ANIME: Disappointments

There are a lot of good anime, if you focus on Slice Of Life genre. Non Non Biyori is both adorably moe and a surprisingly beautiful, scenic look at modern rural life in Japan.

Unfortunately, for every gem like Servant Service, you get a dog like Galilei Donna. The sisters of Galilei, descended from Galileo in a modern ice age, COULD HAVE BEEN a fascinating Japanese take on Girl Genius, which is what the first pilot episode implied. Instead it was a redshirt slaughter fest that never redeemed itself. I was quite disappointed. Unbreakable Machine Dolls could have been a fun one about AIs but ended up being another slaughterfest and it was grotesque. The best part of that show was the cheery end credit music.

Most people cite the violent dismemberment and carnage inflicted on Asuka in Evangelion as Anime's LOWEST BLOW, and resulted in actual serious death threats against the director. Some naturally some idiot decided to go a step worse and take Robotics; Notes and do something similar, though with less reason. What could have been a playful story about geocaching and Augmented Reality GPS games, and early primitive robotics instead became a vicious and bloody conspiracy murder-power plot. Completely unnecessary. There was enough plot in the games and setting without bothering with actual murders. And they viciously murdered a good character I liked, killed her for no good reason. This is an author who needs to be groin kicked.

I liked that there was a wild programmer hiding inside a computer building coding games. I don't like that they decided to give her a tragic backstory. It wasn't necessary. Otaku programmers are already a tragic backstory. If they had left the data found through the geocaching as a GAME instead of actual data, and if it had been pursued as a game someone put too much time into, as a sort of historical anomaly, and the reason the officials warn them off being that the guy responsible was seriously nuts and killed himself when nobody wanted to promote it because it was nuts, that would have been enough darkness and tied everything back into the AR games the Otaku writes, and could have been used to help drag her back into reality and becoming a useful member of society that has friendships with other people. That would have been a suitable plot appropriate to the audience and material. Instead of the high pressure bloody spray it turned into. What were you thinking?

Apparently the same thing as they were thinking when they took Steins;Gate and turned it from an amusing tale about crazy time travelers who aren't always hallucinating and murdered a crucial moe character so you could tell it was serious. Same people, if you can call them that. I dumped that show for the same reason. I must avoid this studio if they're going to keep pulling this crap. Face punching is needed. Do Japanese express their outrage by repeated face punching, like Americans do?

See that banana? That was amusing. So why go murder the moe chick? There was no point other than viciousness. Who watches that? Who rewards that? And are there really enough fans to justify making such a series of murder programs into children's anime? And Japan wonders why we don't close our military bases there, as if they're vicious and liable to attack their neighbors. Steins Gate and Robotics Notes rather proves my point.

And keep in mind I steer clear of the boys anime which are mostly a series of ever-more-vicious bloodbaths of ego and violence. It is like Japan is trying to breed more violence in its sons, in hopes of restoring the murderers to power that wrecked the country in WW2. Their refusal to punish rape as a real crime when committed by a Japanese male (its serious when someone foreign does it) with maximum penalty merely 2 years in Japanese prison, a sentence rarely handed out, and maximum fines of $20K. That says a great deal about a country. Yep, so our bases aren't going away. And Japan will become more Korean, quietly, as their racist and insane population die off. And their young women move to California. They are welcome here. We don't expect them to look after our parents or be a perfect housewife. This is a shame, too, because Japan's interior is largely empty, and while there are lots of densely populated towns and cities, there are also lots of fields and land to be cultivated. If only farming paid. This is the upside of gems like Silver Spoon and No-Rin, which are both anime about farming, because they show the heartache of failure as well as the joys of success. Farming is intensely risky, and the smart money is planting without getting a loan or risking your own land. It is being very safe so when disaster hits, as it can only hit in farming, you don't lose your farm, just your shirt.

The good shows from Japan are charming and beautiful and I wish them the best. The bad shows bother me that they exist at all. Do the Japanese not understand what that says about their culture? Do they not understand this is why they are imprisoned for the next few centuries, to prevent WW2 ever happening again.