No, seriously, what? Is this real life? I watched the first Horizon subs to hit NyaaTorrents and, as a result, the classroom scene horribly confused me. It was something about extra dimensions surrounding Japan set to a porno-esque soundtrack. As a result, I waited a couple more days until a more reputable group released their subs… only to find myself still horribly confused. Uh, harmonic divine states, the Testament Era, the Nanboku-cho Wars — actually, who cares?
I eventually turned to Horizon‘s Wikipedia entry to make some sense of the situation, but it should never have come down to this. Encyclopedia entries should only be summaries, y’know? The primary source, on the other hand, is supposed to be engaging, but even after watching the classroom scene a third time — now equipped with the knowledge from Wikipedia — I still couldn’t penetrate the thick fog of jargon surrounding the show. To storytellers out there, why do you feel that this is necessary? Why not just have compelling drama play out through poignant interpersonal relationships? Why do you guys prefer dense, incomprehensible backstories in lieu of strongly-developed characters? Here’s a hint: having a billion cast members won’t necessarily make a good anime.
To make matters worse, I have no clue what any of Horizon‘s characters are trying to accomplish. Usually, the first episode of any show establishes the series’ long-term goals: what’s the conflict and how are we going to resolve it? Some anime will require two episodes instead of one to get the job done, but this can be overlooked if plot is really goddamn interesting. Horizon, on the other hand, is dilly-dallying over some mystery girl at the moment. From what I can gather — and trust me, it isn’t much — Tori wants to propose to a girl who resembles a dead girl he used to know. Aaaaaand, that’s it; that’s the plot of the first two episodes thus far. Not only that, the second episode then wastes five minutes talking about how the mystery girl’s breasts might feel.
Well, the episode isn’t all about Tori. The other half tries to be super-serious about some girl who was going to be a boy but plans fell through or something…? She wanted to undergo gender surgery to succeed the family name, but something happened — I think robot maids invaded, but don’t take my word on this — and now she merely has a deep voice. So uh, yeah, she’s now a Lost Noble running for Vice President and complaining about bureaucracy. Like I’ve said, I don’t get the show.
So where is this anime going? I thought there were going to be mechas (with breasts!) and exciting battles. All I’ve seen so far, however, is a class clown covered in spider webs, trying desperately to seem lecherous. I say trying because he’s not even a believable pervert. Tori’s just this weird caricature that every character on the show finds endlessly amusing for reasons entirely unknown to me. And if you haven’t seen the show (lucky you), imagine that this all accompanied by some really annoying singing. Even when a seiyuu isn’t trying to poison the airwaves, the anime’s soundtrack strikes me as odd. Also:
“His athletics and grades are average, and he’s both self and publicly recognized as an incompetent leader. However, because he doesn’t know the meaning of depressed and has an incredibly cheerful attitude, he’s very respected nonetheless.”
It sure doesn’t take much to be a leader in anime these days.
To storytellers out there, why do you feel that this is necessary? Rather than having compelling drama played out through poignant interpersonal relationships, do you guys really feel that your stories are enriched by having such a dense backstory?
I’ve got no problems with a far-reaching and eventful backstory about the world and its characters, as it adds depth to the setting and makes it distinct from the horrible contemporary Japan/JRR Tolkien knockoff fantasy world/mecha-filled science fiction triad of creativity-devoid settings. What I do have a problem with is when a series decides to write up a long and detailed history, and then shove it in the viewer’s face with gob-smackingly awful presentation. A good portion of this episode was the characters literally standing in place just to read from the series’ own wikipedia article, except they start halfway down the page and there’s no context given whatsoever.
At this point in time the information is completely irrelevant to the actual events of the plot, and not only do we simply not need it, but the series would actually be improved without it. All we need to know is that these people live on a big floating city-ship, and there might be a some sort of political tension going on in the world. We don’t give a fig for clumsy info-dumps about the world’s history. Let us work that out on our own, or set some scenes in the past if it’s so important. Show us where this ship is going and why instead of amorphous globs of unrelated information that we can’t make heads or tails of.
In fact, just show us things plain and simple rather than relying on walls of impenetrable jargon. I don’t want to hear about this strange and fantastical setting that’s so different from the norm – I want to see it and judge that for myself. I never found out for certain what events created the bizarre and fragmented world in Kino’s Journey, but I didn’t need to. I never learned what was over the walls in Haibane Renmei or what gave birth to the Haibane, but I didn’t need to know that either. There were intriguing little clues everywhere, but not a single line of dialogue or frame of animation needed to be dedicated to explain these things directly.
Ack, something tells me I missed a bracket somewhere :/
Well, the operative word in the passage that you quoted is dense. A detailed backstory isn’t necessarily hard to comprehend when, as you’ve suggested in your examples, everything unfolds organically. Horizon, however, tries to force so much information through a relatively tiny, five minute-ish window (guesstimating) that every other word becomes impenetrable jargon. I think dense backstories are often flaws rather than not. I would’ve been more entertained reading a paper on the Higgs Boson.
The dreaded exposition dump. I think anime is especially bad about this. It seems like very few anime script writers know how to write decent exposition, if they even know the meaning of the word at all. Well, that, or they think their audience is completely retarded.
If there’s a science fiction or fantasy show set in some kind of school setting, you can bet your ass the teacher is going to stand up in the first or second episode and dump a bunch of shit we don’t care all over the place. Infinite Stratos had the gall to do it within the first ten minutes of the first episode, IIRC. I hate that show. If it’s not a school story (a rarity in and of itself) there will probably be some old dude who will accost the protagonist and rant unbidden about the backstory for an entire episode.
As a side note, I really also hate it when SF/F anime series have a high school setting shoehorned into them for no reason. The characters in this show live in a post-apocalyptic magical floating city-ship, for crying out loud. Do we really need the contrived ‘high school story’ framework that 80% of anime already adopt?
On my long list of tropes that anime has serious a myopia for which need to be buried in a very deep hole, never to see the light of day for thousands of years, the arbitrary school setting is up there right next to harems and aggressively dull main characters. I literally couldn’t bring myself to watch more than the first ten minutes of Chrome Shelled Regios for the same reason.
The world is all but destroyed, civilization is fragmented into wandering nomads adrift vast wheeled platforms which must constantly flee enormous mutated abominations caused by some horrible forgotten event, the twilight of the human race seems ostensibly near to hand… and here comes a giant high school run by teenagers where all other teenagers from all around the globe are sent to live idyllic everyday lives fraught with soberingly un-funny comedy, meaningless “school club” antics, and accidental fanservice. Joy!
Disclaimer: No actual joy was experienced in the creation of this post, except by means of viciously lambasting anime tropes that need to stop existing.
It’s just a lame security blanket for anime, it seems. Gonna take a risk? Double up with twice as many played out conventions! I’d give a more thoughtful reply but I’m being asked to play an MMO.
I took a look at this once it came out with bad subs. Bad idea. Then I tried it again with different subs and I still didn’t really get it.
Maybe only the picture in the preview chart looked good. I don’t know.
I’m not even sure the picture in the preview chart looked all that good. >_>
Last time I saw it, it was a view of the sky/sea with a girl/guy looking outwards.
Oh wait…
>sea
>automatic +1 for me
This looks like a QUALITY anime. Lol.
You’re giving this show too much credit.
I read this post, watched the first episode, and laughed throughout. How can a show be so damn bad?
The animation is derp, the characters are derp (not to mention racist), and the dialogue is more confusing than any one of my posts. H-How… why… how??
What credit did I even give the show?
I think flomu is stating that it was so bad, the fact that you even wrote a post on it gave it too much credit.
And then there was Nichijou….
Thanks for updating your blogbun.
Really hate it, protagonist is a good for nothing shit, hate how he cant do anything and that just pisses me off. first season i could barely get through but second season! they showed even less of him and whats worse is he is reduced to liquified shit (not literally) with even less screentime. dropped it and first anime i have ever hated, sorry if you guys dont agree with me but everyone has there liking and im more into shounen male protagonist ripping up everything, but the only thing in this protagonist is ripping hes own clothes away