Fate/Zero and Lord El Melloi II: Fakers Chasing Their King’s Shadow

Management: This essay is meant to be less of a review and more of analysis of the show being examined. It contains plot spoilers for both the Fate/Zero and The Case Files of Lord El Melloi II: Rail Zeppelin Grace Notes anime.

If there’s one thing that Fate fans and others who’ve watched Fate/Zero can seem to agree on, it’s that Waver Velvet is a good character. Some Fate verse fans have been annoyed by kinds of expectations Fate/Zero has set up to newcomers to their beloved franchise, particularly Fate/stay night. In many ways, with the exception of Heaven’s Feel route, Fate/Zero is a big stylistic and tonal departure from the original VN narrative. Non-fate fans who’ve watched Fate/Zero accuse it of being too edgy or pretentious for its own good. Fate/Zero has gruesomely distressing scenes, is brutally unfair to its sympathetic characters, and just dunks and dumps on its paragons with relentless waves of cynical philosophizing and worldbuilding. Waver may be Fate/Zero original, but his propensity for being awkward and earnest is a familiar and welcome sight to Fate fans. Those same qualities endear the non-Fate ones, who see his goofiness and kindliness as a break from and counter to the oppressiveness of Fate/Zero’s gloom and doom. In the end, violence forces Waver to part with his partner Iskandar (aka Alexander the Great, his heroic spirit during the last Holy Grail War, and his king). Hope remains though that Waver is able to emerge from his coming-of-age character arc a more mature and still compassionate person.

In some respects, Waver has become more mature as he’s taken temporary mantle of Lord El Melloi II; however, as the Lord El Melloi II anime reveals, his parting with Iskandar has left him with regrets. These regrets make him feel like a faker, which makes the Faker that appears later more than a coincidence. Or maybe it’s just self-projection, since he’s the one who came up with the name? They’re each other’s character foils. Like the person he’s dubbed the rather crudely direct Faker, Waver is perhaps giving himself less credit than he deserves. In chasing the shadow of his king, he’s downplaying the shadow he’s cast on others.

Your Name: Disastrous Places and Liminal Spaces

Management: This essay is meant to be less of a review and more of analysis of the show being examined. It contains plot spoilers for the Your Name anime.

We’re acquainted with these tales of from folklore and myth, the premises of horror stories, those testimonials people caught on special TV channels: a place of some awful significance is haunted by undead spirits. Moldering graveyards, abandoned asylums, scarred battlefields, places of disaster… In the fields of Gettysburg, for example, some locals claim that they can hear the dead, soldiers from long ago who haunt the former battlefield. Gettysburg was the location of the American Civil War’s bloodiest battle, and its legacy as the site of mass slaughter has made the more superstitious perceive it as a site of restless energy. In the popular imagination, these places serve as liminal spaces, locations and sites where all-too-natural dichotomies are not normally observed: death intermingling with life, life intermingling with death. The dead have not passed into the afterlife, the ether, or permanent rest as they ought to have. Instead, their undead spirits wander the grounds, bound to some place of awful significance.

While Your Name is not a horror film in the way the genre is conventionally understood, the narrative of Your Name plays an awful lot with liminal spaces. The concept of liminality in religious and anthropological studies has a definition that’s a little broader than just the spaces the mortal and the infinite occupy. Liminality is the concept referring to transformation and intersection, where clearly delineated dichotomies of “one” blur and bleed into the “other,” branching into or becoming new and distinct entities. Life and death is the domain of liminality, but so is the profane and the sacred; the child and the adult, the individual and the communal, this direction and that, this person and that, and even time and space itself. Directed by Makoto Shinkai, Your Name is a story layered with examples of its characters passing through various thresholds, states, and spaces of liminality to resolve a conflict. The film starts with the blurring of one traditional dichotomy: the inexplicable bleeding of its two protagonists into each others’ lives, a body-swap. Midway, the film grounds its supernatural gimmick with its extant reason: a place of disaster.

A Place Farther than the Universe: Journeys to Antarctica and Japan

Management: This essay is meant to be less of a review and more of analysis of the show being examined. It contains plot spoilers for the A Place Farther than the Universe anime.

There’s a lot to A Place Farther than the Universe that even a cynical guy like me can relate to. It’s a story of earnestness governed by doubts that I’d imagine speak to many folks. Mari “Kimari” Tamaki’s personality might have been too earnest for me to consider her my character favorite, but as the initial main girl introduced to the audience, her central conflict was something that hit home. You may have big dreams early on. You may have achieved little since then to realize your aspirations. You get intimidated after realizing the scale of the work and luck needed to accomplish your goals. You fall into a deep melancholy over being no where close to your aims. What was the point of everything until now? That was me in my 20s, with hair on my chin and honors to my degree, working a job for a year that wasn’t worth the time and tuition I spent for schooling. I’m still in my 20s, and I can confidently say that I’m in a better place now.

But I’ll admit, the recent memory of a year of my youth wasted still bothers me. In that spirit, I understand why folks combine new resolutions with dramatic gestures. People do it often at the turn of the New Year, promising on its midnight stroke to becoming better people no matter what. If you think about it, why it has to be on New Year’s Day is a decision people make that’s ultimately arbitrary. It would be more logical for folks to devote themselves to new resolutions as soon as they form them. However, it is romantic to follow through commitments when they’re associated with some grand spectacle. People convince themselves that a dramatic gesture will make it harder to break a promise. It gives them an extra boost of courage, or it puts extra pressure on them to save face. For Kimari, Shirase Kobuchizawa, and her other friends, her life-changing adventure was a trip to Antarctica. For me, my call to adventure was going to Japan.

Land of the Lustrous: Gods, Parents, Saints, and Growing Up

Management: This essay is meant to be less of a review and more of analysis of the show being examined. It contains plot spoilers for the Land of the Lustrous anime.

At the intersection of philosophy and theology is a word that both these disciplines have used to describe ultimate truth: God. God, in both senses of the word, is a concept that’s too abstract for newborn babes to fully appreciate as they mewl from their mothers’ wombs into a cold world. We open our eyes, our vision yet fully formed, and the very first beings to actively engage our sight (and the rest of our senses) are our parents. They take us into their care and teach us things: practical things, like how to walk, and ideological things, like how to see the world. We are taught by, ask, observe, and learn from our parents. We are made in their image and likeness, our first and most intimate mentors. For us humans learning how to be, the closest and most tangible thing to a God that we can appreciate in our early years are our parents. As we grow older and learn to respect other authorities, to realize that our parents are not always infallible and omniscient, but sometimes wrong in their judgments and even debase in their worldviews is tantamount to some betrayal. My mother and father were my Gods, my go-to sources for knowledge and wisdom. Now they are not, and I’ve had to struggle with the fallout of our strident disagreements.

In Land of the Lustrous, the effective parent of Phosphophyllite, Cinnabar, and all Lustrous beings was Kongo-sensei. He carved them from his hands, gave them names to identify with and cherish, taught them of the world, and gave them purpose through specific roles in their society.

In turn, all the Lustrous, and Phos initially, looked to Kongo for affection and guidance as their effective parent. As his effectively beloved children, they placed their complete faith in him and trusted him unconditionally. But eventually, Phos began to feel their relationship with him needed a more critical evaluation. They discover Kongo concealing something important from the rest of the Lustrous, something related to the Lunarians. The rest of the Lustrous confirm to Phos that they suspected Kongo was hiding things from them all along. They were content to leave it be. Phos wanted to prod at it further. Slowly, gradually, Phos sought answers to inquiries about the Lunarians that Kongo wouldn’t answer but Phos believed he knew the answers to. Kongo appeared to be letting the Lustrous suffer by withholding important information about the Lunarians. However Phos, in the end, couldn’t bring themselves to hate the parent who raised and nurtured them. Phos began rebelling against Kongo, though Phos’ feelings toward him remained conflicted. In being recast from the God-parent role he was always seen as by his charges into a flawed parent that he always was, Kongo is revealed to share more qualities with Christian saints than with of Buddhist boddhisattva. This Christian-informed observation is little odd, considering the show’s heavily Buddhist presentation.

Dreaming of Dad | An Original Poem

Management: Here’s the result of a tangent I went off of while trying to write something about Shelter. Shelter is an animated music video short about a girl, her dad, and the things he left behind and now help define and inspire her. Rather than a post I planned  to write about Shelter’s themes on grief and family, I ended up craft a poem about my angst and my dad instead. This is only my opinion, but it didn’t come out half-bad. Feel free to comment, and please enjoy.

Very rarely, I do get terrible nightmares. They’re dark dreams. They wake me in the middle of the night or early in the morning. I end up shaking. The sun has yet risen. I feel afraid. I feel alone. In these dreams of mine, my dad’s there.

But then he’s not. Violence. Absence. I usually keep them in the back of my mind, but when they’re brought back with searing vividness, I imagine roadkill that I’ve encountered of peoples’s cats. I sometimes cry. I’m a gloomy child, you should know. I don’t subscribe to that that subconscious invincibility, that uncritical indefatigably the minds of my peers seemed to be twisted by. Scenes of battles and beatings, battings and bullets twist my mind like the shock of an animal pressed into the bloody pavement by the callous consumer car-mobile paying no thought to the creature whose bones they cracked… and ground… and spread.

Hyouka: A Dying Land

Management: While my opinion of the show is generally positive overall, this essay, by no means, is meant to serve as a comprehensive review, but rather, as an articulation and analysis of some of what I feel is this series’ most integral and interesting themes. The piece takes primary reference from Episode 22, “The Doll that Took a Detour.”

It is the ending of an episode that ends this Japanese Hyouka season, “The Doll that Took a Detour.” It is the Hina Doll Festival’s end.

The many men responsible for the celebration, having proceeding from one village to the next by procession, allowed themselves feast and merriment for the duration. The women, formerly in ceremonial wear, have likely dressed themselves more casually for the after affair, dusting off the cherry blossoms that caught on them from the air, having put away the clothes and props they need for next year’s fare.

These people are old. The festival is old. The dispute that brought about the tradition of the festival is old. The momentary dilemma between the two villages that nearly disrupts the procession’s route… it hearkens from old.  As Houtarou Oreki and Eru Chitanda walk from the festivities back to their respective homes, the latter turns to the former within the vicinity of the cherry tree, blossoming out of season, to say something. She says something like this to him.

This land is dying.

Sasami-san@Ganbaranai: Religion, Tradition, and the New Age

Management: While my opinion of the show is positive overall, this essay, by no means, is meant to serve as a comprehensive review, but rather, as an articulation and analysis of some of what I feel is this series’ most integral and interesting themes. This piece has undergone a major re-write.

On the surface, Sasami-san@Ganbaranai is a strange concoction of battle spectacles, religion, and eccentric and risqué behavior brewed out of a Haruhi-inspired cauldron. The premise is a riff off of a Haruhi-inspired archetype, a girl who subconsciously alters the world using god powers she can’t consciously control. Inspiration is not imitation, however. While I’m not going to deny the influence The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya has had on Sasami-san’s narrative, I’m confident in expressing this: Sasami-san’s is more ambitious than Haruhi’s, if not quite as smoothly well-written. It’s willing to talk about controversial issues in contemporary Japanese society that the Haruhi series is not really equipped to discussing. The show combines its fight scenes with its universe’s mythos, not unlike Monogatari, to craft a social commentary on Japanese religion and spirituality, as well as culture and lifestyles, in the New Age.

Unlike Monogatari though, Sasami-san’s universe is built primarily from extant Shinto kami mythology. However, all that needs to be known (if not fully appreciated) about this mythology to understand the show’s social commentary can be found within its narrative.

“Identity through Inou-Battle” or「エンドレスパラドックス!!!」

Management: Somewhat of a general review, somewhat of a thematic analysis, and somewhat just two anime dorks having fun with words, roleplay, and other nerd geek weaboo stuff, this is a collaboration work between ZeroReq011 of therefore it is and Frog-kun of Fantastic Memes. Sentences, images, and perhaps some voice impersonation was contributed jointly and staggeredly by the both of us in creation of this piece.

ZeroReq011: It’s a pseudo-harem set-up day at school. Four girls. One guy. The standout quirk of said guy is that he’s a–

Frog-kun: Zero, what are you–

ZeroReq011: INVASION BITCH

Frog-kun: O-Oh my God…

ZeroReq011: Don’t worry. She respawns.

Frog-kun: W-W-Why…

ZeroReq011: Because chuunibyou. Chuuni. I’m practicing my chuuni impression for this piece. You like it? Come now, you know I’m not actually evil.

Frog-kun: …r–

ZeroReq011: –ight then!

When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace. Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de. Inou-Battle for short. The one guy and four girls (okay, five girls, but her ship’s sunk pretty early on) are inexplicably granted superpowers. Naturally, they continue with their commonplace school lives.

I Have No Friends and Must Win | Stella Women’s Academy, High School Division Class C3, A Review

Management: This is a comprehensive review of own devising, where I go over a pro and con analysis of the material in an attempt to convince people to watch the show-in-review. Hopefully, in encouraging people in general to watch things I think are interesting, they’ll at least somewhat know what to expect while watching. For clarity’s sake, I’ll emphasize this: the review isn’t meant to be so much holistic as it is coverage of what I believe is of core importance to the show. 

From the surface, Stella Women’s Academy, High School Division Class C3, or C3-bu for short, looks like it’s going to be K-On! with airsoft. It could also turn out to be Girls und Panzer, but with airsoft. Maybe Upotte!!, but instead of real guns, airsoft. Sabagebu! Its name translates from the literal Japanese equivalent of “airsoft.”

Not quite. Unlike all these aforementioned shows, C3-bu’s not treating girls with airsoft as fun and games, or airsoft as fun and games, or even airsoft as war as fun and games. It’s treating airsoft as war. And it’s treating war as war, and war is zero-sum. For the player of fortune, for fortune of victory, the fighting ends and fortune’s achieved only when one side wins it all and the other falls to hell. Other conditions notwithstanding, victory’s assured when the enemy side has been all shot. It is imperative that at least you must survive. It is imperative that you survive. You must survive. You are the player of fortune, after all. The player of victory… victory… victory…

…believes Yura after a certain point. It’d be closer to the mark to say that C3-bu’s more like Evangelion.

Kokoro Connect: A Glass Half-Empty

Management: While my opinion of the show is generally positive overall, this essay, by no means, is meant to serve as a comprehensive review, but rather, as an articulation and analysis of some of what I feel is this series’ most integral and interesting themes. This essay, in particular, is about Kokoro Connect’s final arc, Michi Random, though the show does contain specific references to its first arc, Hito Random.

As much as viewers of Kokoro Connect such as I may exclaim from the top of their Internet lungs Himeko Inaba being “GREAT SO GREAT WHY IS INABA SO GREAT” forever infinitum eternity etc, in truth, I don’t personally find her the most relatable character in the show. To be friends or even more-than-friends with someone like that in real life (if not with Himeko exactly) would likely be a dream come true for many fans of her character. Consensus-wise, the character that I found most relatable is decidedly less liked, not in the least due to her to her rather souring behavior in the show’s last animated arc, Michi Random. A girl so considerate, even-tempered, and sweet suddenly making an about-face and turned into this really sullen, angry, nasty bitch.

A lot of viewers felt disgusted by this newest attempt at “forced drama” gone too far. They felt betrayed that this bright and social character they liked or tolerated suddenly become bleak and anti-social. They couldn’t understand where her shift in attitude came from. They turned their backs to the story, deeming it contrived even in light of the show’s premise. They turned their backs to her. They might have gone back to waiting for Himeko to be adorable or awesome again, except this girl’s raining on Himeko’s freaking parade too.

So why do I find her relatable? Iori Nagase’s me, or at least an extreme version of me.