[ANIME] Anime Night Update

[jordangreywolf]

"Anime Night" is theoretically every Wednesday night, but is subject to interruption by hurricanes, my absence (usually work-related), or Gwendel's disinterest.

Presently Watching:

• Restaurant From Another World: Anime adaptation of a light novel series that started off as web stories, of which Gwendel has been a fan for some time. There is something of a genre of "food stories" that has been around for quite a while, where the "story" mostly revolves around some "magical" restaurant (perhaps literally, often not) where a character eats some dish, and waxes eloquent about its attributes. This basically combines that with the concept that the restaurant is an "ordinary" little Earth restaurant from Japan that every weekend magically travels to a D&D-esque fantasy land. Hence, the diners are kings, queens, street urchins, barbarians, lizardmen, dwarves, vegetarian wood elves, and occasionally even dragons. Some of the book insert illustrations are positively adorable.
  
  Pro: Silly, harmless, mildly amusing concept. Each episode is roughly broken into two mini-stories, rarely connected to each other. We usually watch this first, while eating dinner. Gwendel likes it.
  
  Con: Deviates from the books (according to Gwendel) in its inclusion of some minor "fan-service-y" elements (but fortunately this isn't a major part of the show). Also, there's no real ongoing STORY here; no character development to speak of, character reactions to the food are formulaic (initial doubt and puzzlement, get food, taste it -- scream "OMAI!!!" and then devour it and demand more - rinse, repeat), no mysteries the story shows any interest in unraveling, etc. This is "slice-of-fantasy-life" stuff, so of course there's no conflict, and there needn't be any, but the novelty is wearing thin for me.




• Sakura Quest: Slice-of-life story about a country girl who moves to the big city (Tokyo), fails to get a big break there, then reluctantly takes up a job in another small town. Of course, the small town has quirky characters, and she makes several friends. The show is very girl-centric, but isn't devoid of male characters the way some more recent "moe" shows have been. Also, it's kind of nice to see a story that acknowledges that, yes, there IS life after high school.
  
  Pro: Interesting stories and characters. Continuity. Some adversity and conflict, wins and losses. Doesn't feel stuck in a rut or "status quo is God." Gwendel likes and prioritizes it.
  
  Con: I wish I could get a fantasy or sci-fi story at least half this interesting. ;) Really, I suppose the major problem is just going to be how much tolerance the viewer has for "slice of life."




• Classroom of the Elite: Near-future setting; disinterested-seeming protagonist (le sigh) goes to an elite academy (yawn) where there's some sort of point-buy/reward system put in place to encourage competition between all the classes ... only, nobody bothers to explain the rules. Surprise! Protagonist isn't as incompetent as he initially seems, and other characters in various ways prove to be a little different than the archetypes they initially seem to fall into.
  
  Pro: This actually interested me at first, and kept my interest with revelations that some of the characters had a little more depth than they let on at first.
  
  Con: Well, we haven't gotten all that far, because Gwendel is in command of the queue, and hasn't played an episode of this in a while. I think it was getting too serious/dramatic, and she doesn't seem to care for that as of late. This is borderline "limbo" on the queue. Anyway, my main concern is that the mystery element of the show (which intrigues me) might be betrayed. I hope for some sort of a "reveal" that this ludicrous arrangement is part of some sort of twisted social experiment, but what if that doesn't come out? What if the shock/surprise elements are just the product of a writer making it up as he goes? That would be sad. So I'm not ready to recommend this yet.




• Made in Abyss: A town has grown up around what's essentially a mega-dungeon -- the "Abyss," a multi-layered gigantic pit descending into the ground, dotted with technologies of some ancient civilization, and possessing strange local phenomena, populated with all sorts of strange monsters, plants, and the occasional ancient-artifact robot.
  
  Pro: World-building is fascinating. Background art and scene-setting is at times spectacular. I'd love to get an art book of this.
  
  Con: Just who is the intended audience for this? One moment, it's all chibi pre-adolescent characters on light-hearted adventures. Then ... it's gut-wrenching horror, as we see some monster feasting on the innards of a not-so-lucky explorer, or we get to see someone poisoned and blood starts seeping out of every orifice, and someone has to attempt amputation of a limb (break the bone first, then cut away...). And then there are the adults in this world: oh, they're just such LOVABLE big-hearted people ... who punish children who step out of line by stripping them naked and stringing them up, or who beat them around, or any number of things. Gwendel is more the fan of this than I am, even though she's the one who usually abhors anything that feels like drama. Maybe it's because it seemed a lot more lighthearted at first, going in, and everything was so pretty, and now she's hooked? There's something very dark and corrupt about this, and I feel ill at the prospect of watching more.




• Hero Academia: In a world where 80% of all people have some sort of super power (albeit for many, an especially PETTY one), our protagonist starts as a powerless individual who nonetheless strives to become a superhero, and manages to get into an academy ... for superheroes! Cue rivalry with classmates, a big and arguably unfair competition (to show off to potential future employers), and ... internships!
  
  Pro: It's an interesting twist on superheroes. Sometimes it looks like it's building up to be yet another typical Shonen Jump story, and then it defies expectations.
  
  Con: Eh, there are petty things I could nitpick on, but this is a semi-serious/semi-silly superhero universe. Certain things are par for the course.
  I think I like it more than Gwendel does, though; she's been letting this one go on the back-burner for a while, so it's almost in "Limbo" territory.

In Limbo:

• Kado: The Right Answer: Uber-powered higher-dimensional aliens arrive. Some star negotiator dude just happens to be on a ship that they absorb while coming into our dimension, and ends up in the thick of things.
  
  Pro: Very different concept. Doesn't take place in a high school, and doesn't have some whiny, blank, boring "everyman-except-all-the-girls-inexplicably-are-after-him" protagonist.
  
  Con: No idea where it's going. So much about why the aliens seem to think that Japan is the natural choice for first contact makes me worry that this is going to go the route of GATE and present the rest of the Western world as the bad guys. I haven't seen very far into this, though, as Gwendel seems to have lost interest.




• The Eccentric Family: Made by the same team that did "Tatami Galaxy," which is also a very weird and trippy anime. This version of Japan seems to be mostly populated by humans (of course), tanuki, and tengu ... with MOST humans being completely unaware of this arrangement. The "Eccentric Family" of the name seems to refer to a bunch of tanuki. There's melodrama and weirdness, and a very strange relationship between the main protagonist and a human woman/sorceress who was abducted by a tengu as a child, and who happens to be a member of a strange little club of humans who, each year, have a tanuki stew pot (into which our protagonist's DAD ended up one year). The show is set in modern day, yet has a strange, alien, and mythic feel to it at times.
  
  Pro: Trippy. Very different from the run-of-the-mill stuff. Little details mentioned in passing early on are revealed to be more relevant later on. There is a certain element of mystery going on here. Also, fortunately tanuki are just treated as shapeshifters, and they don't go into depth about certain aspects of their mythos the way that, say, Pom Poko did.
  
  Con: The morality is at times a little too alien for my tastes. The tengu who abducted the primary female (antagonist?) openly lusts after her, which puts a dark spin on him abducting her in the past. Also, when things started to seem more melancholy, Gwendel seemed to lose interest. We haven't seen more of this in quite some time, and we're already at least a full season behind.




• Grimoire of Zero: Fantasy setting. Mercenary who happens to have been born looking like a sort of white tiger hybrid travels with a couple of spellcasters in a land where they're considered "witches."
  
  Pro: Hey, big cat guy.
  
  Con: Pervy elements. Muddled morality.

Dropped Series:
This is the stuff that most certainly has been dropped, rather than watching through to the end of the season.

• Knight's Magic: Computer programmer and model-robot-kit-enthusiast from real world dies, and is conveniently reborn in a fantasy world wherein there are GIANT STOMPY MAGITECH ROBOTS, and kaiju-ish monsters to fight. Somehow, his computer programming knowledge allows him to master magic, master the engineering of giant stompy robots, think outside the box, and generally prevail in every encounter, all while still being a perpetually happy pre-adolescent (in this world, anyway) occasionally mistaken for a girl. Oh yeah, and the girls love him.
  
  Pro: Giant stompy robots.
  
  Con: Boring power-trip wish-fulfillment-in-another-world.




• In a Different World With a Smartphone: Boring everyman boy gets accidentally zapped by a lightning-bolt from God (oops!), so God makes it up to him by resurrecting him in a fantasy world. He gets to take "one thing" with him, which turns out to be his smartphone (and apparently his clothes, for free), but his smartphone has been upgraded to work off of magic, to have map apps for the new world, and all kinds of useful stuff like that, AND the guy gets mastery of all schools of magic AND any unique spell he ever hears about, AND he gets girls falling all over him, and on and on. Also, a narrator helpfully fills in huge swathes of story, so we can fast-forward to his next great success, rather than experiencing anything resembling an actual obstacle along the way he has to spend more than a few minutes to surmount.
  
  Pro: It's animated?
  
  Con: Boring power-trip wish-fulfillment-in-another-world.




• 18if: Somewhat unmotivated everyman boy finds himself in a dream realm, where "sleeping beauties" become "witches," and he must find some way to snap them out of it. He's accompanied by a mysterious dream-girl who claims to be his sister, and a cat-man-scientist (who's just an ordinary human in the real world, but apparently his "dream-avatar" is as a cartoon cat?) who provides useful exposition about things in the Real World.
  
  Pro: Trippy opening sequence. Talking cat (sort of).
  
  Con: Formulaic in the sense that it seems this guy falls in love with some new girl every week. Erratic in that the "mood" shifts dramatically, there's no sense of "how things work" (in one episode, out of nowhere, we learn that one girl is using the power of dreams somehow to kill people in the REAL world, so this isn't apparently just a matter of "people trapped in a coma-like state," but a REAL threat to reality), and the protagonist isn't necessarily likeable all the time. It feels as if there are writers with very different styles each episode. Also, there are many unanswered questions (why is this guy perpetually in the "dream realm" -- and what of his body back in the Real World, if any?) not in the sense that there's an ongoing mystery to REVEAL answers about them per se, but rather that it feels as if there's no interest whatsoever in explaining things further.