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November 13, 2023

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A review of Slow Loop

Newly minted high school student Hiyori Yamakawa, soon to be Hiyori Minagi, is going through a lot of changes: new school, new stepfather with her mother’s second marriage, and new stepsister included. To get away and clear her mind, Hiyori does what she loves, going to the docks to go fly fishing. However, while there, Hiyori runs into a strange girl, Koharu, who has no experience with fishing but seems fascinated and excited by it. Hiyori gives Koharu the basics on fly fishing, and after spending a while getting to know each other, Koharu mentions that her father is getting remarried and that she’s supposed to meet her own new stepsister that day. But of course, as they now realize, Koharu has already met her.

Slow Loop is yet another slice-of-life anime I picked up. Anime schedules are still crammed full of isekais that I have zero interest in, but we also get the odd SOL cute girls doing cute things sort of series like this one, which aired last year. As usual, I’ll credit Yuru Camp for getting me somewhat into this genre of anime last year. Maybe it’s no surprise that I took to Slow Loop, since it’s extremely Yuru Camp in its premise and execution, though it’s hardly just a copy of that series, with a few character relationship elements that set it apart.

Not awkward at all: Koharu with her father, left, and Hiyori with her mother, right

The similarities with Yuru Camp are obvious even from the premise. Slow Loop focuses on the various styles of fishing, in rivers, lakes, and the ocean, the many types of lures and baits, and so on. Just as with Yuru Camp and its focus on camping, and with Super Cub and its focus on motorbikes, I have absolutely no knowledge of the subject of Slow Loop. But also as with those series, that lack of knowledge didn’t stop me from enjoying the show. Regular campers, cyclists, and anglers can likely enjoy and relate to those respective shows on a deeper level, but I never felt confused or, on the other end of that scale, talked down to as a total know-nothing.

Those similarities extend to our main characters. Hiyori, a pretty low-key girl with a love for and intense interest in her fishing hobby, bears a strong resemblance to Rin, while Koharu, the high-strung and enthusiastic novice, is our Nadeshiko. And while there’s no official fishing club this time around, the cast of Slow Loop is filled out with their parents — including Hiyori’s deceased father and Koharu’s deceased mother who show up in a few flashbacks each — and a few of their friends who also take an interest in fishing. Just as with Yuru Camp, there’s also barely any focus on the characters’ school life, even less this time around — it’s easy to forget Hiyori, Koharu and co. even attend school considering how little time the show spends there. Instead, we get plenty of fishing trips to lakes, rivers, and the seaside, where Hiyori shows Koharu the ropes and also learns a thing or two herself about styles outside of fly fishing.

And of course, Slow Loop also has a strong focus on cooking, with a natural focus on seafood this time, and with Koharu as the resident cook to pair with Hiyori’s fishing skills. I maintain that these slice-of-life shows make for better “food porn” than even the Food Network here in the US (not a big fan of that term myself, but if it brought you to my site and to this review, so much the better, because this show is for you.)

Seafood seems to be one of those love or hate kinds of foods. I fall on the love side of that argument, along with my love for the also controversial mushrooms and olives (the best pizza toppings, don’t fucking @ me about that)

Finally, both series take the unusual step of actually acknowledging that these high school students have parents and don’t just live in a weird vacuum without any responsible adult support (see K-On!, where the only prominent adult is kind of halfway responsible at best, and where parents are entirely absent.) I don’t have much of a problem with that lack of focus on the family, especially in the romantic series where the natural focus is on the leads (Takagi-san, Nagatoro, etc.) but Yuru Camp and Slow Loop benefit from their active inclusion of parents and siblings — that life in the slice-of-life feels more real, especially when said parents and siblings aren’t just tacked on for the hell of it but actually play important roles in their stories.

Hiyori’s childhood friend Koi with her younger twin brothers. Koi’s father is kind of a Jimmy Buffet type who only wants to fish and has a remarkably hot wife — definitely the most fun-looking family in the show, even if dad drives his daughter a little crazy with his irresponsible behavior.

Despite all the similarities I just highlighted, I don’t mean to say that Slow Loop is just a carbon copy of Yuru Camp only with fishing instead of camping. It seems likely that manga author Maiko Uchino got at least some of her inspiration from Afro’s manga, especially seeing how both ran in Manga Time Kirara, a manga magazine known for running this kind of slice-of-life CGDCT stuff. However, Slow Loop has its own unique character thanks to its deeper focus on the family lives of its characters and their coping with past tragedies. Hiyori learned everything she knows about fly fishing from her late father, who died of a sudden illness a few years before the start of the story, and Koharu still cherishes the memory of her late mother and younger brother, both killed in a traffic accident.

Having never gone through that kind of loss as a kid, I can’t say how I would have handled it. Losing your grandparents as an adult is naturally very different, especially when their end is more or less expected and everyone’s prepared for it, and after they’ve lived full lives — by contrast, it’s hard for me to imagine seeing your own father or mother’s life cut short as a child and the trauma that must follow.

Slow Loop features some appropriately downbeat moments, especially during the several flashbacks through which we see Hiyori and Koharu’s memories of their father and mother, to important points in their younger years, and to the aftermath of their deaths. However, the series doesn’t drown in depression and melancholy either, instead focusing on the creation of a new family, both between Hiyori and Koharu’s surviving parents and between the stepsisters themselves. The pair take to each other pretty quickly, bonding in part by teaching each other to fish and cook.

The relationship between the stepdaughters and their respective stepfather and mother is naturally more complicated. Even if both parents are pretty obviously decent, pleasant people as the parents in Slow Loop are, I imagine the act of stepping in as a kind of replacement for a deceased father or mother can cause some resentment and bitterness (again, not speaking from experience, aside from my parents divorcing when I was a young adult, which is a very different situation.)

Slow Loop doesn’t ignore this issue. Koharu comes right out in her straightforward, even blunt, way and admits to Hiyori that it feels strange having some new lady in the house, guessing that Hiyori feels the same way about her father. I can imagine another series in which the stepdaughter characters don’t deal with their new family arrangement as well — plenty of opportunity for drama and character development there. Slow Loop features some character development especially in Hiyori, who’s able to break out of her shell a little (and see also Rin in Yuru Camp again) but she and Koharu are remarkably mature about the situation. I won’t even say mature for their age, because I’ve known people who can’t handle such changes even as adults: just one of the several reasons I’ll never work in family law.

I also liked the focus on fishing’s perception as a male hobby, with Hiyori, Koharu and friends breaking out of that mold. Since I’ve never really gone fishing (unless drinking beer on a dock near people who were fishing counts) I can’t say much about that on a personal level either, but in American culture fishing does seem to be a stereotypically guy thing — think of all those 90s and 00s sitcoms where the goofy slob of a husband tries to get away from his nagging wife for a weekend to go fishing or golfing and gets in trouble for it — and maybe it’s the same in Japan.

Hiyori at work being asked a difficult question by her younger family friend Futaba. Yeah, it’s a true slice-of-life show: of course they had to find an excuse to put at least one character in a maid outfit.

But then there’s obviously no reason that girls can’t be into fishing, just like there’s no reason guys can’t be into dressmaking. That gendered hobby theme isn’t as prominent in Slow Loop as in Bisque Doll, but both stories take this question on in an effective way, with the younger Futaba worrying about how her best friend will look at her if she’s open about her love for fishing. As with Hiyori and Koharu’s family dynamics, the characters turn out to be extremely mature, even the grade school kids, with Futaba’s friend immediately accepting her and even asking why she thought she had to hide her passion.

The characters of Slow Loop avoid drama so easily and smoothly that it doesn’t feel quite realistic, but then I felt the same way about Yuru Camp and especially last year’s movie, in which Rin, Nadeshiko and the crew were able to come to a resolution that made everyone happy instead of falling into a more likely fight over land use and a complete bureaucratic nightmare. Having seen a few dispute like that up close in my profession, maybe my mind just automatically goes to conflict as the default. But just as I said about the Yuru Camp movie, I don’t mind this more idealistic approach — I think Slow Loop presents another case of the world as it ought to be more than as it actually is, which is fine with me, especially in the increasingly shittier world we actually live in. Maybe that’s just another reason we need series like Slow Loop all the more.

I haven’t been out in nature for years now; being trapped in an urban/heavy suburban area of a big city for years has probably warped my mind even more than it already is anyway.

The only other real conflict I found in Slow Loop was in Koharu’s slight insecurity over Hiyori and Koi between such close childhood friends, but even that’s mainly played for comedy with Koharu just getting a little pouty and Hiyori making fun of her a bit. As usual with these slice-of-life series, you shouldn’t come to Slow Loop expecting character conflict and drama. This medium is stuffed full of it, so full that people have been using the term “anime” the last few years to refer to anything suspenseful or dramatic. Slow Loop is instead more soul-healing material, and hell if some souls don’t need healing. I know mine does.

Seeing this ideal world and then thinking about our shit one is actually making me a little more depressed, so I’ll end the review here.

So there’s another recommendation if you want it. Slow Loop doesn’t seem to have made much of a wave outside of probably the committed Manga Time Kirara slice-of-life fans, but if you’re interested in finding some slightly less-talked-about and underrated anime and you need a break from all that drama, try it out. Crunchyroll is a piece of shit streaming service, but if you don’t mind fighting with the app to actually play a single damn episode without crashing or using tedious workarounds to take screenshots, you can find Slow Loop in their catalog. Or just use the alternative.

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November 9, 2023

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A few more things I bought, part whatever

I’m trying to cope with the news these days by writing no-effort posts like this one. As an American born and raised with partly Palestinian family roots and pretty strong cultural connections through them, it’s felt like taking the usual dose of frustration multiplied by a thousand, especially when people speaking up for their rights in this country are often wrongly vilified as extremists. Though of course that’s nothing compared to what millions of people are going through right now.

And since I can’t very easily talk about this sort of thing anywhere at all given all the bullshit that I can’t afford to deal with, here’s my place to vent by writing about a few new interesting things I bought over the last couple of months, two from a convention (my first since COVID) and one from a coin/stamp/card shop, because I’m in that depressing part of the Venn diagram where those two interests overlap. This is the only way I can keep my sanity, between a job I dislike and a nightmare world that seems on the edge of collapse where all you can do is watch and despair. Maybe that’s not a good coping mechanism, but it’s by far the least unhealthy one I’ve discovered.

Tanned Girl + Blue Hair Anthology by Neyuki Rei

So then why not have a look at some 18+ art? This is a small full-color piece, kind of between a doujin and an artbook, fully translated and published in the US. J18 Publishing is in the business of localized physical doujins, which I fully support. If I were the fucking Monopoly Man I’d pour money into that business myself. (Also, not a sponsored post, but I will sell out for money and/or free doujins; let’s talk.)

All I can do is occasionally buy a new book that looks appealing, and for some reason, Tanned Girl + Blue Hair did it for me. This is a collection of cheesecake featuring this tanned blue-haired girl just like the title says. I hadn’t seen Neyuki Rei’s art before, but her style reminds me of Nan Yaegashi’s, the guy who draws for Senran Kagura. Very soft-looking, and the focus on the back end is also appreciated. As long as we have such art, life can’t be completely miserable all the time. I’m still building that physical collection to survive the apocalypse and total breakdown of the electrical grid. Next goal is to learn how to grow crops.

Me at lower left. I’m honestly not quite that masochistic, but otherwise this cover is just some kind of weird animal abuse that the artist maybe didn’t mean to imply.

Comic AG Vol. 51, Jan. 2007

This one is just straight up pornography, no cheesecake or borderline stuff here. I bought this partly because it was cheap, partly because of the cover (of course, my brain just saw the catgirl dominatrix and said “buy”) and partly because it’s a novelty to me. I’d never seen a manga compilation in a a more typically western comic format, though this one does read right-to-left.

Not much to say about the contents; they’re porn. Just a lot of fucking with some weird circumstances attached like these stories usually have. There are probably talented writers who can expand on those kinds of stories, but I’m not one of them. To me, the most interesting thing about this volume aside from the cover is the fact that it was published by J-List — these guys are ancient in internet history terms — and that they were localizing physical h-manga complete with English translations and decensoring back in the 2000s when even now, after the massive anime boom, localized hentai is an extremely niche market. But I already know far more about this subject than I’m supposed to.

That’s some photo composition there

10 Million Mark note, Germany, 1923

Another thing I know far too much about are old scraps of paper that have no practical use. Money is always good to have, but I’ve also collected some old money denominated in foreign and/or dead currencies like this one. There are some beautiful old banknotes out there a lot more interesting-looking than our boring dollars, and some of my favorites are these German notes from the 20s. The democratic Weimar Republic had replaced the fallen empire after World War I, but Germany soon went into economic collapse after territorial losses and enduring heavy war debts. The ultimate result of all this was the rise of Hitler and the disaster that followed, but in the early 20s people had the immediate problem of having their money constantly becoming more worthless.

The government first responded to the hyperinflation as they usually do: by printing notes in larger denominations. This happened most recently in Zimbabwe with its famous 100 trillion dollar bill, but it reflected a lot of what happened in 20s Germany, with people ending up dragging sacks of thousand, million, and billion-mark denominated notes. The Social Democratic cabinet in power at the time managed to kill the mark and replace it in 1924, ending the downward spiral, but there are still a lot of these hyperinflation notes around, many of them very affordable, in the several dollars range. And if you’re wondering what’s on the back: nothing. These and many other notes from the period didn’t have reverse designs at all, since everyone figured they’d be worthless within a month anyway.

I also picked up a few other things, like a very classic film-looking poster for Mononoke-hime and a nice and thankfully cheap artbook by Ume Aoki, the Hidamari Sketch/Madoka artist, but there’s not much to say about those except they’re good. I just had to write something so as to keep level. Until next time, when I might just have another short post to share.

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October 27, 2023

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Nine more songs to hear (anime and otherwise)

Look, I have to admit something. I am a weeb. Yes. I’m sure you didn’t know, so this may come as a shock.

I say that to partly explain my next point, which is that there’s something about Japanese pop you can’t find in the American variety. To sound like a complete snob, American pop has never interested me all that much. Just to be clear, I’m not counting the Beach Boys or Fleetwood Mac or Michael Jackson in with “pop” in general here — I mean the more recent Top 40 stuff.

Meanwhile, Japanese duo Yoasobi gave us Idol. The OP to this year’s big-name anime Oshi no Ko, “Idol” is just the kind of song I didn’t think I’d like back when I was in high school if you had described it to me, but it is extremely fucking good. I especially like the almost martial section in the middle, but there’s plenty here you won’t find in typical pop — see 0:40, all that staccato starting at 1:06 on what almost sounds like a harpsichord, the chorus itself, and all the great bass lines (a running theme in the Japanese pop I’ve heard.)

I don’t normally give a shit about chart numbers, but it was nice to see “Idol” hit the top worldwide and here in the States for a bit. A recent conversation here on the site reminded me that non-US artists too often go ignored here in the States, and “Idol” is a good sign that that might be changing (also the legions of BTS fans over here.)

Continuing with the anime theme, here’s another song you may know if you’re into the scene. “Fukashigi no Carte” is the ending theme to Bunny Girl Senpai, which I swear is on my short list to keep watching. This version in particular, featuring all six female leads’ VAs, is beautiful:

Apparently there’s a lot of context here I’m not getting, so I’d better go watch the show, but even without watching it you can easily appreciate the theme. I love that old feel it has, like an old jazz standard.

Speaking of old-fashioned, here’s a song that sounds meant to resemble the old French chanson style. “Etoile et toi” is the ending them to the Kizumonogatari series of films that I reviewed a few years back:

At first I thought they might have covered an old classic, but “Etoile” was apparently an original written for the films. Probably helps that I’ve seen the movies, since there is definitely context to this ending that gives it more emotional impact. But it’s good all on its own too.

Leaving the anime realm for now, though not leaving Japan — not quite anyway. This next song is also French, an instrumental piece by Japanese fusion guys Casiopea and cover of Maurice Ravel’s solo piano Pavane pour une infante défunte / Pavane for a Dead Princess. That title is already pretty damn grim, fitting the story behind it, and Ravel’s original is accordingly beautiful but somber.

Casiopea’s version adds some interesting flavor to the piece with its synth tones that Ravel couldn’t have hoped to get back then. I can and will criticize some of Casiopea’s cheesier synth uses (I’ve come around on some of their music after their debut that I didn’t like at first, but “I Love New York” still sucks) but they use their instruments effectively here. It feels even more emotional than the original in a sense, or maybe emotional in a different way. Still mournful enough for the subject matter.

The only other thing I can say about “Pavane” is that the title must have inspired ZUN of Touhou Project in naming Remilia Scarlet’s theme in Touhou 6, “Septette for the Dead Princess”, even though musically the two have nothing to do with each other — “Septette” rips off the third movement of Beethoven’s “Pathetique” for a few bars instead. Saying that knowledge would have got me shoved in a locker in my old school, but thankfully the late 90s/early 00s were a different time.

Next up is not “Septette” (though it’s also great) but a legendary meme song from the old internet of 14 years ago: an arrangement of the Touhou 4 theme “Bad Apple”:

It’s been a while since, but this song was huge back then among the kinds of weirdos who went to anime cons, like me. Touhou fans were and are an even weirder, more obsessive subset of that group that would be impossible to explain without its own dedicated series of posts (maybe a subject to revive that deep reads series with?) So I can’t say why “Bad Apple” got so popular, given how many good Touhou covers are out there, but it deserves that status. A lot must have to do with the cool changing silhouette video. Good thing for me it’s an old one: I actually recognize all these characters, since I fell off from the series just a little after this “Bad Apple” cover got big.

I guess I shouldn’t just be a damn weeb for at least one entry. So here’s something from a western game: the entire soundtrack of Outer Wilds.

I know this isn’t a song but a whole album, but can you complain about getting more music out of this post? Maybe, but listen to the whole thing anyway, because it’s good. I forget whether I referred much to the music in those two review parts I wrote a while back, but if I didn’t, I’ll say here that the soundtrack adds a massive amount to the game itself, both in creating atmosphere and in tying into the story of the game itself. I won’t say any more about Outer Wilds itself for fear of spoilers, but if you haven’t played it, you should anyway. (But note, I haven’t played Echoes of the Eye, so I can’t comment on that. I heard it’s horrifically scary and I’m a coward.)

Something now that I might have been embarrassed to admit to liking 20 years ago. The next song is “Bubble Tea” by Soundcloud composer dark cat:

Man, how the hell do you squeeze so much sugar into a song and not have it be unbearable? It’s really good, though, with a nice beat and mix of synths, cute vocals, and a few weird fart sound effects and those ultra-high-pitched vocal samples that I usually hate but that seem to do okay here. They call this music “catstep”, whatever the hell that means, but dark cat seems to be pretty cool whatever label you choose for them.

Something very different and part of the way around the world now: Sastanàqqàm by the band Tinariwen from northern Mali. That’s a hell of a lot of desert, the Sahara itself, but the Touareg people have managed to live there for a long time and with a long musical tradition. Just look up Timbuktu and music on Google.

I like the mix of more regional/traditional instruments and electric ones, and there’s a great beat and groove to “Sastanàqqàm”. I’d like to find more music from those parts in general — west Africa is responsible for a lot of modern American music for a historically obvious and depressing reason, so maybe we should all have more interest. Maybe it’s part of why Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel and other artsy 70s musicians got into it in the 80s with New Wave. I only hope the extremist jerkoffs don’t manage to take over these regions and ban music again like they did in 2012, in addition to all the other bad and worse shit extremists get up to.

Now to the final song, back to my weeb roots and to the one song on this list I’d consider marking NSFW unless you have a very cool boss. And a VTuber song no less (of course, yeah.) It’s “I’m Your Treasure Box” by Houshou Marine:

What can I say, it’s a catchy song. Sounds and feels very cabaret-ish with the instruments and Marine’s cute but supercharged sexy singing, and also considering it’s about the horniest song ever written since Prince was writing songs. The lyrics are about as lightly veiled as possible, and the music video adds plenty to the appeal of the song itself. Especially the last couple bars of the chorus from 1:37. You tell me that’s not what it looks and sounds like.

But all the sex is justified and in character, Marine being the sexy pirate captain character of Hololive who’s constantly meme’d about being horny. It’s a perfect character theme as far as I’m concerned. That’s coming from a totally dignified and learned musical position too, no other possible reason I could like this song.

And that’s all for now. This was a pretty thrown-together post, but sometimes I just have to do that to keep the momentum going. Quality control, now that’s not such a priority.

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October 21, 2023

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A review of Gunbuster

The Earth is threatened by space insects, and the only ones who can save humanity are a set of students piloting giant robots. That’s a tale as old as time, or at least as old as 1988 when the OVA Gunbuster was released (in Japan as Aim for the Top! Gunbuster.) This six-episode series came from Gainax and from first-time director Hideaki Anno, and if you’ve seen Evangelion you might see some of its seeds in Gunbuster. But this isn’t just an older proto-Evangelion — it’s interesting all on its own.

Gunbuster is also one of the couple really “old anime” I’ve watched, now alongside LOGH. Maybe now that 2000s anime like Azumanga Daioh is being considered old, I’m also feeling old, and so I wanted to feel comparatively young by watching an 80s one.

Whatever my motivation was, here’s Gunbuster.

A far sadder story than you might imagine. (Also spoilers, though coming on 35 years I don’t know if that’s necessary.)

Noriko Takaya is a typical high schooler, except for her father having been the admiral of a massive space fleet on the front lines of a galactic conflict with parasitic aliens bent on destroying humanity and all other living beings in the galaxy. His death in battle when she was just a kid still haunts her, but Noriko pours her feelings into training so that she can follow her father, join the fleet, and fight the aliens to the death.

Sadly, Noriko doesn’t seem to have much ability in piloting the mech she’ll need to use in space. Despite her best efforts, she’s still lagging behind her classmates and can’t catch up. Even so, her coach pushes her to work harder, convinced that she has the innate talent to excel. After proving herself in a one-on-one mech fight with another student, Noriko pairs up with her beloved senior classmate Kazumi and flies off to the flagship Exelion to begin their real training in defending Earth, leaving behind the rest of their classmates including Noriko’s best friend Kimiko.

Defending them from these ugly bastards I guess

The five episodes that follow tell a pretty usual “unlikely young hero saves the world” kind of story, but with plenty of style to set it apart. I had no idea what to expect from Gunbuster going in — maybe a typical mecha anime, but then since I’ve barely watched any mecha anime not even that would help me. But good thing I landed on this anime for whatever reason, because it was interesting and impressive in a few different ways, though not without some minor problems that keep it out of the top tier for me.

The most immediately obvious difference in Gunbuster from what I usually watch is that old 80s/90s anime look it’s got. Aside from the older look of the animation, Noriko and friends have that vintage anime girl look to them. I don’t know if there’s a term for it, but you see it a lot on vaporwave album covers and throwback neon-colored print t-shirts these days. I like the style, and it worked great in Gunbuster.

Noriko looking determined as hell

The nice visuals extend to the many shots of ships, machinery, and aliens. These Gainax guys clearly loved this tech and mechanical stuff for how much they show it off, and the aliens look suitably alien and terrifying. And the Gunbuster and the other mech suits look cool, though again, I’m not much of a judge when it comes to mecha. I can’t distinguish any of the giant robots from each other too much, aside from maybe the Evangelions for their unique looks, speaking of Hideaki Anno being the director.

But the whole giant mech thing fits in well with the grand scope of Gunbuster. It’s about the length of a movie, a little over two hours in total, but the scope here is so damn grand that I ended up feeling the show was too short and could have used at least a full one-cour run. Maybe Gainax couldn’t afford a longer series for all the detail and effects, or maybe it was a conscious decision — Mr. Anno is known for making unusual choices that might not have anything to do with budget concerns, so I won’t even speculate about that. In any case, the scale of the war in Gunbuster is absurdly fucking massive, with swarms of alien monsters shoulder-to-shoulder forming a rank of 80 astronomical units, 1 AU being the distance from the Sun to the Earth. And this nightmare army can be wiped out by a couple of schoolgirls in giant mechs with some backup from Earth’s space navy.

A short of Earth’s fleet from the black-and-white last episode, nice classic film look to it with the widescreen format.

There’s plenty of battle in Gunbuster like you’d expect, but the core of it and the more interesting part was the focus on the main characters’ personal struggles. I got the giant robot fighting action I expected, and also the focus on Noriko dealing with her father’s death. What I didn’t expect was a meditation on traveling near the speed of light, then getting back to Earth and finding your best friend from school is now a mother while you’ve barely aged at all. Time dilation is a real phenomenon, having something to do with relativity that I don’t understand that well. The point is, the faster you travel relative to someone else, the slower they perceive you as moving, to the point that the two travel through time at vastly different speeds. Something like that, but however it works, Noriko and Kazumi end up aging about a year in the span of well more than a year on Earth because of the incredible speeds they have to pilot the Gunbuster and other mechs at to fight the aliens.

Noriko, just now graduating, sees Kimiko with her daughter. Time didn’t wait up on Earth.

This causes some obvious problems, like watching your friends and family age rapidly while you stay pretty much the same age. Upon returning to Earth after her first major battle, Noriko runs into Kimiko, now a decade older than her and with her own family. While they’re still friends, that gap in time and aging would be shocking for anyone to deal with, though Noriko seems to take it pretty well considering everything else she’s been through halfway through the series.

That gap is harder on her onee-sama Kazumi, who’s in love with their coach Ota, a grim badass guy who always wears sunglasses and the very man who kept pushing Noriko to succeed. Ota, left behind on Earth with space radiation sickness, manages to hang on long enough to marry Kazumi before he dies — sort of a happy ending, but about as melancholic a happy ending as you can get.

Nice Miyazaki film references here. It’s been 20 years since I saw Nausicaa, but I know Anno was responsible for some of its designs. That’s probably worth a rewatch.

A lot of Gunbuster deals with these sacrifices made both by Noriko and Kazumi and by those supporting them. Noriko’s doubt surrounding her own abilities also plays a large part in the story, especially when her love interest, fellow pilot Smith, gets killed while they’re on a mission together in the third episode. While Noriko blames herself (pretty unfairly, but survivor’s guilt is a serious issue as well) she eventually uses her feelings for Smith and her grief over her father’s death as motivation to push herself beyond her limits, quite literally saving the world in the process together with Kazumi.

There’s more of that optimistic but melancholic feel, which runs through the very end of the series, which I don’t want to spoil for you even if I did set down a warning about spoilers above. If you’re a fan of bittersweet and want to check out some older anime, you might like Gunbuster a lot. I don’t seek that kind of stuff out myself too often, but it works in this story where the emotion is high throughout, especially for Noriko, who both breaks into tears on a regular basis and has moments of pure concentrated rage while fighting the alien hordes.

Also, lots of these kinds of shots shoved in as well. The 80s weren’t that different from today in that sense. I also like this fake beach room on their space battleship — it reminds me of the infamous Underground House in Las Vegas with its walls painted to simulate the outdoors.

That’s not to say Gunbuster is perfect. The series feels rushed at points, especially with Noriko and Smith’s relationship, which barely had ten minutes to get established before he dies — not enough time considering how central his death is to her increasing resolve. And again, the scale of the story could have easily justified a longer run time in general, but maybe I’m just spoiled. Gainax had only been around for a few years at this point, so if they were restricted in what they could manage in 1988/89, that might just make Gunbuster all the more impressive.

But then, once again, I have so little background in either mecha anime or 80s anime in general that it’s hard for me to make those kinds of judgments or to compare Gunbuster to anything else, aside from LOGH, which it barely shares anything in common with aside from the space military theme. I just took the series as I found it, and I liked it, for whatever that’s worth from someone with no authority to talk about this genre or period of anime.

I also want to acknowledge this cybernetic space dolphin. I have no idea what it’s about, and it’s never mentioned or explained. If there are any diehard fans reading, please let me know what’s up with this guy.

I liked Gunbuster enough to want to watch the 2004 sequel Diebuster, so I’ll probably be checking that out soon. As for where you can find Gunbuster if you’re interested, it’s on Crunchyroll, but I’ve had it about up to my neck with that fucking site, this class-action settlement against Crunchyroll and its owner Sony being the cherry on top of all its bullshit. I’m not sure thirty dollars per user is going to actually make us whole after having our information sold to Meta — of course to Meta and of course without our consent — but I’ll take my money if that’s all we’re getting. Meanwhile, the pirates get to feel a little more justified in flouting copyright law. Again, I can’t outright support that, but it’s pretty obvious that Sony has no interest in maintaining any moral high ground when it gets up to shit like this.

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October 16, 2023

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Demo mode: Tevi

It’s Next Fest time again at Steam. Nuts to Valve, as usual, but where else are indie devs going to post their games for sale? I love itch.io, but it’s like a flea market where you can find 2% gems among 98% garbage — maybe not the best place to sell if you can help it.

So I played a demo. Just one, because my other concerns aren’t giving me any extra time these days. I hate it, but what can you do.

Tevi

What a surprise, AK picks the game crammed full of kemonomimi girls to play. But it was a good bet, because the Tevi demo was enjoyable enough for me to put the game on my wishlist. Tevi is a Metroidvania that looks like it will be in the vein of Rabi-Ribi, which I think was made by the same guys. I played some of that game, and this has a similar feel: rabbit girl runs around dangerous wilderness fighting monsters and asshole catgirls who throw bombs at her for no reason. Main character Tevi has to take on plenty of enemies, including her friend/rival Vena, who draws her into a bullet hell boss battle to test her fighting skills.

Nice background, though I generally avoid places where I might have to fight rattlesnakes

Tevi features a nice set of difficulty levels, which is great for me, since I both like these Metroidvania-style games and am also fairly bad at them. At the same time, I feel bad playing on easy mode, like I’m missing out on a nice challenge. That’s especially true for these bullet hell games. Both Rabi-Ribi and Tevi have a similar feel to the Touhou series in that way even though that’s a shooter and these are platformers — attribute that both to the bullet hell, the bosses who refuse to die, and all the animal-eared girls. The latter games’ skimpy outfits don’t hurt either, though Rabi-Ribi really cranked that aspect up. The protagonist bunny girl isn’t quite in a bunny girl outfit this time, anyway. Or maybe it’s a steampunkish version of a bunny girl outfit.

You do get a well-endowed angel lady too, no problem with that

I like what I’ve seen of Tevi so far, and I might get the full version upon release. I don’t mind a challenge, and I also appreciate that one of the goals in the demo is to make sure the Waffle House is still open. Because when the Waffle Houses are closed, that’s when the world is truly ending. If you’ve ever lived in the American South, you know. (That’s not even a joke — see the Waffle House Index.)

Technically not actually a Waffle House, but the name is close enough. The inside of this place looks a lot nicer, though.

A very short post today, but that’s all I have time for right now. See you next time, when I’ll hopefully have a little more peace.

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October 10, 2023

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history

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Historical drama film review: The Hollow Crown: Henry IV

Oh yeah, these are where the history plays really get going. Henry IV is a great time, and in particular the first part of the two. High politics, a battle with a swordfight, family drama, drunken parties, and dirty jokes: this play has everything I want from Mr. Shakespeare.

Before I get into the story and everything, I guess calling both plays put together Henry IV isn’t proper: it’s Henry IV Part 1 and 2. I will be referring to each part when discussing them separately, but I might not otherwise. The second play follows directly from the first, and the two are so linked anyway that I don’t think that’s a problem, but all the literary scholars out there might disagree. I’m not one of them anyway — I went down one of the “I need money” educational paths instead, and look where it fucking got me.

My personal complaints aside, here’s Henry IV, starting with Part 1, where we find King Henry IV ruling England after the fall and death of the deposed Richard II as depicted in the first play in the series. Henry has a severe case of heartburn caused by several lords in the north of England and in Scotland, in particular the Earls of Worcester (where they make that sauce?), Douglas, and Northumberland, and by their Welsh allies led by Owain Glyndŵr aka Owen Glendower, the last actually Welsh Prince of Wales. The biggest thorn in King Henry’s side, however, is Northumberland’s valiant hardened warrior son Henry Percy, aka Harry Hotspur. He, his father, and several of their friends backed King Henry against Richard but now feel betrayed by his increasingly unreasonable demands of them, and with a severe communication breakdown depicted at the beginning of the play, the kingdom is about to tip over into civil war.

King Henry needs all the help he can get with fighting this rebellion. Unfortunately, though he is able to put armies out into the field, his eldest son and heir Henry, better known as Harry or Hal in the play (I know, there are a ton of Henrys/Harrys in this story) spends far more time drinking and carousing in the Boar’s Head Inn with his rowdy friends than he does in court or doing any of the things a crown prince is supposed to do. King Henry chastises his son enough that the young Henry is moved to actually be useful, riding off with his father to join him in battle, and finally killing Hotspur in single combat and winning some respect for himself for once. Part 2 picks up from this point, tracing Prince Harry as he prepares to take over from his increasingly ill father, and ending with his own coronation as King Henry V.

That synopsis might make these plays sound dry, but just the opposite. Part 1 especially is full of dirty jokes and hijinks carried out by Prince Harry and his friends, most notably the old gluttonous knight Sir John Falstaff. This guy is one of Shakespeare’s most famous and memorable characters, and for good reason: he’s both interesting and fun to watch, a complete wreck of a man, constantly drunk and constantly dodging his many debts, but also witty and charming in his own way. We probably all know someone like Falstaff — fun to hang around, the kind of guy whose bullshit stories you might listen to and just accept without pushing back because really, what else does he have going on, and he’ll probably die soon given his continual binging anyway.

The two Henry IV plays, adapted into film form for The Hollow Crown, feature another excellent cast with one of my favorites, no less than Jeremy Irons, as the king. I can’t think of a better actor to play an irritable old guy, at least as he is as an old guy now himself (and I still insist that the trashy Showtime history/sex show The Borgias was worth watching if only for his performance as the (in)famous Pope Alexander VI. Yeah, I’m standing by that one to the end, a shame it got canceled.)

The rest of the cast is also excellent, in particular Tom Hiddleston, now best known as Loki, playing the young Prince Hal and Simon Russell Beale as Falstaff, who I’ve only seen otherwise playing extremely evil bastard Lavrenti Beria in The Death of Stalin (also a very good film.) And a nice plus for fans of the sadly disgraced Game of Thrones HBO production: a few of the actors from that series show up here, with Harry Lloyd playing Mortimer (a far nicer guy than his GoT character, though that’s not a high bar) and Robert Pugh as Glendower (at least saner than his GoT character, which is saying nothing at all. I won’t get into that, though.)

This first part, focusing on Prince Harry and Hotspur as his foil, is my favorite of the two (and again, that seems to be the popular opinion; I’m not being a hipster this time either.) The two start out seemingly as near opposites: Hotspur is serious, ready for action, and hotheaded, while Harry only seems interested in getting drunk and messing with Falstaff and his other friends. However, by the end of the first part, Harry has surpassed Hotspur, actually killing him in battle and taking his place as the lauded honorable warrior prince guy. Though he hasn’t dropped his old ways by this point, it’s established that Harry was always actually serious-minded and only played up his raucous behavior to make him seem an even greater king in comparison to his wild younger days. That’s exactly what happens, though this early internal monologue of Harry’s might also be “cope” as the kids call it.

Can’t blame him, I’d hang out here too if it were the 1400s. This was the only real entertainment before we got the internet and subsequently VTubers.

Hotspur, by contrast, fails in the end despite his admirable qualities. His hotheadedness gets him in over his head at times, which is fun to watch (especially when he tells Glendower to stop bullshitting about an earthquake happening when he was born.) The alliance against Henry IV has problems outside his control, however, with Douglas or Worcester (I can’t tell all these earls apart) ending up fucking everyone over and getting his head cut off at the end, so it’s not so much that Hotspur fails as that his cause does, at least for the moment. And he got an English soccer team named after him 500 years after he died, and can you say that? Probably not.

The dramatized Battle of Shrewsbury is nice and exciting, but my favorite scenes take place in the Boar’s Head Inn with Harry and his drunk companions. That’s a place I’d love to be, drinking and singing with these crazy bastards. Probably more significantly, this is one of those points where Shakespeare writes about regular people instead of kings and dukes, with plenty of lewd jokes included. No wonder Falstaff was so popular, playing a central role in almost all these scenes, sometimes as the butt of the joke (being extremely large and drunk all the time and a coward among the regular insults) and sometimes dishing it out himself. For my favorite scene, see the mock interview with Harry and Falstaff playing himself and the king and then switching places. Hiddleston does a great Jeremy Irons impression, and Beale as Falstaff is memorable, giving the character some of that sadness, the “banish all the world” part especially.

But the fun has to come to an end, and Part 2 is more serious and dour, dealing with the old King Henry’s failing health and impending death as the young Henry realizes he has to step up more completely and prepare to take over the government of England. In doing so, he has to break with all his old friends and reconcile with his demanding father, with a great payoff just before the king’s death and a nice callback to Henry’s famously misquoted “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” line. That reconciliation also means that Falstaff and his entourage have to be cut off, and there’s some sadness there considering that Falstaff is at least kind of sympathetic — not an evil guy exactly, but just one who indulges way too much in the pleasures of life without thinking about the future or anything loftier than what he’s going to eat and who he’s going to scam (and the fact that he also gets scammed by his friends helps him be a little more sympathetic.)

Over time, though, Harry realizes that Falstaff can’t hang around him anymore and learns the extent of his manipulative behavior, talking shit about Harry when he thinks he’s not there. The same goes for his other companions, including his bro Ned Poins who just disappears after the end of Part 2 without a trace. From what I’ve read, there’s not much evidence to support this idea that the young soon-to-be Henry V hung out in bawdy taverns and had drunken parties with his friends, but it all makes for a good character arc and the most entertaining scenes in the play and film both, so it’s fine.

That’s all I have for Henry IV. The two Henry IV episodes of The Hollow Crown put together make a fun four-hour war drama/boozy comedy hybrid with great acting, and you should watch it. Just don’t use Falstaff as a role model. Should he get a place alongside Walter White, Jordan Belfry, and Don Draper on that “you missed the point” image meme?

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October 4, 2023

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Yet another AI lawsuit: Authors Guild v. OpenAI

Another case? I should say cases, because the above-named case isn’t the only one — I’ve read three other civil complaints, all making similar arguments and allegations against OpenAI and its various corporate entities.

This most recent filing attracted more attention likely because of the big names attached to it: the Authors Guild includes George R.R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, Jodi Picault, David Baldacci, and lawyers-turned-authors Scott Turow and John Grisham, all successful and celebrated writers. Last month, this group joined a few others in filing a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that the company violated their copyright by using two massive digital libraries to train ChatGPT. Each complaint I’ve read alleges that OpenAI could not possibly have 1) used only non-copyrighted writing in its pool of training material or 2) used copyrighted work with proper permission, but I don’t feel like dissecting three or four complaints that more or less make the same arguments.

So Authors Guild v. OpenAI, Inc. Here’s the 47-page complaint if you want to read it for yourself. The gist of the argument can be found on pages 10 through 15: that the two libraries of work OpenAI used to train ChatGPT contained a large amount of pirated material and that OpenAI knowingly used said libraries (which it has called “Books1” and “Books2”, great imagination for naming there) to train ChatGPT. OpenAI is well known for its lack of transparency in its methods and has refused as expected to provide details about these libraries, but the plaintiffs’ attorneys have inferred that their clients’ and many other authors’ works were illicitly ripped and fed into ChatGPT. I miss robot assholes when they weren’t so livelihood-threatening and were also funnier.

I’m not concerned with the remedy these or any other plaintiffs have asked for, partly because I believe they won’t get it, and partly because I’m neither a successful nor a celebrated author and so don’t have any personal interest in the judgment (or settlement, but I don’t expect a settlement either under the circumstances.) I’m only interested in the argument that OpenAI knowingly (because how could it have been unknowing?) violated copyright in training its learning machines. This has long been an allegation not just against ChatGPT but also image generators like Midjourney that I’ve written about before.

This time, there are a couple of important differences. The difference in medium is the obvious one, but the allegation of using specific libraries of largely copyrighted works is another, as least as far as I’ve read. I believe this and similar cases might include some discovery disputes when the plaintiffs ask for information about the libraries and the defendants respond with “that’s a trade secret.” The good news for the plaintiff authors if this counter comes up is that there are ways to protect trade secrets in court aside from withholding relevant documents. The parties can agree to a special protective order to keep documents containing such secrets highly confidential and out of the public eye, and in some cases an “attorney’s eyes only” stamp might be applied if one party really doesn’t want the other to directly see the hot information.

Now that I’ve bored you with talk about discovery and protective orders, I’ll get back to the real subject: whether working from a library of copyrighted books without the authors’ permissions to train an LLM is a violation of copyright law. I think it probably is, but I could just as easily argue the other side if I were paid enough (and there’s a lawyer’s integrity for you.) We don’t even have to guess at what defense OpenAI might use, because they’ve already used it in their answer against Sarah Silverman’s complaint a few months ago. Silverman v. OpenAI, Inc. is currently caught in a fight over the defendants’ answer and motion to dismiss, in which they raise a defense of transformative use, which I’ve also brought up before. Once again, that defense hasn’t yet been tested in court because all this shit is still so new and courts move at a snail’s pace, though we may get a better idea of the courts’ approaches to transformative use in this context soon. The only other comment I have to make about OpenAI’s likely answer is that they seem to lean pretty hard on that “copyright law is meant to promote science and art” part of Article I of the Constitution, which might be good news — aspirational sentences from the Constitution almost always fail against the letter of the law in legal argument.

For now, I’ll set these cases alongside the others I’m watching that relate to AI generators and potential copyright violation. Generally speaking, I think I’ve gone from anger and distress over it to bitter resignation over the past year. The development of text generators naturally hits me the hardest, though I take some solace in the fact that even fairly competent AI writing is still stiff and formulaic. I also extremely doubt Sam Altman’s sincerity when he says OpenAI’s goal is to help humanity, but then maybe I’m just too much of a bitter fuck to believe him on the off-chance he’s telling the truth. Until next time.

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September 27, 2023

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Historical drama film review: The Hollow Crown: Richard II

Throw a Shin Megami Tensei in the front and Raidou Kuzunoha vs. Whoever on the back of that post title. But no other title works, because after rewatching Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V, I got interested in Shakespeare’s historical plays again and decided to pick up The Hollow Crown, a highly praised TV production of the histories from Richard II all the way to Richard III (which might just sound like two sequels to a film called Richard, but there are six Henrys in the middle there.)

That’s eight films, and I should be clear that I’m not committing to watching all of them, but maybe I will. You’ve seen how good I am at keeping series like this going. (I will finish that King Crimson runthrough, I swear.) But for now, I can at least say that I’ve watched Richard II, the first part of the Henriad cycle of plays, and now I’ll talk about it.

At the start of the play, King Richard II of England is sitting in his fancy palace holding court. The Plantagenet king was into the arts and liked nice things, so when his cousin Henry Bolingbroke and other guy whose name I forget enter court and challenge each other to a duel, Richard isn’t happy. Despite his and Henry’s father John of Gaunt (an extra-important guy in English history of the period) trying to cool things down, the duel is set. However, Richard uses his royal privilege to cancel the duel and just exile both, Henry for several years and the other guy forever.

Richard isn’t just a sensitive soul, however. While Henry is exiled, his father John loses his strength and curses the king from his deathbed to his face, accusing him of being corrupted by flatterers and a spendthrift. After he dramatically dies even before a pissed off Richard has left his house, the king turns back to tell his boys to seize the property for the crown. He wants to invade Ireland like an asshole and he needs the money.

Henry responds just about how you’d expect. Rowing a boat back across the Channel, the dispossessed son gathers an army back in England and starts for London, or wherever the king is. Only the king is still in Ireland at this point. When he finally returns, Richard learns that everyone hates him and has abandoned him aside from a few loyal retainers. Not even his three best bro sycophants survived, all taken and killed by Henry (featuring two very graphic beheadings — wouldn’t be a rebellion without beheadings.)

This all ends as you’d expect, with Henry winning the war and taking the crown from Richard. The future King Henry IV would have the taint of usurpation on him, but people still seemed to like him a lot more than the last guy (at least right now) so who cares? Richard ends up locked in a dungeon, where assassins meet him at the end of the play to kill him following a very badly managed coup plot uncovered against Henry.

Richard II, who became king as a boy and had the fanciest portrait known to man

That’s Richard II, and though I’m not an expert, it seems pretty close to the history I’ve heard very broadly speaking. These events all pretty much happened, probably with some embellishment in parts. I don’t know too much about the historical figure except that he really was reported to have been a lover and patron of the arts, which is very cool, but also that he did invade Ireland and disinherited Henry among other nobles to fund that war, which wasn’t, at least if you were a 14th century English noble or Irish person in general probably. I imagine all his fancy building projects added to that deficit. However, I’ve also read that Shakespeare’s portrait of Richard himself wasn’t all that fair, which wouldn’t be a surprise at all considering what he did to Richard III.

I’m far more interested in the theme of legitimacy and power throughout Richard II than in its accuracy, however. Shakespeare playing loose with his historical characters will become a running theme as far as I can tell (a lot of that supposed to have been taken from Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles that might have some accuracy problems itself) but this is drama, and the broad themes can have plenty of truth to them no matter how off the characters are from their real-life counterparts. A lot of Richard II deals with the concept of legitimate rule and of the value of loyalty to a shitty leader who has the right to rule anyway by virtue of birth (which it has in common with modern classic Legend of the Galactic Heroes, just by the by.) And while that might not have much meaning to a modern person lucky enough to live in a democratic state, it’s been a concern of pretty much everyone for almost all of human history, including the medieval period of Richard II and the Renaissance of Shakespeare’s England.

I don’t know whether the real Richard II was truly lousy enough that he deserved to be deposed, but the character certainly is. However, he was also undoubtedly legitimate according to the law of the time, and on top of the law sat his divine right: the concept in Europe that God appointed kings to rule who were for that reason semi-sacred themselves. So when God made a bad choice of king for some mysterious reason of his own, you had to just put up with it and not depose or kill his pick. Not that this divine right stopped kings in England from getting their shit fucked up — see William II (hunting “accident” while alone with his younger brother and heir) and Edward II (deposed and allegedly killed with a hot poker up the ass, though this is debatable) — but divine right could act as a kind of shield against overthrow.

Speaking of portraits, I can only hope I have the most famous image of me be a portrait as cool as John of Gaunt’s. I’d also like Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights as my theme song.

Richard II sure as hell needed all the shield he could get, and yet he’s such an awful, tone-deaf king in the play that he has no hope of survival, much less of keeping his crown. Where he’s ruled by sycophants, his cousin Henry Bolingbroke is a decisive and serious badass warrior. It’s kind of weird that Richard seemed to think his cousin who everyone liked wouldn’t come back from exile after being disinherited, but maybe the man was just that blind and/or arrogant.

Even then, Richard ends up as such a pathetic character that despite doing it all to himself, I still felt a little bad about his demise in the end. Part of that might have to do with Ben Whishaw’s great performance opposite Rory Kinnear as the grim Henry IV, but the dude does not stop complaining since he scrambles back over from Ireland. Complaining about being deposed, about losing all his supporters, about how his divine right isn’t being respected. And Richard isn’t the only one complaining. John of Gaunt complains about dying while his son is exiled and about the king being an asshole (always fun to watch Patrick Stewart rage though), Henry complains about Richard disinheriting him and killing his father indirectly because he sucked so much, Henry and Richard’s uncle York complains about his nephews both being dicks and then about his own son being a traitor, etc. etc. And the entire last third of Richard II is Richard complaining about and to Henry, mostly about him being forced to abdicate as he makes matters as awkward for Henry as possible.

Take it from a complainer — I understand where Richard is coming from. I don’t believe in kings or divine right or any of that, but imagine growing up as king from the age of 10. It would probably fuck with your brain, wouldn’t it? His bitterness at losing the crown feels very natural, as does some of the apprehension we see on Henry’s face while they have their long back-and-forth. But in the end, Richard sucks, and he’s now gone and soon to be dead, and Henry is king: long live Henry IV, the guy who just started the god damn Wars of the Roses.

Maybe it doesn’t make much sense, but I didn’t enjoy Richard II, or Complaining: The Play, all that much even though it’s well-written and acted. There aren’t any faults with it that I can see aside from maybe too much emphasis on Richard moaning for 30+ minutes, but then again people in Shakespeare’s time might have seen that as significant. Kings didn’t get deposed that often back then — only Edward II got that treatment, and while I think the Anglo-Saxon period had one or two coups, that’s so far removed from even the play’s 14th century setting that it hardly counts at this point.

My problem is that I can’t sympathize with Richard at all, at least until he gets thrown into that dungeon and killed (or more likely in real life just starved or wasted away from disease, but assassination is more dramatic.) But he’s not a compelling villain either like Richard III — he’s just kind of a spoiled asshole. Though the last third of the play, for all its complaining, is pretty compelling in how it depicts Richard’s breakdown from “king” to “guy thrown in a dungeon and left to die.” Good news for him, it could have been worse — at least he didn’t go out like Emperor Andronikos I Komnenos of the Byzantines. (Don’t look it up if your stomach is weak, it went pretty damn badly for him.)

So maybe Richard II is fine, but I’m just looking forward to the next two plays in the Henriad, because I know those are some fun, and real crowd-pleasers in Shakespeare’s time too. While Henry IV mixes a lot of drama and comedy together, Richard II is totally humorless. That suits its grim subject at least, and it seems meant to be much more contemplative all the way through. I just prefer some crass humor thrown in with that contemplation. Look at the anime I like — that’s just my thing.

Speaking of, next up in this series is Henry IV and a lot of drunken disorderliness and even more civil wars. I’ll be taking both parts on at once, too, so look forward to that if it grabs your interest. Until next time!

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September 22, 2023

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anime

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Thoughts on Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These – Collision

Even more legendary heroes of the future galaxy. If Legend of the Galactic Heroes is the actual future, maybe it’s better that we don’t have one — only a shitty world needs heroes.

Sorry, enough doom from me for now. This third season of LOGH: Die Neue These is titled Collision, which is a pretty accurate one. Collision is also full of political intrigue, even more than the first two seasons, with the de facto independent state of Fezzan taking a more prominent role in the story. However, the greatest focus is placed as usual on the two great heroes of the story: Duke Reinhard von Lohengramm, the young conqueror and now Kaiser of the Galactic Empire in all but name, and Admiral Yang Wen-li, the democratic military genius who hates war.

I thought about just pushing through the fourth season and getting current with the series — the third and fourth both aired last year, with no sign yet of the fifth (though there was a three-year gap between seasons 2 and 3, so that doesn’t mean much.) But my OCD wouldn’t allow that, so here I am writing another seasonal thoughts post, again with spoilers. LOGH provides more than enough to talk about, anyway, so it’s all right.

Yang and Frederica on Iserlohn, which looks like a nice place to live. Too bad Yang can’t just spend his days there sleeping, drinking brandy, and reading/writing history.

Having settled both civil wars last season, the Empire and Alliance are back to the usual ongoing war for the entire galaxy. Yang, now commander of the key space fortress Iserlohn that he won from the Empire, is at the front line of that war with his entourage, including his adopted son and newly-minted fighter pilot Julian Mintz. Or Minci from what I remember in the OVA subs — not sure what his official name is, but I’ll call him Mintz here since this show does.

Meanwhile, Reinhard sits in the Imperial capital Odin as its de facto ruler, turning from a fleet admiral to an administrator. The Kaiser, Erwin Josef II, is a child and a mere pawn, and Reinhard controls him completely now. Not that the kid is old enough to care, and all the better for Reinhard, who would rather not kill the young Kaiser and usurp the throne. At least not yet, and certainly not while the Alliance still holds Iserlohn Fortress, the gate between the two empires. (Just ignore whatever the fuck explanation the story gives again about “impassable zones in space” or whatever. That honestly still bothers me a little, but other physically extremely improbable things happen in this show and this season, so whatever.)

Reinhard sends off a couple of fleets to attack Alliance fleets outside Iserlohn, drawing Yang into still another battle. But no second face-to-face between them yet: Reinhard stays behind to direct the massive reforms he has planned for the Empire. He has extremely capable and loyal men and woman (his chief advisor and political genius Hildegard von Mariendorf, one of only a few prominent women in the series) to help him, but the death of his best friend/sworn brother Admiral Siegfried Kircheis seems to have left a hole inside him.

Hilde contemplating a pretty cold-hearted decision from Reinhard. This will be the first of many “If only Kircheis were here” comments throughout the show.

Reinhard’s rise is bad news for the Alliance, both for his skill in battle and for his popularity among the people of the Empire. We get the sense that they pretty much tolerated the late Friedrich IV because they had to (though he didn’t exactly seem to be a monster and even kind of knowingly helped Reinhard topple his aging dynasty by raising him up, to be fair to him.) But Reinhard, now made a duke at the pinnacle of the nobility, uses his power to tear down the old crusty upper class and its privileges, granting the people some degree of political and civil rights. We don’t get a sense of the scope of these reforms — LOGH isn’t an extremely deep political drama in that sense, which works given its huge scope — but it’s enough that we see some commoners cheering and toasting the guy at taverns in town.

The people of the Alliance, meanwhile, do not love their government. I can’t blame them, since most of the Alliance ministers are some combination of raging asshole and complete idiot (and again, LOGH is so extremely relevant right now, even more than when the OVA was released, at least for us Americans.) But this all spells trouble for Yang, who is about to get entangled in exactly the kind of political intrigue bullshit he’s always tried to avoid.

Enter this guy, whose name I always forget, but it’s Adrian Rubinsky, ruler of Fezzan.

Collision is divided into three parts as I see it (and it was originally aired as three limited-release films before its TV run, which just confirms that thinking.) This first part is setup for the rest of the season, establishing Julian as an increasingly important character and with a hint of what new role Frederica might play soon, and giving us a look at the newly reformed Empire. On the Alliance side, I’m always happy to hear more of Yang’s complaints about wanting to retire while stationed on Iserlohn, partly because I relate to them. Though I’m not a military genius, I also hate both war and attention (not that I’ve ever had any of either, so can I really talk about it?)

However, despite his relative lack of ambition, Yang has been thrust into a dangerous position, one that he seems to understand very well but doesn’t give much thought. Thankfully, his old mentor Rear Admiral Casernes is always practical and warns Julian that his adopted father will need to be protected from threats that remain unsaid, but that we can understand to be the Alliance government itself.

Here’s where Julian starts some heavy lifting in the series. I’ve heard some people don’t like him — maybe it’s a Wesley Crusher kind of situation? But I didn’t hate Wesley that much, honestly, and Julian is no Wesley (in a good way.)

As Yang considers his and Julian’s futures, Reinhard is deep in thought about the past. If you missed Kircheis, good news: he’s still around in flashback form, specifically in the show’s accounts of the Klopstock Incident in which a disgraced nobleman tries and fails to assassinate Kaiser Friedrich at a party with a bomb, with Reinhard sustaining minor injuries and Kircheis running to his rescue, and of their winning over of the “Twin Pillar” Admirals Mittermeyer and Reuenthal. Mittermeyer takes his place here as another one of the best characters in the series, executing a noble officer and war criminal on the spot in accordance with military law. Not that I’m a fan of summary executions, but it’s hard to feel bad for a guy who murders a civilian in cold blood to loot her corpse.

Of course, Mittermeyer pays the price, given the officer he killed was connected to Duke Braunschweig. After this mere commoner tells the nobility to their faces what they are, he gets tossed in prison and whipped by the sadistic Baron Flegel before his best friend Reuenthal comes to rescue him with Reinhard and Kircheis in exchange for their sworn loyalty. It’s all good stuff, though I wonder whether these episodes would have worked better if they’d played chronologically instead — we could have gotten a hint of Braunschweig’s and Flegel’s evil before the whole Geiersburg rebellion, making their disgraceful deaths all the more satisfying.

Fine, add Mittermeyer to the man-crush list. Though calling Flegel a pig isn’t fair at all — pigs actually have a use in society.

This leads into the middle section of the season, my personal favorite. We’ve seen a little of Fezzan, but now it becomes a major player in galactic politics. Relatively small, but an economic powerhouse, Fezzan and its leader Rubinsky make a policy of playing both sides in the war to their own benefit, and also in theory to the benefit of a weird shadowy religion/terrorist group called the Earth Cult who have serious influence on the planet. Rubinsky has his own plans, however, and puts them into action with the help of his aide/secretary Rupert Kesserling. Kesserling is a smooth operator and just the kind of guy you’d want to do some intrigue for you, just as long as you keep an eye on him at the same time.

Fuck this guy, though he’s also pretty fun to watch in a Machiavellian way

Kesserling is tasked with forcing a defected Imperial Captain Schumacher, the guy who shot Flegel on his own battleship’s bridge, to join an escaped nobleman in Fezzan and do… something. What that something is isn’t clear, but it’s aimed at Reinhard and meant to save the Goldenbaum Dynasty. On the upside, I like both these guys: Schumacher seems like a decent type and also killed Flegel, and while Count Landsberg was very much on the wrong side of the Geiersburg thing, he’s so damn enthusiastic and friendly that he’s hard to hate.

The second item on Kesserling’s list is to fuck up Yang Wen-li’s day. When he visits the Alliance commissioner, Kesserling suggests that Fezzan will refuse to buy new Alliance bonds if Yang isn’t subjected to an inquiry. An inquiry for what? Surely you can think of something, Commissioner. Kesserling suggests that Yang’s destruction of Heinessen’s defenses in his suppression of the coup the previous year was just setup for his own coup. Never mind that Yang would be the last man in the galaxy to use his power in that way — the commissioner is completely played by Kesserling and phones the capital, setting the wheels in motion for Yang to get recalled from Iserlohn at just the perfect time for the Empire to attack it.

And here’s my absolute favorite part of this season. The inquiry is one of the landmark events of LOGH, at least for me. It’s not a massive space battle (and that is coming very soon, trust me) but it is a battle of wits, and in either kind of battle, Yang has the advantage.

After returning to Heinessen with Lt. Greenhill and a small entourage, Yang is immediately separated from them, locked in a hotel room (a pretty decent-looking one with free room service, but still) and called out for lengthy interrogations by the entire cabinet of the Alliance government less President Trunicht, who don’t seem to like getting his hands dirty. Most of the ministers, and one especially vile dumbass in particular, do their best to drag Yang over the coals, all but accusing him of planning to overthrow them. Yang, completely without and denied moral support or legal assistance, holds his ground and pushes back on the inquiry, openly mocking it as unjust. All the while, Frederica is just outside working her ass off to get Yang freed.

Find another anime that involves legal argument so often. Unless it’s the Phoenix Wright anime, maybe.

I can’t post the Neue These version, but here’s a small part of the inquiry as depicted in the old OVA. That’s part of what I love LOGH for: it’s a clash not just of arms but of ideas, with Yang representing the individual will against a national hivemind. That stance is sometimes used in a libertarian way, but they don’t completely own it, because it fits just as well with a more regulated and ordered society that recognizes the state serves the people and not the people the state. And it’s a nice lesson for our own horrific political climate when this court of inquiry is so fucking recognizable. Just turn on C-SPAN one day if you’re here in the US and watch a House or Senate hearing, though I think I’d rather have the LOGH Alliance guy yelling at me than Jim Jordan or one of our own other elected clowns.

Sorry, no more current real-life politics, though you probably could have guessed at my political leanings already anyway, and it’s really impossible to talk about LOGH without getting into politics. Back to the story, Yang is about ready to submit his resignation to these asshats (which they’d probably take as a power move on his part when we know it would be genuine) when the inquiry is abruptly halted. What could have changed the ministers’ hearts?

This is where that third part of the season begins.

Back on Odin, Reinhard makes a daring move against the Alliance by using the military chief engineer’s idea to warp Geiersburg Fortress all the way to Iserlohn in order to destroy it. Reinhard doesn’t care for the engineer, who actually is an asshole, but not an incompetent one as he sees, because the plan works. Commanded by Admiral Kempff, who badly needs a win after a bitter defeat at the hands of Yang, Geiersburg begins a fortress vs. fortress death laser battle with Iserlohn before finally breaking off and deploying its fleet. Star Wars fans who have ever wondered about two Death Stars fighting it out, do yourselves a favor and at least watch episode 34, if I haven’t yet convinced you to watch the whole thing.

Of course, Yang isn’t in Iserlohn thanks to the dumbass groundless government inquiry he got forced through, and he’s still a few weeks out from his base, but thankfully the Imperial forces don’t know that, or at least not yet. While Yang is the genius of the Alliance, he’s also surrounded by extremely smart people who manage to at least hold their own as the two sides move and counter each other in a deadly game of space navy chess. Said game is made more interesting by Kempff’s having to guess at whether Yang is actually in Iserlohn or not as rumors begin to seep across the battlefield.

Kempff has that real Prussian officer spirit that seems like it’s going to get him killed (I’m also considering the many death flags he tripped just a few episodes before this.)

The guys at Iserlohn manage to hold Kempff, Müller, and their sailors off until Yang arrives, and thanks to his practically psychic link with Julian, the two figure out what each will do and coordinate their tactics even with all communications knocked out by the Imperials. This puts Kempff in the path of an ambush, and here he decides to just smash Geiersburg the fuck into Iserlohn and wipe it out.

And that’s where the season ends if you can believe it. Quite a cliffhanger, making this season probably feel more like half of a longer season considering the next also aired in 2022. While seeing these two huge fortresses blast the shit out of each other is fun, not to mention the hand-to-hand combat led by coolest man alive Walter von Schönkopf, I was more interested in the personal and political drama as usual, I say as I pour my fine cognac and sniff my cigar in my Corinthian leather chair. But you don’t have to be a snob to like this stuff when it’s so compelling.

If only I could just think this was a total fantasy and could never happen where I live.

The most interesting developments to me occurred in the Alliance this season. Not that Reinhard’s plans for reform and conquest aren’t important, but he essentially spends Collision consolidating his position and popularity as Prime Minister, initiating a new plan to attack Iserlohn that he’d already been planning to do anyway, and mourning Kircheis, talking to the lock of his hair in a pendant he always wears. The most change among the Imperial side seems to involve Hildegard von Mariendorf, now on her way to perhaps fill Kircheis’ role as a softening agent for Reinhard (which makes her sound like one of those fabric-softening sheets you use in the dryer, so maybe not the best term.)

man

I already know how this story goes as the OVA tells it, but if you don’t, I won’t spoil anything beyond this season. Let’s just hope that Reinhard can patch up that hole inside him, because if he can’t, it might turn out badly for the whole galaxy. Even his proposal to smash Geiersburg into Iserlohn, which he doesn’t actually express to Admiral Kempff but leaves it to him to figure out on his own, is pretty damn cold when you know that the base doubles as a city of three million including a lot of civilians who I guess would all just get killed.

The situation in the Alliance is more interesting, meaning it’s a lot less stable. The previous season’s military coup has the government understandably shaken, but putting their best admiral on secret quasi-trial without counsel, and at a time when the Empire is prepared to attack, is just about the worst way to deal with the matter. Apparently their intelligence service sucks pretty badly.

I say this several times a day, and I also never actually quit.

The tension in this situation is realistic. Just look at Reinhard, carrying out a sort of “soft coup” in just that way, but real-life history bears that fear out as well: see again Napoleon taking control of France in 1799 and Julius Caesar in his famous Rubicon crossing. Popular generals, or in this case admirals, can pose extreme danger to an unstable leadership with waning public support. For that reason among others, I understand why a civilian government might want to conduct an inquiry into the conduct of one of its highest military officers.

But then we know Yang doesn’t want power. One of the tragic stupidities here is that his government doesn’t seem to get that and creates a problem where it doesn’t exist. Or else they believe his low-key guy act is just that, which is equally tragic for him. But even if they knew his character, he might be subject to political intrigues anyway — Fezzan certainly doesn’t give a damn about his true character as long as they can get their way by using fear over his popularity to jerk the Alliance around.

To go off on another political rant, I’m a committed democrat in the broad sense of the term, but what’s to be done when the people elect enough assholes and con artists that that lot can take control legally and dictate the course of the state? I know the answer isn’t “do a coup”, but I don’t have my own answer to that question, which I wish were a purely historical and hypothetical one. Add in a lot of rot that’s probably natural in a republic still running on an essentially unchanged 240 year-old document, and you have modern America (and to various extents, other countries face similar political decay or have completely collapsed.) We live in an interesting time ourselves, and that is an absolute fucking curse.

With all his positive reforms, Reinhard might be an alternative people go for, but how often is an absolute ruler not also corrupt, vicious, and/or incompetent? As attractive as enlightened absolutism might seem, for every Frederick the Great you get a Wilhelm II to fuck everything up.

My feelings about Die Neue These haven’t changed much since watching the second season: it’s pretty much all good stuff, but the OVA has at least a little more depth and is still the better option as far as I’m concerned. But again there’s the whole 80s look to it, and I understand why someone would prefer DNT for that or other reasons. It’s not like they dumbed the story down as far as I can recall, so you can probably just ignore my nitpicking.

Really the only part of this season, and of the show up to this point, I didn’t care for much was Reuenthal’s backstory about how he doesn’t like or trust women because his mom tried to stab his eye out when he was a baby. This explanation doesn’t make much sense to either me or Mittermeyer, who’s very happily married and thinks his friend would be happier letting his prejudice go. Sure, hate your mom for that, but all women? Aside from Reuenthal’s hangups, the story itself feels strangely out of place at this point. Though to be fair, Reuenthal will also be a major player in the series moving forward, so the focus on his personality together with Mittermeyer’s is welcome.

As for all the rest, I approve. I also feel better having gotten some complaining about modern-day politics out of my system after saying I wouldn’t repeatedly, but it’s always good to just let it out, and that’s one of the reasons I write here, after all. Next time, I’ll probably take on something lighter than LOGH with all its war crimes and secret interrogations, so until then.

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Thoughts on Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These – Collision

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