No items, Fox only. Since writing up another series will require me to watch around four to five episodes in one sitting, we’ll just quickly revisit Another again. It turns out that Yukari wasn’t the only person to die last week; her mother also met some unspecified demise. As usual, whenever tragedy occurs, people feel compelled to place blame. Since Koichi didn’t heed everyone’s advice to kindly shut the hell up about the mysterious incident from twenty-six years ago, our hero must have activated a terrible curse! Nerves are frayed even more when another classmate nearly meets her end from a falling pane of glass. Before you know it, Nurse Sanae dies from a falling elevator. Shit’s totally going down.

Or is it? By pure accident or design, the deaths or near-deaths that we’ve seen in this anime all seem like the result of sheer stupidity. Of course, let me preface this by saying that the curse most likely does exist. After all, did you ever notice how whenever characters gossip in fiction, the nonsense that they spew are almost always correct? In real life, this is an entirely different matter. Like the telephone game demonstrates, word of mouth will easily twist a story. Gossips are usually wild and unbelievable as a result (“I heard Becky sucked off the entire soccer team! No, really, my cousin’s friend told her and she told me!”). In TV shows and movies, however, gossips are 100% true. Why is everyone dying? Because the damn new kid won’t shut up!

Still, it’s fun (for me, anyway) to look at things with a little skepticism. Yukari died because she accidentally impaled herself on her umbrella. Since the umbrella had to orient itself in an upright position for the split second that the poor girl was about to hit the ground, there must be a curse!

Well, first, she freaked herself out and started running down a flight of stairs, increasing her chances of injury. She was also carrying an unusually sharp umbrella; in fact, it seems as though this entire town in countryside of Japan has a monopoly on dangerous umbrellas (why didn’t anyone think this would be a bad idea?). Finally, when she tripped, she immediately let go of the umbrella which had previously been at her side, allowing for it to bounce in such a weird way as to impale her at the bottom of the stairs.

What about the upbeat theater girl in this week’s episode? Why was she and Koichi casually indulging themselves in small talk beneath a large pane of glass? Plus, it rains practically every episode. As inhabitants of the town, they should have known that the weather could get windy at any point. Hell, why was the pane of glass not even properly secured in the first place? As for Nurse Sanae, that elevator looked mighty rusty when she got in. Maybe it hadn’t been properly serviced and maintained for some time. While Sanae may not have died due to her own stupidity, she probably did die due to someone else’s incompetence.

By now, you might be saying, “Dude, you’re sperging out over this. It’s a horror story. Obviously, a ghost did it. Just buy into it and enjoy the show.” But bear with me for a moment. PA Works’ inability to execute their characters properly is a precisely the point. The deaths so far in the anime have been very Final Destination-esque, i.e. mishaps occur and often as a result of negligence. But if you’ve ever seen Final Destination or the pointless sequels it spawned, you’d know that the filmmakers didn’t just put a whole bunch of slow, plodding CCTV footage full of accidents before the audience. Deaths occur suddenly and stylistically, captured by improbable camera angles; essentially, Final Destination is full of jump scares.

Another currently features the same type of accidents as Final Destination, but none of the jump scares. Instead, the anime telegraphs its characters’ deaths from miles away. And then the slo-mo–… oh god, the unnecessary need to stretch out ten frames of animation so that we can see Sanae’s blurry head smash itself into the elevator floor. Conjuring up fear is usually pretty easy, but it requires a bit of the unknown. Of course, Final Destination-esque deaths are easily explainable too, but in hindsight. Since they often occur out of nowhere, the audience doesn’t get a chance to process the logic of the events. As a result, the jump scare works. In Another‘s case, as soon as I saw Sanae get into the elevator, I knew she would die and how she would die. That just leaves this episode a little anti-climactic.

And this leads to my final point. If Another wants to be scary, the deaths aren’t helping. They feel obligatory… like, well, this is a horror story, right? People die in these things, right? Okay, let’s start offing them one-by-one in the most unimaginative ways possible. As a result, death feels perfunctory in the show. For a story that wants to establish mood and rely on a slow build-up to something horrific, easily explainable deaths attributable to human incompetence is, well, not very scary.

Don’t be like Blood-C
It was always obvious from the very start of the series that the students of class 3 are hiding something. Despite this, Another can’t help teasing its audience: “Look what we know~! Don’t you wish you could find out what happened twenty-six years ago?” Building up a mystery is fine… provided you have the writing to back it up. At the moment, however, Another is skirting a very dangerous line that Blood-C stumbled like a fool over. Blood-C had one trump card up its sleeve and, well, that’s all it had. It became painfully obvious by the second or third week that something was very wrong in the world of Blood-C, but the show’s creators stood steadfast in their refusal to move the narrative forward. The anime refused to spill its guts until the audience had long grown weary of the show’s antics (except for those strange folks who were actually enthralled by the narrative, but they were obviously smoking something…).

So what’s Another’s solution to this potential problem? Clever writing could maintain the mystery, but Blood-C failed here and I don’t think Another has the necessary chops to pull this off. The other solution that comes to mind is to simply move on. Continue the plot. Introduce another mystery or two. One of the reasons why the pursuit of knowledge is so addicting is our realization that learning only leads to more questions. So instead of continually dangling the current mystery in our face ad nauseum, Another could just allow it to organically develop into another mystery or two. But will they? Or is the narrative content with the one ace in the hole that it has, happy to stretch Koichi’s cluelessness out from start to finish? It’s early in the series so it’s not like the show has doomed itself already, but all I’m saying is… don’t be another Blood-C.