Valvrave has garnered lots of attention. I probably don’t need to describe it. I take it as further confirmation of my belief that the CE Gundam opening moves are now so familiar that they can be used as background.

Gargantia

So far Gargantia hasn’t been very good giant robot show, but I’ve been enjoying its fish-out-of-water plot. Mildly. Wouldn’t want to get too enthusiastic about something this forgettable.

Majestic Prince

An interesting one. It’s not very serious and absolutely has a parodic edge to it, but it’s also occasionally sombre. This probably won’t work for that many people, but I’m buying into it for now. Maybe it’s the surprisingly tentative opening song.

3DPD

The present age being one of petty, diminished things, all three use CG for their giant robots. I find the work in Gargantia least satisfying. Valvrave and Majestic have the advantage of setting at least some of their fighting against the more anodyne background of space. And Majestic‘s robots are plasticky, commercialised objects within the show’s own fiction, too.

Southern Cross

Really, the mecha show that matters most to me at present is Southern Cross. It’s fun and there’s no CG. And I like the Southern Cross Army’s body armour.

I imagine someone somewhere is accusing it of being just animation for animation’s sake, about nothing.

I’m not sure being that is a problem. But thankfully that’s not a discussion we need to have, ‘cos LWA does have a subject. It’s not necessarily clever or (if you ask me) interesting, but it is appropriate to the project: it bounces craft-as-entertainment and pragmatic craft and craft-for-craft’s sake off each other and then synthesises them.

First, though, let’s question the rules. I have a hard time thinking of television I’d like to see, because I really want some careful, expensive animation, and a lot of televised anime rather lacks that.

I also distrust the excitement about newness and the rejection of nostalgia: as I’m sure GL knows, nostalgia felt in 2012 for, say, the seventies is at least as much a new, fresh event of 2012 as a desire for the new. Indeed, nostalgia is more current than neophily, because modern people always want new things, unthinkingly, while nostalgia entails an awareness of the present’s difference from the past, and of past’s distance. The nostalgic fan knows that they are in the-year-of-our-Lord 2012, which the neophile does not, or at least does not automatically.

At least, that’s what I imagine it feels like. As my fanhood dates to the noughties, I’m incapable of feeling nostalgia for anime.  Arcadia of My Youth and Mouretsu Pirates are equally new to me. I’m in my mid-twenties and so barely capable of feeling nostalgia for anything: I just haven’t been sentient for very long.

Anyhow, what would I like to see? Well, I have a soft spot for Britsploitation material. That’s why I was able to enjoy a surprisingly large amount of Earl and Fairy, why I like Hellsing more than I should and why I might watch the K-ON film despite never having dabbled in the franchise before. So I’d enjoy something set in the UK, and I’d probably enjoy its inaccuracies at least as much as its accuracies.

It must have some mecha element, that’s a given. I propose motorcycles that transform into exoskeletons, perhaps operated by an organisation which cynically uses a Big Society social enterprise as a front. Less glamourous than Harlington-Straker Film Studios, but it’ll have to do. Grudgingly, I’d accept a limited number of fights, not for the narrative reasons offered by GL in his hypothetical title, but to hoard money so that what action there is can look nice. So substantial amounts of time should be spent on detective work and quietly tense pavement-pounding. But the tone of the show should have an irreverent edge to it, not dissimilar to, though more tongue-in-cheek than, Darker Than Black‘s hardboiled episodes. Perhaps Yousuke Kuroda (in a good phase) and maybe Hiroyuki Kawasaki writing, though I’ve no sense for this sort of thing. tl;dr? Scryed in the Shellsing.

Or, if you don’t like that, how about a slow-burning anime about the Fermi paradox, with particular inspiration, though no outright adaption, from The Killing Star‘s take?

Recycling material is fine so long as the material is good. And often it is good, especially when it’s a more formalised, expected component like a transformation or combination or launch sequence. I don’t mind watching goodness several times. In my better moments, I rather like the idea of watching goodness several times.

Furthermore, stock footage has a certain reliability. However dull the rest of the episode is, at least I can bank on the manly combination to be great. This is an efficient way for animators to spend money and time.

And if you’re not convinced that repetition has its place, consider the two most commonly recycled elements of your standard anime episode, which we all take for granted: the OP and the ED.

(Would I take much the same stance on grander kinds of re-use, like repeatedly using the same premise? Of course I would. Of course.)

But it was never much more than acceptable (‘as average as it gets for PreCure‘), and contained little to entertain normal adults, so what I’m saying is, I suppose, that you, dear reader, probably shouldn’t bother trying it.

That judgement makes me think about how we divide up the franchise as a whole. There’s a trend towards what I’d call Heartcatch exceptionalism: the position that Heartcatch Precure is, quality-wise, just better than the other iterations. Reluctantly, I agree. Reluctantly, because while I like Heartcatch very much, it’s not probably not my favourite—I think I prefer the original, which was my introduction to Precure a year or so ago.

Heartcatch is also one of the bits of the franchise most easily enjoyed by more normal anime fans. I’ll put it another way: I’ll cheerfully watch a boring, cheaply-animated, bad episode of Precure because there are things in the franchise’s central concepts which I enjoy, entirely independently of the quality of their execution. You are probably not like this. Heartcatch is better-placed to appeal to you. (The All-Stars DX movies are the other bit of the franchise worth checking, because they are short and endearingly mad.)

Oddly enough Heartcatch‘s position within its franchise reminds me of a very, very different title, Macross Plus. I think Plus is easily the least Macrucian Macross. Apart from anything else it is, as I’m sure a zillion people have said before me, substantially more pessimistic about music, love and transforming mecha, the three legs of the Macross tripod.

Every part of the franchise gets to play a part in deciding what’s Macrucian, true (even Macross II… hell, if you were introduced to Macross via Robotech—I wasn’t—that too will have influenced you…) but, at less than three hours, Plus is too short to much affect the impression left by the TV shows. I suspect there was a time when Plus had enough prominence among Anglophone anime people to counteract that, but nowadays the fan on the torrent tracker thinks Frontier when one says ‘Macross’.

Plus is also good. Like, really good. Solid, good fun, and great Itano circuses. It’s my favourite Macross thing. But! I don’t really enjoy Macross’s central tripod that much. I’m not a Macross fan. Perhaps I should say ‘not yet a Macross fan’, because I suspect that might change as I grow older, but that’s by-the-by. I’m no authority on the subject, but my best guess at the show which is most Macrucian is Macross 7. You will note that it is unusually long for Macross, which (I think) gives it influence as it just wears people down into its way of thinking.

First, there’s Aquarion Evol. I’ve known of Aquarion for a good while, and a few years ago I dipped a foot into the original series before deciding that while the CG mecha were technically impressive, they were also annoying. Evol‘s CG mecha are even more technically impressive, but still annoying: juddering, weightless and disgustingly pristine. I haven’t got a great eye for this stuff, so I’ve little sense for how much of that is my taste and how much, if any, really is a fault it’s worth banging the table over. But it does rub the wrong way, especially when titles like Unicorn and that Votoms Finder one-shot—and yes, I understand that they’re not on television schedules and budgets—have convinced me that I like well-integrated CG mecha work. Hell, even the oddity that was Soukou no Strain got away with fairly bad CG by putting it in a weightless and pristine environment.

And the combination-as-sex thing doesn’t amuse me for (although this is not Evol‘s fault) I just finished watching Godannar. Actually, let me talk about Godannar for a paragraph. Godannar seemed to me to be built along the lines of jp’s description of Giant Robo: an attempt at ‘how we’d like to remember giant robot anime’. But instead of amazing production values Godannar has a soap opera-ish story about a young married couple, and lots and lots and lots of fanservice. Maybe it was just made with half an eye to people who did watch robot shows as kids, and were old enough by the early 2000s to want a soap operaish story about a young married couple mixed with lots and lots and lots of fanservice. I don’t know. I do know that Godannar made me laugh a lot and I recommend trying it if you haven’t yet and you like giant robots and ludicrousness.

Anyway, back to Evol. Evol is saved by its stupid finishers.

Second, there’s Rinne no Lagrange. I’m a bit surprised more noise hasn’t been made about Lagrange‘s sense of place. The brief reported remark about tourism here sent my mind in this direction, but really this stuff drips from the episode titles, from Madoka’s dedication to Kamogawa and from her suspiciously encyclopaedic fighting knowledge of the town’s layout and inhabitants. I’m hoping, but not expecting, that Lagrange will amuse me by exhibiting some small vein of conservatism similar to that which, I am reliably informed, ran through Hanasaku Iroha.

There’s a hint at this rootedness tying back into the plot sometime in Madoka’s defiant claim that Kamogawans’ love for their town is just as strong as the Demetrians’ love for their planet. I think I’ve come across a version of this issue in re: the problem of pain, the question being about whether these things are cumulative: can you add each individual’s love of their home into one big mass which you can then feed into your felicific calculus? Or is the love one person can feel for their home the maximum relevant amount? And all that sort of thing.

More importantly, robots! The ancillary stuff, that deployable runway, the useless lasers, &c—that’s some convincingly sharp mecha paraphernalia. Plus the robots’ own shape, their transformations, the workings of their blades and shields feel coherent, part of one thought-through effort. So far the fighting itself is very easy on the eyes and, importantly, has fun ideas. Madoka’s been pulling out the sort of attacks that belong in a slightly different breed of robot action, with mixed but consistently amusing results. I initially judged that Lagrange was not a mecha fan’s mecha show, and I suppose it isn’t, really, but at present it is, on a few measures, rather putting Evol to shame.

By loudly disliking Lagrange on Twitter Ghostlightning has prompted a defence; I’m not sure decades of mecha piloting can be quite so breezily reviewed, and I don’t think Madoka’s get-up-and-go can be so easily pinned to some kind of post-Fukushima need for pep, and even if it can, there’s no necessary connection between that and Lagrange being, like, good… but I do like this post. There are snippets in there which capture enjoyment rather well. Meanwhile, on GL’s blog but courtesy of DKJ, we have a post which captures the opposite of enjoyment. I’m not sure it really mounts much of argument for Lagrange being bad, but then I’m not sure I’ve mounted much of an argument for it being good.

What is interesting is that final paragraph; from what little I know I’d say there’re certainly connections in pacing and profit model between basal mecha shows and basal magical girl shows. In some respects they’re closer to each other than to their extrapolated forms—but Lagrange is not basal. However, at this point I’m probably just BSing. More than usual.

I usually end my twelve Christmas posts by thanking the bloggers and readers of the anglotakusphere. You guys are great!

Well, all the bloggers could stand to proofread and redraft a bit more and a lot of you have aesthetic criteria so unconsidered that it’s a miracle I still subscribe to your feeds… but I do, so well done. You guys aren’t great, but for a bunch of humans you’re alright. Readers: you’re great.

I don’t really post any more, and reading back through this blog I’m dissatisfied with most of my old posts. I do miss blogging with ideas, though, despite the fact that they were usually rubbish ideas.

I miss the other blogs, too. I was going back through my old indiscriminate annotated blogroll, in all its squillion-word glory, last night, and there’re a tonne of names there that I used to look forward to reading. Things probably weren’t better back then, but it feels like they were. And note that ‘probably’: in all such judgements idiots have a way of jumping from the obfuscatory effect of nostalgia, which undeniably exists, to the conclusion that things definitely weren’t better back then, whenever ‘back then’ was. Let me put that another way: it is very difficult to know whether things were better or worse does not mean we know that things were neither better nor worse.

Anyway, to end this post on a more cheerful note, things I’d have liked to have posted about over Christmas but didn’t find space for! Bryger is one of the latest titles being dragged out of untranslated obscurity, and in its way it’s pretty sweet. Golgo 13: The Professional looked great for spells—I’m no expert but it seemed a very pretty movie—but also delivered the ugly Golgocopters that make it famous. Dangaizer 3 was very Obari. The Kara no Kyoukai movies left me mostly unmoved, but I can see why they have fans. I enjoyed Horizon on the Middle of Nowhere because most of its components were terrible. Code-E was poor but I heard the sequel has powersuits; also, I realised after finishing it that this post on a blog you don’t remember put it on my list of titles to watch back in 2007. Panzer World Galient was the best show involving mecha centaurs I watched last year. Okusama wa Mahou Shoujo was the most inventive spin on the magical girl concept I saw. Shin Getter Robo vs. Neo Getter Robo featured Texas Mack. And of course I could easily cull eleven things worth posting about from Precure alone, if I wanted to bore you. I also watched a bunch of stuff again, including Giant Robo, all the Legend and of course the traditional Christmas return to War in the Pocket. 2011 was a good year.

And of course the fact that Space Pirate Captain Harlock was referenced is good: the “password” that Ririka trades with her old friend is the very first line of the Harlock OP song.

This is indeed good, and, as he goes on to say, it would be almost ungrateful not to acknowledge Harlock in a space pirate anime. What interests me is that this isn’t just thrown in the background somewhere: it’s being used as a passphrase. In a show more po-faced than Mouretsu, a passphrase would be something inocuous and definitely not related to piracy. But that show would be boring. In this show the phrase is a bold identification.

Taking the opening words of SPCH‘s opening—which is I think fairly obviously a creed from Harlock himself—as the phrase the pirates use to identify themselves to one another suggests that what makes an anime pirate piratical is that they are in some way Harlockian. Or, more narrowly restricting this to the phrase itself, that they have the Harlockian attitude to space: not a threatening final frontier, but a manageable ocean, and moreover my ocean, for my yacht. Taken this way I think it functions as a nice tribute, intentional or not.

(And was that first episode as a whole any good? Goodness, I don’t know. Ask someone else.)

Thing is, you see, I’ve been watching it at an anime club. I used to avoid those, but, having returned to university after graduating and working a desk job for a spell, I was feeling sociable and gave this one a try.

It’s true that these societies don’t have the practical function that they used to, allowing the efficient showing of rare VHS material. But it’s fun! Everyone I’ve met seems to be able to hold down a conversation. People make jokes I couldn’t have thought of myself, which I think is one of the most excellent, most gracious functions that humans perform for each other.

Speaking of humour, the club also solves one of my anime-watching problems: usually I only find comedies funny if I watch them with other people. And the club is also a useful device which makes me watch titles such as Dennou Coil. I’ve known it’s good for ages, but left on my own I’d never have managed to tear myself away from my solid diet of giant robots for long enough.

* * *

This is likely a short-term membership, because the wheels have been coming off my postgraduate career lately. I think I’ve become a bad investment, and I’ll probably be leaving again within the year. But I’m nevertheless glad I returned to university: I’ve learned I was wrong about a lot of things, and one of them was my judgement of social watching.

Freighting the smallest actions with importance, and making them take up lots of tense viewing time, is Kaiji‘s stock-in-trade. The second series started well with a willing surrender to excess, as Kaiji dug himself still further into debt in the Teiai Group’s underground labour camp. It was good to reconnect with our hero’s hapless side.

But Kaiji’s not a bungler when he’s in a nasty enough place, so the real payoff was his subsequent rise, uniting the debt-ridden lowest of the Teiai slave undersociety to beat Ootsuki at his own game. Those bloody dice narrowly edged out Cure Aqua’s lightsabre in the competition for my choice of Weapon of the Year!