Taking a step back from the Lucky Star factions
Posted by: Owen S in Anime, tags: Comedy, Commentary, First impressions, High school, Lucky Star, Slice of lifeI know this seems like a terribly opportunistic time to start my blog given the topic of the moment, but I guess it’s better than nothing. So everyone’s got an opinion about Lucky Star, with the lovers going “MOAR” and the haters going “NO MOAR”, and while I found the list of reasons for not liking it to be pretty acceptable, lolikitsune’s post left an awful taste in my mouth and I thought a more positive take on the whole thing would be appropriate.
I know coloured hair’s there for character differentiation, but…
First off, what is Lucky Star all about? The general consensus seems to be that, aside from being a 4-koma adaptation, it’s also a slice of life/high school series. Cue comparisons to Azumanga, which would be inevitable given the genre similarities. But is that all there is to it? Let’s add another one into the equation; Ichigo Mashimaro, which also happens to be a slice of life anime.
This is how I see it:
IchiMashi = real setting, real characters
Azumanga = real setting, surreal characters
Lucky Star = surreal setting, real characters(?)
To elaborate further, IchiMashi has always been about realism, at least to the point where I can recognise the stuff the characters did (excluding Nobue), no matter how wacky or outlandish, as trying to be representative of real life. Like, “This is how little girls out there behave, and we’re animating them” — having a little sister that age probably grants me the license to see that.
Azumanga never really struck me as great, or overtly funny — for instance, the humour seem to be forced to fit the mould of the characters, not as a natural consequence of the characters being themselves like in Miu’s case. Now this is where it gets all horribly subjective, and opinionated: Azumanga has a real setting but surreal characters. Chiyo’s chichi was never really explained and seemed to me as part of the surrealism factor, or gratuitous wtf situations. Osaka was funny for all of a couple of episodes before you realised she was destined for gag dummy status. And there was Kimura-sensei, which needs no further explanation… the list goes on.
Now Lucky Star, as far as I see it, is a twist on Azumanga in this aspect — the setting’s surreal in the sense that, well, the cast seems awfully tailor-made for the otaku crowd, something I won’t argue with. Konata as a character seems awfully surreal because, well, the whole “female otaku that plays eroge, galge, and MMORPGS obsessively” thing doesn’t seem to click. To say nothing of how she’s smart, but lazy — like we totally didn’t see that one coming.
The other characters, like the twins for instance, aren’t that far off. Tsukasa’s the twin living in her sister’s shadow — not that great in her studies, good at cooking, bad at sports, clumsy. Single redeeming trait aside, we have her sister Kagami — she’s great in her studies, but she’s tsundere, and likes what is presumably danmaku. And the token meganekko, Miyuki, who’s smart beautiful rich etc etc, also has a split personality while gaming and, according to Wikipedia, is “healing-type” like Tsukasa, whatever that means.
Pretty ironic at this point how for all of Lucky Star’s supposed money-making aspirations the characters do the exact opposites of what their Azumanga counterparts are doing — absolutely nothing. They go through their lives without the obligatory joke every half-minute, or as Shirukii said, “This episode got -one- stifled laugh out of me”. So it’s a slice of life anime whose 4koma roots are general knowledge, yet no one seems to appreciate how close the characters are to a portrayal of real life than Chiyo and friends ever will be.
So there’s a huge contrast. Lucky Star’s characters are in a surreal setting because they scream PRODUCT OF CRASS COMMERCIALISM as opposed to Azumanga’s every(wo)man cast — no coloured hair, no X number of cheesy character traits per girl that seem to come off The Dictionary of Moe — just good old normality. But what do the girls in Azumanga do? For a slice of life anime they sure seem to take life at a gag a minute, something I found as annoying as the laugh track in sitcoms. The extraterrestrial origins of Chiyo chichi was never really explained. Kimura’s antics don’t seem to fit in with the ‘normal’ picture Azumanga tries to paint — surely he would’ve gotten arrested already at some point? Wait, he’s got a soft side, so that must make his closet pervert tendencies acceptable, right?
The worst thing of it all would be how I foresee Lucky Star never getting the PEDO tag like Ichigo Mashimaro did despite their cute-girls-go-about-their-everyday-lives similarity — IchiMashi was real to the extent that it felt creepy at times, like you would be if you were invisible and took a video camera around filming a bunch of little girls. That voyeuristic quality probably is what led to its success, yet I can’t see it happening to Lucky Star because everyone’s taking it at face value or not knowing how to go about something so different. Because we all know Ana wasn’t there for the foreigner jokes, or Matsuri there for the timid personality ones.
I guess the community at large is probably coming to grips about how difficult it is to watch something that seems to be the inverse of the norm, that hasn’t any precedent since it seems to be a first. This still is slice of life/high school fare, but since it doesn’t fit the bar that Azumanga presumably set for the genre (given how it was the first thing Jaalin compared it to) I can see why a lot of people hate it.
The best part about this post? I saw 1:30 worth of the first episode, which beats lolikit by a minute. Thank God for summary blogs. I also wanted to say something else about the whole moe argument against Lucky Star and other related stuff like Kanon and KyoAni (also brought up by lolikit), but I guess I’ll save it for another post or something.
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April 9th, 2007 at 11:04 pm
>>lolikitsune’s post left an awful taste in my mouth
I’m sorry ^_^;;
April 9th, 2007 at 11:41 pm
Yay, first comment ever; sorry for the comment moderation, I wasn’t aware of the default settings. And don’t sweat it. Doubt I would have gone to such lengths to type out a reply if your post wasn’t that negative, lol. Was scribbling a reply while commuting to college today.
April 10th, 2007 at 2:01 am
fantastic analysis you have here - i like how you laid out the setting and characters for the three shows. by doing so, you’ve objectively highlighted a key difference between these shows, something i doubt anybody has thought of or would dare to argue against.
the thing is, i dont think anybody in either “faction” (myself included) took their analysis this far - the references to previous 4koma animes were to illustrate the niche aspect of the humor, not to compare other reasons for appeal. for me, that’s as far as the similarities go - to refer to that first paragraph right under the skittles pic, yea, i really do think that’s all there is to it, at least in this debate.
after all, what has the main criticism of lucky star been? “it’s not funny.” this is completely understandable given the immense amount of hype this show was given due to kyoani’s previous “rofling” exploits, but also a good indication of where people’s expectations were placed. it wasn’t about the characters nor how “good” it is alongside previous 4koma successes, but rather its approach to humor, to which the general blogging consensus has “meh” as the high point.
i think we might see a slight swing of opinion after the subs come out (with the safe assumption that afk’s strato keeps most of the cultural nuances intact), but the fact that the OP and the kyoani name are the only two things that the blogging consensus have accepted as quality, those who have made their decisions within 7 minutes are unlikely to change it (might have been 3 things had they made it to the disgruntled idol)… at least kanon had nice animation.
as for the point about moe - i never paid much attention to it as i was too engrossed in the dialogue, but apparently it’s a big selling point for 4komas, and it’s something that’s been referred to over and over for lucky star. i think it’s great that the characters are cute, but i wonder if it detracts from the dialogue and the circumstantial humor, which i believe is where all the attention should be placed anyway.
it’s a shame, really, that a show would take so much fire not for what it did, but for what others thought it should have done. it’s just like you put it… people don’t know how to react to something so different, so fall back on their own expectations.
either way, i think it’s crazy how large of a reaction this first episode of seemingly nothing has generated. whatever, i’ll still be tuning in every week!
as a sidenote, i really enjoyed reading this. you’ve definitely set up a unique premise in the blogging community with this post, and i hope your future posts can maintain this level of analysis and wit. there’s some real honesty and personality in your writing - in my opinion, the ONLY two things that matter. keep it up… i’ll be checking back often.
April 10th, 2007 at 4:43 am
I’d just like to say that my opinion of Jaalin has improved greatly after reading his comment here, for whatever it’s worth. Pretty much shows that he’s not a jason, and that’s a really, really good thing. :)
Also, Owen, to be honest, when I first commented on this post, I hadn’t *read* it- I saw the bit referencing me and felt an apologetic urge. Nice post. Nice blog. Etc.
Actually, the main things that annoy me in the Lucky Star discussions are that a) some people complain about it not being funny, and b) a lot of people seem to think that missing humor is the only reason for disliking Lucky Star. I realize I took a pretty damn offensive stance, but it kind of irked me that a lot of people completely ignored what I was saying and just said “you don’t get the humor.” (I happen to love AzuDai.)
The fact that, over the past few hours, people have been accepting the fact that the moe *might* be overdone and whoreish (even if they themselves don’t see it as such) is refreshing. I’m grateful to Jaalin for bothering to mention my argument, and I’m grateful to you for acknowledging that I’d said something.
Also, 1.5 minutes? That’s like, the OP. Alone. You beat me! Damn it! :3
April 10th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
jaalin: Wow, thanks! Kinda speechless, I just felt like I scored a goal with your reply. Ditto on the subs thing, I’ve got a feeling that opinion might just change after the afk release so I’m keeping my fingers crossed on that.
lolikit: I don’t really get the jason reference, but okay. :P People going “it’s not funny” probably had great expectations of something else to begin with, I guess. I had this theory about the length of your watching Lucky Star being correlated to the length of your post actually. Haha.
And thanks a lot for your comments and feedback, guys. It’s really encouraging to see two prominent anime bloggers say such kind things about my first post. I’ll definitely keep up at what I’m doing, now that I know people actually like it.
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