C: The Money of Soul and Possibility Control 11 — I Don’t Care

C: The Money of Soul and Possibility Control,

This was an exceptional episode, in that it managed to make the rest of the series look decent by comparison. It was plagued by the same problems that the rest of the show has suffered from: it’s filled with preaching about solutions to nonexistent problems, such as the great present vs. future debate, and the setting doesn’t make any sense. This episode was filled with deus ex machina like no other.

Let’s take it from the beginning. We start with a battle between Kimimaro and Souichiro. It was probably the most poorly animated battle in the show, and also the least interesting: there weren’t any cool powers or anything. The battle consisted of Kimimaro and Souichiro hitting each other with swords and screaming about how they’ll protect the people dear to them while asking if the other understood now. Unsurprisingly, no one understood because their entire argument was pointless. I think Kimimaro got cut and half at some point, but then the creators forgot. Mashu and Q fought at the same time and argued about what Souichiro’s sister would really want. The only enlightening nugget I gleaned from the entire battle was when Q told Mashu “I don’t care.” Motion seconded.

The most well-animated part of the fight.

While the battle is ongoing, everyone panics and the Japanese Yen becomes worthless. Because of this, everyone can see the Midas money, and it becomes worthless too, for reasons that should be obvious. Of course, this causes Q to transform into Souichiro’s sister and Souichiro has a flashback. Then, as one would logically expect, the C wave hits Japan a second time and has no effect. For reasons that are well explained, the financial district shuts down. In case you couldn’t tell, I was being sarcastic.

The battle is a draw. Kimimaro reverses the printing press and the future comes back. Kimimaro and Mashu share a long (incestuous?) kiss, as some corny music plays in the background.The corny music plays for a really long time. The credits roll. Everyone is happy. Yay.

Kimimaro sees the happy children and his one-sided crush in the park. Everything is well with the world. Oh, and Japan became the 51st state and started using the dollar, because that would totally solve all their economic problems. The clown meets Kimimaro and invites him to come to the financial district. The clown will always be there when there is a future to take as collateral. *tear* Kimimaro looks at the picture he took with Mashu, Q and Souichiro after their battle. He mentions that he forgot to smile. The End.

Overall, C was a very disappointing showing for noitanimA. It had a creative setup, but executed it in such a way that the setting became a liability rather than an asset (ha ha ha ha ha) since it was fraught with deus ex machina, inconsistencies and half-baked ideas.

Steins; Gate 12 — Conspiracy Theories

Steins; Gate,

Those are some crazy compression ratios. Hey, CERN, want to give me access to the LHC? Then I can store petabytes of anime on a floppy disk!

Steins; Gate has been one of my favorite shows this season, with some great characterization and by far the wittiest, best directed dialogue in any recent anime. That’s why what happened this week’s episode was entirely unexpected: the creators completely blew the previous episodes out of the water. Not only did this episode continue (or even surpass) Steins; Gate’s well established trend of spectacular dialogue, but the plot took a tremendous leap forward as well.

And boy does the shit hit the fan hard (spoilers): the lab gets stormed by CERN, led by Moeka, and she murders Mayushii. I speculated before that Moeka was with CERN, but I definitely didn’t expect her to go far as killing Mayushii. I have no doubt that Mayushii will return— this is a show about time travel, after all— but this still hit hard, especially in a show which has been so peaceful up till now, with the exception of the first episode.

There are three big questions that this episode raised for me (and my most recent conspiracy theories are included).

  1. What is special about Mayushii? Mayushii, although she initially seemed to be one of the most straightforward characters, is now the person most deeply enmeshed in enigma. I mean, the intro to this episode was a conversation about her chasing Okabe which took place before mankind even existed (although it seemed like Okabe’s dream). But there is definitely more to her than meets the eye. She has been with Okabe since he was a child, and we know that Okabe had also opened Steins; Gate at that time. I’m led to wonder whether Steins; Gate or even the time travelling microwave are products of Okabe or science, or whether Mayushii may turn out to be the one responsible.
  2. What is part-time warrior up to? She claims she is searching for her dad, which may be true, but there is clearly more to her than that. In this episode we learned that she knows of Christina’s work with CERN through a prophecy— which sounds like a perfect word to describe the memory transfer procedure Christina just invented — and she also realized that CERN was going to attack the lab and escaped. It seemed that she was hesitant to abandon them though.

    I’m thinking that John Titor might be associated with CERN, since he and Moeka were both searching for the IBN 5100. But come to think of it, part-time warrior’s dad wasn’t John Titor, but Barrel Titor. Perhaps Moeka is John Titor, and is part-time warrior’s mother. Now who is her father? Well, part-time girl was heading to the time travel forum to meet her father. Who else was going to go but cancelled due to changes in the timeline? Daru. And we already know that Daru has the hots for Moeka. Of course, this entire discussion presupposes that part-time girl was born in the future, which, according to Christina’s theories, is impossible. But there doesn’t seem to be a rule that memories have to be sent from and to the same person.

  3. What is CERN‘s goal? Interestingly, CERN only decided to interfere when Okabe decided to stop messing with time travel. It’s possible that this could be a timely coincidence with the memory transfer device’s completion. But transferring memories doesn’t seem much more dangerous than sending cellphone messages, especially when Okabe already has been transferring memories (of which CERN is no doubt aware through their eavesdropping). The more likely explanation is that CERN is concerned about time travel being made public. They appear to have even greater capabilities than Okabe, with the ability to even stop time. It seems that Christina’s theories are not the end of the story.The other interesting point is that Moeka shot only Mayushii, which leads back to my first question. Mayushii knows absolutely nothing about time travel, so she is the person they have the least reason to kill. Of course, it’s possible they want to interrogate the others first or use them. But both Okabe and Daru understand about as much of how time travel works as Mayushii. Which leaves Christina as the only valuable person from this perspective. Which leads me to reach the opposite conclusion: that Mayushii was killed because she is in fact the most dangerous lab member in the eyes of CERN.

The face of denial.

In addition to the exciting plot developments which will inspire all anime fandom to have fun creating conspiracy theories, the dialogue in this episode continued to be topnotch. As just one example of this show’s masterful use of dialgoue, let’s take a look at the conversation between Okabe and Christina on the bridge while heading home from grocery shopping. While they talk about the decision to reveal their invention to the world, Christina worries that they won’t have time to meet her father. To which Okabe replies, “I’ll solve all my lab member’s problems” and calls Christina his dear companion. This was after Okabe decided not to use the memory transfer device. At this point, I was wondering if CERN hadn’t replaced Okabe with a clone. What happened to his mad scientist act?

But then, to Okabe’s surprise, Christina said “Thank you”, and Okabe became blustered and confused, and tried to check her temperature because she was saying “un-assistant-like things”. Then Christina denies being a tsundere in a very tsundere way, and asks what’s wrong with Okabe for saying such weird things. So my point is, Okabe acts completely out of character for the beginning of this episode, but the dialogue makes it seem perfectly natural: because the other characters realize that he’s acting out of character. This is one way to make your characters take unexpected actions and also appear even more consistent.

To make what Okabe said earlier even more believable, they bring it up again a few minutes earlier: after Christina begins to cook, Daru asks what happened to solving all his lab member’s problems. Another pro-tip which anime creators often forget: viewers have memories longer than ten seconds. Make use of them. I also love it when shows can do a convincing job of inerleaving the serious and comedic elements, which this scene was a shining example of.

I look forward to hearing your conspiracy theories in the comments. No spoilers from the visual novel, please.


Morita-san wa Makuchi OVA — Taciturn Yuri

OVA,

This came out a couple months ago, but if you haven’t seen it yet, don’t worry, because you haven’t missed anything. I’ll summarize the entire thing. We start with an exciting two minute intro of copy-pasted pages from the manga. Then:

  1. Someone interacts with Morita.
  2. Morita thinks for several minutes about what to say next.
  3. She doesn’t say anything.
  4. Misunderstandings and lesbian hijinks occur.
  5. Two boys comment about how jealous they are.
  6. Repeat ad nauseum for twenty minutes.

The only times I even cracked a smile were when Morita’s mother appeared.

This OVA was a teaser episode for a show that’s airing this summer. If the jokes have gotten old before the first episode has even aired, then we’re in for some trouble. I won’t even bother going into how terrible the animation was or how faceless the supporting cast was since, well, if a comedy isn’t even funny, what’s the point?

Hanasaku Iroha 12 — Kidnappings and Guilt Trips

Hanasaku Iroha,

This was pretty much my reaction to Ohana’s announcement.

The show really picked up steam with Ohana’s trip to Tokyo. Her mother, Ko and the girl at the bookstore, and even a new setting for Tooru and Minchi have made things more interesting again. I still can’t believe Ohana decided to kidnap her mother, she’s such an idiot (in a good way).

Tooru was hilarious this episode. He agreed to the kidnapping plan, nearly slept together with Minchi thanks to Ohana, told Minchi to throw up so that she could eat more food, started playing crane games, and instead of yelling at Ohana’s mother started hitting on her. Not to mention his cool pose while drinking soda and his smooth talk about being a chef. Poor Minchi though, I feel like she is definitely losing to Ohana and her mother.

I enjoyed everything involving Tooru and Ohana’s mother this episode. As for Ko’s segments, the confrontation between Ohana and bookstore girl was nice. I laughed at Ohana realizing that she was the villain. Ohana’s guilt trip was fine as well, but I felt that it could have been just a bit shorter. Yes, we realize everyone is trying to fest it up. I feel like they might have put that in just to make Ohana use bonboru more – it’s like the new balut.

Now for a little bit of site news: I now have a twitter account, @draggle_kun, so feel free to follow me. I also added some Facebook / Twitter / Google like buttons to the bottom of each post. This is an experiment of sorts, and if no one uses them I’ll take them out in a month or so. Also, we have a new banner thanks to my 1337 GIMP skills. It’s slightly less FABULOUS than my last one, but I think it looks nicer. If you look closely you can see some artifacts around Tsurumi and Eclair’s hair, but it’s an improvement over the green glow around Volken in the old banner. Now I just need to figure out a nice background for the site…

Dog Days 12 — Petting and Learning New Tricks

Dog Days,

Not much happened in this episode, it was mostly Shinku going around to spend a few last moments with everyone. I still enjoyed the episode though, since they interspersed all the goodbyes with random stupid crap like petting, teaching tricks and torture scenes. Still, the goodbyes were a chore to sit through. I hope that the final episode isn’t more of this. I’m guessing it won’t be, since we haven’t seen Becky for a while or even met Shinku’s teacher, but I wouldn’t be surprised either way.

It turns out that Rico’s discovery from the previous episode is that Shinku can’t come back to Biscotti after he returns, and will lose all his memories as well. He decides to keep it a secret. Rico is a wreck, but continues looking for a way to allow Shinku to return. Shinku also discovers that Yuki is a god, but decides against worshiping her.

The jokes in Dog Days just aren’t fresh anymore. This is the second time Shinku walked in on Milhi in the bath, the second time they played catch, the nth time they had petting, the nth time Eclair went “hmph!” All of these things are still amusing, but they’re really starting to get old and need to be balanced with some new jokes as well. Pretty much all of the humor revolves around people acting like dogs. It’s still funny (especially Leo’s petting and the Princess learning tricks in this episode), but they could sure use some other jokes at this point. Recurring jokes are fine, but they can’t be your only jokes.

Anyway, have your weekly Eclair fix. She didn’t show up too much in this episode but we still got a few good faces.