The Yard Sale
Unfulfilled, overbearing desire breeds moments of idiocy. But sometimes, it can be confused with the muffled cries of the Muse, opening doors you were too afraid to open for one reason or another.
This post has turned from vision to creation. Hosanna (work in progress preview, 39.5mb Xvid). My first AMV EVAR zomg.
Manabi Straight Banzai!
It’s not just about Manabi Straight anymore, honest!
The realization came when watching Sola 7 – the show has changed from that mysterious lukewarm eroge-anime-wannabe to …well, a more memorable eroge-anime-wannabe. Realizing the show has “gotten good” it sort of poked me into thinking about how it did so.
But first, it wasn’t so much the show has gotten good, but rather that it has gotten somewhere. Sola is still a show cloaked in mystery and they managed to reveal as little as possible without making it like Higurashi. But what’s great about Sola in the first place is that it isn’t the mystery that is driving the viewers, but the characters and their unsettling relationships. It’s not the same as how NHK ni Yokoso is memorable because that’s just shock and “interesting social issue.” It’s not the same as how Paprika is memorable by being “very pretty and thought provoking.” It’s not even like how Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo was memorable as charming and moving. Sola is memorable because it is “unexpectedly charming” and “cute.”
And I don’t know about you, “cute” doesn’t go far for a redeeming trait for an anime. It’s almost a genre definition. To be honest I don’t know what would go far, as people find different things to be remarkable and memorable. But one thing that makes memorable is something that echo with the audience’s experiences in a visceral way. Like FLCL’s first episode.
Uninstall is a good example of being memorable in the short-term through something more visceral.
To be fair, Sola is still in limbo: it’s going places but where will we end up when we get off the bus? Will we roll out of a train wreck or get high like a cable car up Hakodate? And that’s the other sort of impression, the one a lot of us like: impression through superior story and theme.
This is just a list of really neat things that I’m putting together (with help from many others; you know who you are) that makes Manabi Straight’s ending such an awesome experience. It’s proudly a contender for my Best Ending Evar.
Needless to say, SPOILERS. But such good, warm, fuzzy spoilers.
Damn you Funimation, better get on with it!
Feel free to add your own to this list in the comments or anywhere!
I guess this needs a comment.
![[your_mom] delivers!](http://omo.serenana.info/wp-content/photos/snapshot20070517205816.jpg)
“Did anyone notice DNA‘s ass”? You bet I did. Actually if you paid attention the past 7 episodes you would realize depending on the angle of their butts, definition vary. And this applies indiscriminately to all the characters in the show. Normally I’d chalk it up to cheap production values; after all this is not a show that is suppose to wow you with great animation; it’s by all means pulp space opera. Naturally when you just want to get some character on the screen, you pay attention to their upper body and face, but their lower body is mainly just for walkinglooking like the character is like a human. How do you draw flabby or flat butts anyways? Throw two generic curves in and we’re all set! At least she has correct looking chops in the OP.
Of course, the comment comes in an inopportune time, in my opinion. The end of episode 7 was fairly impressive; unexpectedly finding help in the form of the largest-boobed fleet commander (am I making an accurate statement here?), right after some awesome Iron Tribe fireworks is something refreshing and “yay.” And if you’re like him:
You know where your eyes are pointing at.
So I guess it’s only because I’m watching episode seven for the second time that I actually paid DNA’s ass any attention.
One common element shared by far majority of TV anime is the high school setting. Many of us who watch anime regularly may have long since gotten used to this subtle background fact of life.
Invariably a lot of the material used to make anime are aimed for the adolescent crowd, so high schools are popular settings by extension. But what is high school life like for a Japanese kid? I have no first-person experience, so I can’t say. I imagine for the lot of the non-Asian viewers, that will be the case.
Even if the Japanese education system is a bit of a hybrid between East and West, the focus on entrance exams has long twisted the Japanese education system, on practical grounds, as a means of a guide to some sort of standard of education, a setting of norm. If you did well in school you would have a shot at getting into a good college, and from that a decent job opportunity. If you’re just an egghead, then you will naturally excel in academics and if you end up in academia, all the more better. If you don’t do so well in school, there’s always hard, sweat-of-the-brow work. Or, marriage and home making.
But being an exaggerated means of escapism, anime and manga as I observed it…well, no one likes to be reminded of their day-to-day reality, especially that one big fat exam which torments their collective, uncertain future. Sure, we all can share with living under that sort of stress to some degree, but it’s another story to experience life in a society where that’s everything.
A bit of sharing: at my cram class today the professor decided to do a bit of public service and reminded us the best way to relieve anxiety is to place the impending exam in context: that there is something more important in life than one’s career, or one’s job prospect, or what will happen to us if we fail. Gain an appreciation for life right now; we are probably more fortunate than many others. At the least, not being totally strung out on stress is likely help your exam performance.
But at the same time, this stress is appreciated. It gives you a perspective.
Utopia is where Manabi Straight takes place. It’s a world without that perspective, or I should say, it actually realizes a set of fears many people in Japan should have: that when people graduate, they won’t have jobs; when people graduate, they’ll find themselves holding a depreciated piece of paper because everyone has one; when people graduate, they’ll do the same things people who are younger are doing a better job with, thanks to the future curve; when people graduate, they won’t find a more fulfilling life than before they graduate.
So what does schooling offer them? Why are we spending time milling away when we could be starting our careers today? Just because some people pay you more later on? Perhaps that is counter to the harsh reality of today, but the stress won’t end.
At the end of it all, I guess, the point is that anime is entertainment, but the healing nature of Manabi Straight comes across as the background theme behind all the commotion that we talk about. It’s a calculated effort; a show for freeters and salarymen and just those people struggling with their grinds from one period of their life to the next.