Y/N?
>> n
You have chosen “Yes.” Are you sure? Y/N?
>> no dammit i dont want to see the tutorial
The 24-minute tutorial will begin in 5, 4…
>> nonononononoooooooooooo
…3, 2, 1–
Notes:
• Wow, that SZnickers joke was really, really lame. Way to go, Bones.
By the way, how did Yoshino know where to find Mahiro anyway?
• I’m having a hard time appreciating Hakaze’s character. It doesn’t help that she’s confined to one spot and thus doesn’t really have any other function other than being a dispenser of knowledge. And every time we see her, Bones is extra careful in ensuring that we get a good glimpse of cleavage as the camera slowly pans over her torn rags.
• It’s a little cheeky of the anime to point out the fact that the Hakaze’s going to feed dry, boring exposition to Yoshino, but at the end of the day, it’s still exposition.
The anime alleviates some of the pain by having Mahiro fight some mage in the background, but the trick isn’t entirely successful because neither of them really have much at stake in this battle. The mage isn’t Aika’s killer (as far as we — including the characters — know), nor are they engaged in a battle of philosophies or anything. The two men just sorta bumped into each other on the streets and started fighting.
• Hakaze keeps feeding us extraneous info like Mahiro’s opponent’s level as a mage. Who cares?
• “It almost sounded like he wanted this Aika to return to life…” I get that nobody (other than Evangeline) knows or should have known that Yoshino and Aika were secretly dating, but what is so puzzling about Yoshino wanting to bring a friend’s sister back to life, especially if the sister had been brutally murdered? If the narrative wants to emphasize Hakaze’s suspicions regarding Yoshino’s relationship with Aika, this was a silly way to play it up.
• Isn’t it bizarre how Yoshino had no problems locating Mahiro at a parking building at the start of the episode, but then spends the rest of it in a futile attempt to locate his friend? He then conveniently spots Mahiro’s cell phone, which happens to be set to vibrate so Yoshino must have some keen-as-hell hearing.
• There are just too many coincidences. Mahiro is chased down the last tunnel to be bombed. He and Yoshino escape right as the helicopters arrive to fire their missiles. I get the feeling that these events will somehow be explained away as a part of the world’s logic, i.e. Yoshino is destined to be the hero or some such nonsense, but this won’t make the narrative any more satisfying to see the characters continually escape trouble out of sheer contrivance.
• I kind of like the singing children and the old couple.
They’re sort of like a Greek chorus.
• But even though the town’s being quarantined, Mahiro and Yoshino find themselves on an outbound train…? The guy talking to Evangeline on the phone even said they were going to bomb railroad tracks along with the highway tunnels. So… did I miss something?
• In general, I felt that this was the weakest episode yet. The narrative didn’t really go anywhere as we spent nearly half an hour on a duel. To top it all off, the episode really served as a lecture on how magic works in the world of Zetsuen no Tempest, but the anime contents itself with the bare minimum of being self-aware that it’s a lecture. As a result, Bones didn’t do anything interesting at all with either the lecture or the duel.
I know that this isn’t going to be a long series. I know that Bones has a tendency to rush things. Still, the fun of the first two episodes was in drawing all sorts of connections between the story and the Shakespearean quotes. As a result, I really hope this third episode was just a fluke.
I’m a bit worried about this adaptation, about half the manga is a single conversation :s. It could end up being very boring to watch.
I don’t mind conversations if they are interesting conversations. Some of my favorite movies are just people having conversations. On the other hand, conversations where one person tells another person over and over how magic is meant to restore the logic of the world, yeah… that gets a little boring.
I know what Algen’s mentioning and I agree, at this pace half the adaption will be a single conversation stretched out over about 3-4 episodes or so. Looking at a chapter count I suppose they’d be on pace to finish the first major arc within 11-13 episodes, but the manga pacing somehow had a very different feel, or perhaps just benefitted from being read all at once.
In terms of the lecture, no real argument from me. At a high level I think it’s a fair criticism to pre-emptively point out a major flaw in the overall work, which is that what the author seems to have gone for requires building a rather involved set of rules and limitations. All of that structure meant to set up the eventual themes and symbolism, and so on, but having to introduce it all upfront and in such dry form really exposes how artificial they that whole structure really is.
So yeah, I was curious to see what they’d do with this but in the end what they’re doing with it is so far fairly underwhelming. The worst part of it for me is that I know why they’re feeding some of the extraneous information and so on, and that knowledge isn’t improving my viewing experience the way you might think it would. A disappointing lead-off for sure.
If there’s ever a moment for Bones to take some creative liberties with this adaptation, it would be now ’cause that sounds horrible.
That didn’t seem to come across to me, though. I just felt like Hakaze was repeating herself over and over. This must be true considering how we’re not really discussing the specifics of the episode, merely the overall impression. Why? Probably because there was little of any substance in that episode besides the same assertion over and over.
Prefacing this with the blanket statement that it was a boring lecture and if anything it probably bored me more than it bored you, and that part of why it’s hard to discuss specifics is that this was a pretty dull episode on the face of it, and what there is to point out is hard to point out without being spoilerish.
I guess at a high level what I would say to try and reframe it is that what the author really seems to be going for (especially now that the print run is apparently coming to a close) is to shift a lot of the narrative work onto the “rules of magic” and whatnot; at risk of a minor spoiler, part of why Hakaze’s going on about their magic being defense-only and powered by the “tree of genesis” is that, in a shocking twist, there’s also magic powered by the “tree of exodus” that is offense-only…and it’s basically like that all the way up and down the line. For me seeing it animated is lessening my opinion of the original work because it’s making me aware of just how contrived and artificial the overall arrangement is, and of the extent to which the human drama is almost an afterthought or byproduct of this intricate-but-unwieldy world it’s now taken 3 episodes to partially explain.
This upcoming long conversation is a case in point: it’s actually a pretty decent bit of back-and-forth mindgaming, but making it work at all from a dramatic standpoint requires the audience to be pretty thoroughly clued-in on the relevant “rules of magic” beforehand, whence all this lecturing (which sucks, don’t get me wrong). It would be much better if either the original or this adaption could smooth out the flow of events to allow the rules to be introduced more-naturally and more-incrementally — and this was one of the areas I was hoping the adaption would improve upon — but neither seems up to the challenge. I think a concise way to put it is that it winds up being a bit similar to Death Note in how much it depends upon rules-lawyering for dramatic tension, except that in Death Note the core mechanics could be explained simply, and were more amenable to gradual revelation.
And to get ahead of things a bit: one of the worst aspects of the upcoming long conversation is that because the rules have been so clearly spelled out by the time it happens it’s actually not too difficult to guess the approximate outcome well before it happens, and this makes something that’s already a bit too long feel an awful lot longer. That is, unless the adaption cleans it up, but I’m not keeping my hopes up.
It’s hard to discuss what you’re talking about since it seems we’re now referring to future content, which I am not yet privy to (damn me and my refusal to read manga). It’s just weird to me that neither the creator nor Bones wanted to do what practically every other story would’ve done: revealed the rules of the game gradually. Plus, there was just a lot of needless talking when a lot of the rules could’ve been communicated visually. I get that Hakaze’s “lecturing” to Yoshino, who can’t exactly see Mahiro fight, but the audience doesn’t need to actually sit in on the lecture as well. We could’ve just seen the rules play out in the fight itself. There are so many ways Bones could have gone to make this palatable, but they didn’t.
It was a lecture. The story was bluntly honest about it.
What I do think though, is that after this episode, I’m less lost of what’s going on. Probably, this episode was meant (and designed) as a World building Episode leading up to the main plot, not to a standalone itself. The previous two episodes makes more sense in the context of the third episode.
Then again, Worldbuilding interest me, and I’d like to think I have a higher tolerance for it. Now, what can be disputed is whether the exposition was done elegantly at all.
Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if Aiika was murdered AGAINST the logic of this world.
Oh Andmeuths, Andmeuths, Andmeuths… why must you always point out something I’m already aware of: “…but the anime contents itself with the bare minimum of being self-aware that it’s a lecture.” Being bluntly honest doesn’t get you any points when you’re still boring about it.
Designing an episode to be viewed in tandem with another episode when you can’t possibly air them together is just plain stupidity. If I complain about being served only hamburger buns, you can’t say that I was meant to eat it with the hamburger patty that won’t arrive at the table for at least another five to ten minutes. Why wouldn’t you serve them together? Oh, you can’t? Then why even serve them at all? Why not — and this might just sound crazy — serve something else? At the very least, add something interesting to those hamburger buns. Maybe some ketchup would be nice? Being blunt that you’ve given me just hamburger buns doesn’t change the fact that they’re still just hamburger buns.