Spirit of Wonder – Scientific Boys Club

I got around to watching all the anime adaptations of Spirit of Wonder (by Kenji Tsuruta of Emanon fame) this week, and I have to say… MAL reviews and scores for these are really low. At first, I thought this was just a matter of taste. The stories can be super slow (think Aria), and it’s not really your typical sci-fi fare.

But after reading reviews for the Scientific Boys Club OVA, I think people are just missing the point. I wrote my own review about it (giving it an 8/10), but I want to write down a few more notes on it here.

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Darling in the FranXX: an autopsy

(it was shit)

Today, I happened to look at the MAL page for the show, and the four top reviews give it 3/10, 1/10, 1/10, and 1/10. I don’t want to say “look, told you so” because there’s no point to that – everybody already knew it. The thing that confused me for the longest time, though, was how the weekly episode threads on reddit had so many supportive and optimistic comments.

I feel like the lesson to be learned here isn’t that DitF was a great show with a bad ending, but rather that the opinions on reddit threads are totally biased towards the most ardent fans. After all, what could a critic say except “wow, that was shit again.” The only “valuable” discussion around such weak, shitty writing would come from people who think it actually means something.

The popularity of DitF itself is bizarre, actually. Originally, people saw that Studio Trigger was making it and expected a Gurren Lagann or Kill la Kill. But… it was made by basically everybody who didn’t work on that stuff. The F team. Nobody really cared about that, though, because it was TRIGGER + MECHA. In a season with no big name shows besides Violet Evergarden (which was also carried solely by studio name), the masses needed something to fanboy about – and more importantly, characters to make waifus.

Darling in the FranXX reminds me of Guilty Crown, back in Fall 2011. That wasn’t mecha, but it was… mecha-lite in its sci-fi vibe. But it was mysterious waifu girl meets boy and blah blah the world, just like DitF. Back then, it was stupidly popular too, but got its fair share of hate from the start. I can’t imagine how bad the senseless fanboying could have gotten if Guilty Crown didn’t have three giant series in Fate/Zero, Hunter X Hunter, and Future Diary looming over its head.

…actually, I guess I now can.


the problem with violet evergarden

…is that I don’t give a SHIT about Violet Evergarden. After writing my last post on Sora yori mo Tooi Basho (which, by the way, has a stupid-as-hell English name so I’m going back to Japanese), I went and watched episode 5 of Violet Evergarden.

I had Violet Evergarden in mind as I was ranting about how Antarctic Girls is falling into the pattern of a “conflict-of-the-week,” and it’s pretty obvious why: it’s an episodic show with a microscopic overarching plot of Violet becoming human. I’m using “microscopic” because so far I haven’t been able to detect any meaningful change in our beloved robogirl. And while the conflict-of-the-week is sometimes interesting, everything revolves around KyoAni trying to make me feel sorry as I watch socially-inept Violet drawing pity as she takes off her gloves.

I don’t give a shit about this character. There’s nothing remotely appealing about a main character who has no emotions, and it’s even worse that every interaction and dialogue has to do with how she has no emotions. I could bear with it for the first few episodes, but now it’s just KyoAni flexing their animation skills and puking out a European Endless Eight where the only thing everybody talks about is how Nagato has no emotions.

you suck

 


an outsider’s view of shirobako

MAL score progression for Shirobako (now it’s 8.46) [1]

Recently I’ve gotten an excuse to do nothing but watch anime every day for hours on end (I got finger tendonitis), so I’ve been going through my anime backlog. I’ve been out of the scene for basically five years now, so I haven’t watched or even heard about all but the most popular shows since 2012.

I think it’s worthwhile to give my unbiased view on Shirobako. Judging from the progression of the score on MyAnimeList (top image), people came to like it more and more as the show went on, going from a trash-tier 7.18/10 to a top-100 anime score. And from the few blog posts I read [2,3], the cultured individuals of the blogging community have held it in high regard.

So this is where I come in, I guess. In my aimless browsing of memes on reddit, I ended up watching one of ProZD’s videos [4] where he mentions Shirobako as a top-10 anime. Although my taste in anime is completely different from ProZD’s (i.e. I wouldn’t put any of the other anime he mentions into my top 20), I started watching Shirobako almost immediately after, ran through it in four days, and slapped on a 10/10 score.

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Somebody made a manga based on me!

Actually, Butsurigaku wa yasashisugiru desu is based on a romanticized view of physics research at a Japanese all-girls high school. I’m a physics researcher obsessed with Japanese culture, who wishes he were young and filled with dreams like back in high school.

So close enough.

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