I’ll let you do it after me
January 29, 2007
I was reading Dan Kennedy's book on time management today and came across a nice little chapter on instant disqualification. In short, he says that people who are not punctual are untrustworthy. That would be the literal sense: they cannot be trusted to be his clients. Normally this could turn into a lovely Scott Adams-esque essay on timeliness, but since I prefer to write blogs about things nobody finds interesting (and thus does not comment on), we'll turn to anime.
Or perhaps that was just an intro paragraph to justify the mild amount of torture that you, the reader, must endure to balance out the intense torture that I, the anime censor, endure when I watch irredeemable garbage such as Eureka Seven and Maburaho.
But intro paragraphs are not entirely worthless! For example, I have discovered an easy method of instant disqualification in anime. A method that would surely cause controversy if it ever got out into the open (translation: if anyone ever read this). It's very simple. If the main credit sequence has a song by a male artist, that show is probably terrible. The notable exception to this is Samurai Champloo. The shows that fall into this trap are Eureka Seven, the utterly inhuman sCRYed and the needless Tenjho Tenge. Most of the shows I watch have songs sung by women or, for bonus points, by the lead voice actress. Slayers is a great example of this.
Since sCRYed is slightly old (and quite difficult to type), let's focus on Eureka Seven. I'll admit I only watched two episodes of this show, but that's like eating only two mouthfuls of salt. You tend to know where they're going with it. Eureka Seven begins with a terrible song by a male j-pop vocalist. Strike one. It features a 14 year-old kid who thinks his town sucks and fancies himself a sky-surfer. Strike two - he and I should have a discussion about an unhappy little boy named Shinji Ikari. And then one day a giant white sky-surfing transforming robot falls on his house, piloted by a green haired girl who's some kind of cross between Rei Ayanami and Meia Gisborn. No, that's not being redundant. So, strike three.
Strike four is definitely my favorite. By luck and pluck the dopey kid ends up in the cockpit of the white robot. The girl is passed out for some reason and the two of them are falling right out of the sky. A missle from an attacking enemy robot is closing in. Cut to black. The next frame we see is this massive crater ringed by what look like seashells, with the white robot in the center. The girl steps out of the robot unharmed. Her two friends land in their giant robots and she explains what happened. What saved them and delivered a mighty smackdown to the enemy robots and also nine square kilometers of innocent topsoil? Not the "Amita Drive" expansion slot the kid put into the robot, not the robot's innate awesomeness, but (that any human being could not deliver this line without instantly dying of laughter is proof the green haired girl is a robot): "this boy's natural talent and belief in himself." Strike four, and the bat flies from the batter's hand and is disintegrated upon orbital reentry. It would have been appropriate for me to kill myself at this point, but I'd hate to have that be the last thing I ever hear in my entire life.
Compared to Eureka Seven, Maburaho is like a new Cowboy Bebop (I'm just kidding; this show is still quite terrible, even by comparison). Somebody obviously watched a lot of Tenchi Muyo! and decided a clone was in order. I'll admit I like the idea of Maburaho. In this world, magic is fairly common place. Most people can cast magical spells about a hundred times. Extraordinary people can cast thousands, or tens of thousands of spells. The catch is that once you cast all your spells, you die (you can also die from normal things, I assume). So society values people with a higher spell count.
Our hero is Kanzuki somebody. His spell count (at the start of the show) is eight, down from nine when he was a kid. He is a loser, so much of one that his friends tell him that to his face every day. But he's in this special school for high magic count kids because (unbeknownst to him for the first episode) his magic power is very strong. This boy's eight spells will work wonders. And as a bonus, his kids will have ridiculously high spell counts. When this news comes out, three typical anime heroines (the "normal" one, the "rich, busty" one, and a poor Motoko Aoyama clone) decide they want to have his genes.
The main redeeming feature of this show (aside from the above image, woo woo!) is that the well-developed rich girl seems to understand what needs to be done. She needs to get herself knocked up by this loser. So when the normal girl insists that she's Kanzuki's wife (childhood promise, you know the deal), busty girl is willing to compromise. Sample dialogue:
Normal girl: "You mustn't [have sex with him]! I won't let you do something like that!"
Busty girl: "Why not? I'll let you do it after me."
Normal girl: "Don't say that! You're supposed to love a man from the bottom of your heart, and..."
Busty girl: "You can still do it, even without love."
Yes, a very sub par Tenchi Muyo! attempt. They don't really go anywhere with this: there's nothing in this series that you can't imagine being in any other idiotic harem show. Something like the three love rivals cooperating instead of competing for Kanzuki's genes. Or maybe the normal girl actually listening to Kanzuki when he says important things like (on the phone to his parents) "no, I don't have a girlfriend." I guess that would be a bit much. I would really like to make my own anime where, I dunno, a boy and girl have some kind of mutual attraction to each other, communicate their true feelings, face romantic, political and scholastic obstacles in school... and maybe pilot giant robots. At least the first two things. But no, it always has to be a sex-crazed boy or wedding-starved girl chasing down an indifferent and oblivious mate. Twenty-five and a half episodes of beating around the bush for six minutes of them shyly holding hands is beginning to fray at my nerves.
What's next? Spiral arrives soon, as does Green Green (maybe I should know better by now) and Saiyuki Reload. The work of the librarian is never done.
