Cruel Angel Theses

The number of posts don’t seem to be letting up any time soon. Ditto this. While I’m officially semi-tired of all the true tears discussion that’s been going on as of late, I still consider it to be awesome even if I’m kind burnt out from people talking about it — you know what they say about too much of a good thing. When was the last time something from this maligned genre provoked so much discussion and dissection, on such a rich level, too? I can understand the rationale behind Shinkai not making that leap from movies to a TV series, if only somewhat.

It happened previously to me with ef, and I don’t know why getting burnt out on discussion about a good anime happens, because it technically shouldn’t. Maybe everyone’s already repeating what I already know, and I can’t be arsed to comment, even if I’ve read their posts. Maybe I like talking about a series better when it’s indie, although that wouldn’t explain Clannad. Maybe I need to read less blogs, even if this goes against what I believe about reading more. But I digress.

This rather lengthy dialogue I had with Mike of AnimeDiet was conducted last Sunday, under the guise of dissecting what I felt was the core theme of both kimikiss and true tears, and what makes them such a powerful experience: character inconsistency, and the difference between what a character feels and what he or she subsequently demonstrates. That part’s still there, but it’s buried in a plethora of other stuff, all of which I came up on the fly. The second half of this dialogue is linked to at the end of this post.

Owen: I’d like to the tone for the rest of discussion by first establishing your personal bias for or against a work like True Tears, Mike. Would you say that you have a particular preference for an anime in this genre, for one?

Michael: My bias is, in general, against. I always start a dating sim/game adaptation with a real suspicion that it will be a pandering work full of clichéd, prefab female characters and a blank slate male lead (at best). I am not generally a fan of moe, though I have a higher tolerance of it than others. Which is why when it does better than average — as it does in True Tears, or ef, or Kimikiss, or Clannad — I’m not only pleasantly surprised. I often become a fan or a booster.

O: Following on from that statement, would you say that True Tears truly (pun unintended) deserves all the attention that it’s been getting as of late?

M: Well, yes and no. (How equivocal of me!) It is the best romance drama-type show this season, certainly better than H20. It’s well-animated, well-scored, and the characters show some good development and better-than-average emotional believability (which is the most important criterion for this sort of genre, in my opinion).

However, in many ways it is also a fairly standard soap opera, especially after the bit about Hiromi’s questionable parentage. For me, the most interesting bits are Shinichiro’s artistic side, his imagination, and Noe’s imaginative fantasies. Those could potentially be wonderful metaphors if they follow up on those in the future.

O: I bring this up due to what I like to call “pockets of resistance”, or “the old guard” staunchly resisting True Tears, despite near-universal acclaim from all sorts of bloggers, from the mainstream to the indie, and the in-between mongrels like me. You saw the initial resistance to ef, and how well that turned out. Do you see True Tears outperforming even the most hardline and cynical of expectations, from what you’ve seen at this point in time?

M: It’s possible. It’s much less off-putting than ef was initially, that’s for sure. My first review of True Tears was actually mostly positive for instance, compared to my first ef as well as Kimikiss reviews. For me what stands out the most is how low-key it is compared to other shows — there’s far less screaming and over-the-top angst thus far. It’s almost the classic definition of a “sleeper” hit.

O: I see where you’re coming from, and can’t help but agree with that. Since we’re not going to talk about True Tears exclusively, let’s juxtapose it with Kimikiss for a moment. Do you see a positive trend here, with ef, Kimikiss, and now True Tears airing back to back — a potential norm set where we’re rid of all the bothersome clichés once and for all, with adaptations that compare favourably to the source material?

Kimikiss, for one, bucked the trend considerably when the famed director of H&C decided to throw all the perfectly-ordinary archetypes out of the window and remake it according to his own vision. There seems to be, at least from what I see, a conscious effort to portray eroge and/or dating sim adaptations as not just those shows of yesteryear.

M: Yes! I see that too. I see this as evidence of the genre come of age, when directors are willing to reformulate the stories as stories rather than as simple game adaptations. Even Clannad has done this to a degree previously not done. It’s been particularly a delight and a surprise to watch the evolution of Kimikiss in particular. However, I fear that this means that the fad is almost over. Usually when things get to this point, it means the trend is about to shift.Often the best work is made when the flood of mediocrities has just about run out.

O: Alternately, we could just be hitting a little vein of gold in an otherwise barren mine. ;) Do you think that the source material bears all that much importance, or could any old story be fashioned into something of epic proportions given the right director?

I personally feel that it’s a combination of both, and sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don’t — Clannad has the fortune of being lead by KyoAni, who’s already adapted two other Key works previously. True Tears has Simoun’s director; SHAFT, well, Shinbo needs no further introduction; last but not least, H&C’s director on Kimikiss.

M: Note what they all have in common: all those folks are either good storytellers or visionary artists. Good storytelling is the same in any medium. You need well-motivated characters with more than two dimensions who act and react in believable ways to situations that grow out of their characters. For romances, you really need to get a sense that the people involved are a likely couple. Kimikiss, I think, does this better than most anime romances. And they are also right to simply ignore the fact that these were once games, and just tell a story with those characters from beginning, middle, and end.

O: I see. I’m bringing this up due to what I feel is a shared value found in both Kimikiss and True Tears. Most, if not all of the conflict in both shows are driven by the inconsistency of the characters, a noticeable disparity between what they act or or say, and what they truly feel. Would you say that this is the reason for both shows playing out so well despite their usually maligned roots?

M: Yes, good old emotional repression. Both shows have it in spades. And I think the reason why that’s popular is simple: it’s easy to relate to. We hide our emotions all the time, but in ways that other people find blatantly obvious from our body language, tone of voice, etc. We do it all the time! Especially in potentially embarrassing situations like love.

Admittedly, though, I think Mao’s repression was getting just a tad ridiculous in more recent episodes–though it’s finally beginning to resolve. I also have a half-baked cultural theory in which I think this trait appeals more to Asians and Asian-Americans than perhaps to other cultures.

O: Exactly! I was mulling over this in the shower earlier, and as the threads began to unravel I was struck with the thought that both True Tears and Kimikiss set themselves apart from the rest, together with ef, Clannad et al, by virtue of how they don’t just emphasize the love alone — the difference between a show mulling over love itself, and a show that focuses on the idea of being in love and the problems that come with it; how for all its romantic intentions it still has the everyman emotions that allow us to relate, even if we don’t have childhood friends as hot as Mao or Hiromi, or schoolmates as eccentric as Noe or Eriko.

M: Yup. I remember from early on, Kimikiss stood out for how incredibly normal and nice the kids were–in fact, I think they’re a bit too innocent for their age, but in a way that was believable. (I knew plenty of people like that in high school.) All shows need an emotional hook of some kind, but that doubles when it’s something like high school romance, which is a very common experience and thus possesses a much higher “smell test” than more obviously fantastic kinds of stories.

In fact, what I find more surprising is that given how common it is, why more stories aren’t more believable. The run-of-the-mill harem comedy is so patently unrealistic by comparison. I’ve always said that emotional resolution is more important than plot resolution, and key to that is whether we believe these characters really could behave that way.

O: Ah, I think we’ve reached a common understanding here. I’ve previously railed at Kanon and Air for both being too preoccupied with the final girl’s arc, and an overt emphasis on plot more than character made it feel so out of place, as if what mattered more was completing the story rather than face time with the characters.

I had this conversation with TheBigN the other day, and while we were going back and forth at it I realised why Noe didn’t annoy me or rub me the wrong way like Misuzu of Air did, for instance — her entire existence wasn’t about what subset of moe she fell under, but how she mattered as a person.

It also helps that Noe’s eccentricity doesn’t extend to such an unbelievably prefabricated extent that you can separate her by trope — in fact, I know of people who live their lives with a certain logic that only makes sense to themselves, and as far as Noe and her own brand of reasoning goes, she fits that bill very well.

M: Well, I’ll say that Noe annoyed me less to begin with than Fuko did when she started out in Clannad. I still think from time to time that Noe is still a tad too childish for her age, even given the wide imagination she clearly possesses, but like everything else in the whole show, it’s not shoved in your face nearly as much as it was for Fuko. What saved them both is their interesting backstory and the way they interact in particular with their families, and that’s one general trend that I find very cheering in more recent anime; that families, parents, and siblings are beginning to have a much more prominent role with the main characters. True Tears really stands in out that regard too.

O: Funny that you mention that, actually. I’ve previously lamented about a prevalent theme that most eroge or ren-ai games rely on — something I like to call “the supernatural crutch”, and wondered aloud if there would ever come the day where I’d chance across an adaptation that was grounded in reality, and not set in a fantastic place where magic of any capacity happens. It occurred to me that that wish of mine has been fulfilled long ago with the advent of shows like these, and I was wondering what you think of that statement. Take H2O for example, since it’s airing right now — what if we removed all that spirit rubbish, Otoha, and Hirose magically regaining his eyesight?

A lot of these works rely on their plot, as we’ve previously noted, in order to get things moving. I have issues with this due to how it’s carried out, for when the mystery’s over the girl in mention usually ceases to have much useful function, and the show degenerates into filler of some sort along the way. What do you make of that?

M: I was taught in creative writing class that plot always must come out of character, not the other way around. Develop your characters, make them rich and interesting people, and the plot and the conflicts will come naturally. Most shows don’t do that, though, especially genre shows of any sort–they tend to start with a Big Concept or Point they want to make and shape the story around that.With H20, for instance, the real heart of the story (at least in the beginning) is not the blind guy. It’s the conflict between the main girl and the other girls in the class.

The way it’s set up is rather contrived; we are shown in very very unsubtle ways that she is the outcast, literally beat upon by others, without being told why until we get really forced flashbacks.The seeds of a good story are there in the conflict between her and her former best friend. Had that been the starting point, I think we might have gotten somewhere. Of course, then it would no longer be a harem show. It would be more like a soap operatic drama.

O: Speaking of dramas, are you familiar in any capacity with Asian ones? Hiromi’s bombshell in the snow reminded me of how a lot of Korean dramas are made out to be — strong character development and conflict, shocking revelations mid-season, and the inevitably predictable twists and turns that involve a terminal illness, being related by blood, a love triangle, or all of the above — yet it never gets stale.

The point I’m trying to make here is that there’s so much to be found in the real world and everyday conversation, infinite possibilities of credible storytelling that could impact the viewer more than any childhood promise or astral projection could, but hardly anyone takes that route. Instead we have origami-wielding vampires, girls in comas who fade away from existence, and everything in-between.

M: Well…first, I’m not terribly familiar with Asian soap operas. I’m following the drama adaptation of Honey and Clover, which I’ve found funny but slight and uninvolving, and have watched all of Gokusen, but that’s pretty much it. Most of my ideas come from my study of literature. (And my own experience in trying to write stories. Most of the insights I have are ones that I can’t seem to practice for some reason!)

As for fantasy elements like astral projection, childhood promises, etc… I can actually understand why they’re there. See, these stories are first and foremost romances–not just in the sense that they are love stories, but in the older meaning of the word, stories that tell of great adventures or happenings with symbolic depth. A long forgotten promise is, in the right hands, a powerful idea. It stirs that in-built longing for eternity and love beyond time that I think we all possess. The idea of a projected ghost from a comatose person is an analogy for the way people never really quite disappear from our lives until we forget them, even when they are not in front of us physically. The problem is that we’ve seen it all before. They’re clichés now.

O: I get what you mean. In other words, you’re not faulting the intention behind the setup, but how it’s executed — the same old same old that eventually gets bothersome. Familiarity breeds contempt. Is that right?

M: Yes. Plus, it’s often used as a substitute or a crutch. Instead of developing unique and interesting characters, they pull out these stops to wring tears out of the audience. It may work on a first-time watcher or someone new to the genre. But my first time watching Video Girl Ai is never going to happen again…

…now that I know how stock the situations are.

O: Haha, yes. I share your sentiments — there never will be another Love Hina for me.You mentioned “a Big Concept or Point” earlier, and I’d like to see what you think of this. All of the shows I’ve mentioned so far, be it Kanon (Miracles), Air (Summer), Sola (Alone/Sky), Kimikiss (Kisses), True Tears (Tears), ef (Memories) — they always have a prevalent theme that they try to present, be it subtle or overt. Do you view these concepts or points as a necessity?

These themes are, from what I can make of it, one of the largest setbacks when it comes to obtaining new blood and snaring a viewer that would otherwise never bother. They look at the seemingly corny title (I mean, Myself; Yourself didn’t exactly make grammatical sense) or campy name and keep on looking.

M: Yeah, it’s a very tough line to walk. I remember when I first heard ef’s tagline: “Do you have memories you don’t want to forget?” I loathed it. I thought it sounded like a really cheesy wish-fulfilment game slogan, which is what I thought the show would be, too.

O: Let’s not forget H2O’s “-will rock your soul!”, while we’re at it!

M: I refuse to believe that was not at least a little tongue in cheek. They can’t be that dumb otherwise, can they?! :)

O: Yes, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. ;) Nothing’s really came close to the trauma I’ve experienced of Kanon’s subliminal “Do you believe in miracles?” message that was repeated ad nauseum throughout its run, and I did flinch at ef’s corny slogan. As it stands, I’m perfectly happy to let them smother me with something the makers want to point out or show, as long as it doesn’t suffocate me in the process.

M: As I said, it’s a tough line to walk. Very often, stories are inspired by a single image or motif–a lot of those things you mentioned are more motifs than themes, and when done right are powerful connecting devices. Themes would be like anti-war messages or the futility of revenge or the like. I hate being preached to in storytelling, or banged over the head by anything.

(Click to continue reading…)