Showing posts with label weebery. Show all posts

Monday, 28 November 2022

THE STUDENT COUNCIL PRESIDENT WAS REINCARNATED AS CANNON FODDER IN A NIGHTMARE FUTURE

oh my god why the fuck did i have this idea

lets call it

FIVE PITCHES FOR IMAGINARY ANIME SHOWS

wait! I still have a KICKSTARTER running for my NEW BOOK.

Only THREE DAYS to go if you want this book! We may never re-print! KS ends on Thursday Dec 1st at 7pm UK Time!

LEGEND OF PSYDUCK WARS

Psyduck can't say anything but "Psyduck" or derivations thereof, but Psyduck can read minds and thereby knows all about language and the thoughts and dreams of others and it is in their voices that Psyducks story is told, a kind of epistolary tale.

Like a Philip K Dick story from the point of view of psyduck; decaying realities, conspiracies, fractured memories, identity manipulation.

A saga of the Pokemon universe, a story of psychic warfare, occurring over generations, hidden from most of the Pokemon world. A secret war! fought in shadows! A war over the nature and perception of reality itself with the aesthetic of the 'spooky' Pokemon cryptoculture elements like the ghosts and fragments, strange stories, lost levels of old games, that decayed pixel art look, glitch art.

I feel like I might be the wrong writer for this as actually I know almost nothing of the lore of the Pokemon universe and most of the crackpot theories are things I’ve heard other discuss first but for a start;

Pokemon being a Post-Apocalyptic land - I think there is allegedly a single 'soldier' character in the lore and no army for him to belong to.

Pokemon being slaves - the first Pokemon game was meant to end with you deciding not to play digital dog fights with your Pokemon any more as they were Sentient and often quite self-aware, but in fact this carried on and expanded, why? Universal mind-wiping and memory alteration.

Ghost Pokemon - what are they the ghosts of?

honestly there are a tonne of these

So the series would be a diegetic investigation of all the cryptic Pokemon lore and all the inconsistencies and incoherencies of that imagined world, treated not as fictional constructs but as actual ruptures in reality, brought about by and cloaked by psychic power, the actions of spirits or world-ending abominations

And only Psyduck knows the horrible Phillip K Dick truth of this reality and cannot speak it but must instead be a lonely guardian over the invisible fissures in consensus reality. For if the ordinary people knew how fragile their constructed truth really was the centre would not hold

and madness, or despair, would engulf all.

COW MASTER: FIRST HERD

An historical agricultural procedural;

It’s the fertile crescent about 11,000 bc. Aurochs haunt the plains! Unkillable monsters! No man may face them and live!

In a valley somewhere a genius is born! But - his father is killed by an Aurochs. He swears revenge, he will defeat the Aurochs - ALL OF THEM, and make them slaves to the tribe! (this series does have milk fetish elements).

What follows is a deep dive into (late Neolithic?) proto-agricultural culture and a perhaps multi-generational saga of researching, capturing, breeding and living with the descendants of wild Aurochs and their conversion into cows. Really going in deep on each individual problem and the procedural methods for solving them.

Because the main character is totally obsessed with cows it’s as much an in-depth look at them (cows) as it is about the culture of the main character. Like any situation where you learn a huge amount about someone, or something, sympathy results and the story is as much a strange one of reconciliation between man and cow. Maybe the main character turns against the taming project at the last minute but now it is TOO LATE as there is simply too much power in the COW. Society has changed, probably forever.

This could be part of a series about the gradual assembly of the Eurasian agricultural animal 'package', including Dog, Horse, Cow, Sheep and possibly Pig, and Chickens could be a mini-series

(no Goat Master as really we have never truly mastered Goats), (and there could be a Cat series but that would have to be called 'Man-Master: First Purr' since in that case the taming process went the other way round), not sure what genetics is currently telling us about the timing of these various animals. I think a few of them may have common, quite narrow bottlenecks.

Really the development of the Eurasian agricultural package is perhaps the longest, most intensive and most productive scientific project in human history. Since all of these creatures were originally either useless or dangerous to us and the end of the process you eat your eggs then get on your horse to go out with your dog and round up your sheep and cows.

Only now, with this series, do we fully understand just how strange and miraculous the nature of these symbiotic servant species truly is!

MARLBOROUGH!

A multi-series epic following John Churchill, later Duke of Marlborough, from (relative) penury through service to the King to becoming the ultimate super-diplomat, scheming bastard and possibly the best field general Britain has ever had.

Key thing here is that Marlborough was an irl Bishonen when he was young, so you can have hott young Marlborough for the first few series, and then we get older Marlborough, a very classical japanese/anime protagonist, (actually I'm pretty sure the main guy in Legend of the Galactic Heroes is partially based on Marlborough, specifically his looks and how he got his place in court), the warm/cold mysterious charming manipulator who take incredible risks and gets away with it.

Confidant of the King, he betrays him at exactly the right moment, (and possibly before), and issues in the Glorious Revolution. Later he battles in Europe while his wife is frigging off the Queen!

Big battles! clever tactics! outrageous risks! fantastic fashions! Wonderful hair! Secret plans, told to no-one which turn the tables at the last minute, a wonderful villain in Louis the whatever.

There really hasn't been a BIG pop culture depiction of the 'Age of Ann' that I can think of; the Glorious Revolution and the early days of the Saxe Cobergs. There is 'The Favourite' but that’s arthouse and ignores the quite-interesting Euro-geddon, omni-scheming and giant armies marching

men pointing at maps

That anime thing where a single fight takes like nine episodes would actually work pretty well for a very large period battle, you could spend each episode following one character and group, isolated in their experience and makind decisions based on what they know and as you watch more of the episodes you get more of a global awareness of the battle than any group in it, so what before seemed like heroism may be foolishness, what seemed like a crazy risk was actually part of a clever plan etc, then in the last episode you cut to Marlboroughs POV with his just-according to-plan speech about how he planned to win this particular battle.

(Oddly enough one of Marlboroughs (way down the lists) soldiers was a Captain Blackadder.)

The massively different versions of Marlborough you get depending on whose record or analysis you read would fit quite well into a multi-person epistolary view where the focus of each episode moves from person to person, with each of them having an entirely different opinions of Marlborough, so he could be the 'villain' of his own series for an episode etc.

THE PATH TO POWER

Basically Robert Caros 'Lyndon Johnson' series; the anime.

Anther multi-series epic about a politicians career based on a very long biographical series. (Honestly if you stripped out the endless repetitions and re-descriptions, each book would be about the length of an anime series), along with an involved social history of the United States.

Nice thing about Caro is that he writes, and or finds, _scenes_, not just information; Johnsons fathers vividly described physical and mental collapse as he bankrupts the family. Young LBJ writing his name in huge letters on the school blackboard. Young LBJ insisting on being the one to ride the mule to school. LBJ betrays Leland Olds and destroys him in the senate! LBJ an the meeting where his team schemes up a way to escape the corruption charges which will tank his (second) senatorial election, the high-risk move of going straight to the supreme court!

And the first series has LBJ going to college! Its a fucking school drama! Classic Anime! Along with LBJ being an utterly evil scheming prick and using every questionable method imaginable, from secret societies to whisper campaigns to straight-up blackmail, to take CONTROL OF THE STUDENT COUNCIL - its literally the birth of an Anime Villain

THE STUDENT COUNCIL PRESIDENT WAS REINCARNATED AS CANNON FODDER IN A NIGHTMARE FUTURE

Its a post-isekai isekai which reverses the usual socio-cultural matrix of the classic isekai which is; introverted loner and social failure gets reincarnated into a world where he can become a hero.

Instead we have a high-achieving athletic, social and sane normie, just an all-round great guy

who happens to also be very successful and generally a positive influence, (and it’s important that he is generally a rational, logically positive person, intelligent and adaptable), and somewhat successful with the ladies. Great future ahead of him, well-liked, and deserves it.

Then he gets reversed over by Truck-kun and wakes up in the off-brand 40k Nightmare Future where he has been forcibly recruited into the auxilia and is thrown into the meat-grinder against the demon robot forces.

https://www.deviantart.com/taurus-chaoslord/art/Iron-Rooster-New-Style-370076664

Key thing is - he is still the same guy, still intelligent and capable, a natural leader and at least to begin with, fundamentally a good person, so he rapidly gets over his shock and does his best to survive and even thrive and decides, since he has protagonist energy, that he is going to bring sanity, reason and decency to the grimdark future.

However instead what we get to watch is the slow corruption and maddening of an anime protagonist as every victory, success or story of survival against the odds involves the Student Council President more and more deeply in the broken moral ecology of his new reality until he slowly becomes exactly the kind of corrupt, deranged and cybernetic maniac who would order the retrieval of random souls from parallel worlds to recruit into the penal legions or whatever.

Monday, 29 August 2022

Weebery Five - I Barely Survived

I am back and I have watched yet more anime. I could not stop. The original posts are here

One - Descent into Weebery

Dororo

Re:Creators

Inuyashiki Last Hero

Two - into the Maelstrom of Thighs

Gankutsuo: The Count of Monte Cristo

Onihei

Outlaw Star

Full Metal Panic!

Three - Hee hee hee

The Great Passage

Bannana Fish

Kemurikusa

Kokkoku

Four - I Came back for More

Ranking of Kings

Odd Taxi

Fire Force

My Hero Academia

Jojo

Attack on Titan

Mob Psycho 100

Slime

Demon Slayer

Belle

I have broken this down into categories based on general theme

1 - WHAT THE FUCK

Darling in the Franxx

Assassination Classroom

The Girl from the Other Side

2 - COMEDY???

Spy x Family

Love After World Domination

3 - HARD TO BE A WOMAN

Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department

Shadows House

Vivy -Flourite Eyes Song

4 - FAAAAAAAATE

Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works

Fate/Zero

5 - FUCKING ISEKAI

SSSS.Gridman

Dr Stone, Series 1

The Vision of Escaflowne

Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation

The Devil is a Part-Timer Series 1

Re:Zero - Starting Life in Another World

Banished from the Heroes Party I Decided to Lead a Quiet Life in the Countryside

6 - I FORGOT ABOUT THESE

86 Eighty Six

In order to keep this to something like a sane length I will try to describe the premise to each show in AS SHORT A WAY AS POSSIBLE before moving on to note things I liked.

CATEGRORY ONE - WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK

Darling in the Franxx - what the actual fuck

Starts as a porn kind of? Gets good then goes VERY strange. Look it’s just your classic evolved-from-porn post-apoc teens in mecha show that evolves into a ruthless depictions of vampiric gerontocracy which then in the very last big turns into a cosmic galactic war, also the mecha are driven by orgones or their equivalent apparently.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS

The central section where the teens in a kind of fishbowl simulation of a school gradually find out that they are essentially malmukes, slaves created purely to fight to the death in defence of a society of immortal adults, that they are subhuman in that society and they will never "grow up" and become adults, either they will die in the field or die of genetic degradation since they are hybrids not made to live that long.

We find this out along the way in a range of neatly implied ways - the children’s school uniforms which look like early 20thC ritualised European school uniforms with braces, ties, garters for the socks - then we find out that these are daily-extruded plastic/paper hybrid all in one coverings with just those elements pictured or embossed on the fabric. We didn't see this because its an animation and we can't see the texture of cloth, and the teens don't know how strange it is because its all they've ever known.

It's really quite wonderfully horrific - the depictions of seemingly-empty night-cities of immortal humans who live in giant CLEAN apartments blitzed out of their minds on cyber-soma, with no actual physical connections to each other.

The "bad" things about Franxx are also things I kinda respect it for just having the balls to do. I sort of respect it for being so irredeemably porny to start with (think it actually evolved from a porn to begin with) and towards the end of the series it goes completely fucking nuts, in a way where you get the sense they knew they were not getting a second series and decided to 'Babylon 5' it, so in very quick succession you get the secret queen of an underground race of ancient, well not aliens as they are terrestrial but Archeans or Cryptids, plus the ascension of adult humanity to a bodiless state by a bunch of aliens who were behind everything the whole time, the reveal of a centauroid super-robot powered by love, war in space, pregnancy, learning to grow crops, more war in space and a cosmic gate to the far side of the Galaxy and a super-war against the aliens. It really goes balls out.

+ Vampire State/Gerontocracy = its literally all about that - OLD = BAD! BOOMERS = BAD!! Looks like Japan has already gone through everything we are about to.

+ Calls to the FBI = so much it would be mad to try to list them, the whole thing really, especially at the beginning. If you have seen this you should be on a watchlist.

Assassination Classroom

Its Goodbye Mr Chips if Mr Chips was a --- like a warner brothers monster? Or a surrealist nightmare? The moon blows up. A super-being exists and reveals to the worlds government that they blew up the moon and are going to destroy the earth and the ONLY way to stop this is to let them teach this one particular class in this one particular Japanese school and if the students in this class can assassinate the creature before the year ends the world will be saved. Honestly its a tribute to insanity that this plot actually makes sense by the end of the series.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS

Basically imagine if one of those shitty High Concept series from US TV that starts "what if" and rapidly dies of being milked too much and staggers on with its desperate original fandom hanging off its withered haunches - well imagine if one of those was over and done in one series and actually managed to answer all the insane questions it brought up at the start. And was funny.

What can I say it’s Mr Chips/Dangerous Minds with heart-warming stories of personal growth and regular increasingly complex assassination attempts and various plots

+ Vampire State/Gerontocracy = not that much but the Japanese School system treating its "failures" as disposable objects is a theme.

+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = a little, one of the students is very obviously a "trap" and this becomes a whole thing. But honestly, for anime, relatively low levels of ambient paedophilia

The Girl from the Other Side

A girl wakes up in the forest at night, heavily implied that she is a survivor of a massacre of "infected" or suspected infected people from 'the inside', this forest being the outside. Meets a weird as shit man beast monster wearing a suit who looks after and protects here while being very careful never to physically touch her as he definitely is infected and if they touch she will end up a memoryless monster like him.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS

It’s really incredibly strange and beautiful. Is either hand animated or pseudo-so. Storybook, well I say "dreamlike" too much but this is the most like a dream you half remember. Quite affecting.

ANGRY though because clearly much deeper and more complex than what we were shown but we only got THREE EPISODES! WHY? Cost too much to animate? Ended in a vague bougie ambivalent symbolic way which frustrated me. It’s based on an illustrated series so may eventually pick that up.

+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = NONE! Don't you fucking even DARE to besmirch the purity of this sacred Anime!

CATEGORY TWO - COMEDY???

Spy x Family

If you know anything about Anime you probably know about this already but I will go on. Pseudo cold-war setting. cold as ice but Heart of Gold super-spy given mission to literally create a family, beautiful but very awkward young office girl secretly a midnight super-assassin looking for a cover relationship to get suspicion off her back, orphan girl w telepathic powers is looking for a home, all three come together in a pseudo-family which is, in effect, a real family except we know that and they don't. The spy doesn't know the wife is an assassin, the wife doesn't know the husband is a spy, neither of them know the girl is psychic and the girl knows everything.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS

Do you know how fucking hard it is to do an action comedy that’s actually good and that’s for normal people? Well the first part is hard for anyone, and doing anything even vaguely normal is hard as shit for the Japanese...

Its just a really well done action comedy that’s also a very pleasurable, ridiculous and self-sustaining farce. Basically its Frasier meets The Man from Uncle. A family who don't realise they are actually a family but we the audience do! Normative Values! you probably don't think this is good from the way I described it but it fun as shit so whatever.

+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = there are LITERALLY NONE its hard to believe! This Anime is pure! Oh no wait I forgot Yor Forgers brother has a somewhat creepy crush on her. I spoke too soon, you win again Japan.

HOWEVER, other than this, this is one of relatively few Anime that I would willingly show to normal people.

Love After World Domination

The main guy from a Power Rangers type situation and the S&M-Themed Arch Foe from the villains organisation fall in love and have a tentative romantic relationship.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS

This was pleasant and the art style was calming. the warm soft roundness of the characters and ok basically I have a childs colour palette so whatever fuck you. The gags are intermittently funny but sometimes go pretty hard. I laughed occasionally. Someone clearly put a more than normative amount of effort into developing the art style at least compared to the average anime.

+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = I don't know if an almost insane level of neuroticism and pathological avoidance and simultaneous desire for intimacy actually counts as "perversity", but its repeated so much in anime that it actually feels like it does. I suppose this one isn’t that bad as they are partially making fun of those tropes.

Also the Miss Reaper costume is... like way too hot for a sort-of kids tv themed anime

CATEGORY THREE - HARD TO BE A WOMAN

Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department

(This is really a comedy but I needed to bulk this section out). Farcical/Absurdist workplace comedy with a young scientist trying to survive and get ahead in the crazy world of corporate but the corporation is actually the evil supervillain org from a seinen hero series - her job is monster development and all the monsters go out and get beaten up by the hero figure.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS

Slightly badly animated but much more directly funny than 'Love After World Domination', the workplace insanity is more cutting and feels more on point, monster designs being completely bollocked because the CEO paid a visit to the lab and 'made suggestions', a valentines themed chocolate monster being banned from use because she was poorly manufactured and is full of foreign objects, (also never make a holiday themed monster, you can only use them once a year), single-episode beat-em-up sidekick roles being sketchy single say work-for hire jobs where they bus you to another city and don't tell you what it’s about, its funnier than I'm making it sound.

+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = male monster gets brain transplanted into the body of a hot wolf girl yeah its Japan.

Shadows House Series 1

Is it weird that this reminds me of the Korean film The Handmaiden? I really liked this one. Young girl wakes up in a box, in a servants room in a labyrinthine house, finds out that she is a 'living doll' and is meant to act as a servant for a featureless living silhouette the exact shape and form of the main character with slightly different dress who speaks and seems to think just like a young noble lady but who emits soot in a vertical column when upset. An entire generation of shadows live in this wing, each with a 'living doll' servant, which they are physically identical to in form and shape, except that they are utterly featureless black voids. Gradually we realise that that the 'living dolls' as well as being servants are meant to act as their shadows 'face', learning their moods and manner so well that they can walk alongside them and simultaneously express emotion in a visible way. Then our main girl and her shadow mistress are put through a range of increasingly odd and obscure tests and situations, those that don't pass "disappear".

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS

It’s a beautiful weird country house puzzle drama. I like stuff where everyone is mannered and drinks tea and anyone could be killed at any time according to a labyrinthine arrangement of rules which are never fully disclosed. Possibly this is my British DNA showing. The first series main character Emilico, a hyper positive to the point of mental illness super-girl is great. The classic introvert/extrovert pairing of the two main girls is also great.

+ Vampire State/Gerontocracy = oh hell yes, the older generation of Shadows are effectively evil and part of an evil and consuming structure of power headed by the oldest, who is essentially worshipped by the rest.

+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = not that bad.

Vivy – Fluorite-Eyes Song

An A.I. created "to make the world happy with my singing" is visited by another robot from the future, in the future A.I.s go Skynet and destroy mankind. These two team up to alter events so that doesn't happen. The stage is set for a series of special-ops missions and strange investigations spread out over decades as the two awkwardly try to change fate.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS

Remember the Asimov film I.Robot, well its a bit like that but good, except actually very good. Really well animated - some fucking great robot vs robot vs cyborg vs human fights. Matsumoto the cube-formed time travelling robot is great, especially as time goes by and he develops more and more abilities and add-ons, all of which are cube-based. Ah and its overwhelmingly sad. Also its really beautiful, did I mention how well animated this is? Plus each episode is a strange new evolution of the relationship between men and machines, and between machine and machine.

+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = you know I'm not sure I even saw one. A guy does fall in love with a robot at one point but the incredible sadness of how it turns out really robs it of FBI points.

CATEGORY FOUR - FAAAAAAAATE

Goddamn Fate, the Universe which started as a multiple choice story that was also kinda a porn and just got more complex from there. Basically don't bother with this unless you like working things out of the fly or really enjoy lore. I have only watched two series of this; Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works and Fate/Zero.

A maguffin called the 'Holy Grail' grants wishes. To reach it, seven mages have to fight each other by summoning seven 'Heroic Spirits', like ghost, tulpas or reincarnations of famous historical heroes. Only one mage can reach the magical thing at the end.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS

The main interest comes from the tactical dicking about between the mages and the various skill-sets and personalities of the different mage/spirit pairings, and the conflicts between the values, personalities and ideologies of the different mage and spirit combos. In one scene Gilgamesh, gender-swapped King Arthur and Alexander the Great have a sit down to discuss the meaning of Kingship, you are unlikely to get this stuff outside Anime.

Damn the creator has a dark view on the heroic ideal and the search for meaning, in Fate Zero at least, those with the most clear "heroic" motivation are gradually corroded by those desires, leaving them mutated and morally compromised, while those who often seem if not sociopathic then very unpleasant, often gradually come to seem more reasonable as time goes by and they emerege as, at least, less hypocritical and self-deluding

+ Vampire State/Gerontocracy = not so much though the old mage families which dominate things are usually mildly psychotic.

+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = YES. Did you want to see Gender-Swapped King Arthur tied up in a BDSM style by Gilgamesh Lord of Uruk well you are going to.

CATEGORY FIVE - FUCKING ISEKAI

The genre that has eaten Anime like a fat fucking fuck eating everything.

But the Isekais have been going so long that they have started to meta-evolve, a bit like the Gremlins in the film 'Gremlins 2' producing slightly more interesting variations and iterations on the basic theme. Here I throw in Isekais and a range of post, pre and semi-Isekais together.

SSSS.Gridman

Is this even an Isekai? Or even a post-post Isekai? Fuck knows. It does take place in some kind of virtual dream realm or something. A teenage boy wakes up with amnesia, his parents are 'on holiday', he tries to act normal and go to school but the city is attacked by Kaiju and things get stranger from there.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS

Very strange intense and horrific dreamlike feel as kids and people die horribly in monster attacks before the city is "re-set" each night, leaving no memory of the particular people who died. Only the main characters know people are "missing" school classrooms gradually becoming more sparse, happy families reduced to lonely parent and single parents unable to mourn the absence of someone they can't even remember.

Pleasing monster designs - especially towards the end where the demonic entity allowing the Kaiju to become real just grabs a bunch of unfinished ones off the shelf, resulting in some really awkward, gawky nightmare broken toy monsters that are quite unpleasant.

Also a good scene where the heroes meet with the main alien/demon guy in an ordinary roadside restaurant at night -everything is normal and low-fi and this fictional supervillain inhuman nightmare guy thing walks in and no-one but the heroes really perceive it fully.

Monster vs Robot Superhero fights with the crazed energy of a childs summertime imagination but maybe we are indeed in a dream or something like that? What is real?

+ Vampire State/Gerontocracy = not really other than the deep loneliness of the children

+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = hmmmmmm

Dr Stone, Series 1

Mankind gets turned to a bunch of stone statues by UNKNOWN FORCES. Several thousand years later one guy wakes up and decides he is going to re-create ALL human technology from the stone-age ground up, revive ALL of humanity and also work out the Petrification thing.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS

Procedural science stuff! That’s basically what this series is about. Want to see how to go from a literal stone age level of tech to building a radio in a year or so? Well here you go.

The Plot armour in this one is a little ridiculous.

There are some genuinely effecting moments where stone age people experience the miracles of raw science, diseases defeated through sulphur drugs, an electric light shining in a stone age world.

Has a lot of unexplored depth where you could look at the not-all-good effects of technology and knowledge on a prehistoric culture but that’s largely unexamined

+ Vampire State/Gerontocracy = motivation for the main villain is that in our time the place was plagued with olds who owned everything and kept everyone down so now he is going to CRUSH their frozen bodies and build a NEW SOCIETY of the young and pure! No one has told this guy that people age I guess

+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = none come to mind... a gymnast eats cotton candy in a suggestive way..

The Vision of Escaflowne

One of the (near) original Isekai transported to a dream realm stories? and its technically Shogo. Teenage girl arrives in fantasy land where evil Wizard Scientist guy is trying to conquer everything for obscure reasons - girl faces "bellas choice" between Hot Princes whilst having adventures, also there are steampunk mecha powered by dragon hearts.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS

Its FUCKING BEAUTIFUL. PEAK 90s aesthetic. The backgrounds. Sky rocks hovering in the midnight air. The science-fantasy worldbuilding. The dreamy summer-ish feel. Our own planet hangs in the sky like an unreachable vision.

+ Vampire State/Gerontocracy = Isaac Newton is evil and old but he's just taking the place of God who is always evil in Anime.

+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = I think there's a sister-brother crush in this? Not sure. But that’s about it, oooohh no I forgot [SPOILERS] one of the evil characters is actually the abducted sister of one of the good guys, transformed through dark science in to a psychotic man, yes they changed her gender and psychology thanks Japan you did it again.

The Devil is a Part-Timer Series 1

After a standard defeat-the-demon-lord story the Demon Lord in question escapes... to Japan. With a handful of his courtiers, followed by the Hero who beat him. Over here though magic is hard to come by and they are little more than normal people who have to adapt to Japanese society, get jobs etc.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS

Damn this thing is keeping a lot of balls in the air. In particular a strong conflict between the rarely stated background and current reality, i.e. the demon king literally killed quite a lot of human beings, including the hero girls actual family, and this is never entirely swept under the rug, but just chunders there quietly. Honestly manages to remain fun and interesting but how will they maintain it and where are they going with it?

+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = questionable relationship with subordinate at McDonalds

Re:Zero - Starting Life in Another World

NEET is Isekai'd to normative Fantasy World, is genre savvy but has no special powers. Turns out his power is Groundhog Day. When he dies he is returned to the last 'save point' and must live that time again till he can reach the next. He doesn't know when he has reached a save point, doesn't know anything about the vast range of conspiracies and horrible things aimed partially at him and is massively overpowered by everyone, plus when he dies its utterly horrible and traumatic.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS

Oddly a really innovative story structure. Everything is a mystery and the hero progresses largely through understanding *context*.

Deep and tragic alienation of the Hero from reality as, he knows and values everyone around him deeply but from their perspective they met him about a week ago. Same applies to us as through repetitions we understand everyone’s drives and backstory.

Key Point - its really more of a horror story, or a guy trying to escape from a horror story, and the middle parts of the first series are some of the most exciting horror/nightmare stuff I've seen recently. Poor bastard dies so much and so horrifically, and is so utterly trapped by fate and astounded by impossibilities, that ultimately he does what anyone would and goes completely catatonic - just shuts down mentally for several episodes, AND THEN THINGS GET WORSE

+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = fetish maid.

Banished from the Heroes Party I Decided to Lead a Quiet Life in the Countryside

Another derivation of the Pre/Post/During/Alternate 'Defeat the Demon Lord' story. Follows the guy who is the mainstay of your JRPG party throughout the first half of the story but eventually you load up on specialists and level grind and he's just not keeping up so you summarily dump him in an inn or something, after taking every single sword and potion you left on his person.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS

Prepare to see something you have never seen before in an Anime, something so surprising it may SHOCK YOU. In this story, a man, and a woman (not related by blood or even raised together), have an emotionally intimate relationship, that develops at a reasonable pace, without any insane misunderstandings, mental breakdowns, mind control, demon rape, anyone bein snatched into a parallel dimension or any we-need-to-hide-this-from-the-world bullshit, and then they fuck.

They just fall in love, get closer and eventually have fulfilling sex. I don't know what to tell you. Has 'BftHPIDtLaQLitC' actually done the impossible and produced an anime with NO perversity? No because the guys sister kinda has a crush on him.

I mean thats not the only good thing about this series - the slow development of how living in what’s effectively a 'Levelled' society actually works and affects people, and the weird science-fantasy inferences of how that came to be ('High-Elf Ruins look like a crashed space ship, very D&D) are interesting, plus a main character who is trying hard to avoid explicit heroism and build another kind of life with a strange skill set, good. But holy shit they just kiss, bang and have a relationship, holy fucking god.

+ Vampire State/Gerontocracy = Kami Sama seems evil but that’s relatively normal for Anime

+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = Sister crush

Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation

FUCK this is tiring. Did I write about this one already? Its not the original Isekai but the one that set the template for the more recent versions. NEET meets Truck Kun and is reincarnated as a baby with a nice family in a fantasy world, he keeps his adult knowledge and is naturally insanely overpowered with magic juice.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS

I've been writing this for a while.. It’s just really good? It’s kinda pervy but surprisingly emotionally honest compared to most Anime. This is one of the only guys where they got Isekai'd and actually genuinely tried to change who they were in their new life and genuinely and deeply struggled against their own crappy broken personality and to actually grow in ways not defined b power (though they also get to be super-powerful too HAXXXOORRR.

+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = Oh yeah plenty. Really can't even list them all.

Category Six - I FORGOT ABOUT THESE

86 Eighty Six

Future gene-hacked society is fighting against an A.I. hive-mind someone accidentally made and which is wrecking everything but hopefully it will run out of juice soon. In order to avoid taking casualties they uuuuuussseee.. the children of refugees! Yep its child soldiers thrown into disposable mechs and sent to fight until they die. Main female character is an in-group remote force commander who starts to intuit that race-based child slave solders might be wrong somehow.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS

People shit on this because its depiction of racism is facile but I am old and conservative and 90% of all pop culture is somewhat like that for me anyway so whatever.

The direction has these modernist cuts which leap directly from inference or incident right to consequence, which I quite liked and appreciated as it saves me a fair amount of time. The depictions of swarm warfare - solar-powered micro-drones filling the sky like swarms of flies or lying in great fields like crops of glass, weird mechs and super mechs, the shitty spitfire-like vulnerability of the good-guy mechs, the depictions of a decadent society which has made a terrible invisible deal; its officer class bloated, drunken and mentally broken passed out in fountains capped with statues of the glorious founder, nothing to do except remotely supervise the sacrifice by war of the Untermensch, and the bad-guy A.I. has taken to stealing the heads of human troops lost in the field, it finds some forms of originality hard to rips the heads off, freezes them and either strips the brains down to engrams or just straight up wires the heads into its mechs as an officer corp.

Saturday, 5 February 2022

would a depressed man be watching this much Anime?

(Or "Weebery Four: I Went back for More) One, Two and Three here

People say I'm depressed, but would a depressed man be watching this much Anime? I think not. After mainlining even more of this stuff

Themes

Still Upset About WWII

'Dororo', which was basically a psychogeography of living with/under a Fascist power structure

FullMetal Alchemist - oops we did a genocide

Attack On Titan, especially last season - heroes are arguably the baddies, oops we did a genocide, generational shame

Slime had an affecting and strange one with a child transported from Japan during the WWII bombings meeting someone from modern Japan who tells her the country is doing well and they re-built which makes her happy, (he does not go into specifics about the US bases and half of SEA still hating their guts)

Now Prussia Is My Best Friend

There is one nation in occidentalist nihon imagination and unlike the anglo-influenced occidentalist blur that I may have been expecting; friendship broken with anglos, now Deutschland ist mine best friend

Nihon simps hard for Prussia, so smart, so disciplined, so PURE. is the feeling reciprocated? hard to tell.

Tragic Bad-Guy Point-Of-Death Backstory Flashbaacks

A technique which according to my amygdala, can simply never be overused. I just never seem to get tired of these. That orc you just killed - they had an abusive orc family they rebelled against but ended up as a mercenary with a drinking problem, they were looking for a way out before you CUT THEIR FUCKING HEAD OFF.

THERE'S A VIRTUAL WOOOOORLD

I'm thinking more of 'summer wars' and 'Belle', in which the Virtual world is .. basically the same thing?

In the better fictions this is like the dreamy forest bits in Midsummer Nights Dream, or the Maze bits in whatever play, or Masqued Ball stuff - all the characters we know can meet and interact in different identities across a different reality.

Anime Mans Burden

How many Isekai shows are there with some nerd colonising a fantasy world, based on computer game logic, and 'improving' everything with the power of their enlighting civilisation. It’s interesting, in its entirely unconscious belief in the power of reason and a decent person from a particular cutlure 'uplifting' a band of simple foreigners. It’s a hell of a lot like Victorian fiction. THANK YOU FOR IMPROVING US SEMPAI!

Boner For Tha Pehhpe

Aye, they do have the best costumes and architecture and won't directly kill you for criticising their beliefs - it feels like there is a LOT of fantasy/sci-fi dark Catholicism in Anime or is that just me?

Seriously the Vatican needs to contact the Japanese government and start charging copyright on this stuff, there are more cathedrals, conspiracies and weird priests in Anime than in Italy.

Breath Fetishism

Not as a sex thing, but Demon Slayer, and MHA (which are almost the same show some of the time), and I think a few others, this deal where you do ritually controlled breathing and learn to super-breathe, and then learn to super-breathe ALL OF THE TIME to become super-charged, AND it’s in the first bit of Jojo as well

is this a Japanese body-awareness thing? big history of breath control? lots of concentration on breathing, I mean more than equivalent martial traditions?

The Word for "Hero" in Anime is "Hero"

Not a surprise to see a lot of boys fiction with a focus on heroism, BUT - lot of these make a point of the word 'Hero' being the western word, so, is there not an exact equivalent in Japanese? Is that precise Western construction a slightly novel thing in Japanese culture?

Pure Boys and Decency Porn

Ranking of Kings - seriously disabled but VERY PURE boy takes on all and warms and changes their hearts with the power of his kindness and purity

MHA - VERY Pure and only slightly Berserk boy warms hearts and cares for others

Slime - Extremely decent, no EXTREMELY Decent and in fact virginal, and now a-gender reincarnated pure boy Kiplings the fuck out of a society of Fantasy monsters and impresses all with his capability, decency and purity

Demon Slayer - Literally the purest of very pure boys, so pure that if you INVADE HIS MIND his subconscious is literally a blue peaceful ocean, SO FUCKING PURE, absolutely murders the fuck out of a bunch of evil demons who, in their sad-boy flashbacks, turn out to not be so bad after all

Mob Psycho - bowl-cut Pure Boy just wants to do the right thing and be a normal teenager while happening to be the most insanely powerful psyker ever

MHA & JoJo have this too, even Odd Taxi a bit

It’s not that they do this, it’s the intensity and prevalence of the theme, or is that just my viewing habits and the algorithm shaping my experience? Am I secretly a pure boy fetishist?

Speaking of which;

Exciting levels of Pederasty

From mild but continual hebephilia to "I look twelve and dress like a stripper but I'm 1,000 years old oops I've FALLEN ON YOUR FACE". Nihon rarely fails to live up, or down, to expectation.

Tha Shows

Ranking of Kings

I am a MASSIVE simp for this show. If you often find you share my taste then watch it.

Quasi-Disney aesthetic. Deaf-mute weak boy-prince heir to the throne in fairytale-paracosm faces the 'Ranking of Kings', basically a league table of kings, except that is barely the subject of the first series, instead it’s a mythopoeic deep-dive into the conflicting characters and paradigms of a range of characters rooted in Fairytale archetypes but which grow far beyond their simplest incarnation without losing that essential rootedness.

The first interview I googled about this had the interviewer banging on about "how you subverted the Fairytale elements" FUCK OFF YOU FUCKING DRONE, DOING THE GOOD VERSION OF A LOW-STATUS FORM IS NOT FUCKING 'SUBVERTING' ANYTHING.

(ZERO Pederasty so far, GET EXCITED BOYS LETS GOOOOOOOO)

Purity of the Boy - 10000000000% FUCKING PER CENT BABYYYYYYYY

Odd Taxi

Good. Basically a Tarantino film made into a series, or more an Elmore Leanoard novel made into a series. The people are animals.

Method of Victory;

Decency - 90%

Specific Brain Damage Perceptual Superpower - 9%

Breath Control - 1%

Boy Purity - subtly conveyed but hitting 80 or 90% purity

Fire Force

Absolute banger first few episodes. Fairly good follow up. Semi-sci-fi near-future cathspolitation. Everything is on fire apart from Japan and even that is on fire a bit. Pyrokinteics are being born and the better ones are trained to stop the victims of a plague of apparently-random auto-combustive zombie demon outbreaks. Could the giant powerful catholic new religion that controls everything somehow be behind things yes probably. Can the creator keep coming up with new ways to use Pyrokiniesis. Yes again.

Method of Victory

"Going Beyond" - 60%

Breath Control - 20%

Power of Friendship - 20%

Pureness of the Boy - mid-range purity

My Hero Academia

The old X-Men cartoon but its anime. Feel like this is a normie take. Maybe I should be ashamed that I am still this into capeshit but I am who I am I guess. Fatherless neurotic gets SUPERMAN AS HIS DAD!! AND HE TRAINS HIM TO BE THE NEXT SUPERMAN!!!! Combined with the X-Men danger-room sections but that’s the main story, plus tacit analysis of 'heroism' and how a collectivist society deals with Burgerland levels of freedom and individualism because now everyone effectively has a gun all of the time. Answer - everyone is banned from using their superpowers except a cadre of Heroes who are basically celebrity cops taking down anyone who breaks the rules.

Method of Victory

"Going Beyond" - 95%

Breathing/Energy Control 2%

Power of Friendship - 3%

Purity of the Boy - High level. 99%

One Piece

There are a thousand or something episodes of this, I have seen five, it was ok

No stats on this so far. But also no Pederasty.

Boy Purity - highish, say 75%

Jojo

This is very popular with the yoof about two years ago? I have seen some of the first season, it was ok, people say that’s not the best one? Just go and re-read Sontag on "Camp" and "Kitsch"

No Pederasty so far but very, very very gay. Acceptable.

Method of Victory

"Going Beyond" - 50%

Breathing Control - 50%

Purity of the Boy - 90% at least

Check the stats, he's far from the goodest boy

Attack on Titan

Hans are we the baddies? Yes and so is everyone else. basically Fullmetal Alchemist with Giants. I am loving it and waiting for the second part of the last series to be done so I can watch it on one go. NO SPOILERS!

Purity of the Boy - oh no

Mob Psycho 100

"Indy" feel, (whatever that means in anime), Psychic boy deals with school and psychic warfare with the help of his conman-with-a-heart-of-gold boss who pretends to, but has no, psychic powers. I like this one.

I have only seen the first series so NO SPOILERS

method of victory;

"Going Beyond" - 95%

PURE HEART - 3%

Power of Friendship/mentorship - 2%

Boy Purity - 85 to 95 per cent

Slime

I became a Rudyard Kipling Poem In Another World.

Decent but virginal semi-failure becomes low-level monster in a fantasy world BUT HE IS SECRETLY THE MOST SUPER-POWERFUL CREATURE EVAARRRR HOW IS THIS DIFFERENT TO ANY OTHER ISEKAI POWER FANTASY? Its basically decency porn. What if a good person tried to do the right thing in everyone’s best interest and somehow it worked. If the FullMetal Alchemist/Attack ON Titan and somewhat MHA are the historical-moral-maze, generational-guilt, no-sane-escape themed animes this is basically Little House on the Prairie, or early Superman. "Ha ha I like you slime, at first I thought you were just a slime but you have impressed me with your courage and decency, I will reconsider my evil ways". You fucking bet you will buddy. Increasingly besieged by anime titties, and also a Lolli. Thanks Nihon.

method of victory;

Decency - 90%

"Going Beyond" - 5%

Metagaming - 5%

Boy Purity - a straight 90% if you are willing to ignore the elf tits

Pederasty - high

Demon Slayer

The purest possible boy with a tragic past and insane weapons and sucide fetish FIGHTS DEMONS. But WAIT, did this particular Demon ALSO have a sad and tragic past which lead them to be easily redpilled on becoming a demon and will we get a flashback as they die in which they recognise and come to terms with their past and perhaps also thank the CHILD who just SLAUGHTERED them? Yes, yes we will.

Method of victory;

"Going beyond" 60%

Breathing 25%

Magic Sword 15%

Purity of the Boy - an absolute clear 100%

(Pederasty levels - he carries around his sister gagged in a box)

Belle

If I hadn't seen 'Summer Wars' and 'Your Name', and/or was a teenage girl, I would think this was the most amazing animation of the last ten years but I have and am not so I just think it was very good. Beauty and the Beast, Virtual World, Young Girl, Tragic Backstory, Coming of Age. Good anime. No complaints.

Method of victory;

Decency 20%

Hyperintelligent best friend 30%

Singing 50%

Friday, 2 April 2021

Weebery Three - He He Heee

Join me as I continue my descent into the anime hidden deep within the Amazon Prime recommendation algorithm.

Parts One and Two.

THE GREAT PASSAGE

A quiet group of people try to make a book! Will they succeed???

Presumably there is a Japanese subgenre about groups of people attempting some kind of creative pursuit. This is one of those. Except in this case its the story of a bunch of underpaid and ignored nerds fighting (against the odds) to make a dictionary for a country that already has a bunch.

The dive into the family of Japanese dictionaries is part of the interest, and the reasoning behind the central concept, the dream which inspires our heroes.

Each Japanese dictionary is meant to have a different 'character', to prioritise a slightly different selection of words and to make slightly different definitions. Because of this, each has a world-view, a personality, based on who made it, and when.

I have no idea how much, or if at all, this interacts with the differences between English and Japanese as languages. So far as I know; Cambridge and Oxford dictionaries; about the same, Websters; American and not as good. Collins; unknown. And that’s about it. I have no idea if dictionary nerds think these texts have different approaches to the world. Perhaps they do.

We have our hero, Majime, currently labouring with horrific ineptitude as a salesman, an introverted nerd, obsessed with words but when he is banishpromoted to the low-status team hidden in the old building at the back, undergoing a long term project which eats the companies money but which no-one has the nerve to cancel, we discover - HES A DICTIONARY NATURAL GUYS.

Add the slightly-dodgy hotshot salesman who may be there as a punishment, but watch and learn as these two unlikely colleagues slowly become friends, and when the dictionary gets into trouble with management - will the sketchy salesman’s cunning tactics and Machiavellian dealings be the one to save the day? Yes, yes they will.

As well as a central inspirational elder whose idea the dictionary is, the old team he established, who are now close to aging out of the project, the love interest and partners of the main group, and as the series goes on, in fifteen years time, the new generation who arrive to find Majime occupying the 'elder statesman' role.

The central idea motivating all these different people, what the dictionary is intended to be - is a form of meta-communication, a ship to cross the sea of words. It’s a drama where people can have discussions and arguments about the exact interpretations of the definition of a word in a language I don't speak. Etymology may be pretty different in japan but the strange accrual of meanings, sub-meanings, emotional tenor, and the difficulty of absolutely and precisely defining a word-concept when, in actual life, it exists most truly in a complex web of mutually interacting social and conceptual meanings, each of which are also shifting slowly over time as the nature of life itself shifts and alters, is still there. To define a word you need to look deep into its past, and widely into its current place in the web of things.

It’s a high-stakes low-stakes drama. In comparison to most genre fiction the challenge is; will (another) dictionary get made, or will the publishers finally give up on the long-term money sink and likely low profits and pull the plug?

But while the more-evidently cool and exciting genre stories I describe below have some COOL AS SHIT CONFLICTS up front; SUPER DRUGS, CRIME GANGS, APOCALYPSE WORLDS, EVIL ROBOTS, FUCKING TIME TRAVEL, but underneath those strong drivers, have sustaining webs of complex interpersonal dynamics which counterpoint and lend them meaning of a different kind.

This one is a normal-person story but the very long time over which it takes place, the generational leaping so we can see the consequences and development of individual personalities, and the close and compassionate eye with which it examines its characters, transforms workplace and life dramas into, well, the dramas they actually are.

Will Majame finally work out how to ask out the cute girl in his building, will salesguy be secretly honourable even though it screws his career? Will they find a way to finish the FUCKING DICITONARY? Will senpai even live to see it done? What does it mean for him if he doesn't?

There is a cool a fuck episode in the last act where they find, by chance, *one* mistake in the final text. Majame decides they have to re-check, again, the entire text, BUT THEY ONLY HAVE DAYS TO DO IT. ITS IMPOSSIBLE I TELL YOU!!

Its a good series.

BANNANA FISH

This was very gay.

Occidental as fuck.

Man have I ever seen any main character threatened with rape as much as here? Let alone a male lead?

Japanese-eye view on a American crime/conspiracy drama with very slight sci-fi stylings, so more airport novel/earthbound Bond than actual science fiction, plus alienation, child abuse, an anime take on gang culture, love, loneliness.

Basically, worlds toughest super-hot teenage gang leader who is also super-intelligent, (though that only comes through in the more genre-y later episodes), falls for super pretty pole vaulting Japanese reporter, in the midst of a gang-war super-conspiracy over a mysterious mind-wrecking drug called 'banana fish'.

Not entirely my jam but I finished it when I haven't finished other series so it must have been pretty good.

KEMURIKUSA

WHAT IS GOING ON I'M SCARED

tldr; Little House on the Prairie - in BLAME!

This looks cheap - not that that's the most important thing about it but if you go in not knowing that then you will likely judge it for that first. Reason for this is that it looks like it was made by about three people with limited resources, so its "passion-project-pure-vision-limited-means" cheap, rather than an EA/Disney-style; "marketing-manager-run-shovelware-of-known-IP" cheap.

The good kind of cheap.

A small group of sisters live on an utterly desolate, dark and ruined place which looks like an abandoned 20th century or 21st century Japan. They are clearly not entirely or mainly human, as they can leap about like super-heroes, can survive purely by drinking water and have a bunch of weird exploits.

Unfortunately, there is no more water and they are being hunted by "red bugs"; mechanistic robot creatures which emerge from an enveloping sea of corruptive red mist which seems to enfold everything outside their home.

This all seems pretty awful, and in fact we learn several sisters have already died.

But - this life, this existence, is all the sisters know. We don't find out immediately how they came to be but they refer to a "first person" - someone who was there before them, and as far as they are concerned, their entire reality has always been like this, (though slowly getting worse), so while for us it’s an utterly spooky and disturbing post-apocalyptic hellscape, for them, as bad as it is, its normal.

We are generally more disturbed by the environment than the characters are.

There are other islands in this enfolding mist. Previous exploration attempts have lead to deaths but, the water is running out here, and they need to go in search of more, no matter how dangerous it is, if they want to live. And at that exact moment, a strange man just 'appears' from the depths of the island, like the sisters, he has no complex contextual memories of who he is or why he is there, and he is even more of a pure innocent than them.

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON

WAIT IS THIS THING GOING TO STIFF ME BY PULLING A 'LOST'

OR A FUCKING JORODOWSKY WHERE 'ITS ALL A FUCKIN METAPHOR LAD'

No it will not.

Or at least not much.

Things generally make sense at the end, or at least as much sense as they need to

what didn't I mention?

Oh yeah, there are goddamn MAGIC LEAVES. The only thing living in this world apart from the Sisters and the Red Bugs is one tree, which they carry around with them in a re-purposed tram car, and this tree sometimes produces leaves, which sometimes looks somewhat holographic or supra-real, (no its not all happening in the matrix), and which have various powers associated with them. You can also sometimes find these things lying around. These are the 'Kemurikusa' of the title, and working out what they are, what they do and what they mean is the key for the characters understanding the world.

Nightmare decayed futurescapes, nation-consuming gigastructures, geology transformed into artifice, but its a story about family, relationships and love y'all!

Honestly I can't go too deep into the meaning of stuff without also going into the secrets of the setting, and revealing those ahead of time would damage the story, so there you go.

(The main male character is REALLY fucking annoying but from reviews apparently that’s a thing in anime).

KOKKOKU

The magical power to stop time! Just like in Bernards Watch!

(If you are not of my generation you have NO FUCKING IDEA of the scale and level of magically powered artefacts randomly discovered by school-age children on televisions, keys to other worlds, magical wish-granting coins, a fucking SPACE SHIP. They just found this stuff lying about! yet it never happened to me....)

Our spunky main character has a defective family. Useless dad, otaku brother, distant granddad, but after the littlest kid, who everyone actually likes, gets kidnapped, the grandfather reveals that he has an artefact capable of stopping time which he has not used or revealed for reasons that become clear as the series goes on.

Unlike most time-stop dramas, this one takes place almost entirely within one singular stopped moment, there is no going back and forth exerting power in the real world and then stopping time again, instead its more like stranding a bunch of people with highly complex and hugely opposed motivations together in a world made of one moment, a city full of time-stopped people.

As things go on the cast discover more about how this world of 'stasis' works, its strange guardians, the dangers of remaining there and the creepy motherfuckers who have followed them in.

Who will manage to leave 'stasis', who will survive, who will be trapped inside that moment forever??

Top Level - a well worked-out genre setting with complex, (not pathologically detailed in show), but coherent laws.

Mid Level - a tactical and force-of-personality-based game of ruthless opposition between the family and their opponents and the motivations of the different members of both groups. They are all in the city, but they are there alone, or at least, no other human can reach them. They can access any building and grab an object, but cars don't go, phones don't work, only what is around you and grabbed by you becomes subject to motion, so it’s a state-of nature-deal which brings primal motivations to the fore and necessitates low-tech OSR style tactical thinking.

Bottom Level - families, our reasons for doing things, meaning and the loss of meaning, what it means to lose your place in the world and what people might be willing to do to get it back, or make a new one. A lot like Kemurikusa, the high personal stakes and alienating environment which simultaneously separates the characters from ordinary society but also provides limited, and strange, opportunities for power, brings people down to their core values, if they even know what those are, and into developing and contrasting those values with each other.

INTELLIGENCE - Everyone here is as intelligent as a manga author carefully thinking through options.

Well not everyone, quite a few are dumb, but the 'main characters' are all relatively cold and careful planners. Maybe that’s just what its like in Japan? This isn't a flaw, just a feature.

- things being carefully worked through, relatively original and MAKING FUCKING SENSE both as story AND diegetic elements - oh lord how I have missed thee!

The sense that the people making the thing have thought about it more deeply and more coherently than I did watching it, holy fuck I haven't had that from western pop culture in a while.

A bunch of reviewers on myanimelist fucking hated this declaiming all the qualities I though it had as ones it didn't. A MYSTERY? Could Histories Greatest Critic be wrong? Or are these the wittering’s of thoughtless drones? U DECIDE.