission is more understandable. After living with the lonely Hayate for a while and coming to fall in love with her as family, it makes sense that they’re desperate to protect her; and with their wild gambit of using the book to save her being pretty much their only option, it seems sensible enough for them to go through with their plan–since the book, while dangerous, will not likely destroy the universe just by being activated. Seeing the backgrounds of these characters and how desperately they struggle to protect their master–even as they hurt her by leaving her alone, and realize that they’re doing something which she wouldn’t want them to do–it’s hard not to root for them just as much as, if not more so than, the main characters.

Meanwhile, alongside this great battle, we get to see the payoff and continuation of Fate’s arc from the original series. In the time since the ending of season one, Nanoha and Fate have been exchanging video mail along with Nanoha’s friends, and by the time Fate returns home, she and Nanoha’s bond has already deepened considerably. Moreover, Lindy Harlaown, the Time-Space Administration Bureau captain from the first season and Chrono’s mother, decides to adopt Fate as a daughter, and we see how Fate slowly acclimates herself to living with a happy family, and how she finally makes peace with the dream of a perfect family life that she’d always had when her mother was alive. It’s actually a touching arc, which does a lot more with the idea of an enemy becoming the main character’s ally than I’ve ever seen in another anime series.

But it’s not only the solid narrative ideas driving this series that make it good–and it certainly isn’t the execution either. Nanoha A’s still has some frustrating elements, such as no less than three battles that take up large sections of episode, only to be interrupted when a mystery man comes in and forces a win for the antagonists, rendering the entire battle pointless. It still requires you to buy into fight scenes in which characters just kind of float around in midair talking, and in which the rules of battle are ill-defined enough that anyone can basically do whatever the plot calls for them to. It’s still a show wherein the best people that the Time-Space Administration Bureau has fighting for it are a handful of ten year-old kids, who occasionally are positioned in vaguely compromising ways by invasive tentacles. It’s not as if the story suddenly makes sense, or that the characters are deep and interesting, or that the themes are any more adult than they were before–it’s still very much a corny, low-grade, late-night anime aimed at young adults; …yet, something about it is weirdly… moe?

To explain what I mean, I have to get to the heart of what moe describes as a term, which is difficult because the term itself is so ill-defined. Some people like to connect “moe” to the word “moeru,” which can both mean “budding” as well as “to burn,” especially in the sense of “burning with passion;” and I think that this kind of gets close to the right combination for understanding moe as a sensation. After all, moe isn’t so much an adjective as it is a verb–it’s a feeling which an audience projects towards a subject, and is defined more by the individual than by anything else. People use the word to describe an attraction to cute young anime characters, and sometimes describe it in terms of a database of different moe “types” that fans categorically respond to–but personally, I’ve always seen moe more as an emotional response to narrative–(whether deliberately constructed, or merely perceived)–than as a categorical response to a character’s construction. Specifically, I think that moe stems from a feeling of wanting to see something succeed which maybe isn’t quite there yet; like when you see someone trying their best, and hope that they’re going to achieve their goals.

A popular kind of moe in recent years is referred to as “gap moe,” which I’ve seen defined as “alluring discordance,” referring to when the moe factor of a character is how parts of their persona don’t seem to fit together as you’d stereotypically expect. But if I can get philosophical about it, I think that moe may exist entirely in gaps: the gaps which a fan fills in when they see a character and interpret them more fully than what exists in the context of the work; the gap between the character as they are now, and the person that they are hoping to become; or possibly even the gap between the effort that a character puts into doing something great, and the actual quality of the result. Moe, to me, is all about how we look at gaps, and the charm of how we fill them; which, strangely, fits into the more perverse ideas about moe about as nicely as any phrasing I can manage.

So what does all of this navel-gazing about otaku terminology have to do with Nanoha? Mostly, that not only are the characters themselves moe, in how they all try to do their best with utmost sincerity, but also how the show itself is moe, with how it really puts its heart into telling this sincerely earnest story about love and tragedy, by way of incredibly stupid anime tropes.

Bear in mind for a moment that Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha was the first ever TV production by studio Seven Arcs, with Nanoha A’s being the second. The studio was formed by former members of Studio Pierrot (which itself is best known for less-than-stellar productions of shounen manga adaptations such as Naruto and Bleach) in the year 2000, and started out only producing porn OVAs (such as Night Shift Nurses) with the hopes of eventually creating a full TV series. Whereas the well-established Akiyuki Shinbo had directed the first season shortly before going off to become the chief director for ever SHAFT anime for the rest of eternity, A’s was the directorial debut of season 1 episode director Keizou Kusakawa, who would go on to direct almost everything else that Seven Arcs ever made before creating a separate animation division called Seven Arcs Pictures in 2012; and other than Triangle Heart and, later, Dog Days, writer Masaki Tsuzuki has exclusively been known for writing every single installment of the Nanoha franchise, from TV shows to novels to manga.

What I’m getting at here, is that Lyrical Nanoha was what this team had. They’d put their limited talent to the test on the original series, and it had paid off with success; and it’s easy to tell just by watching it that the team really went at Nanoha A’s with everything they could muster. The artwork, animation, storyboards, character designs, and even directing are all dramatically improved over those of the first season–even if the product is still kind of just a mediocre late-night anime. It’s easy to see moments wherein the writer and director struck with ambition, even if they couldn’t deliver with the best animation or technique possible; and it pays off in scenes which, even if they don’t really look all that cool, give you the impression of what the artists had in their head and how cool it was meant to feel. Every scene and every element of the production feels passionately and even confidently crafted, as if the staff decided that even if this was a corny late-night anime, they were going to try and bring as much potential out of the script as they possibly could with the tools at their disposal–and that, I think, is what shines through in the final product, and gives the entire show a kind of gap moe of its own.

I’ve got more to say about the subtle intrigue of Nanoha A’s, but this video is running out of time, so I’ll be continuing this story in part 2. Join me then to look not only at the charming triumph of Nanoha A’s, but also to jump into the wild and wacky world of it’s big sequels; and, while you’re waiting, also head over to the youtube channel of The Davoo–he’s the one who edited this video, and he’s a really cool guy doing really cool analytical videos that are currently criminally under-recognized. If you like my style, then you’ll probably like his as well, so please give him a shot; and, as always, if you enjoyed this video, then be sure to share it around. If you’d like to support my channel, then consider donating via patreon or paypal by following the links below. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one!

This video was edited by The Davoo, who runs a pretty great analysis channel that you should totally check out: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheDavoo

If you enjoy my content, consider supporting me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/digibrony

Google Drive

Text version:

It’s easy to make assumptions about people that you don’t know. A group of teenagers: probably high schoolers. Everyone around you at the grocery store: probably bored.

The bigger the group, the broader and more biased the assumptions. City folk: probably in a hurry. Canadians: probably polite.

All of these generalizations are based on templates which we’ve created in our minds about what it means to be a so-called “normal person;” along with certain categories of normalcy which we use if we need to get more specific. When we look at strangers, we tend to think of them as nothing more than “normal;” maybe with some qualifiers, like “normal white guy,” or “normal old lady.” We think of people this way because we don’t know anything about them–and since we’re not necessarily interested in learning about them, our brains quickly categorize them by way of basic understanding without giving them much thought.

But in reality, everyone has a story of which they are the main character, in a book which only so many people will actually read from. Everyone is, in their own way, a protagonist; whether theirs is the kind of story that we’re interested in reading or not. Sometimes we get the chance to read a bit of someone’s story and it leaves us wanting to know more; and some of those stories are appealing enough to be shared until they become famous.

If you’ve never read the blog Humans of New York, I highly recommend it for getting a sense of the people passing by you every day on the street. It’s a collection of portraits coupled with quotes and short stories from random people, and it peels back the curtain a bit on the interesting things going on with every person that you ever run into. It’s a testament to the density of human stories–and so, in its own way, is Durarara.

The most important character in Durarara is the district of Ikebukuro–which is why the entire first episode is dedicated to introducing it. In order to understand what portrait I think Durarara’s author, Ryougo Narita, is trying to paint of his Ikebukuro, I think we have to start by understanding some things about the actual real-life city.

For starters, Ikebukuro isn’t a city at all. It’s a small district of Toshima City; which is, itself, not a city either, but one of the eight central wards of the Tokyo Metropolitan area. Toshima as a whole is home to fewer than 300,000 people, who are densely packed into just over five square miles of land–into which another 70,000 people commute each day. Unfortunately, I don’t know exactly how many people live in Ikebukuro specifically, but considering that it’s known primarily for being a commercial and entertainment district, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the people inhabiting it on a daily basis are commuting into the city.

The point I’m getting at is that Ikebukuro is tiny, both in terms of land mass and relative population; and this is important because of the sheer number of characters who are relevant in some way to the story of Durarara!! Going by the number of pages in the “characters” category on the series wiki, there are at least 74 named characters in the story. Beyond this, factor in all of the members of the Amphisbaena, the Awakusu-kai, the Blue Squares, the Yellow Scarves, the Toramaru, the Dragon Zombies, the Saika Army, and the Dollars, and there are hundreds, if not possibly thousands of characters tangentially related to the main events going on in the story; which amounts to a sizeable percentage of the population of Ikebukuro.

But what’s fascinating about the presentation of relevant characters in this story, is that none of them really knows how the people around them are related. Most of the named characters have their own things going on, and are really only concerned with a little bit of what’s happening in the city. It’s only when people start taking action that the ramifications of those actions begin to ripple out across the rich tapestry of human interaction that is society.

Narita’s Ikebukuro is brimming with larger-than-life celebrity characters, a lot of whom we learn about up-front: a headless biker with a cat-eared helmet; a man dressed like a bartender with superhuman strength; an information broken manipulating everyone to do his bidding; a back-alley doctor taking on supernatural patients; etc. Some of the characters are even celebrities in the traditional sense, such as the idol who is secretly a killer, and the actor who falls in love with her.

But Durarara isn’t only interested in its famous characters–it’s also interested in the unassuming high school boys who are secretly leaders of the city’s biggest gangs, as well as their shy girl friend who is actually possessed by an evil sword spirit. It’s interested in a van full of otaku who always seem to find themselves in the middle of the action, as well as the proprietors of a Russian sushi shop which is actually tied to the mafia. It’s interested in a high school stalker who knows more about what’s going on in the city than anyone else just because she wants to be able to protect her boyfriend, as well as an otherwise normal little girl who finds out that her father is a mafia boss.

In Ikebukuro, everyone has a story. Even the people who seem normal at first are hiding a more exciting secret, and all of them are connected in ways that they might not even realize. The grey mass of supposedly irrelevant background pedestrians could actually turn out to be a massive number of interconnected gang members organizing themselves via internet forums–which is exactly the case during the show’s biggest payoff in episode eleven.

To me, Durarara has always looked like a celebration of humanity’s intrigue, presented in a twisted, supernatural form. It’s a fiction-is-just-as-strange-as-truth approach to showing just how much is going on in the world around is, and how connected everybody really is. Parts of the time, it’s about the buildup to the big moments when all of the pieces of the story fall into place in one giant spectacle; but even more of the time, I think it’s about moments like this from episode four of season two–when a huge group of otherwise insane characters in the middle of their own crazy narratives all sit down for a hot pot together. Most of them don’t even know what the others are going through–they all simply see one-another as friends–yet all of them are actually protagonists.

All of this is what makes Orihara Izaya such a perfect villain for this story. Izaya loves people more than anything, and is fascinated by learning about and becoming a part of their stories. He’s a person who wants to lift up and shake the tapestry of society until it ripples and folds in on itself.

One of his best scenes comes in the first episode of X2 Ten, when he’s attacked in his hospital bed by a girl that he tormented in the past. She was someone whom he saw as normal–lacking connection to the sub-world of abnormalcy over which he reigns supreme–and who’s now been dragged into his world by her own actions. Izaya wants to change and to connect everyone’s stories in an even more complex and chaotic web, in the name of turning Ikebukuro into a battlefield befitting of Valhalla; and he does this by having the best grasp out of anyone of how everyone in the city is connected. In episode seven of X2 Ten, he invites his own crew of newly connected villains to have their own hot pot moment.

My favorite piece of dialog in all of Durarara comes from Izaya’s speech to Mikado in episode twelve. He tells Mikado that life in Tokyo will become normal in about six months, and that if he wants things to stay interesting, then he’ll need to get into some underground stuff–which will then become normal to him after a few days. In order for things to stay abnormal, he’d have to be constantly evolving–but Izaya’s advice is to “enjoy everyday life.”

At a certain point, especially in the second season, that’s exactly what Durarara becomes–if it’s not what the series was all along. As the episodes have become more and more disjointed, the plot more vague, and the payoffs more minute, it seems more and more like Durarara is just the story of a bunch of normal people living their everyday lives, which coincidentally run into one-another and suck more and more people in as they go along. It just so happens that being a normal person in Ikebukuro is the same thing as being a total badass.
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Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha is an interesting franchise filled with interesting shows, in a way that renders the relative quality of those shows as kind of an afterthought. Nanoha is not often worth watching for being a tightly constructed narrative, or for presenting thematic ideas that will cause one to reflect on their life; more often, it’s worth watching because of the many strange little details that just can’t be found anywhere else.

One thing the franchise became famous for is its surprising cross-genre appeal towards mecha fans, who find themselves attracted to the cool-looking and very mechanical-feeling weapons and their weirdly complicated naming schemes. While the first series introduced the idea of magical girls whose battles were ripped straight from Dragon Ball Z, and whose weapons would seem at home in the hands of a giant robot, Nanoha A’s opened the floodgates on different weapon types and crazy new forms of attack. Every mage has their own named, talking weapon, which has its own set of named attacks, its own unique fighting style, and speaks a different foreign language–and most of them can even morph into several different forms. Early into the series, Nanoha and Fate’s weapons, Raging Heart and Bardiche, are badly damaged, and literally *ask* to be fitted with dangerous upgrades as a matter of pride in the name of protecting their masters. To rephrase that: Nanoha A’s is a show in which sentient mecha weapons get pissed off after losing to better weapons, and ask to be upgraded in the name of hot-blooded passion. They find themselves fitted with a new cartridge-loading system, which never fails to look badass in action.

This is the kind of thing that you really only get with Nanoha, and it’s the kind of thing that attracts very specific types of niche fans. After all, mecha fans are basically defined by the fact that they’ll pretty much watch anything as long as it has mechs in it–if it’s actually good, then that counts as a bonus. Likewise, people looking for these kinds of character designs, or this kind of vibe, or this brand of drama, will find their incredibly specific niche filled with Nanoha; and a lot of the strengths of the series are in how it fills its weird niches so perfectly.

Seeing an anime character’s rival end up joining their team, making friends with all of their friends, and attending their school, is something I’ve seen a million times; but somehow, the idea that said rival had to spend six months waiting for a criminal trial in space while exchanging video diaries with her new friend, was such a fresh and novel take on the idea that it brought the entire show to life for me in a way that it might never have felt otherwise. Then, to continue riding that arc by actually acknowledging the character’s lack of parentage and having them get adopted by one of the other characters, brought the whole thing to life even more. Whereas most anime seem to consider parents nothing but an afterthought and present teen characters and their drama in a void, Nanoha A’s not only sorts out Fate’s home situation and acclimates her properly to normal life on earth, but it even ends with Nanoha and Fate actually letting their parents and friends in on what they’ve been doing all this time so that they can move forward in their magical studies with the proper blessing of their families. Again: I can’t really get this in a lot of other places.

What’s cool about all of the weird details in Nanoha is that they weren’t necessarily things that had to be there in order to tell the story. There didn’t need to be a Time-Space Administrative Bureau suggesting a vast universe of possibilities within the realm of the franchise. They didn’t need to present the Book of Darkness as some kind of strange device running programs that develop personality by way of their interactions with humans. The details about how fighters from different planets fight with different techniques, or how the commander was originally from England, or how Yuuno’s powers make him some kind of super-librarian, were all basically superfluous and could easily have been left out.

However, I think the fact alone that these details are so unnecessary is exactly what makes them so effective. Nanoha’s universe doesn’t feel very concrete or make a whole lot of sense, yet it manages to feel alive because its characters have so much background and so many random things to do. I don’t remember Zafila doing basically anything when it came to the main plot of the series, yet the scene at the end when Arf tells him that you can move around more easily in human society by taking the form of a small puppy, and then we see Vita walking with him in the post-credits, immediately made both him and Arf feel more like characters than they ever had felt prior to that. Similarly, the crux of Vita’s arc in the middle of the show when she’s slowly starting to fall in love with Hayate happens when she decides to buy a toy bunny at the store, and this moment of giving into her humanity is how we understand that she’s starting to develop emotions.

All of these details give the sense that, even if the logic holding this universe together isn’t all that apparent to us, it does in fact seem to exist. There is a reason behind every character’s actions and feelings, and there are reasons that they are capable of certain things and incapable of others. Do I know why Chrono’s magic manifests itself one way, while Yuuno’s manifests in another? Not really–but when Chrono uses his binding magic on the twin familiars who trained him, and they growl that they never taught him this kind of magic, I can understand the idea that magic is an intricately complicated system which probably makes sense to the characters.

Again, none of this is necessarily to say that Nanoha A’s is a good show because it has these elements. I would still say that it’s kind of boring, wastes a lot of time, and gets pretty ass-pull-y as it moves towards the climax. But again, I don’t think the relative quality of the series is nearly as interesting as the simple fact that it is what it is. It’s this weirdly unique magical girl sci-fi show that operates with so much sincerity that I can’t bring myself to accuse it of not making sense–I’d more readily be willing to say that it totally makes sense and just doesn’t explain itself well.

In 2012, Nanoha A’s was adapted into a two and a half-hour film, which came as a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the film is far and away the best-looking installment of the franchise to date, and is comprised largely of impressive-looking action sequences. On the other hand, in spite of cutting out a lot of the redundant and boring scenes from the show, the film ends up running through its plot points at such breakneck speed that they lose impact completely. What really sucks about this is that the film actually restructures a lot of the major plot points to make more sense and to flow into one-another better–and I’d even say that most of the dialog is improved in comparison to the TV show. A bunch of scenes were added in to flesh out Reinforce as a character throughout the story, Hayate is presented with a bit more personality, and we also get to see a lot more of Nanoha and Fate spending time together. None of this does much to help the film function as a stand-alone work, though, and I definitely wouldn’t recommend it as anyone’s first exposure to Nanoha A’s–but as a fanservice vehicle or supplementary material, it might be worth checking out for fans of the show.

Considering how the movies are supposedly an in-universe fictionalized retelling of the events of each series, with all of their changes being effectively non-canon, it actually seems like the franchise itself is canonically playing around with the idea that it doesn’t always provide a full perspective of what’s happening. At the very least, I can’t shake the feeling that the Nanoha universe is more fleshed-out and well-realized inside of Masaki Tsuzuki’s head; and where this quickly becomes increasingly apparent is when the franchise suddenly and massively opens up as it moves into its third series, Nanoha Strikers.

By the time Nanoha Strikers began its 26-episode run in April 2007, Nanoha reached the point of starting to look like a proper multimedia franchise. In addition to another series of drama CDs released after Nanoha A’s an assortment of manga chapters were published alongside each series, often filling in little slice-of-life details between episodes, or later showcasing some of what happened during the six-year time skip at the end of A’s. Fan books and other promotional materials started appearing, along with little 4-panel comics tied into each of the different seasons, and the expanded universe of Nanoha’s story quickly began to take root.

If Nanoha A’s was all about establishing this firm emotional groundwork within a very small, tightly-knit story for the rest of the franchise to take off from, then Nanoha Strikers is all about taking the ideas of the Nanoha universe and seeing how far it can go with them. Right off the bat, it seems to cast off the conceit that this is supposed to be a magical girl series at all, with a much stronger focus on fantasy action. Set ten years after the events of Nanoha A’s, even the saccharine friendships of the characters have exceeded what would be normal for a magical girl show, as the main cast reaches adulthood and doesn’t change in the slightest.

By now, the at-home slice-of-life elements have pretty much been done away with, as the story takes place on some kind of alien world with a ridiculous amount of planets visible in the sky, and almost every character now has some kind of important job at the Time-Space Administration Bureau. In the past four years, Hayate has been trying to organize her own action unit, with Nanoha and Fate as her leading officers, and Nanoha herself seems to have taken on a minor celebrity status among the mage community. The series opens with the three of them training new recruits to join their team, and if you try to think too hard about the logic behind any of these world-building elements then your brain will probably start to hurt, so it might be better to roll with the punches like Subaru.

Speaking of Subaru, it’s actually kind of impressive how much stronger of a start Strikers gets off to compared to the previous series. Not that it’s saying much, but Subaru and Teana start off with more personality than most of the cast has ever had up until this point, and between them and Hayate, we’ve actually got a lot of properly defined goals for the characters to pursue. The early episodes launch straight into some fairly well-done action scenes, and it’s pretty clear that Seven Arcs have gotten even more ambitious with their production efforts (though most of the soundtrack still sounds like corny freeware-produced visual novel BGM).

If I’m being honest, though, the real intrigue of these early episodes has less to do with their quality, and more to do with the facts of what goes on in them: Nanoha, Fate, and sometimes Hayate regularly sleeping together as adults–the magical spirit of the book of darkness being reincarnated as a tiny adorable fairy girl named Reinforce Zwei–the guardians of the book of darkness remaining unaged, even as the rest of the cast grows older–Fate regularly taking custody of powerful orphaned kids the way Linda did for her–the fact that the magical girls fighting in the first two seasons are now adults with much grander ambitions, who are also training a new generation of magical girls; all of this, once again, is the kind of stuff that I can only get from Nanoha Strikers. It’s such a uniquely bizarre and satisfying concept to see Nanoha and Fate all grown up, seemingly properly together, still kicking ass and driving the plot forward, that it made me want to watch the entire Nanoha franchise just to get to see these characters grow up. It really is a lot like watching the magical girl version of Dragon Ball Z.

One of my favorite elements of Strikers is how it lends a lot of weight to the ten years of activity which we never got to see from its main characters. Nanoha, Fate, and Hayate haven’t just been sitting around for ten years–they’ve made all kinds of new friends and enemies, and seemingly had repeated run-ins with opponents who might’ve given them just as much trouble as the ones they faced in their childhood. There’s something almost surreal about the way that everyone refers to them as “childhood friends,” when to us we only ever saw them at the time when they’d just met. The universe of the story has a tangible sense of existing ten years in the future of the previous shows. In episode nine, we even get an excellent scene which recontextualizes Nanoha’s previous adventures as the dramatic struggles of a mage pushing herself way too hard and suffering the consequences for it, which affects the way that she trains her students today.

After about ten straight episodes of team building between the main characters, Nanoha Strikers introduces a metric fuckton of antagonists during one major battle–as well as some political adversaries for Hayate on the side–and the plot begins moving forward in earnest. Also, Nanoha and Fate kind of end up with a daughter; did I not mention that was going to happen?

Vivio’s subplot is by far my favorite thing that happens in the Nanoha franchise, and what finally justified the entire thing to me in the long run. Something about watching Nanoha and Fate trying to play parental roles to this child that they ended up with out of nowhere finally brought their characters to life for me, and indeed the knowledge that this was going to happen was a big part of why I wanted to watch all of Nanoha to begin with. Call it a novelty thing or whatever you want, but I reserve my right to be excited at what is probably the only lesbian couple to grow up and adopt a child together in anime history.

None of this is to gloss over the many reasons that Nanoha Strikers is far from a masterpiece. At heart, it’s still a dumbass action show with plenty of poorly thought-out or downright silly worldbuilding elements. My favorites are whenever the show tries to justify it’s weird plot contrivances: like when it’s explained that Subaru and Ginga were partially taken in because they just happened to actually look like they were the daughters of the adoptive mother who found them; or when nobody dies in the middle of a huge, dramatic battle scene because the villain supposedly loves people in general; or when the villain turns on a bunch of magical monitors during the final battle for some reason, making it easy for everyone to communicate. I still don’t understand how Fate raised both Erio and Caro in basically the same way, yet never at the same time, in spite of them being the same age and eventually working together; and there’s also, like, a combat nun, from the church of who knows what–it can get really goddamn cheesy. It feels like Masaki Tsuzuki just writes the outcome that he wants for his characters, and worries about the logic afterwards, usually by brushing said logic under the rug and going along his merry way.

Like the shows that came before, Nanoha Strikers is still pretty drawn-out and has some boring episodes, though overall I found myself a lot more invested in the characters and their goals, which left me more willing to stick with them through the slower moments than I’d been in the previous seasons. The big action scenes were even more confusing and full of ass-pulls than ever before, although the special powers were at their most diverse and exciting. Any time the show started setting up some kind of big tactical scenario, I found my brain just kind of hazing over until it got to the part where people actually started fighting–but at least the consequences of each major battle were a bit more meaningful than those in A’s. This isn’t ordinarily something I get hung up over in anime, but I was a bit let down by the lack of deaths in some of the major battles, especially considering how many characters there were on both sides of the conflict; but then I also understand the motivation to keep as many characters around as possible for use in future installments. Around episode twenty, the plot became convoluted enough that I wasn’t entirely sure what the hell was going on, but by the end of the next episode everyone was fighting again, so it didn’t matter all that much.

Production-wise, I think Strikers may have been too ambitious for its own good. The moment-to-moment quality of the art and animation is lower than it was in A’s, but only because it’s trying to do so much more than A’s was, with every episode containing way more individual cuts, a much larger number of characters, and no shortage of lengthy action scenes. In the end, I think Strikers is a lot more visually exciting and entertaining than the previous shows, but also reveals a lot more strain on its budget and talent than Nanoha A’s did.

As corny, cheap, and silly as Nanoha Strikers was, I ultimately couldn’t help myself but to enjoy it. Something about the earnest sincerity of all of these characters and their struggles had me backing them up every step of the way through the hilariously goofy story–and when the insane six-episode climactic battle happened, I was more or less on board for the entire thing. Strikers was easily my favorite of the first three shows, if only because it had so much more stuff going on and was so much more exciting to watch.

For a lot of fans, Strikers has been more or less the end of the Nanoha series for the past eight years now. While the first two seasons were adapted into films in 2010 and 2012, there wouldn’t be a proper new anime installment in the franchise until 2015. However, that’s not to say that the series went quiet–it simply shifted its medium of focus. In part three of this Nanoha Retrospective, we’ll be taking a look at the manga sequels and spinoffs which started running in the wake of Nanoha Strikers, as well as exploring some of the anime and manga which were directly influenced by the Nanoha series.

Be sure to join me then, and if you have any thoughts about Nanoha A’s or Strikers, then be sure to leave them in the comments below. This video was once again edited by The Davoo, whose channel is a lot like mine but with a broader focus, and is very much deserving of your attention! If you enjoyed this video and want to help us to create more like it, then please support my channel via patreon or paypal by following the links below. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one!

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The anime-within-an-anime is a time-honored running gag that pops up all over the place in different shows and is always a blast; but today we’re going to be looking at three specific anime-within-anime which give an interesting historical perspective on the time period in which their parent shows were made. Specifically, we’ll be looking at Kujibiki Unbalance, EXODUS, and Third Aerial Girls Squad, which share a number of similarities in their intent that we’ll get into as this video goes along.

Before we dive into the first of these shows-within-a-show, let’s look at the parent series that it comes from–namely the 2002 manga/2004 anime series, Genshiken. Originally running for four years before picking up with a direct continuation in 2009 which remains ongoing, Genshiken was the story of one college club dedicated to the study of modern visual culture–meaning, essentially, anything related to otaku fandom. Its characters were a lovably broken handful of hardcore otaku going about their everyday lives; playing fighting games, watching anime, and buying tons of porn.

What made Genshiken particularly remarkable was its realistic art style and portrayal of its characters, which frames them as real-life otaku interacting with a world of anime without really being inside of it, in spite of actually inhabiting an anime and manga series. If you want to hear more about Genshiken, I just guested on an episode of Mangapod talking about the first three volumes, so go check that out–but for now, the most important thing to know about Genshiken is just how it’s meant to be a realistic portrayal of the otaku of its time–which is part of what makes Kujibiki Unbalance so important as the show-within-the-show.

In the original Genshiken manga, Kuji-An was a popular shounen manga series which everyone in the club was obsessed with, and which they were hoping would receive an anime adaptation sometime soon. What little details we learned about the series mostly came from the after-chapter pages, which were supposed to be from a fanzine that the club members put together in which they talk about things like their favorite moments and characters from the series, as well as describe who they play as in the fan-made Kujibiki Unbalance fighting game.

In the anime version, Kuji-An has already been adapted into anime, but otherwise serves pretty much the same purpose. Not long after the first season of Genshiken finished airing, the team behind it produced an actual three-episode OVA of Kujibiki Unbalance, which is meant to cover the first, twenty-first, and twenty-fifth episodes of the twenty-six episode fictional TV series, and is directed by one Tsutomu Mizushima, who would go on to direct the later seasons and OVAs of the Genshiken TV series itself.

Kujibiki Unbalance could not have been a more spot-on representation of what was going on in anime culture at the time. It arrived on the wings of the moe boom, when visual novels were becoming all the rage, and were just starting to be adapted into anime with stuff like Kanon and Da Capo in 2002; and when the generic high school harem rom-com was starting to take a singular shape among the works of Ken Akamatsu and his ilk. The characters all have extremely round faces and weirdly proportioned bodies which kind of remind me of the designs in the original Higurashi visual novels, without being quite as clean as the puni-moe stuff coming out of places like Madhouse at the time. It’s worth noting that in the context of the Genshiken canon, the artist of Kuji-An was apparently a doujin artist before he became a professional manga creator.

All of the characters are given the kind of garishly solid and primary-colored hair which was typical almost exclusively of the early-2000s, and every design has some kind of obvious gimmick–be it a giant helmet, or a scarf, or goggles, or lime-green thighhighs, etc. Somehow, the design sense has always reminded me a lot of Mai-HiME, which may have represented something like the start of this genre’s evolution alongside stuff like Idolmaster Xenoglossia or Code Geass. The main character is an almost dead ringer for Negi Springfield, but you could basically substitute him for any character of that type.

Narratively, Kuji-An feels like an even mix between visual novel and high school comedy tropes. The forgotten and mysterious history between the main character and the student council president feels like something right out of Kanon, as does the overly sentimental freeware soundtrack that constantly riffs on the mesmerizingly catchy opening theme. Each character has their own distinct quirk or special ability, sometimes dipping into the supernatural or unrealistic, and in the first episode, the main character sort of encounters their quirks one-at-a-time, like playing the intro to a visual novel.

Kuji-An has that just right mix of totally goofy, irreverent comedy hijinks and way the hell too self-serious drama that’s so common to high school anime–and the very definition of anime from this time period. Episode twenty-five has the characters at their low point, trading back and forth really trite, vaguely emotional-sounding dialog, while beating you over the head with the show’s incredibly vague theme of luck in a way that only a Key story from the late 90s could.

The show’s midsection, represented by the fake episode twenty-one recap montage, reads like a condensed version of an entire season of Negima or some other generic high school rom com with a lot of girl characters; random, wacky episodic situations with the occasional bad excuse for fanservice, that all apparently has the underlying message of showing just how much this group has been through together. In terms of watchability, I’d definitely say that this is the most fun episode of the OVA, in that it’s actually pretty funny at times beyond simply being an on-the-nose recreation of what generic anime looked like in 2004.

It’s worth mentioning that in the context of the Genshiken anime, the Kujibiki Unbalance anime was apparently fraught with a lot of problems common to anime adaptations of then and now–lackluster animation quality, a change in tone and director halfway through the series, and an ending that doesn’t really resolve anything since the manga is still running. Later into the series, another Kujibiki Unbalance TV anime starts up, but doesn’t continue the story, and is instead a total re-imagining of it with different character designs, reflecting not only what happened to the Negima series around the same time, but also what happened, in fact, to the real-life anime version of Kujibiki Unbalance.

Strangely enough, in spite of how deliberately and hilariously trite the entire concept of Kujibiki Unbalance was, it kind of turned into its own miniature franchise. A series of three light novels were released from 2004 through 2006, and then a full-on twelve episode reimagining of the series went to air 2006, which itself ironically came packaged with three OVA episodes of its parent series, Genshiken, and then received its own manga and light novel adaptations in 2007.

The 2006 series isn’t really worth talking about here since it actually makes an effort to be a real show and not a blatantly generic send-up, but it is kind of fascinating to see how different the art style is compared to the OVA. The backgrounds are much larger and more detailed, and the designs have been made sleek and subdued with much more earthy color schemes. It actually looks a bit more modern than some of the stuff that aired alongside it, and has a strange and distinct sense of animation; though I still wouldn’t really recommend it.

Moving along to our next two shows-within-shows, we’ll need to jump a whole decade after the release of the Kuji-An OVA to yet another series directed by Tsutomu Mizushima: the 2014 instant-classic Shirobako. Not unlike Genshiken, Shirobako has been renowned for its realistic portrayal of its characters and their brutally stressful adventures in anime production. It’s a series that really gets into the bones of everything that goes into creating anime, and I cannot possibly recommend it highly enough–it’s currently in my top 5 favorite anime, please watch it.

Each half of Shirobako follows its characters through a large part of the production of a twelve-episode anime series–the first half dealing with the anime-original series EXODUS, and the second being a fictional manga adaptation called Third Aerial Girls Squad. Each of these fake shows were given OVA specials with the Shirobako DVDs, recreating their supposed first episodes; and like Kujibiki Unbalance before them, they represent a lot of what’s become popular lately in typical otaku-oriented anime.

Of the three shows I’m tackling in this post, EXODUS is perhaps the least obvious about exactly what it’s supposed to be, though it features some unquestionably modern trappings that will eventually date it just as perfectly as Kujibiki Unbalance. For starters, there’s the fact that it’s about an idol group, and that it opens on their incredibly awkward CG dance sequence. If you’ve been watching… basically anything lately, this should all seem familiar. The characters make references to current anime buzzwords like “chuunibyou,” while checking their status on youtube and twitter using smartphones to see how much progress they’ve been making as idols.

After some racy fanservice scenes towards the start, the girls find themselves embroiled in a strange murder mystery plot that unfolds in a way that kind of reminds me of Eden of the East of all things–but doesn’t really have an obvious parallel to anything I can think of. The juxtaposition of edgy violence against cutesy characters does remind me of two other comically violent Tsutomu Mizushima shows from the past five years, though.

The character designs are also kind of odd, since they look a lot more like the sort of borderline magical girl idols that you’d find in kids shows like Aikatsu or Lilpri than they do the girls from your typical otaku idol show. There is one thing that came after EXODUS which has a lot more of the same feeling, which is the Spring 2015 series SHOW BY ROCK.

If EXODUS isn’t as easy to pin down, though, then Third Aerial Girls Squad most certainly is. One look at its cast of cute girls who happen to be passionate pilots of military-realistic fighter planes should conjure to mind yet another popular Tsutomu Mizushima-directed series–this time, 2013’s Girls Und Panzer. However, while the series isn’t super heavy on fanservice, the overall look and feel of the first episode is a bit more reminiscent of Strike Witches or Sky Girls. And, of course, it can’t go without mention that the second half of Shirobako ran alongside the anime adaptation of Kantai Collection, which probably shares the most in common with the overall tone of Third Aerial Girls Squad out of all the moe-meets-military shows.

Indeed, Third Aerial Girls Squad fits squarely into one of the weirder niches which has gotten pretty big over the past half-decade, of combining large groups of adorable, passionate girls with some kind of harshly realistic military or adult hobby. I’d even put stuff like the mahjong series Saki into this boat as well, though Third Aerial Girls is pretty clearly going for the military stuff. The fact that the series has an excuse written in for why only planes from the 70s and prior can be used in its setting is about as spot-on as it gets; as is the vague yuri vibe going on between the main character, Aria, and the amnesiac girl Cathy whom she rescues.

If I have a problem with Third Aerial Girls as a parody, it’s that I think the episode manages to be a lot more boring and generic than anything else in its genre besides maybe Kancolle–but I guess that’s probably the point. Its character designs, however, are pretty striking and distinct, coming from the very same artist who drew the Girls Und Panzer manga, but with the addition of some really stylistic and captivating eye shapes. Considering these, it’s hardly surprising that the artist has also produced his own two-chapter fanzine of the series.

Looking back on each of these shows-within-shows paints a pretty interesting picture of how much anime has changed over the past ten years; and also how much it hasn’t. Shows in the vein of Kujibiki Unbalance have never really disappeared, though the look and feel of the OVA is so perfectly early-2000s that it could never possibly exist in any other era. Likewise, EXODUS and Third Aerial Girls represent popular movements in anime that are sure to continue for years to come; but elements like the tacky CG dance sequence or the incredibly specific genre trope of cute girls piloting 70s war machines are probably going to date them both to this time period in another ten years.

How do you feel after seeing these shows-within-shows next to each-other, and what do you expect to be the trends that Tsutomu Mizushima finds himself lampooning ten years from now? Let me know in the comments below; and as always, stick around if you want to see more videos like this in the near future. Support me via patreon if you want to help me in making those videos, and share this around to anyone that you think would appreciate it. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one!

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This video was edited by The Davoo, who runs a pretty great analysis channel that you should totally check out: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheDavoo

If you enjoy my content, consider supporting me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/digibrony

Nanoha Strikers was a successful and popular series–but it was also a divisive one, especially among existing Nanoha fans. Those who liked Nanoha more for its magical girl elements were let down by the focus on sci-fi action, and a lot of people weren’t happy with the aged-up characters presented in StrikerS. This posed a quandary for the series going forward, as some fans were hoping for more content in the vein of Nanoha A’s, while others would rather have seen the story continue from where StrikerS left off. Whether or not this conflict is what caused the dearth of Nanoha TV anime over the next eight years is beyond my ability to research–but whatever the case may have been, Nanoha’s multimedia elements quickly became the central focus of the franchise in the wake of Nanoha Strikers.

On one front, we had the StrikerS drama CDs picking up with side stories after where the show left off, alongside the continued onslaught of supplementary manga tie-ins. Then, in 2009, two separate sequels to Nanoha Strikers began running at the same time–Nanoha Vivid, which is still running to this day, and Nanoha Force, which was put on indefinite hiatus in 2013.

On a whole different front, we also had a series of PSP games that started releasing in 2010, which take place in an alternate-timeline version of the Nanoha A’s continuity, and have their own original characters and tie-in manga as well. In 2010 and 2012, we got the movie adaptations of the first and second shows, which made a number of changes from the originals, and which both had their own manga tie-ins that also had *their* own changes from the original. Don’t quote me on this, because researching it got really confusing, but I believe that there are, in total, FIVE different versions of the original Nanoha story written by Masaki Tsuzuki–the TV show and drama CDs, the film, the novelization, the manga version of the film, and then another manga version called ORIGINAL CHRONICLE Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha the 1st, which combines elements from all of them.

In 2012, an entirely different Nanoha chronology opened up with the manga series and mobile game Nanoha Innocent, which apparently is an alternate-universe story about the girls… playing card games; and this honestly doesn’t even surprise me.

Seriously, there are so many goddamn Nanoha manga tie-ins that I couldn’t reliably track all of them down. Some of them haven’t even been translated; and once you start looking into them, they start getting really weird. One thing I found was an official twelve-page one-shot called Magical Girl Fatal Fate, which takes place a month after the original show and is about Fate watching too much magical girl anime and having dreams about saving Nanoha. It’s super bizarre.

There also is more Nanoha fan material out there than I think any one person could ever consume. The sheer wealth of doujinshi (both safe and unsafe for work) is beyond what I can reasonably comprehend, and there’s even a few fan-made games. Also noteworthy is the huge number of toys and other products made for each of the anime series, including some of the earliest releases in the Nendoroid and Figma lines.

During this span of time is also when the influence of the Nanoha franchise really began to show itself on the anime and manga landscape. The existence of stuff like Nanatsuiro Drops and the Moetan anime adaptation could probably be attributed to Nanoha’s success–but the most noteworthy series to be clearly influenced by Nanoha was the Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya manga, which began running in late 2007.

Just like Nanoha, Prisma Illya takes a relatively minor loli character from the extremely popular Fate/Stay Night series of erotic visual novels and recasts her as a magical girl in a parody series which gradually develops more of a serious plot as it goes along. Prisma Illya has a much stronger focus on comedy and fanservice than Nanoha does, but unmistakably comes from a similar place of intent. In 2013, it got its own anime adaptation, which is currently on its third season and enjoying a fair deal of success. The Prisma Illya connection is particularly noteworthy because there was actually a two-chapter crossover manga between Nanoha and the Fate series in 2010. It wouldn’t be surprising either if the germ of the idea for 2011’s Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica was a result of Akiyuki Shinbo’s involvement with the original Nanoha TV series.

The manga series Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha Vivid was adapted into a twelve-episode TV anime in the spring of 2015, and I attempted to watch it while it was airing before I’d gotten around to finishing Nanoha Strikers. At the start of episode three, there was a moment in which I realized that this show had way too damn many characters whom I didn’t recognize, so I decided to watch all of Nanoha from the beginning–which lead to the creation of this video series. Having now caught up with everything, I can say with some confidence that had I not finished Nanoha Strikers just a day before starting the Vivid manga, I would still have no idea who any of these characters are–and indeed, it took a while before I could even tell some of them apart without seeing their hair colors.

Nanoha Vivid is sort of an accumulation of all the things which have happened in the series up to this point. If you didn’t pay attention during Strikers, then good luck trying to identify most of the supporting cast, which consists primarily of the minor villains who were reformed in the resolution of the previous series. There’s even one relevant character who’d previously only showed up during one of the Striker’s drama CDs, and I had to read her article on the Nanoha wiki just to figure out who the hell she was. A lot of the–admittedly thin–central plot of Vivid is about fleshing out the series lore, particularly in regards to the ancient Belkan kingdoms, which have been a consistent background detail throughout previous installments.

For those in need of catching up, Takamachi Vivio was revealed in Nanoha Strikers to be the descendent of an ancient Belkan king, and contained within her the key to piloting the giant ancient battleship, which the Strikers villain Jail Scaglietti was trying to use to.. do something. When her power was unleashed, Vivio’s body took on an adult form, and, during her childhood wielded a level of power which was beyond her ability to control. During one of the drama CDs, another character was introduced with a similar background as the descendent of the ancient Belkan civilization; but by the time Vivid takes place, she’s gone into a decades-long hibernation.

Nanoha Vivid starts up four years after the end of Strikers, with Vivio having grown up to the age that Nanoha and Fate were back in A’s, and having just gotten her own intelligent device which allows her to transform into her adult body at will, in the name of magical fighting and training. At the same time, another girl around her age appears named Einhart, who is also a transforming ancestor of an ancient Belkan king, but one who possesses a lot of that ancient king’s depressing memories–and is going around beating people up to try and prove that her bloodline was the strongest in the world.

If you’ve been keeping up with the series until this point, then you probably already expect that Vivid and Einhart will become best friends with some heavy gay overtones–but what’s kind of surprising and refreshing about Vivid is the way in which it happens. The idea that the good girls in the Nanoha universe are always trying and failing to communicate with their adversaries, and therefore have to speak with their fists, is so ingrained into the meta of the franchise, that it almost seemed tongue-in-cheek at times. However, in Vivid, when Nove shares her first encounter with Einhart and asks about her motivations, Einhart offers them up immediately, and ends up getting assimilated into the group of friends by way of Nove and Subaru essentially kidnapping her at the start of the second episode.

From this point forward, it becomes increasingly apparent that Nanoha Vivid is NOT in any way a drama like its predecessors were. In fact, the best genre comparison I could make is that it’s really like a Shounen Jump sports anime–except where the sport is magical battles, and all of the main characters are adorable little girls. Within a few chapters of Einhart joining Vivio’s group of friends, the series moves into a lengthy training arc resembling the one at the start of Nanoha Strikers, only without any stakes or drama; and, in its place, an extra helping of fanservice.

Nanoha Vivid really kicks the fanservice up to 11; especially in the manga, which frequently allows the older characters to have nipples (whereas the younger ones just kind of don’t, in spite of being equally naked much of the time). Long sections of chapters are set in baths or in bathing suits, and characters’ clothes tend to get more torn and tattered during battle, revealing a lot more of their bodies. On that note, if fanservice happens to be one of your favorite aspects of the Nanoha series, then the Vivid manga comes highly recommended, as the artwork is definitely one of its strong points.

Vivid goes so strongly in the direction of lighthearted fun and so far from any heavy drama that it can also be considered the series’ biggest weakness. Even though I can’t say that Nanoha ever did a great job of forming a coherent story across its run, a lot of its most memorable scenes were the ones in which characters earnestly fought their hearts out in A’s and StrikerS. There’s a reason that Vita falling on her face in the desert while trying to fight for Hayate, and Nanoha sitting down with Teana as she bursts into tears in episode nine of Strikers, were among the most compelling moments in the franchise; and it’s hard to get memorable scenes like that without any stakes or drama.

A number of the side characters from StrikerS have had their personalities changed so drastically to fit into the tone of Vivid that it’s like they’re not even the same characters. In particular, Lutecia Alipne makes such a dramatic change from the quiet and somber girl searching for her mother in Strikers, to the loud, energetic and easily excitable girl in Vivid, that she may as well have been someone else; not to say that this kind of change is unrealistic for a young character to undergo in the span of four years, but there’s a certain disconnect which comes with not knowing exactly how she’s changed so much in that span of time. Some of the combat cyborgs likewise seem to have only now been given personalities in the first place, since they really didn’t have much in Strikers to begin with. And, I guess, for some reason, Agito and Reinforce are now normal-sized little girls, which left me just as confused as the unexplained lolification of Arf in StrikerS.

As Vivid transitions from the training arc into a major tournament arc and introduces a shitload of new characters for its little girls to fight against, the recurring cast takes much more of a back seat, and Vivid starts to distance itself from its predecessors and become its own thing. At this point, I should clarify that none of the things which I’ve just described were necessarily bad. In spite of having fewer standout moments due to its lack of dramatic focus, I actually think that Vivid’s characters have some of the strongest and most memorable personalities in the series to date, as well as some of the most interesting and fleshed-out fighting styles (which actually start to make some degree of sense as it moves through the tournament arc).

Having said that, going back to my previous comparison to Shounen Jump sports anime, I can’t say that Nanoha Vivid stands anywhere close to the top of its genre. For a series that focuses almost entirely on fights, said fights tend to be given only the bare minimum of context, with character motivations almost always being that they just want to prove how strong they are, and/or get stronger. While the powers are more unique and interesting than they’ve been in the past, a lot of how they’re explained is still a whole lot of bullshit, and it’s extremely difficult to get a sense of how strong each character is supposed to be in comparison to one-another until we see who’s left standing at the end of a match. In comparison to any of the flagship shounen fighting manga, the powers in Nanoha aren’t exactly creative or varied, and a lot of the combat boils down to fist fights which aren’t drawn with the kind of choreography to make them memorable. If Vivid has any strong selling point as a fighting manga, it’s simply the fact that all of the characters are cute little girls; so, if you’ve always wanted to watch a bunch of lolis beat the living shit out of each other–and, let’s be honest, you kinda have–then this is certainly the series for you.

Like its predecessors, the most endearing quality of Nanoha Vivid is the earnest sincerity of its characters and the sheer weirdness of its ideas. All of these girls harbor a deep love and passion for the art of fighting, and lack any particular interest in doing anything besides training and sparring. As the tournament arc begins wrapping up, most of the opponents whom the girls have fought against are becoming their friends just because all of them like to talk about fighting so goddamn much. The fact that half of these girls can transform between differently-aged bodies and are heterochromatic reincarnations of ancient kings, is where the awesomely weird part comes in; and it’s still pretty exciting to see the magical girls of previous generations training and raising the magical girls of this one. At the current point in the manga, there’s been a bit more focus on fleshing out the Belkan backstories of the characters, but I suspect that they’ll all be back to fighting again before too long.

At this point, I should also mention that the manga translation effort has gotten fairly slow in the past couple of years and isn’t completely caught up to the Japanese releases; and that if there’s going to be an end to this series, then it has yet to be in sight. As opposed to the previous shows, which were all clearly written and structured to contain a certain number of episodes, Vivid seems to be structured to go on for as long as the author and the audience remain interested; which can be a good or bad thing depending on how much you’d love to see the series continue.

The twelve-episode anime version by studio A-1 Pictures is mostly a very direct and faithful adaptation of a big chunk of the manga, which comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. In exchange for inferior artwork overall, you get color, movement, music, and voices, which are all great. The pacing feels more natural in the TV show, but lacks a lot of the impact which the manga had, especially during big action and fanservice sequences. It also ends at an awkward point in the manga, meaning that if there’s never a second season, then it will be worthless as a standalone work.

A particular detail I enjoyed about the anime adaptation was the large, open backgrounds which did a good job of fitting all the characters in the frame and felt much more realistic than anything which the franchise had up until this point. I’ve actually seen some people criticizing the setting for not looking enough like previous shows, but personally I’ve always found the Nanoha setting to be ill-defined and poorly represented anyways, so this was a nice turn. For an A-1 Pictures show, I was surprised how much I enjoyed the anime, though I ultimately prefer and recommend the manga for its superior artwork and impact.

Around the same time that the Nanoha Vivid manga began its run in 2009, another sequel titled Mahou Senki Lyrical Nanoha Force started running alongside it, taking place another two years in the future and starring Thoma–the first ever male protagonist in the franchise. Unfortunately, Nanoha Force is total garbage.

It’s fairly obvious that the idea behind running these simultaneous sequels was to have Vivid be the fun and lighthearted series, while Force is the dark and dramatic one; but Force ends up ramping up its violent edge factor to a comical degree. Its new characters look like they walked out of Advent Children, and everyone is now carrying around ludicrously gigantic weapons and stabbing each other in the guts with swords. The story centers around a family of nigh-indestructible criminals who fight for… money, I guess? And they all have a curse which gives them nearly unstoppable power, coupled with insatiable thirst for murder. The main character is infected with this curse as well, and the bad guys want him to join their team, while the Time-Space Administration Bureau want him to join there’s, as well as to put a stop to the family’s actions.

Worse than the fact that all of the new characters introduced are completely boring, and have all of the worst designs in the series to date, the manga manages to fuck up its existing characters as well by incorporating them haphazardly into the story. Section six is reformed again after six years, just… because, even though we know that half of the members have long moved on to do other things. The only one with any personal connection to the narrative is Subaru, whose family apparently took in Thoma for a few years–but even her emotional involvement with the story feels completely forced. Everyone else is just there for the sake of being there, and isn’t even given anything meaningful or interesting to do; and the fact that characters like Erio and Nanoha are even involved with no explanation given whatsoever is enough to break the story for me.

I wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to the idea of setting a darker, more violent story in the Nanoha universe–and you’ll remember that I even complained about the lack of meaningful deaths back in Nanoha StrikerS–but that’s exactly what makes Force that much more aggravating. In spite of its big, violent shock value moments with powerful characters like Signum and Hayate getting butchered at the introduction of new villains, no one even dies. The extent of their damages are no worse than what they might’ve sustained from a giant laser beam that barely tattered their clothes in previous seasons–but now there’s corny explosions of blood to go along with it. The entire thing reeks of trying too hard to look cool, without a gripping narrative or characters to back it up.

Thankfully, public opinion seems to more or less take my side with this one, and Nanoha Force proved even more divisive than StrikerS or Vivid. As of 2013, the series was put on indefinite hiatus, and many have assumed it to be cancelled.

The last major franchise installment I’d like to talk about is Nanoha Innocent, which centers around a team-based card-battling mobile phone game that I don’t know much about. A three-volume manga titled Nanoha Innocent was released to give some narrative background to the game’s story, followed by a sequel called Nanoha Innocents, but the current translation effort hasn’t quite finished the first series yet.

Nanoha Innocent is set in an alternate universe in which magic doesn’t exist. Fate’s sister and mother are still alive, and co-run a toy shop with Lindy Harlaown, while Hayate and her guardians are a family running a bookstore; but otherwise, characters appearing after Nanoha A’s haven’t made an appearance yet. In this story, the girls all get involved in a team-battling virtual reality game, which allows for similar kinds of magical girl battles to what we’re used to from the franchise, only in more of a sports game context. The family of the game’s creators, all of whom are inexplicably near-identical to members of the main cast, are also participants in the game, and help Nanoha’s team to train and become some of the best players.

If you’re a big fan of the original Nanoha and not really into anything past A’s, then Innocent is worth recommending for its fantastic, super-adorable artwork, and for getting to see all of these characters in a new, strange context. It also kicks the yuri shipping between Fate and Nanoha up to a whole new level. However, personally I found the game and its mechanics pretty boring, and I don’t feel enough investment in these characters to enjoy just watching them hang out. It’s the kind of series I could only wholeheartedly recommend to diehard fans of the original show.

That about wraps up the strange and fascinating world of Nanoha for now. A third upcoming film is currently in the works to be set in-between A’s and StrikerS, and I’m sure that we’ll continue to see new anime and manga pop up from the series well into the future, so I may continue my coverage of it when the time comes. I don’t have any time left in this video to offer much in the way of closing thoughts, so I hope you enjoyed taking this journey with me, and that you’ll leave your thoughts in the comments. Thanks again to Davoo for his brilliant editing job, and to my patreon supporters who make this kind of long-form work possible. I’ll see you in the next one!

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In the last five years, the modern adaptation of Yoshihiro Togashi’s Hunter X Hunter by studio Madhouse has gotten to be one of the most critically acclaimed long-form shounen action series ever put to animation–and rightfully so as I’ve discussed in a previous video. However, if you grew up with anime in the 90s and early 2000s as I did and lived in one of the countries where it was broadcast, then you may also be familiar with Togashi as the creator of Yu Yu Hakusho, which received a 112-episode anime adaptation from 1992 through 1995, and which was one of the first shows broadcast on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block in the early 2000s.

Now, I’m not typically the type to get into an old show again purely on the basis of nostalgia. Having remembered Yu Yu Hakusho as the usual sort of Shounen Jump series that I grew up with, I didn’t feel an incredible need to go back and rewatch or finally finish the show until after seeing Hunter X Hunter and coming to appreciate just how masterfully Togashi could handle the genre. After sampling the first couple of episodes, I was immediately struck by both the fact that Yu Yu Hakusho has probably my favorite English dub ever, being one of only five or so anime that I actually prefer in English; and by the fact that it was every bit as addicting as its successor.

Yu Yu Hakusho opens with the accidental death of its fourteen year-old main character, Yusuke Urameshi, in a car accident, which leads him to meeting the grim reaper, Botan, and realizing that the spirit world was not actually prepared for him to die yet. Botan gives Yusuke a chance at being resurrected–which, in the manga, involves him assisting with her grim reaper work for a little while through a series of random episodic stories as the spirit world judges whether or not his soul is worthy of resurrection. It’s pretty obvious when looking at the manga that the series was originally meant to be more about Yusuke doing ghost stuff, but likely as a result of this arc not being all that especially good or popular, Yusuke was resurrected by the end of the second volume, and the series was quickly retooled into more of a typical shounen battle manga.

The anime adaptation crops out most of Yusuke’s time as a ghost, leaving only the important and emotional plot bits, and has him resurrected by episode five–at which point Yusuke realizes that he is now able to see spirits and demons, as well as to use special powers thanks to tapping into something called “spirit energy.” Yusuke is then hired by spirit world to become a spirit detective, protecting society from all kinds of evil demons with his growing special abilities.

From there on, Yusuke gathers new allies in the form of his arch-rival turned best-friend with weirdly high spirit awareness, Kuwabara, along with the first two demons that he was forced to take down, Hiei and Kurama, and the hardass old spirit warrior who trains him to become much more powerful, Genkai. Eventually, the main four become a demon-hunting team, and the first twenty-six episodes focus mostly on their casework of fighting lots of demons with crazy powers. Eventually, the series introduces a more central villain in the form of the Toguro Brothers and launches into a gigantic forty-episode arc titled the Dark Tournament saga, during which the story becomes more streamlined and solidly battle-focused.

These first sixty-six episodes comprise the meat and potatoes of the Yu Yu Hakusho anime series, and are what I watched on TV over and over again growing up. As a kid, the things I remembered most were the awesomely over-the-top attacks which the main characters would learn as the dark tournament saga chugged along, as well as the truly epic fights which tended to come at the end of each minor team battle arcs. As an adult, I appreciated these fights only as much for the creativity of their powers as I did for the quality of the show’s visual presentation.

You know how in most long-running battle shows, you’ll every once in a while get that one extremely well-animated and cool-looking fight that really blows you away? Yu Yu Hakusho is like that for almost every fight in the Dark Tournament saga; and since there’s a fight in almost every episode, this means that the animation is incredibly impressive. I don’t think I’ve ever seen another anime series with the sheer wealth of unique and awesome battle sequences that this one contains, with its frequent use of astounding animated backgrounds, intense effects animation, and highly imaginative framing and movement.

Every fight in the Dark Tournament saga has its own flavor to it–not only because of how different each fighter’s powers are, but because of how the animators went about representing the use of those powers. Yusuke vs. Jin is all about high-flying, sweeping motion and moving backgrounds, while Hiei using the Dragon of the Darkness Flame always involves episode director Akiyuki Shinbo turning on the trippy–using harshly-colored backgrounds, intense shading, and crazy effects work. Even if you ignored the storyline entirely, I think the first sixty-six episodes of this series would be watching for fans of animation in general just for how wickedly awesome the fighting tends to look.

That said, even if you do come for the story, then you probably won’t be disappointed. While the central narrative of the series is about as simple as they come, mostly serving as a vehicle to drive in as many battles as possible, the characters are among the more complex and interesting personalities in the shounen battle genre. Yusuke in particular is probably one of my favorite lead characters in any shounen series on the basis of his personality and how his arc plays out.

Yusuke is the typical sort of street punk who spends more time in fights than he does in school, which was a massively popular archetype in the early 90s; but right off the bat, we’re given a lot of insight into his state of mind and what’s caused him to act this way. His father has never been around, his mother is an alcoholic, his schoolteachers are assholes, and everyone is either afraid of him or out to kick his ass besides his childhood friend Keiko. Yusuke tries to deal with the pain of his situation by acting like a cool badass, but he’s also high-strung and hates being misunderstood just as much as he fears being actually understood, so he projects an angry and standoffish attitude in order to avoid confronting his feelings.

Over the course of the series, Yusuke’s biggest hurdle is in learning how to be outwardly authentic about his feelings, and to be comfortable with himself as a person. Even as he slowly realizes inwardly how much he values others and their friendship, it’s so hard for him to admit when he cares about something that it can cost him those things he cares about in the long run. His training with Genkai ends up being not only about trying to power himself up physically, but also about learning to admit the things that he cares about, and to put effort into fighting for them instead of giving up and taking the lazy way out.

Watching Yusuke grow up over the course of the series manages to be highly satisfying, as his emotional complexes become more and more difficult thanks to his growing power lever and feelings of belonging as a spirit detective clashing against his attempts to deal with the life that he always has to come back to. In the end, his arc is all about taking the things which he learns about himself over the course of the series and figuring out how to reconcile all of them against one-another to come out as a better-rounded individual–all of which ties in directly to how well he can use his powers.

Each of the other leading characters has their own arc to explore as well. Hiei similarly deals with giving in to authenticity and getting over his hatred of the world and other people as he slowly develops friendships with the rest of the cast. Coming into this series after having seen Hunter X Hunter, it’s easy to interpret Hiei as a sort of prototype version of Killua, both because of the fact that he’s got a younger sister with her own special powers that he’s trying to protect from a distance, and because of the way that he develops a bond with Yusuke over his respect in Yusuke’s ever-growing powers. There’s a scene at the start of the Dark Tournament wherein Hiei, after testing Yusuke’s new abilities, states that the two of them will be able to take on the entire tournament alone, which sounds exactly like something Killua would say about himself and Gon.

Kuwabara and Kurama are more stationary characters for the majority of the series, but are fleshed out in a lot more depth as we get into their heads and understand their perspectives on the world and people around them. Every one of the side characters and villains tends to have their own backstory and goals which drive them, with the history between Genkai and the villainous younger Toguro brother forming the awesome dramatic backbone of the Dark Tournament saga. It’s worth mentioning as well that Toguro is probably one of my favorite shounen villains, as he does the whole parallel-with-the-heroes thing very well without it ever feeling cheesy, and is the perfect mixture of threatening and badass that makes him a joy to watch. I think elements of the way that he tries to set everything up so that Yusuke will keep gaining power before their eventual battle have later been used as the basis for Hisoka.

As is the case with its successor, the biggest structural success of Yu Yu Hakusho is in how quickly it moves from battle to battle and from arc to arc, with new ideas constantly coming into play and keeping things fresh. Only a handful of battles at the end of the major arcs are given more than an episode and a half of runtime–and in the case of the final battle of the Dark Tournament, its four-episode climax is very well-earned. In fact, I think Yu Yu Hakusho does a better job than almost everything else in the genre at maintaining smooth and logical transitions between its major arcs. Having said that, if there were moments of Hunter X Hunter that you thought were kind of ass pull-y, then expect the same kind of things from Yu Yu Hakusho.

While the powers and situations tend to be a lot less complex or creative in this series than those in Hunter X Hunter, they are introduced briskly enough, and the dialog between the characters is enough fun, that the show remains nearly as addicting and exciting. It isn’t until the Chapter Black saga, which follows after the Dark Tournament, that the powers become complex enough to warrant more lengthy expository dialog–and it’s during this arc that the series overall begins to feel a lot more like Hunter X Hunter.

The Chapter Black saga brings with it an unfortunate trade-off, though. On one hand, the powers and the storyline are a bit more complex, and the new villain, Sensui, has a bit more going on with him than any of the previous ones. On the other hand, with the exception of a couple of standout scenes, it’s from this point forward that the animation consistentcy becomes a lot more standard. Episodes begin to feel a bit more drawn out, with a lot more use of recap footage, and some of the hand-to-hand combat sequences are a lot more lazily done. The narrative of this arc is more intriguing in its complexity, but features way less emotional gravitas compared to the Dark Tournament saga, and nowhere near the cathartic payoff that came with that saga’s climax. Nevertheless, Chapter Black is a worthwhile piece of shounen action, and ramps up the darker, more psychological elements of the series to the kind of level that Hunter X Hunter would become known for ten years later.

Rounding out the show, then, is the much more brief–perhaps outright truncated–Three Kings arc, which is probably the weakest in the series, but not without its points of interest. It gets pretty obvious pretty quickly that the show has to wrap up now, with the power creep having reached its logical conclusion and most of the characters being nearly done with their development; and it also gets pretty obvious that Togashi was bored of writing the series and tried to wrap it up as quickly as possible, as the arc starts off seeming like it could go on for a while before very abruptly speeding towards its end. In fact, the anime version actually adds in a lot more detail to flesh out the last part of the arc, whereas the manga simply brushed past it.

Even though the Three Kings saga has by far the least interesting plot and most lackluster animation, though, it actually does a pretty nice job of wrapping up all of the character arcs and sending the series off with satisfying conclusiveness. In the end, I wasn’t left with any unanswered questions, and I felt like I’d gotten everything I wanted from the series, which is a hell of a lot more than I can say for most of the stuff in this genre.

If Yu Yu Hakusho is worth recommending, then it certainly isn’t for bringing anything wildly new or interesting to the shounen battle genre. If anything, it is decidedly straightforward, even in comparison to a lot of its ilk. You won’t find the seemingly endless universe of creativity in this series that you will in something like One Piece, Dragon Ball, or Hunter X Hunter; and indeed it seems like with the latter series, Togashi deliberately gave himself a lot more breathing room with what he could get away with. Having now seen the way Yusuke makes a beeline from powerless, to as powerful as he could possibly get over the course of the series, it’s easy to see why Togashi chose to surround Gon with a so much bigger and less scalable world, populated by so many more powerful fighters.

Yu Yu Hakusho feels like the shounen battle concept boiled down to its most simple and effective elements, and charges through it at a brisk pace without leaving a lot of room for continuation. It completes all of its world-building and character development decisively; which, depending on what kind of fan you are, may be exactly what you’re looking for after dealing with the endlessly incomplete nature of most of the modern Shounen Jump stories.

What sells Yu Yu Hakusho is simply its raw entertainment value and the strength of its characterization. Yusuke and his team have good chemistry together and are all highly memorable, distinct characters, both in terms of design and personality. Yusuke himself does a better job of carrying the whole series on his shoulders than any other shounen lead I can think of, to the point that during a few small arcs wherein he was either sleeping or training for several episodes on end, it almost felt like the entire tone of the series had shifted. Yet, any time that one of his teammates took the spotlight, they always brought their distinct flavor to the forefront and got me hyped to see what kind of stuff they were going to do.

All in all, I would say that Yu Yu Hakusho was among the best long-form shounen series that I’ve seen to date, and easily one of the best anime adaptations. I never felt like it was wasting my time, and there was not only a total lack of filler, but even a lot of questionably worthwhile parts of the manga cut from the show, with bits added in that the manga was at a loss without. For at least sixty-six episodes, it had a level of consistency in its inventive animation that honestly kind of blows Madhouse’s Hunter X Hunter adaptation out of the water; and after seeing just how much killer stuff could be done with this series on cels in the 90s, I found myself eager to check out the 1999 Hunter X Hunter adaptation, which I’ve heard is more inventive than its remake as well.

Parting thoughts: Botan is cute, Shizuru is mai waifu, and Koto is best girl, all years; dragon of the darkness flame in episode 58 was the most hype shit I’ve ever seen (except that Meruem vs. Netero was actually five times more hype); finally seeing the Fingers Around My Dick episode while drunk after seven years of quoting it was the most satisfied I’ve been and the hardest I’ve laughed watching anime in a long time; and follow me on twitter if you want to see thoughts like this while they happen.

If you’ve ever been a fan of Yu Yu Hakusho, then tell me about your experiences with it in the comments below; and stick around while you’re at it, because I’m gonna be using this show as a springboard in the near future to talk about more of Akiyuki Shinbo’s work in the early 90s, so check that out when it drops. If you want to help me to make videos like that one and this one from here on out, then consider supporting me via patreon or paypal by following the links in the description. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one!

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Asuka Langley Sohryu’s arrival in episode eight of Evangelion completely changes everything. All of a sudden, this slow-burning character drama full of psychologically broken kids trying to find the motivation to fight for the sake of survival blows open into this silly, action-packed, brightly-colored fun time, wherein a teenaged odd couple learns how to play DDR so they can drop a synchronized Inazuma Kick on a giant monster to the backdrop of classical music. It’s almost startling to watch unfold, and sounds like an insane writing decision on paper. Right when our main characters have found the resolve to act heroically and start kicking ass, they get thrust into this ridiculous middle school romantic comedy, and the already bizarre robot battles take a downright goofy turn. So why did GAINAX do this, and how did they manage such an incredible tone shift without completely throwing the audience for a loop? Well, a hell of a lot went into it–and looking at all of it stacked up together, their methods were nothing short of impressive.

For starters, before diving into episode eight, we have to look at what was done in the previous episode to set us up for it. Whereas the first six episodes focused primarily on Shinji and his struggle to find resolve, culminating with his turn to a more protective side in episode six, episode seven was the first borderline side-story in the series, and the first to focus more primarily on another character.

However, in the background of that episode, we got to see Shinji subtly beginning to change. We saw him expressing a much wider range of emotions, and doing so much more openly; taking a stand and making demands of the people around him and asserting himself. Shinji has started to stabilize and come out of his shell at this point, allowing him to more easily communicate with the people around him, and to feel more comfortable in his current home.

I mentioned back in episode two how Misato’s house was meant to be established as a sort of home base for the series, and how we were meant to move into it exactly as Shinji did. Likewise, episode seven is the point at which both Shinji and ourselves have become comfortable here. The episode starts off by focusing on Shinji and Misato’s everyday routine, and the story of the episode is a side-mission that has little connection to the main plot of fighting angels, giving the whole thing a sort of slice-of-life feel. Even when the action starts, we don’t get a single word of protest from Shinji about piloting the robot to help with the situation; by now he’s gotten used to his role as a pilot as a normal part of his life.

This is what brings us to episode eight, which immediately departs from the home base that we’ve become accustomed to. Misato tells Shinji in the helicopter that she thought he might get bored of seeing the same mountains every day–almost like she’s speaking straight to the audience that the point of this scenario is to change things up a bit–to take us out of the comfort zone which we’ve become accustomed to by the end of episode seven.

By this point, Shinji only resembles the quiet, paranoid and high-strung person that he was at the start. He goofs around with his friends on the helicopter, and stretches his arms out on the deck of the ship like he’s making himself at home–he’s totally gotten used to the way that his life is.

And then we meet Asuka–an explosion of color and personality packed into one tiny little girl. Just think about what we’ve seen and where we’ve been up until now: aside from Misato, this series has focused largely on dour characters inhabiting a post-apocalyptic city locked in the mountains; and now, we’ve got this red-haired firebrand in a yellow one-piece standing against a bright blue open sky in the middle of the ocean. This couldn’t be farther from what we’ve had so far.

Asuka is a foreign object in the Eva universe–literally, she’s a foreigner to Japan, and the series makes sure you know that by having her throw random English and German words into her speech and complain a lot about how strange Japanese culture is. She is the polar opposite of both Shinji and, especially, Rei, and brings everything to the show which had purposely been left out before she showed up.

Remember back when Shinji fell on Rei’s breast and she didn’t say anything, but then she slapped him because he badmouthed Gendo, and it was like this huge subversion of the middle school pervert trope? Well, the very first thing Asuka does is slap the hell out of all the guys when the wind blows her skirt up and they see her panties–which Touji childishly responds to by pulling out his dick. We’ve never really had this before.

You could have been forgiven for forgetting entirely that Shinji and Rei were middle schoolers in the first place, or that Eva is on some level a middle school anime–at least until Asuka shows up and starts arguing over test scores and reputation, and even somehow turns the class president into a recurring character. Whereas Rei and Shinji largely blend into the background at school, Asuka stands out and draws so much attention to herself that we realize just how many students actually attend this school.

Up until now, Shinji’s arguments were always one-sided and passive-aggressive. He did what adults told him to, wandered aimlessly, and didn’t know how to communicate with kids his own age. After Asuka shows up, he starts arguing all the time over basically nothing, and growing more opinionated and assertive with each new episode. It’s pretty funny too, to watch Asuka run up against the wall that is Rei, who can’t be convinced into argument with anyone. Their first interaction, when Asuka blocks the sunlight that Rei is reading by, so Rei moves over into the sun, aggravating Asuka, summarizes their entire relationship in these episodes perfectly.

Oh, and remember how Shinji only started piloting the Eva willingly after six episodes of convincing, and how Rei only pilots it out of a sense of obligation? Well, Asuka straight-up WANTS to pilot the Evangelion–and not for anyone’s sake but her own. She does it because she’s passionate about proving her worth, and she ties her self-worth entirely to her ability to pilot the Evangelion well–which is why she takes it as such an insult when it’s suggested that she might not be needed, or that Rei could do her job better than she can.

Asuka’s completely new approach to piloting the Evangelion brings a totally different tone to the robot battles. Whereas Shinji and Rei’s actions always felt like a painful struggle, Asuka’s fights are just plain old fun. She jumps around like a maniac, taking time to strike cool poses in her robot and to smile in the middle of battle. It’s no mistake that Unit 02 is introduced through one of the most memorably staged and exciting mecha battles in anime history–and one which bends the logic and believability of the story about as far as it can go. Thought redirecting all of Japan’s power into a rifle was crazy? How about a giant robot playing hopscotch on aircraft carriers right before shoving two battleships into a monster’s mouth and blowing it to pieces?

Speaking of that plan, which Misato had a hand in orchestrating, the writers of this show did something brilliant with how they got Asuka’s presence to dominate everything else for these two episodes–they introduced Kaji at the same time. Aside from slivers of information about his personality, history, and intentions, Kaji is primarily a mysterious presence in the series at this point–but none of that really matters right now, because the reason he’s here is so that he can take the focus away from Misato.

Until now, Misato has been the most consistent authoritarian presence in the series, operating both as Shinji’s caretaker and boss, and as the person who gets shit done when the chips are down in both episodes six and seven. However, the appearance of Kaji immediately brings out all of Misato’s weaknesses; and for these couple of episodes, especially episode nine, Misato is largely relegated to a position of losing control. She still gives instructions to Shinji and Asuka, but her overall presence is lessened over the course of these episodes, while Asuka seizes the reins on dominating the entire cast for screen presence. Misato and Kaji’s relationship will continue to be developed and made thematically relevant over the course of the series, but for now it’s hard not to imagine that Kaji’s presence is mostly a means of distracting what was formerly the strongest personality in the series, while another, equally powerful personality hogs the spotlight.

So, alright, we’ve got a sense now of exactly who this character is and what she did to change the nature of the series, as well as what GAINAX did to maximize the impact of her character’s arrival; but that still doesn’t answer the more important question of why the studio did this. Why get seven episodes deep into a series and then completely change its tone by introducing a character so fundamentally at-odds with everything established up until that episode? Well, simply put–because that’s the point.

Evangelion has been duly noted for incorporating a smorgasbord of social and psychological themes into its narrative–but if I could be so bold as to boil everything the series does down to one central idea, it would be the study of interaction. Eva sets out to explore both the ways that humans are shaped through their interactions with one-another, as well as the way that those interactions will ultimately shape the fate of humankind. In the process, it goes into detail about what it means to act as an individual, and how different individuals are interpreted by and communicate with one-another, as well as what it means for people to have their individually molded by others, or to lose that individuality altogether. All of this is spelled out at length in the last two episodes of the series; but long before that, it’s explored in the show’s very structure.

Shinji Ikari doesn’t have much of a personality at the start of Evangelion. He is an island–an individual largely devoid of interaction, and therefore only slightly molded by the people around him. From the beginning, we see how his father’s attitude has brought him to his current position; but since his father has walled himself off from Shinji, we can’t expect his influence to be felt directly for a while.

Instead, Shinji is shaped by Misato to become someone who decides that he mustn’t run away. Then, he’s shaped by Rei to become someone protective, with a sense of responsibility. And now, he is being shaped by Asuka into someone who can be outspoken and assertive. Every person that enters Shinji’s life changes his attitude in subtle ways, which in turn alters the nature of his actions as well as the nature of how those actions are presented.

Episode three’s angel battle is horrifying and sad, because Shinji is terrified and no one knows how to deal with him. Episode six’s angel battle is epic and triumphant because the teamwork of Shinji, Rei, and Misato overcomes impossible odds while bringing a new, more protective side of Shinji to light. Episode nine’s angel battle is goofy, insane, and hilarious because the chemistry between Asuka, who pilots the Eva for fun, and Shinji, who has to adapt to dealing with her wild attitude, creates a personality that can’t be tamed by the self-doubt and fear which would be crushing Shinji on his own.

Asuka changes everything because Asuka is different from everyone, and therefore changes the way that those people interact. When Shinji sees this beautiful girl his age in all her unguarded sexuality, it kickstarts his libido, and now we’ve got him revealing his more perverted and lustful side. When Shinji has someone accosting him for no reason, who is not only his own age, but not in any kind of position of authority over him, he has a chance to get angry and assertive. When Shinji is paired up with someone who can actually be as emotionally fragile as himself from time to time, he even finds himself in a position where he’s supposed to be the strong one giving advice, even if he ends up being less effective than Asuka’s own motivation. The arrival of Asuka means that Shinji and everyone else now has to deal with Asuka; and in doing so, the nature of their actions make an enormous shift. (In Misato’s case, the same thing happens more in response to the appearance of Kaji.)

Holding off on Asuka for seven whole episode was a pretty ballsy move on the part of the show’s creators. Taking the show’s most energetic, attractive, imminently relatable and likable character and completely holding off on introducing her throughout seven episodes of fairly glum and sober character establishment probably wouldn’t have sounded like a very good business decision; and the prospect of scaring off the audience who’d grown accustomed to the style of Evangelion up until this point only to wind up with such a massive tone shift must have been terrifying. But all of it had to be done, because the most important aspect of Asuka’s arrival is that it changes everything. If she’d been around from the beginning, then her influence over the tone and the character interactions would have been enormous right from the start, which wouldn’t allow us to see how the other characters would’ve been changed by her arrival. The way that Asuka changes everything is massively important to the themes which lie at the heart of the series–and it’s for that reason, I think, that this incredibly bold decision managed to pay off in such a big way.

It helps, of course, that the writers also signposted their intentions so well throughout these two episodes. Aside from Misato’s comment about leaving the mountains, episode eight gives us a ship captain, designed after the same trope as the captains from Macross and Nadia, complaining about having to babysit a bunch of kids. Episode nine has Fuyutsuki growing embarrassed and impatient with the children, which Kaji lampoons beautifully with his remark that adults don’t like to be embarrassed. It almost reads like a fuck you to any critics of how ridiculous this episode gets, delivered by the most cool and collected adult in the series. Even the show’s ending theme changes for these episodes into a far more upbeat and fun rendition of the previous song.

Eva wanted you to know that it was doing this on purpose and that it had a plan–and it never forgot to work in those subtle moments of depth and discomfort which kept reminding the viewer that they were indeed still watching Neon Genesis Evangelion. It dances its way through what could have been a series-destroying shift in tone with unparalleled grace in a manner that few other shows could ever achieve–and all of it adds to just how memorable and massive of a presence Asuka manages to establish for herself in the span of just a couple of episodes.

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Has 2015 enjoyed the greatest summer season in the history of anime? A better question might be: was there any competition? Up until 1998, the concept of a series starting in the summertime was practically nonexistent; and up until 2013, the summer season usually sported as little as half the number of new shows beginning compared to Spring and Fall–since it used to be that a lot of shows were 26 episodes long, and most of them started during those seasons. Nowadays, we’ve got just as many new shows coming out no matter what the season is–possibly because 26-episode shows have gotten to be so much more scarce.

Whatever the cause, 2015 just had the biggest Summer season in anime history–even out-counting the Spring season for the first time ever–and a lot of it was pretty solid. I can’t say that any one show this season could top the best of previous years–but what Summer 2015 did have is possibly the largest concentration of pretty good shows that I’ve ever seen in a single season before. Let’s see how fast we can run through my impressions of them–not including shows that continued from spring such as Food Wars, Baby Steps, and Gintama, or sequels to shows that I’m still watching the first seasons of, such as Gatchaman Crowds.

Wakako-zake was a cute little short-form series about an office lady voiced by Miyuki Sawashiro going around to different restaurants and trying Japanese food and liquor combinations. The hilariously pretentious attitude which she took towards eating correctly made it a fun watch, but my lack of familiarity with any of the dishes kept me at some cultural distance. If you’re into Japanese food and slice-of-life, then check this one out–it will barely take up half an hour of your time.

Wakaba Girl’s episodes are a tad longer at around twelve minutes, which might actually be the ideal length for this kind of sugary-sweet, cute-girls-doing-cute-things type show. It felt like a weekly medical injection for people with low blood-pressure, metaphorically speaking, and comes from the same original author is Kiniro Mosaic, which had its own second season this year. I don’t think I’ll remember anything about this series a year from now other than that it’s gimmick was a refreshingly and lovably stupid rich girl main character, and that it was entertaining enough for me to watch the entire thing.

Jitsu wa Watashi wa’s approach to romantic comedy was decidedly standard and traditional, especially in comparison to its summer season contemporaries–but it’s strange, ugly-cute character designs and heartfelt, almost innocent approach to its characters and comedy gave it a comfy and sort of endearing feel. I’d be shocked if I remember anything about this show other than the character designs and the general concept a year from now, but if you’re down to blitz through some inoffensively standard anime romcom fare, then you can do a hell of a lot worse.

Sore ga Seiyuu is the kind of show that I was destined to watch, not only as someone with an interest in how anime is produced, but as someone whose job is basically an extremely unprofessional version of the voice acting work performed by the characters. It goes without saying that you should watch this show if you’re into seiyuu (tho in that case you’ve probably already seen it), and it’s worth watching as a guided tour of the voice acting industry for anyone with an interest in the subject. Otherwise, I’d have a hard time recommending it since the narrative and characters aren’t particularly interesting; but for me it managed to be highly inspirational, and the episodic guest appearances and anison karaoke in the ending themes were a hell of a treat.

Akagami no Shirayukihime is among the most heart-stoppingly beautiful TV anime that I’ve ever seen thanks to superb color and setting design which I’ll probably remember for much longer than I do what actually happened in each episode. This shoujo fantasy romance felt like an extended prologue to a series yet to come, which may very well be exactly what it is; and depending on where things go from here it could turn into an excellent series in the long run. I was endeared to all of the characters by the end and highly satisfied by the central romance–more so by far than what was provided in the countless romcoms that I’ve been marathoning lately. Having said that, the lack of any real plot so far and general slowness of the series has left me wanting for more before I can regard it as much more than a very pretty distraction that reinforces my love for director Masahiro Ando. I’ll be looking forward to the second season which is apparently starting up next Winter.

Durarara!! technically aired the second part of season two or something–not that it really matters. I’ve gotten way past the point of having any idea what the fuck is happening in this show anymore, but it’s still enough fun that I don’t think I’ll ever stop watching it. You couldn’t possibly ask me to summarize what happened in either part of season two, but I think I enjoyed the second one more in general, if only because it had the chance to flesh out a lot of the new characters and plots which the first part introduced. I guess I’ll be looking forward to part three.

Shimoneta’s boring world where the concept of dirty jokes doesn’t exist was one of the most ingenious settings for a raunchy comedy series that I’ve seen in awhile, with an unexpected undercurrent of social commentary on how censorship turns a society into a bunch of ignorant lunatics; kind of playing out like the opposite extreme version of the film Idiocracy. Even the lengths to which the series was censored and the complaints that it received in its broadcast ended up playing well into its narrative themes. While its concept and humor were great, though, it’s characters came off half-baked, and the lack of a palpable sense of progress in the narrative made it harder and harder to care about the series as it went on. It’s hard to imagine watching another season of this if it doesn’t have some new tricks up its sleeve later on or tries to flesh out its central cast–but for now I enjoyed what I got enough to be satisfied.

Prison School is an absolute riot, with a brilliantly stupid premise that sells entirely on its execution; from the mostly-realistic-but-then-there’s-Andre character designs, to the style of “straight-faced comic insanity” that the main characters in Bakuman would be losing their shit over if they saw it. I’m aware that the manga is supposedly better, but the anime series was fantastic in its own right, with a vocal cast and soundtrack which could easily justify its existence, alongside continued proof of Tsutomu Mizushima’s brilliance as a comedy director. The opening theme was awesome, the high-tension, endless-series-of-stupid-plot-twists narrative was awesome, and I’m definitely excited to see if this show will get renewed for another season, or if I’ll have to read the manga.

Gakkougurashi was possibly the most unique and fascinating take on the genre of cutesy high school slice-of-life anime which I’ve seen in my eight years of enjoying it, all thanks to its suspenseful undercurrent of tension which insistently pervades, yet never jarringly intrudes upon, its surprisingly touching high school narrative. For now, I don’t want to give away too much about what gives the series its highlights, so I can only encourage that if you’re a fan of this genre and want to see it taken in a totally different direction from what you’re used to, then you owe it to yourself to check this series out. It’s certainly one of my favorites of the year so far.

Here’s a list of shows that I dropped which I didn’t think were all that bad, but which I didn’t have enough invested in to finish, which will remain on-screen until I finish the rest of this sentence. Here’s a list of shows that I dropped because I outright disliked them, which will remain on-screen until I finish the rest of this sentence. That about wraps up my impressions of the Summer 2015 anime season, which may or may not have been one of the best Summer seasons in anime history. Let’s hope that the fall season can bring something good to the table as well!

Dailymotion link (in case youtube goes down)

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Over the past month or so I’ve been constantly watching romantic comedy anime, and in the process have come to some conclusions about what elements can make or break a series within the genre for me. These rules may or may not apply to you as well, though I think all of them could be seen as fairly universal elements that most people would appreciate.

#1. Establish what I might like about the characters up front.

It’s pretty difficult to become invested in a romance story if I don’t particularly like any of the characters. This might seem kind of like an obvious facet of storytelling in general, tho I think it’s perfectly possible to make a good story with a protagonist that you’re not necessarily meant to root for, or wherein the characters aren’t necessarily good or righteous people. However, unless your romance series is a hardcore drama about dealing with a toxic relationship, it stands to reason that I’d rather watch a romance between several good, likable people than I would between a bunch of assholes or people that I don’t care about.

Sakurasou Pet na Kanojo is a series with elements of romance, comedy, and drama, which I found myself putting down after a handful of episodes upon the realization that the story had already started diving into its drama before I had actually managed to care about any of its characters. The early episodes establish how each of the characters has a unique talent or attribute of genius–excepting the main character whose crisis is jealousy over everyone else’s talents–but it never really establishes any of them as good or interesting people. Once they started getting dramatic over their various personal hang-ups, I found myself emotionally left behind–as though I’d been expected to care about this drama simply because of its own existence. I suppose this wouldn’t be impossible if I found the drama to be particularly compelling, but it would’ve been downright easy if I’d been invested in the characters already.

Sakurasou felt like it was more concerned with using its characters as tools to talk about its themes of genius instead of treating them as people whose life story just happened to be one that evoked those kinds of themes. An excellent series which managed to have similar themes to Sakurasou while also telling a great story full of imminently likeable characters was Honey and Clover–but to use an even more potent example of how much power there is in likable characters, I want to discuss a series which doesn’t really have any particular theme at all: Kimi ni Todoke.

The opening episodes of Kimi ni Todoke may be a bit saccharine for some people, but they go out of their way to establish all of the main characters as exceptionally good-natured and decent people, while also inviting us to understand their general life problems. The main character, Sawako, is largely avoided and ignored because she looks like Sadako from The Ring, even though she really just lacks the social skills to communicate with anyone thanks to a lifetime of failed attempts to do so.

Sawako falls in love with an befriends a classmate named Kazehaya–unaware that he’s developed feelings for her as well–and Kazehaya helps her to improve her social relationship within her class and to make her first real friends in the form of Yano and Chizuru. It’s only after several episodes of establishing Sawako’s friendships with each of these characters and solidifying the group’s dynamic and chemistry that the first real dramatic conflict arises with some other girls spreading rumors that Sawako is using and abusing her friends. By the time this conflict emerged, I was already invested enough in Sawako’s friendships and how they were affecting her character that I wanted to know how the conflict would be resolved. I’d even go so far as to say that I made it through two whole seasons of Kimi ni todoke largely based on the goodwill which the series bought from me by intriguing me to the characters in those early episodes.

#2. Give the characters lives outside of their romance.

Unless your character’s dream is to be a stay at home parent for the rest of their lives, they should probably have some life goals outside of earning the affections of another character. Even if the series isn’t meant to explore those elements of a character’s life as much as it is the romantic elements, it’s important to at least introduce conflicts or aspects of the characters’ personalities which exist outside of that romance, especially because one of the most interesting things about relationships is how they affect the lives of the people involved.

I really wanted to like Ano Natsu de Matteru–a gorgeously-designed and animated romantic comedy which featured one of the most adorable childhood friend characters around. Unfortunately, said childhood friend makes for the perfect example of how to write the worst kind of romantic heroine–the kind whose only personality trait is that she loves the main character.

In seven episodes of this twelve-episode series, I did not learn a single thing about Tanigawa besides the fact that she was in love with the main character, and that the other guy in her group was in love with her. Both of these loves were unrequited–the main character’s affections were directed at an alien girl who fell from the sky, leaving Tanigawa to walk around flustered over whether or not to confess her feelings across the entire show.

The biggest issue here is that I have no real reason to root for Tanigawa over anything. I don’t expect her to win out in this romance; and since she doesn’t really have anything else going for her, I can’t really cheer her on in any other aspect of her life either. Even if she did hook up with the guy, I don’t have any sense of how this would change the two of them or what their relationship would be like, unless she really does just want to become a housewife.

A series which handled this very same type of character far more skillfully was ef ~a tale of memories, with the character Kei. Like Tanigawa, Kei is romantically obsessed with her childhood friend, Hiro; but unlike Tanigawa, Kei is a star basketball player, able to rebound on her passions and even to possibly find new love after her inevitable loss to the new girl in Hiro’s life. A large part of ef is even about deconstructing what Kei actually plans to do if she and Hiro ever hook up, by having her love rival, Miya, perform the kind of wifely activities which Kei always imagined herself performing, without ever realizing that she wasn’t any good at.

But in Kei’s case, it’s pretty clear that the series was more intent on analyzing her loss in the relationship as a childhood friend character, rather than how being in a relationship might affect her everyday life. A recent anime series which did a great job of establishing its characters’ personalities and lifestyles outside of their romantic relationship was Akagami no Shirayukihime.

Shirayukihime depicts the growing relationship between a strong-willed herbalist on the run from being forced into marriage by one prince, and the other prince who quickly grows romantically attached to their powerful friendship. It’s pretty easy to imagine each of these characters having lived their entire lives without ever meeting one-another. Shirayuki would have continued with her passion for herbalism regardless of anyone she met, and Zen would’ve continued to perform his duties as a prince while hanging out with his retainers on the side.

However, this isn’t to say that the relationship between the characters doesn’t change anything about them. Shirayuki slowly learns how to rely on others and to not bottle up all of her anxieties while trying to work through everything on her own, and Zen realizes the need to prioritize the things that he cares about in life, and to strike the right balance between fulfilling his duties as a prince and fulfilling his desires as a human being. In spite of the many challenges which their relationship brings into their lives, there is a sense that this relationship is ultimately improving both of the characters, even if they could have possibly lived their entire lives without ever meeting. This kind of brings me to my next point…

#3. Make me want the characters to be together.

Nothing is more effective for getting me involved in a romance series than having a personal desire to see the characters end up and stay together. There’s a pretty broad gradient in terms of how well different shows accomplish this, and it’s kind of rare for them to completely and totally fail unless the main characters are a bunch of unlikeable shitty pervert otaku like most of the cast of Saekano or your average harem series. I can only think of one show which managed to really fail at this without having unlikable characters, which was Bokura wa Minna Kawaisou.

Kawaisou is a weird case, because its main character’s romantic interest is not only one-sided, but incredibly distant. He’s got a crush on this classmate named Kawai who happens to live in the same apartment complex as him, but she’s barely even aware of his existence and completely unaware of his personality throughout the beginning of the series. In spite of being in love with her, the main guy really doesn’t know anything about her and spends much of his time curious about what she’s like; but the series itself doles out the details of her personality very scarcely over the course of their rare interactions–and she doesn’t even seem very interesting. The main guy doesn’t have any real personality outside of being comically victimized by most of the people in his apartment complex, and altogether the whole thing left me wondering if I was really supposed to care at all about whether or not these characters ever made any romantic progress.

Meanwhile, shows like Toradora, Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches, and Lovely Complex have me rooting for the main characters to get together before the two of them have even fallen in love with one-another yet. These are series in which it’s clear that the main characters are able to function better as people when the other person is around–be that in the unsubtle way that Taiga would have questionably been able to make it through life had she never met Ryuuji, or the subtle ways that Yamada manages to bring out Shiraishi’s personality and give her something to look forward to, while Shiraishi gives Yamada a powerful support boost from the sidelines.

Most of these romantic comedies don’t give a lot of follow-through on what happens with the characters once they actually get together, but a series which started off with a couple getting married and then made me want to see them together forever was Danna ga Nani. This series takes a casual approach to its romance, once again portraying characters who could not only have easily lived out their entire lives without ever meeting, but whom we could imagine being better off in other circumstances–yet we see the countless ways that both of them help to improve and comfort one-another and end up really loving their time together, in possibly one of the most realistically-portrayed yet endlessly heartwarming love stories that I can think of.

#4. Something has to make progress, romantically or otherwise. (Unless that’s the joke.)

By far the biggest knock that most people have against romance in anime is that it take forever for anything to happen. This problem is far-reaching and often excruciating, but I don’t think that the problem is simply a lack of romantic progress. Plenty of romantic series manage to remain interesting by showing how the characters change and grow either in pursuit of their romance, or as a result of being around other characters in the show, regardless of whether they’ve managed to hook up already or not. I don’t feel miserable waiting for the romance in Toradora or Shirayukihime or Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches to be actualized, because I already can see how the characters are being affected by the progress in their relationship as it is.

Where romantic stories become painful is when I feel as though I’m sitting around waiting for something to change. A lot of the times, this happens in a romantic comedy or harem series as soon as the jokes get old. Characters will come inches away from finally revealing their feelings, only to comically misunderstand one-another and continue on with their frustrations–and that can be fine as long as the series is still funny and endearing in its own ways. Shows like Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun even seem built entirely around making fun of the idea that the characters will never end up together, and constantly manages to base fresh jokes around the comic misunderstandings of its main characters.

But when things go wrong in this department, oh boy do they go wrong. I can think of no better example than the second season of Kimi ni Todoke–and I guess you could say I’m going to spoil it, but this is the kind of spoiler that may save your life. It’s made clear from the very beginning of Kimi ni Todoke that Sawako and Kazehaya both love one-another–and based on their personalities, it’s impossible to imagine that anything is going to stop them from ending up together. The first season manages to dodge the issue of when they’ll hook up most of the time by focusing on other things: be those Sawako’s personal development, or her conflicts with other girls who are in love with Kazehaya, or the romantic side-stories of her friends. At the back end of the season, it seems like everything else has been dealt with and put aside, and all that’s really left is for the main characters to finally hook up; but, after three episodes of teasing, they don’t.

And then we get season 2. Even though the first season has put us in a position wherein the main characters are totally sure of their feelings and pretty clearly just one confession away from becoming a couple, the series drags its feet for eight more agonizing episodes by introducing all kinds of totally artificial-feeling conflicts in the name of keeping the couple apart. A guy shows up who’s interested in Sawako, Kazehaya for no reason gets all self-conscious about his feelings, and then, in one of the most stunningly infuriating moments that I’ve ever witnessed in a romantic series, both of the main characters manage to confess to one-another, while misinterpreting the other person’s confession as a rejection.

All of this treading water felt so in-my-face and like such a waste of time that by the time the main character were together, I didn’t even care anymore. So much of my good will towards these characters and their romance had been drained by the cruel way in which the series went about prolonging their inevitable relationship that I was just pissed off at all of it in the end. The last three episodes of the season actually did make progress and get things going again, but they should have happened eight, if not ten episodes earlier when it would have made sense narratively, instead of putting everything on hold in the name of squeezing out some unnecessary drama.

#5. Don’t forget that this is anime.

A vast majority of romantic anime is adapted from manga and light novels, and romance is not exactly the flashiest genre in terms of action, so it’s understandable that a lot of these series rely on dialog and narration pretty heavily to get their points across. But really, for a romantic anime to stand out as a romantic ANIME, as opposed to a vessel for drawing attention to its likely more narratively detailed source material, it needs to put the medium to use. How can it do that? By doing something like this:

[scene from Kimi ni Todoke ep 8]

This moment conveys the emotions that Sawako feels for Kazehaya purely through sound effects, music, animation and color design. We don’t need a narrator to tell us what’s going on, because we can feel it just by looking and listening.

Even a show that leans constantly on its dialog and narration can use the medium to its advantage in portraying a romantic scene. Take this confession from episode five of Bakemonogatari:

[scene from Bakemonogatari ep 5]

Senjougahara’s pose, Chiwa Saito’s performance of her strange english dialog, and the gorgeous golden light sparking in contrast with her deep purple hair all creates a moment that pops and is memorable forever in a way that it couldn’t have been if it were only text. There’s a reason that the Senjougahara figma comes with this as one of its poses, as advertised right on the box.

For one more example, Tamako Love Story is an anime-original film which is notable not so much for how it handles specific moments, but for how it handles its overall sense of pacing and tone. The film is very deliberately paced and drawn with nostalgic, intimate colors which actually look quite different from the brightly colorful TV series that it’s a sequel too, all in the name of creating the mood that it wanted for its romantic story. The equivalent to this is certainly possible in careful writing or illustration, but the exact tone and feeling of this film is something which I don’t think could be captured outside of its medium.

#6. Give me some conflict in the relationship.

This one is more of a bonus. I don’t think that every show needs to explore the conflicts which its characters may face from one-another or from external forces as a result of their relationship–especially if most of the series is spent just getting the two of them together–but I do think that reaching this stage can make a romance far more interesting.

I was actually pretty bothered by the lack of conflict in the central relationship in the early episodes of Ore Monogatari, which sees its main characters dating by episode three, and then conveys them as essentially perfect people who can do no wrong to one-another to the point that it strained the believability of the series a bit for me. I know that there is more conflict later into the series, but I’ve been more intrigued in the past watching conflicts in the relationships of other anime couples than I was while watching these characters being perfect for one-another.

Danna ga Nani once again works as a great counter-example here, as its main characters do make an exceptionally good couple, with their personalities seeming to compliment one-another, but they also run into a lot of questions about how their relationship can hold up under the weight of their lifestyles. The husband is kind of a skeevy otaku who can’t always keep himself employed, while the wife has a bit of a self-destructive streak and isn’t always sure if her life is going the way it should be. When the two of them find out that they’ll be having a child together, they have to take the conflicting parts of their relationship into consideration and work to compromise their faults and protect the stability of their relationship, which makes for some impressively compelling characterization in a series of three-minute comedy episodes.

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So, those are the six biggest things that I want to see out of anime romance. Not all six of these elements are required for a series to be worthwhile, though all of them are preferred; and I think that the best of the best are the series which get all of them right. If you want to see that kind of coherence in action, then I recommend checking out the late-90s Gainax series, Kare Kano. This show managed to establish lovable, interesting characters right from the outset, each of whom has a lot going on in their lives, yet is unmistakably affected and improved by their involvement with one-another. Their relationship is compelling and manages to make progress at an unusually satisfying pace, without ignoring the conflicts that arise both from one-another and from the people around them, while director Hideaki Anno and his team at Gainax do what they do best at making sure that the imagery and sound design push the emotions of each scene up to the next level. Kare Kano has its own problems that result from production issues in the later part of the series, leading to a very unsatisfying conclusion; but nonetheless, I think the series at its best managed to do everything right in creating the kind of romantic comedy that I want to see more of.

I hope you enjoyed this video everyone, and that if you want to see more content like this, you’ll consider supporting me via patreon or paypal, or simply by sharing this video to anyone that you think will like it. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.

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Hideaki Anno. If you’re capable of naming three or more anime directors, then he’s probably one of them. You’ve heard of him because he created and directed Neon Genesis Evangelion–one of the most influential, infamous, and acclaimed anime series of all time. If you hang around in anime communities or watch and read a lot of analytical content, then you’ve probably seen him quoted, misquoted, speculated about, praised, and derided countless times in equal measure. What you may not have been treated to much of, is the big picture. Who is this guy? What’s his deal?

Now, obviously, I am not Hideaki Anno, nor have I ever spoken to the man. I don’t even live in his country nor understand his language. Everything that I’m going to say about him is speculative as a consumer of all of his work and all of the information about him that I could find in English, and should be taken with a dash of salt. I’m going to try and paint a picture of Hideaki Anno as a director and, on some level, as a person, by way of how I understand him–based on his work, his statements, and the way that he is presented by those closest to him. Hopefully, if nothing else, this will give you something to think about, and shed some light on just what this guy has been trying to do creatively over the last thirty-five years.

For an anime director, and for a guy who doesn’t do a lot of interviews, Anno’s career and personality have been impressively well-documented. Studio Khara–a studio which he founded–contains a pretty extensive bio page detailing his entire life as an artist on its website. His early career was mostly characterized by his being one of the co-founders and main creative forces behind Studio GAINAX, whose formation has been extensively documented not only by its members, but metaphorically in the OVA series that they put together called Otaku no Video; and in the semi-autobiographical manga-cum-TV-drama-series Blue Blazes, which was written by an artist who went to college with the founding members of GAINAX and observed their formation from the sidelines.

In 1999, Anno starred in an episode of a TV series called Extra Curricular Lessons with Senpai, in which he was brought in to teach a sixth grade class at the elementary school that he once attended on how to make animation. In the process, the kids ended up going to Anno’s hometown and meeting his parents and people he grew up with to get an idea of what he was like as a kid.

After Anno married popular manga artist Moyoco Anno in 2002, she went on to write a single-volume manga series about their married life called Insufficient Direction in 2005, which was later adapted into anime in 2014. All told, there’s more secondhand information about Hideaki Anno in existence than there is of possibly anyone else in the anime industry–not to mention that he makes cameo appearances in shows like Shirobako, giving further interpretations of his character; and all of it creates a pretty clear portrait of what he’s generally like.

If there are three things which every single account of Anno’s personality have made abundantly clear, and which are vitally important to understanding his work, then they are as follows: firstly, that Hideaki Anno IS otaku. Not just AN otaku, he is one of THE otaku, to the point that he was legitimately one of the earliest people to popularize the term as something that people called themselves, and to refer to himself as such openly. Secondly, that Anno is extremely socially awkward and most likely, on some level, autistic. I’m not making that up, Anno himself has made statements to the effect that not only might he be autistic, but that anyone working in animation might be autistic on some level as well; and I would say that this comes through both in the way that he’s portrayed in others’ work, as well as in some of the characters in his own writing that he relates himself to, such as Shinji Ikari. Lastly–though this may not be quite as important to grasping his work–Anno has a very low opinion of himself, in addition to having grappled with depression for a lot of his life. It would seem by many accounts that Anno became a lot more stable after getting married, but he’s certainly never been one to speak very highly of himself or of his own work.

Anno’s career path working in animation was more than a little unusual for the time, starting after his acceptance into an arts college in 1980. While Anno had been deeply invested in animation and tokusatsu shows and had been drawing manga since middle school, he was by no accounts a diligent student, and didn’t really think much of himself as a talented individual. If anything, it seems as though Anno’s talents, having manifested in his work producing a fan-made live-action Ultraman film for school using himself as Ultraman, and doing key animation work for Superdimensional Fortress Macross as an understudy, got him scouted by his peers.

Anno ended up working on the classic Daicon animations with the small team put together by Toshio Okada in the early 80s and discovered the joys of working with a team and being given directorial powers, thus leading him into the career path of an animator. His first work to get him recognized was when he answered an ad by Hayao Miyazaki over at studio Ghibli which was looking for key animators in the course of the tumultuous production of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. Miyazaki was so impressed with Anno’s animation that he handed him some of the biggest cuts in the film, and the two have seemingly enjoyed a friendly relationship ever since.

After bouncing around doing key animation work at different studios for a while, often sleeping in those studios as well, and at some point getting kicked out of college for failing to pay his tuition, Anno found himself at the formation of GAINAX working on the Royal Space Force film; before taking up his first directing job on Gunbuster when the OVA series found itself without a director early into production.

The image that I get of Anno in the first decade of his career, is that of an immensely talented but totally directionless guy who just kind of managed to fall into a job as an animator; and, eventually, as a director. Bear in mind that most people move through the anime industry by going up ranks in the production chain, often starting as key animators, before becoming episode and animation directors, and eventually working their way up to a major directorial position. You could say that Anno did this to some extent, but compared to most people, he didn’t really do a whole lot of work in his early career, and bounced between studios and productions to an usual degree. The fact that he became a director so early on could most probably be attributed to the way that Gainax was founded, being as it was one of the only anime studios which didn’t form by breaking away from an older, existing studio, but just kind of sprung up on its own by way of hard work and guts.

I think this is important to understand, because it explains why Anno never seemed to be willing to sit still across his career, and gives perspective both to his influences, as well as to some of his infamous quotes. Hideaki Anno was never really just an anime guy–he was always big into special effects work and live action film, along with other mediums outside of animation. It just happened that the best connections he made and the places that needed his talents the most at the time were anime studios. All things considered, it really wasn’t all that far into Anno’s anime career that things started going south for him.

Not long after finishing Gunbuster, Anno was given Nadia: the Secret of Blue water as a project handed down from a TV network after having originally been conceptualized by Hayao Miyazaki. Given that Nadia is a loose adaptation of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, it isn’t difficult to imagine that it might’ve been a World Masterpiece Theater concept, given Miyazaki’s involvement with that series throughout the 80s, and given the overall style and tone of Nadia.

Whatever the case, Nadia’s production turned out to be hellish for Anno, as he found himself with little creative control over the project thanks to its producers, and the plot and production totally went off the rails in the later episodes, ending in sort of a trainwreck. Around this time, Anno and his team at Gainax tried to launch all kinds of projects which were never able to get off the ground, including an ambitious sequel to the Royal Space Force which crashed and burned after years of work in the early 90s.

This is the period in which Anno fell into his infamous depression which mythically spawned the creation of Neon Genesis Evangelion–but I think the entire image here is rather fascinating. If the journey had ended here, then Gainax would have been just a very ambitious group of young animators who somehow went beyond the impossible for a brief and glorious period before totally imploding along with the rest of Japan during the economic collapse of the 90s. However, by some completely insane stroke of luck, they managed to make Evangelion.

Believe it or not, I think it’s often UNDERstated just how much of a big deal the existence of Eva really was. To put it into perspective, Eva was practically the genesis of the new idea of original TV anime. Up until the mid-90s, TV anime was basically never created without an existing source material, unless it was being made by studio Sunrise in order to sell robot toys. All of the big, original ideas were relegated mostly to OVAs and films–which were booming throughout most of the 80s, but became difficult to find the budget for in the early 90s. Franchises like Gundam and Macross were supported by their ability to sell endless robot toys, as were the more child-oriented Sunrise shows like the Brave series; but while Evangelion did indeed feature some of the most memorable and kickass robots of anime history, it’s plain to see that Eva was cast from a different mold compared other original TV anime that existed at the time. (Plus, there’s only like three robots that would actually make decent toys.)

And that, as it would happen, was the entire impetus behind creating it. Anno and the producers who funded Eva thought that what anime needed was a big, original TV series that wasn’t based on any pre-existing work to help revitalize the medium from its slow decay over the course of the early 90s–so that’s exactly what they set out to make. Anno was given carte blanche to do whatever the hell he wanted with the series for once, and he seemingly brought in every talented person he’d ever caught wind of to put their marks on the series in one way or another. Eva was designed out the gate to be a big deal, and while it wasn’t necessarily much of one through the early part of its airing, it most certainly became one in the long run.

It’s hard to imagine that the Be-Papas boys would’ve broken off from Sailor Moon to go make Revolutionary Girl Utena, or that Sunrise would’ve given Shinichiro Watanabe permission to do “whatever he wanted” with Cowboy Bebop, “as long as it had spaceships in it,” or that someone would’ve greenlit Serial Experiments Lain or Martian Successor Nadesico, had Evangelion not become the whirlwind success that it eventually was. While it might not have done much for Anno at the time, and in fact he fell into an even deeper depression immediately after Eva finished airing, his intentions of revitalizing TV anime were totally successful, and a whole new era of animation really did begin with the release of this series.

Were I to simplify what I think Eva did that was so special as to be such a game-changer for the medium, I believe that it represented a focal point at which everything that came before collided, and then took one step further.

Evangelion was what it was because of whom Hideaki Anno was at the time. He was a hardcore otaku–so he took elements from all of his favorite shows, like Space Runaway Ideon, Mobile Suit Gundam, and Space Battleship Yamato–and others from his favorite manga such as Devilman and Getter Robo–and others from his favorite tokusatsu films, such as Godzilla and Ultraman–and he tossed in the influence of live-action sci-fi films such as 2001 A Space Odyssey–twisted it all up in his own obsessions, from power lines to infrastructure, and in his mental hangups, from his depression down to his inability to communicate with others–and he packaged it all in an unforgettable presentation with as much talent behind it as might’ve existed in TV anime at the time. In short, the man created a goddamn masterpiece.

But, like any masterpiece, the series was entrenched in problems. Anno and his team were constantly reworking and rewriting it, even during production–at times because it was not finished, and at times because of things like a sarin gas attack on a Tokyo subway that forced them to change the nature of a major subplot. Their show got too graphic for its timeslot and had to move later into the night, while the production was falling behind schedule and crumbling in their hands, forcing them to resort to more and more recap footage, and eventually to scrap their incomplete work on the last two episodes to create entirely new ones from scratch–resorting to an insane, rambling, esoteric monologue set to practically zero animation.

It’s in this period of Anno’s history where a lot of his complicated and controversial quotations come from. Anno was adamantly defensive of the last two episodes of the Eva TV series, even though it’s obvious that they weren’t what he intended them to be. You can see unfinished key animation from End of Evangelion right there in the next episode preview from episode twenty-four–it’s not like they planned to end the series on a total clusterfuck.

Taking time away from the series and watching it bloom into success afforded GAINAX the opportunity to expand on the ending and to bring it to even bigger life with The End of Evangelion–so, in a way, the failure of the last two episodes may have been a blessing in disguise. If you watch his wording when Anno defends those episodes in an interview from 1997, he says that they were indicative of himself at the time and what he was going through, and that he likes them for that reason. I think that Anno was glad in the end that there were these variable versions of the ending which represented both the ideal, and the painfully real versions of what was going on with the series at the time.

Anno has been called a troll for the way that he said things like how Evangelion has no meaning; but you can find quotes from the same period which more suggest that Anno was hoping for the audience to find meaning for themselves rather than seeking it from him. Time and again, Anno says not only of Eva, but of art in general, that its purpose is to communicate–and that he wishes for people to be able to gain an understanding of him through his art. For someone who doesn’t really know how to communicate with people directly, he tries to speak through visual mediums; and he deems his success to be in how well his viewers understand him. In a sense, I wonder if it would even be depressing for someone to ask him what he means by something, when his entire hope is that he’s communicated his meaning through his work.

Some of his quotations indicate that he was more satisfied with the response that Eva got than not, though he would incorporate the death threats which he received from some fans into the End of Evangelion film itself. He would regard the production of Eva as something like a musical improv session in some interviews, even though the actual story of the series is solidly airtight through and through. And in spite of how he called the show meaningless at some point, Anno wrote a pretty lengthy piece about the themes of the series when he announced the Rebuild of Evangelion in 2006; but this video is getting long, so we’re gonna have to talk about that more in part two. Thanks again for watching.

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The next part of Anno’s career can be potentially confusing if you don’t look into it right. In 2008, he is credited for directing Kare Kano, of which he infamously left the production after creative disagreements with the author of the original manga. He is also credited in 2008 for directing the live-action film Love & Pop–but listing them this way, as they are on Wikipedia, is actually misleading. Anno launched into writing and directing Love & Pop immediately after finishing work on End of Evangelion, and the film was released early into 1998–its creation having been spurred by the advent of digital camcorder technology, allowing Anno to get into live-action directing on the cheap without having to pay absorbent film costs.

Love & Pop is a fascinating little movie, and it’s easy to imagine why Anno would’ve wanted to make it after constantly running into production issues with anime over the course of the past decade. The film was clearly shot on the cheap and quick, and Anno went totally off the rails with his creative freedom, to the point that nearly every shot in the film is totally weird. At a glance, it would be simple to deride this film as some cheap arthouse fluff by a crazy anime man who doesn’t know what he’s doing with an actual camera–except that after about 20 minutes or so the film actually gets pretty good and kinda makes sense.

If Love & Pop convinced me of anything, it’s that when Hideaki Anno looks at a script, he seems to imagine every single line as having its own totally distinct shot to go along with it. It never seems to occur to him that he could shoot something in a standard way, or by conventional means. It’s possible even, though unlikely, that he just doesn’t know or understand the conventions–but I think if his animation work is taken into consideration, it’s more likely that Anno tries to visually communicate the emotions of every line in his script with as much weight at the words themselves.

Even if a lot of shots the in Love & Pop are clearly just meant to look weird and fun, it never seems like there’s a shot that Anno didn’t think about how it would be presented–for better or for worse. Perhaps the freedom of the third dimension was something slightly excessive to be handed to someone like him–and to his cinematographer who would go on to work with less-hyperactive yet equally experimental films like Bright Future–but nonetheless, I think it speaks to Anno’s strength of vision that his directing stands out so much in every medium.

Perhaps the fervor and energy which Anno brough to Love & Pop had yet to subside by the time he came to work on Kare Kano, because his shot compositions and the energy of how each scene flows together was even more uniquely breakneck in the early episodes of that series. Even if Anno eventually came to disagreements with the producers and with the author of the manga and ended up leaving before it was over, putting the production in a catastrophic state into the hands of his understudy, Kazuya Tsurumaki; I nonetheless believe that for what he did with it, Kare Kano was every bit as strong as Evangelion in its presentation, and is personally one of my favorite anime series of all time. To many anime fans, though, it would seem as though Hideaki Anno went quiet after leaving the show up until the announcement of the Rebuild of Evangelion.

Of course, the truth is nothing of the sort. Anno went right back to work on another live action film, with what I’d like to imagine was an “okay, fuck anime for real,” mindset after all those production issues, and released Shiki-Jitsu in the year 2000. I have to confess–I haven’t seen this film because I straight-up can’t find it. Even in this period, though, Anno was no stranger to GAINAX. He gave his voice to Naota’s cat in Kazuya Tsurumaki’s FLCL that same year, and did some storyboarding and cameos over the next two years for the studio’s Mahoromatic and Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi. In 2002 he directed the spastic anime commercial short Anime Tenchou with Hiroyuki Imaishi, and it was around this time that Anno actually started working to try to get the Rebuild of Evangelion project moving. Yes–in 2002.

Like most of what Anno involves himself with, the Rebuild project didn’t get off the ground at first, and wouldn’t do so until years later. If you think about it, especially knowing how early on it was being planned, the idea behind the Rebuild movies makes perfect sense. Even if Eva was one of the biggest and most influential anime of all time, it was still wrought with crazy production issues, and was kind of an unwieldy, confusing mess a lot of the time. The impetus to recreate the thing now that it was big and famous and could potentially pull as much money and talent as it needed to be all that it could be is pretty obvious. I would even say that Anno’s intentions of using Eva to propagate the evolution of animation was no less relevant at this point than it had been in 1995–but we’ll get back to that momentarily.

2002 was also the year that Anno married Moyoco Anno–who, as I mentioned before, would later draw a manga about their relationship and how much of an otaku Anno is. It’s worth mentioning that in 2004, when Moyoco’s famous magical girl series Sugar Sugar Rune was being adapted to animation, her husband actually did some storyboard and key animation work for the series, even though it wasn’t even remotely tied to anyone he’d ever worked with before. I just wanted to point that out cause it’s kind of adorable, and makes for a hilarious, “what the hell,” moment if you look at this part of career without knowing that his wife created the series.

Anno popped his head up a few more times as a storyboard artist on Diebuster and as a supervisor on the Re: Cutey Honey OVA, while also writing and directing a fucking hilarious 12-minute live-action film called Ryusei-Kacho, which is available right here on youtube and you should drop everything and watch it immediately after this video, it is awesome.

Having seen Ryusei-Kachou, Anime Tenchou, Diebuster, and Abenobashi, Hideaki Anno’s next live-action film–a GAINAX-produced tokusatsu adaptation of Go Nagai’s classic Cutie Honey manga which released alongside GAINAX’s own anime OVA series–makes perfect sense. Watching this film, I would just as easily have believed that Hiroyuki Imaishi or Kazuya Tsurumaki had directed it themselves. (At this point I’d have a difficult time even determining whether Imaishi and Tsurumaki developed their styles more out of working for Anno, or if they were seriously rubbing off on him.)

Whatever the case, Cutie Honey is a spastic, hilarious, carefree cartoon romp full of crazy visuals, adorable fanservice, and awesomely bad special effects. While it may not have the depth of character that Anno’s TV shows are known for, this film remains an excellent showcase of his talent for creating striking, memorable scenes that flow beautifully from image to image, and is a lot more cleaned up and coherent than his previous live-action work. I honestly kind of love this movie, and I think it fits into the overall Anno and GAINAX catalog just as sensibly as anything else they’ve ever made. It even has Mayumi Shintani playing one of the villains, whom you may recognize as the voice of Haruko, Nonon, and Shibahime, given that she almost exclusively voice acts for GAINAX series. I didn’t even mention earlier that Megumi Hayashibara, who voiced Rei in Evangelion, made cameo voice appearances in Anno’s previous films; but what I’m getting at here is that Anno’s live action work wasn’t all that far removed from his anime work–especially in the case of his Cutie Honey film.

After the release of Cutie Honey, it would seem that Anno really put his nose to the grindstone on trying to get the Rebuild series into development and establishing Studio Khara. For a while, his only appearances in the media were through random cameos in a handful of live-action films. It wasn’t until 2006 that the Rebuild films were finally announced, with the first of the planned four-part series coming out in 2007.

Now, once again, it would seem to a lot of people that from this point forward, Anno really didn’t do much of anything besides work on the Rebuild films for like ten goddamn years–and this isn’t as incorrect as it was last time. More so than trying to follow Anno’s career path from this point forward, what I’d like to try and pull apart is for what reason the Rebuilds have been presented in the way that they have been, and to what benefit.

A lot of Hideaki Anno’s infamous quotations have accused the anime industry of stagnation. He has often accused animators and directors of looking inward too much and only being influenced by other anime, instead of pulling influences from outside mediums–which is something that he’s consistently done throughout his career. He doomspoke the industry’s inevitable collapse, though later clarified that he was too harsh and mostly meant that things would fall apart if they failed to evolve. (Again, keep in mind this person’s difficulty with communication.)

These statements from Anno are nothing new–he was decrying the past decade of anime as early as 2002. In his mission statement about the Rebuild films in ‘07, he stated among his desires that he wished to fight the trend of stagnation in the industry, and to connect today’s exhausted Japanese animation industry to the future. Where these statements become strange and a little confusing, is when you stack them next to a series of films that are mostly just a remake of a twelve year-old TV show, which have themselves taken over eight years in production.

It’s hard to imagine that the Rebuild films have stayed in production for so long purely out of taking as long as they do to make; not when they’re so profitable that there are entire Evangelion stores, theme parks, extensive brand deals, and more money being made through Eva-themed pachinko alone than through any other facet of the franchise put together. There is a series–a SERIES of Eva pachinko VIDEO GAMES for the Nintendo DS. There is an Eva horse racing commercial. There is a market for Eva collectibles which is more comparable to a Sanrio character than to a typical anime series. And studio Khara itself often has a hand in producing these things, such as creating fanservicey new animations for the pachinko machines.

Evangelion is an industry in and of itself, and what better way to keep that industry running than to keep the hype alive for as long as possible? Instead of relapsing your hype train with bi-yearly reboots like Spider-Man does, you can keep an entire market afloat by blue-balling the patrons for the main attraction while billing them out of every side-show on God’s green Earth. Now of course, I don’t mean to imply that I think they could’ve released these films as quickly as they wanted to had they chosen to do so, but I can’t help but find some suspicion in the way that this project has continued, unbroken by any of its directors or the studio behind it working on any other major pictures, for over eight years now.

But I don’t necessarily mean to imply that Anno and his team are doing this out of greed. To make money, sure, but let’s return once more to Anno’s mission statement–to revitalize the dying anime industry. If you’re watching my channel, then it’s highly likely that you’ve heard me talk about the dismal state of anime funding, especially for original programs along the lines of Evangelion. Less money means less work for talented people, and less room for newcomers to get started in the industry. Animation is constantly understaffed because the industry is staggeringly underpaid. In light of all this, if someone wanted to give work to as many talented and/or young people in the industry as they possibly could, then what better way to do so than by dumping as much money into it as you can get your hands on?

In the past three years, Hideaki Anno’s intentions with the Rebuild films have seemingly become more clear. In 2012, Anno opened a museum dedicated to tokusatsu miniatures, which he saw as a valuable medium which was sprouting death flags thanks to production costs, and the increase of CG in special effects work. To commemorate the museum’s opening, he co-created an eight-minute short film with longtime friend and fellow GAINAX co-founder Shinji Higuchi, who’d spent most of his time since the 80s becoming a big-name special effects director in the world of tokusatsu. The short was produced by Ghibli and shot using miniatures, and featured a God-Warrior from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind descending on and destroying Tokyo. In 2016, Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi will be teaming up again to direct the next live-action Godzilla film from Toho studio, resurrecting the series after ten years of dormancy.

Towards the end of 2014, Studio Khara began releasing a bi-weekly series of short films entitled the Animator Expo, with Anno and Miyazaki attached as producers. Every episode of the expo features a different staff, with just about every noteworthy freelancer in the industry showing up across its run, alongside a swath of newcomers. If anything had ever seemed intended for the express purpose of injecting life into the industry of original animation, it’s the Animator Expo.

As much fun as it’s been having Anno pop up in random places, like as the voice of the main character in Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises, it can be a little sad to see one of anime’s greatest living directors get tied up with one series of movies for eight years–especially one as controversial and argued-over as the Rebuild films. It doesn’t help either that he took Kazuya Tsurumaki along with him, whom I suspect is more or less the more prominent creative force behind the films as he’s done even less outside of them in all this time. However, it stings a little less to see how they left GAINAX in the capable hands of Hiroyuki Imaishi, who cranked out some of the studio’s best work ever before branching off to form his own, even more outlandish studio in the form of Trigger. Even as a husk of what it once was with all of its big names gone, GAINAX itself is still keeping decently afloat, and they just put out an original series that a lot of people liked this year.

If there ever was a time when Anno’s career and personality seemed to be perfectly in alignment, though, then that time would be right now. Hideaki Anno IS otaku. Not just AN otaku, but one of THE otaku, to the point that he cares more about the state of the anime and tokusatsu industries than almost anyone else, and wants to see them blossom into further potential. After twenty years of being dicked around by producers and rarely getting things his way creatively, he became a producer himself, putting budgets into the hands of the industry’s most bold and audacious creative talents and letting them do as they please.

In Hideaki Anno’s afterword for his wife’s manga about their relationship, he goes on and on about how nicely her manga is able to communicate its feelings, and even goes so far as to say that it does a better job than his own Evangelion. You could easily write this off as Anno being cute for his wife, or as being overly humble–but at the same time, it totally seems like the kind of thing that he’d say in complete honesty. Anno has never liked himself much–he’s never been that confident in his creations on a personal level, and he’s always harbored a deep admiration for the work of others. If anyone was the right kind of guy to be funding other creatives and pushing their work over his own, it was this guy.

Once again, everything I’ve said here is speculation, and should be taken with a dash of salt. I don’t know Hideaki Anno any more than anyone else who’s watched all of his films and read all of his interviews, and it’s entirely possible that I’ve misinterpreted some of his intentions. Maybe the Rebuild movies really have just taken that long to make, and maybe his plans weren’t so grandiose from the start. Maybe he’s a little more confident than he lets on, or maybe his interviews are even more honest than I realize. Having been a fan of his work for as long as I have, and having read about him as much as I have, though, I feel like this portrait of his character makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t know if this is what Anno intended to communicate about himself, but it’s what I interpreted about him–and I hope that in sharing this interpretation, I’ve helped some of you to understand him a little better yourselves. Thanks again for watching.

Video sources:
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Extra-Curricular Lesson with Hideaki Anno: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh0qbJAQhgk
Daicon III and IV Opening Animations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-840keiiFDE
Otaku no Video
Blue Blazes
Insufficient Direction (manga on crunchyroll; sign up with my link, I get paid! https://crunchyroll.com/digibro )
Shirobako (on crunchyroll; sign up with my link, I get paid! https://crunchyroll.com/digibro )
Nissan commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbNE57Q-qBI
Megazone 23
Anno’s Ultraman film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJZBt6wTNe0
Superdimensional Fortress Macross
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnaemise
Top wo Nerae! Gunbuster
Eguchi Hisashi no Nantoka Naru Desho: http://sakuga.yshi.org/post/show/17634/animated-effects-eguchi_hisashi_no_nantoka_naru_de
Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water
R20: Ginga Kuukou (Route 2-: Galactic Airport): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv5jdTDlnV8
Mobile Suit Gundam
Revolutionary Girl Utena
Cowboy Bebop
Serial Experiments Lain
Martian Successor Nadesico
The Vision of Escaflowne
The End of Evangelion
Does It Matter What Evangelion’s Director Says? (Idea Channel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVm65tlhqw8

Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou (His and Her Circumstances)
Love & Pop
Shiki-Jitsu (Ritual)
FLCL (Anno also storyboarded that trippy part I used, didn’t mention)
Anime Tenchou: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm83UPreMbE
Evangelion 1.11 You Are (NOT) Alone
Kantoku Fuyuki Todoki (Insufficient Direction) (manga on crunchyroll; sign up with my link, I get paid! https://crunchyroll.com/digibro )
Sugar Sugar Rune
Top wo Nerae! Diebuster
Re: Cutie Honey
Ryusei-Kacho: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCVg49Ff9m4
Cutie Honey
Nihon Chinbotsu (Japan Sinks)
Evangelion 2.22 You Can (NOT) Advance
Evangelion Store: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ar81fnbwcA
Evangelion Theme Park: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1Lk4CO4vYQ
Eva Schick Commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDn1QoTVt2U
Eva Pachinko game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjMnTWwvqrE
Eva Horse Racing Commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV36QPB0pew
Eva pachinko DS game
Why Good Anime Is Hard To Make
Nihon Animator Mihonichi (Animator Expo) Intro: http://animatorexpo.com/opening.html
Tokusatsu Museum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3unlD_XIhQ
Giant God Warrior Appears In Tokyo: https://vimeo.com/64987176
Girl (Animator Expo): http://animatorexpo.com/girl/
The Wind Rises
Evangelion 3.33 You Can (NOT) Redo
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (on crunchyroll; sign up with my link, I get paid! https://crunchyroll.com/digibro )
Kill la Kill (on crunchyroll; sign up with my link, I get paid! https://crunchyroll.com/digibro )
Houkago no Pleiades (Wish Upon the Pleiades) (on crunchyroll; sign up with my link, I get paid! https://crunchyroll.com/digibro )
Extra-Curricular Lesson with Hideaki Anno: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh0qbJAQhgk

Further reading:

Studio Khara’s biography of Anno: http://www.khara.co.jp/hideakianno/personal-biography.html

Nearly every conceivable quote from anyone involved with Evangelion about Evangelion has been collected in this gigantic source list: http://www.gwern.net/otaku#section

Most of all the key animation work Anno did: http://sakuga.yshi.org/post?tags=hideaki_anno+

A neat little interview between Anno and Go Nagai in which Anno brings up his Devilman influence a bunch: http://devilman.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Painocus/Interview_between_Nagai_and_Hideaki_Anno

Go check out my gaming channel if you haven’t yet: https://www.youtube.com/user/VABHermitSociety

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/Digibrah
Donate: digitalboyreviews@gmail.com
My Blog: https://myswordisunbelievablydull.wordpress.com/
My Anime List: http://myanimelist.net/profile/Digibro
Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/Digibro

This story will fully come together in a day or two when the Digi Bros episode comes out during which The Davoo asks me when I’ll learn to cook–for now, I present the attempts:

As of Thanksgiving, I resolved that I would learn how to cook well enough by next year’s Thanksgiving that I can cook the dinner myself. I started yesterday.

So my mom had a cookbook laying around called The Best Recipes, which takes recipes that are listed on the sides of the cans and boxes of foods and lists them all. It’s an enormous book which and least 10 years old, which was perhaps worth consideration.

The first appetizer which caught my eye was meant to use Underwood roast beef spread–which is a product that I was convinced didn’t exist, but my mom assured me that it did.
I was right.

The recipe called for Roast Beef spread (nonexistent), Melba Rounds (my dad and I couldn’t find these at the store–we were probably looking in the wrong section, as we thought they’d be with the crackers), grated onions, and grated cheddar cheese.

Since the roast beef didn’t exist, I got some Underwood deviled ham spread instead. Since we couldn’t find the Melba rounds, we went with saltine rounds. We had cheddar and pepperjack combo cheese, which is the same difference. As follows:

They looked like an absolute mess put together, and I’m sure I used more onion than I was supposed to, though as an onion lover this didn’t bother me.

They didn’t come out as terrible as I expected, but it was very clear that you do NOT cook saltine crackers in the oven, even for only 3 minutes. Once my mom told us what Melba rounds are like, we got a sense of why they were needed, and why we didn’t find them in the cracker isle. Between me, Vic, and my cousin, we were able to stomach a little more than half the plate. This meal was clearly never meant to happen this way, and while I think that it could’ve been improved a lot with Melba rounds and less onions, I don’t think it’s worth doing again, considering the main ingredient no longer exists.

—

My mom was telling me about a legendary cookbook known as the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, which has a red and white checkerboard pattern and “was in every woman’s kitchen back in the day.” My mom’s copy had been left behind in a cross-country move when I was little. When we were at my grandma’s house on Thanksgiving, my mom found a copy of it in her bathroom, and my grandma let me keep it.

Going right to the appetizers section once again, this time I decided to try some ham-stuffed mushrooms. This was a more complex recipe and ran me a fairly high price because we didn’t own most of the ingredients–but at least I pretty much got all the correct ones. I had to get a lot of smaller mushrooms than the size I would’ve liked because the store I went to only had like two large mushrooms in stock; but overall, this was correct.

It consists of chopped up green onions and mushroom stems cooked with butter, then mixed with flour, grated Parmesan cheese, Savory (this is a type of seasoning which seems to have fallen out of style? My mom hadn’t heard of it, and the bottle I bought was the only one of its kind at the store I went to), white wine, diced ham, and water. Topped with bread crumbs, for which I used the Panko we had around.

I definitely put a bit too much of the wine and water into my mixture, because I’m stupid and I don’t fully grasp how little a tablespoon is. It still looked potentially okay.

This was far more edible than the previous attempt–I’d even call it food. I could tell that the taste had been diluted a bit by all the water I put in, but it still came out with a fairly complex and rich taste. The recipe had specifically been for 24 mushrooms (I had 21), which was way too many to cook for just myself and Vic. He only ate a few since he was going to lunch with Hope, so I tried my damndest to eat the rest myself. I still have like 5 left (I guess I ate like 11?) so I’ll find out if they’re any good cold/reheated. Overall, I’d consider this to be a success as an appetizer, if not close to a resounding one. I also have learned that this dish is probably an appetizer because ten fucking mushrooms really starts to weigh heavy on your stomach.

Watch on Google Drive

Edited by The Davoo

Text version and links:

So the fall 2015 season is already a month and a half underway, and now that I’ve climbed out of my cryo-sleep chamber that beams old GAINAX shows into my head for weeks on end, I guess I’ll give one of those seasonal charts a look. [MAL seasonal chart organized by popularity.]

Alright, we’ve got One Punch Man. This is obviously gonna to be cool as shit. Everyone’s been hyping up the manga for years now, and the main character’s like some weird melon-headed bald superhero dude surrounded by wacky and interesting alien cyborgs and shit. Studio Madhouse is still pretty damn reliable when it comes to action shows, and the director is the same guy who lead Space Dandy under Watanabe’s supervision last year, which was probably the best-looking anime TV series ever made. Definitely gonna watch this one.

Next we’ve got some sequels to shows I didn’t watch, some Silver Links show I don’t care about and… oh, look. An A-1 Pictures show. Judging by this cover art, I’m guessing it’s a light novel adaptation–not that I need to guess since it says so right there.

Now, I realize I’m probably the only weirdo who feels this way, but it’s been over three years since this studio put out a show that I actually liked–a time span in which the studio has released approximately seventeen thousand TV shows–and it happens that Tsuritama was directed by a dude I generally love. Every time they make a show that seems kinda cool at first I end up hating it by the end, and their visual aesthetic drives me up the fucking wall with how unappealing it is.

My gut reaction when I see “A-1 Pictures,” and “light novel,” is to stay the fuck away and never look back–which might seem a little closed-minded and dickish to people who don’t get where I’m coming from. Justifying why I feel these stupid emotions is hard. It’s not the kind of thing I can explain away in one sentence or paragraph or informational video. It’s not just one thing about these shows that rubs me the wrong way; it’s a little bit of everything. So if I’m gonna get to the heart of this, and try to get you to appreciate my big dumb hateboner for this studio, then we’re just gonna have to watch the show together while I bitch about eeeeeeeeverything.

Now before you leave a comment about how I shouldn’t watch a show I don’t like, or about how I’m an asshole for ragging on some show that people love, or whatever other reactionary comment you might be typing up right now, let me set some things straight. First of all, there are reasons to watch something other than enjoyment. In this case, the reason is a combination of intellectual curiosity and a desire to get this off of my chest. Secondly, there are plenty of people who ask me every day to talk more about shows that I don’t like, and who love it when I help them to justify their own negative feelings towards a show–and just as easily as I could’ve decided not to make this video, you could’ve decided not to watch it. And lastly, this is literally my job. I make youtube videos about anime. I don’t do anything else. This is my life.

So, now that we’re all on the same page, let’s head on over to crunchyroll and fire this baby up. If you want to watch along with me, I recommend using this kickass crunchyroll.com/digibro link to sign up for an account; because if you do then crunchyroll will literally give me five dollars. You can tell I’m serious because if I wasn’t then I’d never recommend this show to anyone, ever.

Before we actually click on episode one, let’s take a look at that little poster they’ve got on the side to give us a sense of what this show’s gonna be like. Every single thing about this poster puts me off immediately. We can tell that the main characters are in uniforms since they’ve got the same color scheme and general look, which means that this show takes place in high school. Now, that’s no huge knock on the series, considering that 95% of anime takes place in high school, but it brings along a set of expectations about what the setting and characters are gonna be like.

The uniforms are completely unrealistic and nothing like anything that’d be worn in a real Japanese school, and they’ve got this sort of sleek, almost sci-fi aesthetic to them–which means that this isn’t gonna be just a high school, but a special school for abnormal people. The fact that both characters are holding some kind of spectral-looking weapon means that it’s probably going to be a school where everyone has super powers, and which has some kind of school-sanctioned battling going on for some stupid-ass reason. Every season has at least two shows like this, and the fall season has three which are nearly identical. [Cavalry and 35 Shiken]

Moreover, the girl’s uniform has an unrealistically tight little miniskirt that would break the dress code at any school which actually bothered to have uniforms, along with sexy thigh-high stockings that show off just a few centimeters of flesh which are known as the absolute territory. The idea that she can position her legs like that without the skirt riding straight up and flashing her panties is a fantasy only anime can create, but it puts it in your head that surely, if you watch the show, you’ll be able to see the rest. Her rather large breasts are very pronounced by the way that her chest is pushed out, even though she’s looking at a downward angle; so all of you at home, I’d like you to look down at something while puffing your chest out a little and see how that feels. Anyways, the point is, this is gonna be a fanservice show.

Both of the character designs are what I would describe as “light novel default characters.” First, let’s take a look at Light Novel Guy. What separates Light Novel Guy from Harem Guy is the pointiness and swooshiness and possibly color of his hair. A typical harem guy or otherwise milquetoast Yuuji Everylead dude has black hair, sort of like a bowl cut or just a drab, boring look to him; and maybe glasses, so that he looks like basically every random fifteen year-old Japanese kid. What separates Light Novel Guy from Yuuji Everylead is that Light Novel Guy is how an edgy, “too cool for school” fifteen year-old Japanese kid sees himself. He stands out from the crowd a little bit, and has a dark, brooding edge to him that let’s you know he’s the most important dude around. He’s just generic enough to project yourself onto, but just stylish enough to look like kind of a badass when the chips are down and there’s an ass to be kicked.

Light Novel Girl, meanwhile, is a more specific package, but with a few more variables. She’s just a bit shorter than Light Novel Guy, and she has very large breasts–but not like crazy large. If she had really huge boobs then she’d be the girl with the big boobs, which is one of the side characters, so it’s important that her boobs be about as large as could be considered reasonably proportioned for her height. She’s got a slender body, but just enough leg that she looks like she could muster up a reasonably strong punt to the groin, and her candy-colored hair falls anywhere from her upper back to just beyond her butt. This is what I call the “main girl look.”

So if their overall designs weren’t generic enough, we can also figure out their equally generic personalities by looking at their weapons. Light Novel Guy’s got this big dumb sword with way too much shit going on, which I guess is meant to look like it’s got a status buff or something, or like it’s poisoned… whatever, it looks like a plastic toy that’s possessed by a ghost. Meanwhile, Light Novel Girl has a shiny pink rapier, and is standing in a comparatively defensive position.

Obviously Light Novel Guy is the type of fighter who’s brash, passionate, and maybe a bit out of control from time to time. He jumps headlong into the action, yells about friendship, and does a lot of damage, in contrast to his typically lackadaisical and confused nature. Meanwhile, Light Novel Girl is more poised and reserved. She takes herself very seriously and is easily embarrassed because she tries to be guarded with her emotions; but since she’s on a crash course with the main character’s crotch just by being in the same show as him, then this is going to manifest itself in what many would describe as the “tsundere” archetype. Light Novel Guy is going to see Light Novel Girl in various stages of undress more than once, and she is not going to be happy about it.

The background is littered with garish effects that I’m not even sure what they’re meant to represent. The fiery orange shit behind Light Novel Girl kind of looks like it’s meant to be in the shape of wings on her back, but then there’s also an errant pool of orange crap behind Light Novel Guy, so it’s hard to say for sure. It doesn’t quite look like an explosion or a fire, so much as just like someone going apeshit with a photoshop tool that makes gradient orange splashes. Behind that is like a bunch of stars and vague sci-fi-ish doodles that once again don’t seem like much of anything. The bottom part has been swallowed by this ugly white goo–which, in fairness, isn’t the designer’s fault–the original image has the Japanese title in one of those snazzy light novel fonts, and I guess someone at Crunchyroll just did a really lazy job of superimposing the English title overtop of it.

Alright enough of this shit, let’s watch the show.

Right off the bat, the first episode opens up with one of my most hated anime tropes: the totally pointless shitty fight with no context. Two characters that I’ve never seen and know nothing about are fighting for reasons that I don’t understand. It seems to be in some kind of underground arena with a rabidly interested crowd, but it’s hard to tell if this is like a sporting event, or a gladiatorial thing, or if the characters are doing this willingly, or even whether or not they’re supposed to end up killing one-another. I mean, one of them does end up dead, but was that because of the nature of the competition, or some kind of accident? There’s just too little to go on.

At the very least, I can tell I’m supposed to be rooting for the girl, because she actually has a face and a voice. This girl is like ridiculously cute because she wears glasses, so I know she’s an important character on some level, whereas her opponent is a perfectly generic big dude with a mask and no voice whatsoever. Now, I’ve got a theory, based on the way that the mask breaks off at the end of the battle, that this guy wasn’t given a voice because we’re not supposed to know who he is, and if we heard that voice coming out of someone else or saw the actor in the cast list later, then we’d know who the killer was. In any case, the cute little girl seems like the underdog in comparison to the big scary masked guy, so for now she has our allegiance in spite of knowing nothing about either character whatsoever.

Within the first ten seconds of this battle–as in, two seconds after seeing the faces of the competitors for the first time–all of the dramatic stakes in this fight go flying out the window, because the characters transform into a pair of colored lights beaming around at random. Already, the rules and limitations of their abilities have been made irreparably unclear. Like, what the fuck kind of combat scenario comes out looking like a choreographed light show? How far beyond human capability do these powers extend if the characters can move at these ridiculous speeds and, for all we know, turn into laser beams? It’s going to become apparent in a second that these colored lights represent the colors of their weapons–but the fact that in this shot there aren’t even people attached to them makes the entire scene feel like a surreal metaphor for an actual fight.

The next shot is a laughably horrific excuse for fight choreography that tries to cover itself up by happening so fast that you’ll be impressed just because the characters are indeed moving. The guy comes running through the foreground towards the girl, but the sense of space is conveyed so poorly and his weapon is so awkward looking, that it kind of looks like he totally whiffs. We can only really tell that he’s aiming for the girl’s head, because she ducks down to dodge his attack, even though doing so was probably unnecessary. The girl like rocket boosts off to the right, and then swings at the dude, but this time he ducks under it–which was probably unnecessary because the colored light representing the sword’s arc is actually right where his head would be, if not for the fact that it’s in front of him and missed entirely.

So the guy lunges at her, but–wait, what the fuck just happened? Wait, go back and do that frame by frame. So in one frame, we see the girl’s head start to move to the right, and then in the next frame she’s suddenly in a completely different pose and facing the opposite direction. The dude not only laughable misses his attack, but instead of lunging forward, his body apparently moves backwards, and then he jumps over another sword slash that looks like it wasn’t even remotely close to hitting him anyways.

After that, the camera just starts switching characters from foreground to background a bunch of times because as long as things are moving fast they must automatically be exciting, and then we get some more ineffectual stabbing action before the girl goes in with her big yell. Now this moment where the guy knocks the girl’s hand away is pretty alright, as it creates a tension dispersal and represents the changing tide in the battle to his taking control–but it’s just followed by a bunch of other nonsensical disconnected frames.

The whole thing finally wraps up in one of those big all-or-nothing attacks that always makes me wonder why, if the characters could bust out these super moves whenever they wanted to, they decided to save them for the end of the match when they’re already exhausted. There’s a clash of swords, a pan up to the weirdest light fixture ever, a hint at this mystery man’s special powers, and then the girl is dead. From her last words, “I’m sorry, Ayato,” you can pretty easily figure out that this girl is probably the main character’s older sister, because who else would it be? The name has to be the main character’s name, and the only person who’d be around this age and give this much of a shit about him this early into the story would be his sister.

Now, I don’t think it’s impossible to open up on a big, stupid, flashy fight scene and have it be an enticing way to start a show. Obviously any amount of dialog or setting detail which might clue us into the purpose of the fight would go a long way in making it more interesting, or even just if the fighting styles of the characters hinted at what kind of people they were–be that idealistically, or culturally, or just in the way they fight. Both of these characters seem to have the exact same superpower and nearly identical weapons; how boring is that?

Lowering my standards as far as I possibly can with regards to scenes like this, let’s take a look at the nearly identical opening minute and a half of the Black Rock Shooter OVA. Once again, we’ve got a fight between two characters I’ve never seen and who have no dialog, and the scene ends with one of them being killed. Their powers are so over the top that there’s no sense of stakes or limitations, and a lot of it is just aimless sword swinging. But even this scene managed to intrigue me in a couple of ways. The location of the battle is like nothing I’ve ever seen before, and gorgeously rendered with excellent cinematography; the characters are both pretty goddamn cool-looking, and some of the animation cuts and fight choreography is downright stellar. Even the way that Black Rock Shooter’s death is represented is a lot more artful and interesting than the spot coloring pool of blood. And let’s address that, too.

When I watched this opening fight from the Asterisk War, I wasn’t sure at first if it was supposed to take place in the past, or if it was colored this way just because the location was supposed to be a dark and dreary place. Black-and-white is like a universal film shorthand for flashbacks, but the scene isn’t actually IN black-and-white–it’s just really heavily desaturated, but not so much that you can’t tell the girl’s hair is supposed to be purple. The laser beams are still bright and colorful, which makes it seem like the location is just a really dark place and the swords are really bright; but then the blood is also really bright, which gives the impression that it was meant to look artsy and cool. It’s like they couldn’t decide between whether they wanted to do like an artsy black and white spot coloring flashback scene, or a more normal-looking fight scene where you can still tell what the characters are supposed to look like and which still has the same general feel as the rest of the show–so they went halfway in both directions and made something that looks like shit.

Now that I’m finally done talking about this stupid fight scene, we can let the camera pan up through all these weirdly esoteric shapes which don’t seem like they’re meant to be literal layers of the building where this fight took place, and then abruptly cut to this screenshot of the Sword Art Online opening theme. This has got to be the laziest possible visual shorthand for vague futurism. It seems at some point that the anime industry collectively decided that the inside of the internet is a stylish color gradient with a bunch of random particle effects and image tabs opened up across an ethereal plane of nothingness.

Years of Hollywood films have conditioned us to associate random photographs of vaguely industrial buildings with exposition about the current state of humanity, and through a handful of helpful photographic screenshots, we learn that something called Invertia drastically changed the world as we know it–apparently by way of a bunch of meteors falling on Tokyo. Continuing the theme of vague futurism, a CG globe with a bunch of random names on it and some weird hexagon with meaningless symbols attached to it apparently are meant to represent the shift in world powers; it looks more like an RPG stat graph. We are told that the Invertia caused a shift in the moral principles of society for some reason, which only informs us that the people of this world should be completely unrelatable to us. This is a very important and accurate detail. I hope you’ve also figured out that the word “invertia” is a not at all clever reference to the idea that this incident inverted the nature of the world as it stood. This will not be relevant later on.

Over the course of the following scene, the narrator informs us that the Invertia led to a new race of people being born with superpowers called the Genestella, and that those people meet in this city called Asterisk in order to fight one-another; but I want to break the rest of this scene down in more depth for what’s happening visually, and I’m out of time in this video. Yes, it took me fifteen minutes to make it two minutes into the first episode. Yes, this is going to be a long ride. Yes, I am a crazy person.

Continued in part two.

Edited by The Davoo

Text version and links:

When I left off in the previous video, a handkerchief was floating through the air over an idyllic cityscape, where fancy buildings are interspersed with luscious park reserves, and Light Novel Guy makes a nice catch. A quick shot of Light Novel Girl informs us that the handkerchief is hers, and she seems to be upset about something. Now, if you’re a genre-savvy anime watcher viewing this episode for the first time, then you probably already know what’s about to happen. All you had to see was that the girl’s shirt isn’t buttoned up all the way, and you can guess that this scene is going to end in Light Novel Guy accidentally seeing her in her underwear as a result of his nice-guy attempt to return her handkerchief. If you’re like me, then you’re probably halfway between rolling your eyes, and being quietly impressed at the speed with which this show is rushing headlong into trashiness. But we’ll put a pin in that for now.

We quickly get our first good look at Light Novel Guy, and oh my god, it’s Kirito! No wait, maybe it’s Inaho? It’s hard to tell with these A-1 Pictures characters cause they all have the same fucking face. Seriously, there’s like maybe ten or so different face templates which this studio seems to use on every single character in the majority of their shows. It’s crazy! Now look, I’m not one of those guys who thinks that anime characters all look the same. I can appreciate the subtle differences between say, the characters in K-On, vs. the characters in Hyouka, vs. the characters in Hibike Euphonium, and I’ve seen evidence to the fact that when you switch these characters’ faces around, they actually look really weird. But what happens when you put Kirito’s face on Ayato? Oh. Or how about Inaho’s face? Oh. I guess anime characters do all look the same. And it’s funny that I’m even bringing this up now because it’s SOOO much worse with their girl characters. Anyways, I digress.

Light Novel Guy–by the way, this guy’s name is Ayato–gets all glowy, meaning he’s gonna do some superpower stuff, and makes this really awful-looking leap up to Light Novel Girl’s window. He lands all dainty and smooth, but then is struck with embarrassment as he realizes what he’s just accidentally done. Pat yourselves on the back everyone, cause you saw this coming.

Funnily enough, our first panty shot is decidedly not tantalizing, on account of Light Novel Girl apparently has no ass whatsoever, but the camera pans up quickly to hide it and to get into some bra territory. We’ll come back to this in a second–after the camera’s done panning out across the entire world of this story, in a way that actually kind of reminds me of the opening panning shot from Kill la Kill–besides being several fathoms less interesting because it’s just a normal city and not the creatively constructed world of Honnouji Academy. This comparison may end up being more relevant than you first expect, but we’ll save that for later.

After the title card, we fade in on this shot of a huge building complex, which at this point I’m going to assume is a school campus–in which case it may indeed roughly share the populace of a small city. The main building is 28-stories high–I counted.

So of course, it wasn’t enough that we caught a glimpse of this girl in her underwear before–now we get the full-on slow camera pan treatment with all the details in the garments. May I remind you that this is our first exposure to this character–forgive the double entendre. Before we’ve been treated to any piece of information about her whatsoever, our first impression is that her underwear matches her hair.

Now look, I’m not someone who dislikes fanservice in general. In fact, I actually enjoy shows like Kanokon and Seikon no Qwaser wherein the fanservice is pretty much the entire point of the show, because at that point it’s basically just softcore porn with actual characters. Even in shows that aren’t about fanservice, I tend to be okay with it as long as the fanservice is what I call, “diegetic.” [word on screen.] What I mean by this is that the characters are scantily clad for reasons that actually seem normal and make sense narratively. Like, it’s not unusual to think that if you, say, went to the beach with a bunch of girls, then you’re going to see them in sexy bathing suits. That kind of thing is a part of life. It can add to characterization or to our perspective on a character to see how they may act in situations that lead them to be naked, or sexualized; and that’s totally normal and makes sense.

What bothers me is when you take like a plot-driven show that doesn’t really have much to do with sex or sexuality, and cram in a bunch of random, totally unrealistic scenes wherein characters accidentally see one-another naked just for the sake of itself. I mean, it’s not like I don’t understand the appeal of having like a real, normal, plot-based show that happens to be full of cute girls and maybe sometimes you get to see them naked–but it’s not even slightly difficult to accomplish this just by having the girls converse in a locker room, or making a pool episode, or at the very least, just admitting that the guy is deliberately checking the girl out. A moment like this doesn’t even feel like it’s happening in the context of the story–it feels like it’s happening directly to the viewer. Like the universe of the story has conspired around finding a situation in which the audience can be treated to a titillating camera pan of a half-naked girl which isn’t really in-character from the main guy’s perspective, nor a logical result of the narrative at all.

And what’s more, in this particular case, I’m not even really sure how this is meant to attract me to the show. Light Novel Girl certainly isn’t my type, which is more a matter of personal taste, but why do I even care that I caught a two-second glimpse of some girl I’ve never seen before in her underwear? If I wanted to, I could minimize this window right now, open up a new tab and type “pink hair anime boob” into google and immediately have hundreds of pictures of girls identical to this one in whichever particular state of undress most interests me for as long as I want. What is so enticing about random, disjointed fanservice moments that it could possibly compete with the infinite resource of carnal pleasures known as the internet?

But for the sake of argument, let’s say that I live in a universe where the only source of entertainment in existence is anime, and my browser has been set to automatically load up crunchyroll at all times and no other websites whatsoever. I’m only a few clicks away from Kanokon, Recently My Sister Is Unusual, Demon King Daimaou, and So I Can’t Play H, which all have a lot more fanservice, with actual nudity, and much better animation. If I’m specifically only into girls with long pink hair, I’ve got Shin Koihime Musou, R-15, and Familiar of Zero right there. If I am specifically interested in seeing fanservice of a character voiced by Ai Kakuma, then I can watch Amagi Brilliant Park and Kanojo ga Flag Oraretara on the same site. The only thing that this scene provides me which I can’t get a better version of elsewhere is fanservice of a pink haired girl voiced by Ai Kakuma–and if you’re watching this show for such a specific reason, then you probably don’t give a shit whether it’s good on not. By the way, if you want to watch all of those shows, why not use my crunchyroll link to sign up and make me some mon-[cut me off]

So Light Novel Girl reacts about how you’d expect and we watch her change into her weird, illogical school uniform as Kirito explains his reason for being there. As soon as Light Novel Girl hears this, she makes the fastest transition from “tsun” to “dere” that I think I’ve ever seen, lowering Inaho’s guard and making her look like kind of a reasonable person. On a side note, it sure was considerate of the school to provide their students with uniforms that conform perfectly to the contours of their ass–I bet that’s real comfortable.

Of course, the idea that Light Novel Girl is actually a reasonable character is nothing but a false promise, and as soon as she remembers her purpose in the story, she immediately flips into attack mode and destroys her own living quarters. Like, what else is this shot meant to communicate if not that she’s literally blown up her entire apartment because some guy, to whom apparently she is incredibly grateful, happened to see her in her underwear for a second. It’s a good thing this show takes place in a world where everyone’s moral principles are different from ours or else this behavior would seem completely irrational.

Now, you’ve probably figured out at this point that I’m not going to offer this show a whole lot of compliments–that’s not what any of us are here for anyways–but while we’re on this shot of Light Novel Girl’s cocky smile I’d like to give it credit for the one thing I do think was handled alright by this show: the color design. I realize that some of my critics who literally refer to me as “Pretty Colors Digibro” are laughing their asses off right now, but seriously, the colors are pretty. As silly as the uniforms are, they kind of remind me of Phantasy Star Online–and as much as I don’t like Light Novel Girl’s hairstyle, I like that shade of pink and how it contrasts with her eyes. The use of gradients in her hair is nice and subtle–which isn’t going to be the case for every character, but we can talk about that later. I just wanted to pause on this shot because it’s actually got some character to it–even if that character has been such a jumbled mess over the past thirty seconds that it’s impossible to have any idea what this girl is actually like.

The next shot immediately caused me to burst out laughing. At first I thought, Jesus Christ that is some awful framing, why would you ever position the camera like this? The characters look like they’re just superimposed onto the backgro–and then I saw the CG classmates. Nothing quite takes me out of a scene the way a bunch of random, generic CG pedestrians do. It’s never enough that they look completely different from everything else in the show’s world and stand out like a sore thumb, but they always end up with these janky walk cycles that look fucking hilarious. This shot is especially incredible because the perspective is so fucked up that they look like they’re significantly shorter than the main characters.

After a few more students filter into the foreground, it becomes apparent why the main characters look so awkwardly superimposed onto the background. The trees in the distance have this awful filter drawn over them to make them look washed out, as do the CG classmates, and the students in the foreground are blurry and out of focus, to suggest that the focal point of the proverbial camera is fixed on the main characters; however, the entire grassy area that they’re standing on is all in focus–most especially the foreground closer to where the students are standing. This is yet another case where it seems like they tried to pull off something cool and cinematic, but only went halfway and ended up with something janky and hideous.

We’re treated to a quick rinse and repeat of the girl being irrational and standing awkwardly in a shot full of CG dudes and then we finally learn her name–Julis. She presses this button on her boob and then a super weird laser thing shoots out of it and a duel is begun. We’re not gonna comment on the other details here because they’ll be more relevant later. Believe me, you’re not missing anything, they just kind of stand there and talk about how they’re going to fight for a minute and a half while the camera tries its damndest to find new angles to shoot them from.

After some random, weird little sci-fi holograms float around for a while, we finally launch into yet another big, stupid, pointless fight–only this time it goes on for two whole minutes. I mean it’s better than last time since we at least know that both of these characters are relevant, and we know their names and why they’re fighting–but somehow, knowing that this entire fight is predicated on a stupid-ass accidental pervert scene and that there is literally NOTHING at stake somehow only makes it all the more annoying.

The only conceivable narrative purpose for this fight would be to show off the powers of the main characters; but like everything else in the show, the powers are generic and meaningless. Julis has a bunch of terrible-looking fire spears that she throws at Kirito, and he blocks them easily. Then she uses the same attack at a higher speed, and the result is basically the same. The constantly changing camera perspective, ultra-brief cuts, and random explosions all create a nauseatingly difficult to comprehend scene that looks like a million things are going on even though barely anything is actually happening. Julis is impressed with Kirito’s speed, so she decides to hit him with a stronger attack. All of her attacks have stupidly long and complex names that you’ll never ever remember if they come up again, but it’s okay because the attack is just a really big fuckoff fireball.

Kirito runs straight at the fireball, but it’s a trap–Julis actually makes it explode. Now in the process of making this video I have watched this fight scene four times, and it wasn’t until the fourth time that I really sat back and thought about what happens next. Every other time I was so bored and disoriented by all the flashing lights that I just kind of stopped thinking about it until the fight was over–but now that I’m going through moment by moment, I can really allow myself to drink this in.

Inaho jumps directly through the explosion, as if it didn’t do anything to him at all, while shouting the name of an attack called like the twin dragon or whatever, and then… cuts… the explosion? I think? Is that what’s happening here? Like, it’s clear that the explosion has already happened–he is inside of the explosion, and it has not done anything to effect him. But then he slashes his sword in the air a couple of times, and there seems to be another explosion behind him as a result… or something? WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON IN THIS SHOT?!

Right from this we cut to Kirito pushing Julis to the ground to protect her from a yellow energy bolt thing fired in from the sidelines, so whatever the fuck was going on with him inside of that explosion is just kind of written off in the next shot. I’m willing to bet that no one even noticed how utterly and weirdly stupid that fight scene actually was. So many things were moving around so quickly, and there was so much visual stimulation that the entire thing just kind of turned into white noise–and it’s not until that moment when Ayato pushes Julis to the ground that you wake up from your trance and realize that the episode is still happening. Considering that all of those enormous explosions didn’t even manage to scorch the grass in the place where the characters were fighting, you could be forgiven for mistaking that entire scene for a fever dream that you had after passing out during the prior two minutes of characters standing around.

It was right around this point in my first viewing of this episode back when it came out that I stopped watching the show. After seven minutes of nothing but irritating, generic, and boring scenes, this utterly meaningless action sequence finally lost me to the point that I got out my phone and started tweeting about how shitty and boring the show is–and I think I left it running for about three more minutes before I finally shut it off.

At this point, you probably have a pretty solid general sense of what goes through my mind when I’m watching a show like this–the kind of relentless scrutiny that builds up and breaks a show for me so quickly that I just can’t take it anymore. But, my dear viewers, if you’ll have me, then this is not the end. I didn’t make this video to explain why I dropped The Asterisk War–I made it so that I can slowly try and get to the heart of all the things that bother me so much about shows of this nature, and about the works of studio A-1 Pictures. In pursuit of this, I have already watched all of the seven episodes of the Asterisk War which have aired at the time of this writing, and believe me… I have a LOOOOOT more to talk about–so stick around on my channel for more.

Continued in part three.

We’ve graduated appetizers class with a mere 2.0 GPA and moved on to dinners after a family grocery store trip. I’ve been given entirely too much control over what’s for dinner and picked out five or so recipes, based around my dad’s recent decision to quit eating red meat and my family’s overall general pickiness. In other words, two kinds of spaghetti and three kinds of chicken dinner. Living at home can be stupid sometimes.

For the first type of spaghetti, I’m making my own marinara sauce. It seems to be one of those formulas which overwhelmingly is based around one ingredient (tomato sauce), but has a ton of other stuff in such infinitesimal amounts that I’m having a really hard time convincing myself that they actually effect the taste. Not that I want to do the whole recipe wrong just to find out.

I have no question that I should’ve cut the onions and carrots into much smaller pieces. Each of my parents has tried to say otherwise–my mom that plenty of people like chunky sauce, and my dad that he indeed enjoyed that the sauce was chunky. They are wrong. Even though I love onions and am happy to eat onion chunks, I don’t harbor any satisfaction that this was the right size for the onion chunks.

Nonetheless, it turned out well enough. I ate a whole plate of it without too much complaint, though by the end my stomach was beginning to disagree a bit. I think I was overcompensating for wanting to not feel like I failed and cooked wwwwaaayyy too much sauce by loading on as much as I could. In any case, this is the closest thing I’ve cooked to far so seeming like I did it pretty much right. My parents ate it and no one complained, so I guess it’s a victory more or less. The meatballs pictured below were actually veggie meatballs, which my mom has always eaten and my dad started because of quitting red meat. They are fucking shit. Tastes like eating a handful of dirt and grass.

—

Next up is a kind of soup which I’ve never heard of, but sounded easy to cook: a mulligatawny. I never got a chance to take a picture of all the ingredients together because I had to cook the chicken first before combining everything into the broth, but it consisted of the following:

4 cups chicken broth, 2 cups chopped cooked chicken, 1 16-ounce can tomatoes cut up, 1 medium cooking apple peeled and chopped, 1/4 cut finely chopped onion, same: carrot, same: celery, same: green pepper, 1 tablespoon snipped parsley, 2 teaspoons lemon juice, 1 teaspoon sugar, 1 teaspoon curry powder, 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves.

It was only once I started combining these things that I realized I had no earthly idea how this was supposed to taste or how this was possibly a real dish. Apples, tomatoes, and chicken, all in one soup? What the hell?

The end result was not bad. I wasn’t super into it, but I honestly couldn’t tell if that’s because I didn’t do it perfectly (I had slightly less chicken broth and chicken than the recipe called for), or if the dish just isn’t really my thing. The use of apple made a lot more sense once I tasted it and realized that the apple basically became the flavor of the soup. The chicken didn’t really feel like it was a part of the taste of the soup so much as just bits of stuff that was in there to eat. This is also another case where I have a hard time believing that any of those teaspoons of random shit really altered the taste any, since it still mostly just tasted like tomato, apple, and chicken. Ah well. Passing grade.

In the process of thumbing through the cook book for the first time, I pretty much found myself checking out any recipe with “mushroom” in the title. I’m not sure why, but I seem to be on a shroom kick. Mushrooms and onions are basically my jam. So the first recipe I picked out was this mushroom rice bake, which I was hesitant to prepare because it makes eight servings, and I only expected three people to eat it.

I didn’t manage to get any process pics for this one. It involved beating an egg and some cream cheese together, then adding in a can of evaporated milk, then some separately-cooked onions and mushrooms, and three cups of cooked rice. I was glad that I asked my mom to assist by making the rice on this one, as she astutely recognized that “3 cups of cooked rice” does not require cooking “3 cups of rice,” as I would have done. We cooked about a cup and a half of rice, and we had too much rice.

While the taste of this thing was maybe just a little bland, and I maybe could’ve added more mushrooms, I actually legitimately enjoyed this dish. It’s the first thing I’ve made that I went back for seconds and thirds on, and even Vic went back for seconds as well. It was good enough for me to not go out to lunch later (ate it pretty early). I did end up with a bit of a stomachache as, once again, there is such thing as too much mushroom (and probably too much evaporated milk), but still, I would consider this to be the first unqualified success of my cooking career.

—

Next up for dinner again, we’re making a pesto spaghetti. Really all this means is making pesto, and making spaghetti, and then tossing them together. I didn’t remember to take a pic of the ingredients for this one either, but as I understand it, pesto is a pretty specific recipe, so you could probably just google it and find the exact ingredients.

It didn’t look like quite enough pesto, and it didn’t taste like it either. I think the spaghetti would’ve been better off drowned in the stuff, cause it was just a tad too dry/bland. The chicken cooked with it was not my idea/fault. I had 3 chicken dinner plans, and my dad didn’t really buy chicken based around them. He picked out this seasoned chicken just for the sake of baking, but didn’t end up being home to eat it. As is usually the case with pre-seasoned chicken, it didn’t have nearly enough seasoning to really make a difference and was a bit bland, though at least it wasn’t too dry. Overall, this was a serviceable dinner and not too far off from what I’m used to from our family, but if I’m trying to learn to cook then this is the standard I’m meant to be exceeding.

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It took me around two and a half hours to play through Xeodrifter from start to finish, and I felt like I was going way too slow. This game was practically built to be speedrun. All of the enemies either remain stationary and fire bullets in a specific pattern, or move around in a predictable way, making it very easy to plan a route through the game based on avoiding certain enemies and killing other ones. Likewise, your character has a very clear movement speed, jumping arc, and firing speed, the latter of which can be modified using power-ups. It actually lets you collect a certain number of power-up points to put into different gun mods, and then lets you create three different loadouts for those power-ups, so that you could switch between them quickly as needed.

There is only one boss in the game, which you’ll fight six times, and between getting his pattern perfectly locked down and retracing your footsteps several times across the cyclically-designed world, you’ll probably start plotting optimal routes through the game by the end of your first playthrough–so by the second or third, you can already be testing your times. Each of the six bosses drops a power-up which affects the way that your character moves, and each of these powers can be activated smoothly and strung together on the fly, so you basically never have to stop moving for any reason. If, like me, you end up dying in certain spots multiple times and having to cross the rather lengthy stretches without save points, you’ll probably start trying to plow through the levels as fast as possible just out of frustration.

It’s kind of only natural for this game to feel like a speedrun, since the development process itself was a speedrun of its own. Xeodrifter was born as a result of developers Renegade Kid realizing that there was no proper Metroid or Metroid clone game on the 3DS, and deciding to see if they could produce one in a single market quarter. It ended up taking them closer to five months, but the result is a stripped-down and tightly-constructed Metroid-lite, which focuses primarily on the core components of exploration and movement mechanics that make up the biggest portion of what the Metroid-like genre title describes.

The biggest hint that Xeodrifter is basically a Super Metroid speedrun made into its own game would have to be the sideways and upward dash moves, which mirror the animations of a Super Metroid shinespark to a tee. For those who don’t know, shinesparking is a technique in Super Metroid which is almost completely unneeded for completing the game normally, and only has a handful of obvious uses for collecting secret stuff, but is vitally popular for getting through certain areas in Super Metroid speedruns. Shinesparking is somewhat difficult to pull off just right without getting the hang of it, but Xeodrifter gives it the ease of a button press, as it streamlines its focus purely on the faster elements of Samus’ moveset.

Xeodrifter is a fun little diversion which I didn’t mind buying at the sale price of two and a half dollars, though I’d be hesitant to recommend it at full price if you weren’t planning to play through it multiple times and maybe try to beat the current world record speedrun. After playing through the game, though, I found myself with a sudden and severe Super Metroid itch which that game just didn’t quite scratch; that’s when I noticed that Axiom Verge was still thirty percent off, and decided fuck it, I’m not waiting for it to get any cheaper.

Speaking as someone who is a big fan of the 2D Metroid games and has played a lot of Metroid clones, I can say in full confidence that Axiom Verge is the best one I’ve played; and even that I nearly enjoyed it as much as Super Metroid itself. This game nailed a huge amount of what Super Metroid got so right, while adding its own twists on the formula, and even improving on the overall level design in a lot of subtle ways. However, interestingly enough, the one aspect which this game didn’t really copy is the movement mechanics.

The player character, Trace, moves pretty slowly compared to Samus, and he never really gets any kind of major speed boost or anything close to the shinespark. This isn’t to say that his movement mechanics don’t get expanded on, as they do in a lot of interesting ways, and the methods for getting around the levels continually open up as the game goes along; but there really isn’t the same feeling of fast and smooth control over the character that Samus has throughout the later Metroids. It’s kind of funny that Axiom Verge even has a speedrun mode, because while I do think it would be a fun game to speedrun, it’s for totally different reasons compared to Xeodrifter.

In Axiom Verge, a speedrun would be all about planning a route. This is a game which continually rewards the player for being observant about its level design, and for testing out all the tools at their disposal in every room and on every surface of the game world. For instance, a lot of its long vertical shafts have ways for you to climb up through the walls–or certain spots where, if you jump down, you’ll fall straight to the bottom–which may not be obvious at first. You’ll find these kind of routes out of natural curiosity, as the game encourages you constantly to be on the lookout for hidden areas and items, and utilizes a massive array of teaching tools which I could honestly write a book about if I wanted to.

If Xeodrifter was dedicated to capturing the satisfying way that Samus traverses her game world, then Axiom Verge is dedicated to capturing the satisfaction that comes from drinking in that world in its entirety and learning all of its secrets. I’d actually say that the game is better-paced than Super Metroid was in how it reveals its new areas, and only has you circling back through them at times when you’d want to do so anyways. By the time you reach the end of the game, with all of the powers at your disposal, then you’ll also have unlocked some methods for getting around the world quicker which makes exploration and testing a far more inviting prospect than it ever was in Super Metroid. I never found myself feeling like going back to another area would be too much of a hassle, and usually I was eager to go back and try to get into whatever hidden area I noticed just off-screen before. Also, while getting killed in this game reverts you back to a save point, you actually keep any of the items that you’ve collected, which relieves the stress of having to go back and forth through the same area trying to grab an item and then make it back to the save point without dying.

Just as Super Metroid would continually reward players who obsessively went back through and tried to do everything, Axiom Verge will pay off your more insane obsessiveness in kind. When I finished the game at around twelve hours of playtime, I’d visited 94% of the map and collected 70% of the items, even though I’d probably spent a third of my playtime just running around looking for secrets. I finished the game pretty satisfied that I’d gone out and done all kinds of awesome and memorable stuff, and that I’d gotten to be sufficiently overpowered for the final boss, and yet there were still all kinds of really out-there secrets which I’d yet to know about.

The world of Axiom Verge is satisfying to traverse not so much because of the feeling of the controls, but more because of figuring out what needs to be done. There were times when I’d be staring at a wall, thinking, “what the hell do I have to do here?,” and then getting not only the satisfaction of figuring it out, but then the additional satisfaction of pulling it off, followed by the even greater satisfaction of being rewarded for it with a new item.

The biggest thing which separates the core gameplay of Axiom Verge from that of the Metroid games is the amount of variety that it allows for in approaching it. There are a fuckload of unlockable guns, most of which are hidden, and all of which allow for different ways to approach your enemies based on what you think is cool. I played a huge amount of the game using the close-range shotgun weapon which could hit through walls, just because I liked getting in close and finishing the enemies off quickly, even if it meant taking a lot more damage. Then later I picked up some other guns I loved which made it a lot harder to decide which to stick with.

Axiom Verge wears its Metroid influence on its sleeves. It has bosses which are obviously modelled after Kraid, Ridley, and Mother Brain, and which appear at similar moments in the game; as well as overt references, such as typing the classic Justin Bailey code into your code machine and then spending the whole game dressed in a bikini like the one that Samus would be wearing at the end of the first Metroid. I’m not sure I’d say that Axiom Verge reaches the same heights of artistic design, environmental storytelling, and cohesive worldbuilding that the Metroid games do (especially Zero Mission), but it comes damn close, and it certainly captures a lot of the best atmospheric elements of those games. There are moments which reminded me just as much of Metroid Fusion or Metroid II as other moments did of Super Metroid, which made the whole game a very fitting love letter to the franchise. The tradeoff for the buttery-smooth controls of Samus are that we get some new and inventive mechanics which open up the worldbuilding in new and exciting ways, so I felt like that trade was well worthwhile.

Overall, I would highly recommend Axiom Verge as one of my all-around favorite games, and the best 2D Metroid game since 1994. Between this game and Xeodrifter, it was interesting to see how two games could so clearly borrow from and pay homage to the Metroid franchise and copy so many of its core mechanics, while ending up with a completely different appeal from one-another. It’ll always suck that Nintendo hasn’t and might never roll out another proper 2D Metroid game, but if that dearth is what’s inspired their imitators to bring so much A-game into the fold, then it may actually be a blessing in disguise.

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Renegade Kid talks about the development of Xeodrifter:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JoolsWatsham/20141215/232252/Xeodrifter_Postmortem.php

Gaming podcast let’s play thing with my brother Vic: https://www.youtube.com/user/VABHermitSociety

Axiom Verge speedrun I used footage from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ybw5Zse1jqs

More games analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shPMz-zGyRU&list=PLw6UBKuaMyFBKc29Rhdt6Liy4nZUb9mOs