Incidentally, that Word document experience was how I tried to read the first novel in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya series before I gave up due to the downmarket feel of the whole thing. Yes, the aesthetics of the reading experience itself was what turned me off, not the actual content of the book. Out of curiosity I just checked my local library and it looks like they’ve got the entire series available for borrowing. See what I mean about light novels being a lot more accessible nowadays? Maybe I’ll try to read the Haruhi Suzumiya series again.

Anyway, here is a list of some of the light novels I’ve read which I generally recommend. Overall I haven’t read a great number of them but I’ve read a lot more in the last few years thanks to light novels joining the anime/manga/video game media ecosystem for non-Japanese fans.

Welcome to the N.H.K. by Tatsuhiko Takimoto

The first light novel I ever bought, as in I went to an actual bookstore and paid for it. I think I got it after finishing the anime and the manga. The tale of an unemployed antisocial shut-in suffering through being connected to other equally-desperate people. I found something oddly compelling about this glimpse into the hikikomori life, but I remember being disappointed that the book never explained why exactly the main character became a hikikomori in the first place beyond some vague reference to being unable to keep up with what other people expected. It’s based on the author’s own experience with social withdrawal and I feel like Takimoto was too close to the whole thing to properly articulate what was going on. This book isn’t for everyone, but it’s just the thing for some.

All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka

I actually read this entirely in the bookstore. The laundromat I went to was just around the corner, so I’d leave my clothes in the wash and go to the bookstore to slowly make my way through this book. Anyway, there’s a reason this story was turned into a movie. Edge of Tomorrow‘s appeal is different from the book, but both have their charms. Live, Die, Repeat through an alien invasion until you finally get it right. What’s to hate?

The Saga of Tanya the Evil by Carlo Zen

We covered the anime, you know. The story of a Japanese office worker being reborn into the body of a young girl to fight in a magic version of World War I is ridiculous and entertaining in the way only a history nerd could write. Unfortunately, I got kind of burned out on the series because later entries were essentially more of the same. The first book was the strongest one though I admit that later ones didn’t catch me in the same way.

The Faraway Paladin by Kanata Yanagino

Another story about a Japanese man being reborn into a fantasy world. This time it’s a guy who was obviously very depressed, like fatally so – the book is very indirect about the topic, but I think the protagonist actually committed suicide, which causes his rebirth into a world of dragons and magic. The first book is the strongest for me emotionally. Unfortunately, it slowly becomes another isekai story about using superior skills to gain friendship, wealth, and power. I appreciate that it’s less nakedly a power fantasy and the protagonist does actually struggle for what he achieves. And it’s certainly more psychologically and emotionally mature than the dime-a-dozen edgelord slave harem isekai stories. But I think you can stick to book 1 to get the maximum impact.

Too Many Losing Heroines! by Takibi Amamori

I’m subscribed to this one, the second Seven Seas Entertainment releases a new volume then Google Play automatically buys it for me and lets me know it’s out. A romantic comedy that looks at the other side of a love story. You’ve probably watched many an anime where two lovers get together at the end through many trials and tribulations. But typically the male lead throughout the course of the story would have been tempted many times by other girls. So what happens to the losing girls after the story ends? Why, they meet the main character of this series, of course. Yes, the male lead of this one is almost criminally oblivious to romance, as in many other Japanese romcoms told from the guy’s perspective. But his story and how he almost unwillingly becomes a better person is entertaining. And the anime adaptation is superb.

Let This Grieving Soul Retire! Woe Is the Weakling Who Leads the Strongest Party by Tsukikage

This series is just so wonderfully dumb. It’s about an actual moron with idiotic luck who keeps falling ass backwards into success and who the world thinks is an honest to god genius. If that joke doesn’t work for you then you shouldn’t stick with this series because that’s what the story is built around. But I like it and I’m also subscribed to this series.

And there you have it, these are some of the light novels I’ve read over the years. I’ve got a ton more on my To Read list, but so far I think my experience has mostly been positive. Give any of these books a try if you want to dip your toe into the light novel scene’s various genres.

We return once more to deliver the long-promised girl rockers episode! Bocchi the Rock! explores the blossoming of a lonely teenage girl after she joins a rock band, while We Are the Best! is a 2013 Swedish movie set in the 1980s about teenage girls creating a punk rock band.

Nostalgia and embarrassment, comedy and cringe, rock gods and punk rebellion: this and more in our latest!

NB: We mistook Asian Kung-Fu Generation for Beat Crusaders in this episode. That was our bad.

Travel with us to the last days of the Palace of Versailles as we discuss two works about the (first) end of the French monarchy: the classic 1970s anime The Rose of Versailles and the 2006 film Marie Antoinette. In the anime we follow a young swordswoman brought up as a man as she first serves the young princess Marie Antoinette and then eventually turns against the royal family, while in the film we follow that same Marie Antoinette as she marries into the French royal family and lives in guilded splendor before everything comes to a shocking end with the arrival of the French Revolution.

Opulence and revolution, war and femininity, love and betrayal – this episode has it all! Comes with bonus communism content.

Things from the episode that you may want to look up but don’t know how to spell: Dauphine, Julie d’Aubigny (a.k.a. La Maupin), silphium, abortifacients

Duck and cover! In this month’s episode of Podcastle in the Sky the crew steps back in time into the shadow of a Cold War on the verge of going hot with the 1982 techno-thrillers Future War 198X and Clint Eastwood’s Firefox. In a world teetering on the precipice of nuclear annihilation, these controversial time capsule films sought to peer into an increasingly uncertain future and determine whether technology would bring about mankind’s salvation, or its ruin.

In this episode we discuss the classic anime series Revolutionary Girl Utena and the more recent Netflix reboot She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. Mostly we talk about magic duels, Italian giallo movies, the performance of gender, and binge watching versus the weekly watch.

If you’ve ever wished more podcasts started with a five minute monologue on French and Russian Symbolism, we’ve got you covered!

Spend the holidays the traditional way: by listening to us talk about half-naked muscular men pummeling each other senseless. Yes, the Podcastle in the Sky gang discusses the recent Netflix series Baki along with the 1988 classic Bloodsport.

We talk about mixed martial arts, Kowloon Walled City, bro science, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, mall dojo grifters, and systemic racism in Hollywood. Somewhere in there we also talk about the movie and the anime. Che

I remember asking during our One Punch Man episode what the future of the NEETs in anime would be. NEET, of course, is a British term referring to those unemployed youth who are Not in Education, Employment, or Training, and in the podcast episode I asked whether anime in the future would be about grown up NEET protagonists worrying over not having a pension. Art must cater to its audience, and if there are so many Japanese people stuck in a pit of economic despair, won’t they want their lives reflected in the stories they consume?

It’s a few years later and I think I’d like to expand the question to include those who are horrifically underemployed in Japan. As the title of a Bloomberg article from 2020 reveals, Japan’s Lost Generation Is Still Jobless and Living With Their Parents. The article’s description of the Japanese job market is painful in its inequity.

The doors open only once. That’s how people often describe Japan’s hidebound hiring system, in which college students have their best shot at landing a coveted salaried position in the year approaching graduation. Those who successfully navigate the arduous corporate recruiting process will be rewarded with a secure place on the corporate ladder, along with regular raises and promotions. The rest are largely condemned to flit from one low-paying job to the next, with little avenue for advancement and zero job security . . . Japan’s 2015 census revealed there were 3.4 million people in their 40s and 50s who had not married and lived with their parents.

So here is Japan, here are its young people, and here is the miserable life of bare survival that they suffer through. What can anime say to this audience? How can it be relevant, especially when the makers of anime are also living through the same misery? (And when I say misery I mean misery: in 2019 it was possible for a new animator to make an annual income of 668,000 yen, which is around $6600 USD. Yes, there is no missing zero in that figure. There’s a crowdfunding project just to subsidize housing costs for the ones who make the anime we consume.)

I would say there are two ways for anime to deal with life in late-stage capitalism. The first is to acknowledge its barbarity. However, the logic of modern life is so crushing and inhumane that to depict it realistically is too much to bear for the artists and for the audience. The solution is to turn to comedy to soften the blow.

If we were to name the works of anime capitalist realism that are most well-known, we would not do worse than listing the classic series Welcome to the NHK!, which is about the people unable to compete in the marketplace of labour, or Aggretsuko, which is about the ones who did enter the ranks of the wage slave but who found no better life anyway, or Recovery of an MMO Junkie, which is about abandoning the existential despair of being alienated from your labour. For the present season of anime, we could point to Uramichi Oniisan, except it’s not very good and in fact rather painfully blah.

The second way for anime to grapple with the weight of modernity is more reactionary. Instead of meeting the real, the anime takes the opposite trajectory of escape. The escape might be through returning to a better time – see all the series where the protagonist wakes up as their younger self like Remake Our Life! or gets de-aged like ReLIFE – or it might be a literal escape to a better world. Yes, I’m talking about all the isekai shit that comes out every season, some of which are embarrassingly frank about being nothing but vehicles for wish fulfillment.

Those wishes being fulfilled might be as innocuous as being able to sleep in and work whenever you want and at whatever you want for as much or as little as you want, like in all those isekai series about farming in a fantasy town or whatever (see Restaurant To Another World for an example involving opening a small business in a fantasy land with absolutely no problems whatsoever). Or those wishes could be darker and more disgusting, such as indulging a sexual slavery fetish like in How Not to Summon a Demon Lord or Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody (and yes, the protagonist is invariably a man enslaving women).

It may sound like I think anime about the real world’s unhappiness are better for facing up to the truth, but in reality I think both the path of acknowledgement and the path of escape can lead equally to nowhere. Obviously hiding from society’s problems make one less likely to help in fixing them, but merely knowing things suck doesn’t do anything either. Without a call to action, outrage leads only to frustration and then to resignation and apathy.

So even in our fantasies we can’t escape the inequity of our world. The rank unfairness of existence circumscribes the stories we tell and haunts the dreams that we create.

However, we should not slip into nihilism. I will remind you all that better conditions existed not very far back in time and can do so again, and perhaps be better, for even those older times had their own miseries. Our dreams can point us to another path so long as we remember that dreaming is not an end in itself.

So let us struggle for a better world: what do we have to lose?

Join us as we chat about The Secret World of Arrietty and the novel it was adapted from, The Borrowers. Childhood fantasies, British colonialism, the state of the working class, Ghibli movies that weren’t made by Miyazaki or Takahata – we cover it all. Check it out pronto!

In the grim darkness of the 17th century, there is only war! Don your armor and sally into the fray alongside the Podcastle in the Sky Crew as we discuss two works suffused with blood and battle: the 2012 trilogy adaptation of Kentaro Miura’s dark-medieval fantasy series Berserk and James Clavell’s 1971 cinematic epic of the 30 Years’ War, The Last Valley. Fanaticism, brotherly bonds, the weight of history and the tragedy of watching a beautiful film in 480p all await you in this month’s episode!

Turn your 2020 frown upside down with some opera – the space kind and the regular kind. In 1995, Operavox created a half-hour cartoon about Richard Wagner’s Rhinegold. Four years later, Leiji Matsumoto created an anime miniseries about the same opera, added some space pirates into the mix, and called it Harlock Saga.

How do the adaptations fare? Can you squeeze an almost 3 hour opera into a 30 minute block? Does putting everything in space actually work? Why are there so many pipe organs in the anime?

We cover all this and more in our 20th episode. Give us a listen – what else have you got going on?

We return from our hiatus to discuss two works about Westerns, indigenous representation, serial killers, and bloody violence. Yes, episode 19 is all about season 1 and 2 of Golden Kamuy and the 2015 horror-Western movie Bone Tomahawk!

PodCastle in the Sky is here to provide some easy listening in your time of quarantine. You’re welcome, world!

Get out your neon-tinged sunglasses and jack into our latest podcast about the cyberpunk worlds of Ergo Proxy and Neuromancer. Remember when anime was nothing but shows about mopey people dressed in black leather? Remember when Japan was the future and dead channels on TV showed grey static? We talk about all this and more in episode 18!

Warning: Podcast contains discussions of Neomarxists, Italo Calvino, and why we don’t like steampunk.

Join us on this month’s episode for a blast from the distant past! The Podcastle crew sets out to learn the meaning of true friendship through two retellings of a classic tale from Greek antiquity about two best bros and the bond of trust they forge together in the face of tyrannical adversity; first in Friedrich Schiller’s 1799 poetic ballad The Pledge (Die Bürgschaft) and then in the 1992 anime film Hashire, Melos (Run, Melos!) directed by Masaaki Osumi and featuring early work from the famed Satoshi Kon. Swordfights! Ripped Biceps! Despair and Triumph! It’s all here, on this month’s episode.

One young man disagrees with APC, and tries to tell Main Dude the class secret. But as soon as he tries to tell Main Dude who Creepy is, and I’m talking the words “Mikagi is -” barely leaves his lips, he keels over, has a heart attack and dies in front of Main Dude.

I admit I laughed pretty hard during his horrible death.

Anyway, it’s become…

THE RULE

To not talk to Main Dude, ever. Just as they shun Creepy. The teachers follow along with the rule as well. I assume this school’s certification is not valid since most school inspectors don’t look kindly on the explanation of “BUT THERE’S A GRUDGE GHOST! THAT’S WHY WE SINGLE A CHILD OUT AS A TOTAL SOCIAL OUTCAST!”

Then again, maybe someone in the local education board is greasing the palms of the school inspectors. Someone with a deep, untreated psychosis suffered by the students and employees of this school.

…I need to write this shit down and tell Kadokawa Pictures I’ve got an idea for a show…

TO CONTINUE!

It turns out that Creepy actually isn’t a ghost. She’s just the girl that the class chose as the sacrificial lamb to be ostracized to avoid the curse of the Ninth Grade Class, before Main Dude joined up.

Here we are with some actual answers.

So, 26 years ago, a chick who was super popular in the 9th grade class 3 died. Everyone mourned her like crazy, until a girl cried out “What are you talking about? She’s sitting right there, in her desk!” For the rest of the year, the students played along, as well as the teachers.

The following year, somehow the ninth grade class 3 was missing a chair and desk, even though the class number seemed to be correct. Then every month after school started one student or a family member of the students died. The conclusion was that, somehow, by pretending the dead girl was still alive, the 1972 ninth grade class 3 accidentally invited death into the classroom, and now a sort of…ghoul? I guess? – haunts the class, acting just like a live person, and setting the number of students off by one. Since no one knows which person it is, the class chooses a sacrificial student to ignore completely and pretend they’re dead. And this somehow offsets the curse.

Oooookay. I mean, it’s a little convoluted, but hell, what curse makes sense? Though it’s all very sad. Aw, some dead folk just wanna get a good education, and people have to go and pretend they aren’t there just ’cause they brought the horrible spectre of death on their heels.

And given that Main Dude was in the hospital for a collapsed lung, and his mother, we discover, died in childbirth while birthing him, Main Dude is a pretty good candidate for actually being The Ghoul. Then again, I totally bought the idea that Creepy was a sekret ghost, and not just a sad girl with an eye patch and a penchant for the macabre.

Creepy and Main Dude drink sodas together and discuss what it is to be totally ostracized “for the good of the class.” It’s a bit of a bummer. I rather liked it better when I thought she was a ghost girl, but now she’s just someone an entire school is ignoring for some rando curse. All she needs is another creeper to be her friend! Move on it, Main Dude!

I…I want these two crazy lovebirds to have mopey relations and make creepy babies, guys!

I also am okay with the rest of this asshole class dying. I hope Aggressive Pigtails Chick gets her hair caught on that eating cabbage patch doll.

Death Parade

Hey, my wish from last episode was granted! Episode Five was all workplace related, and digs deeper both into how the arbiters of death work, and what the hell is going on with Audience In.

The Ageless Child Manager sends a test for the Pale Man – essentially a workplace upkeep test. And Pale Man, unfortunately, fails the test. Two people come to Purgatory Bar, a belligerent man and a small child. Pale Man knows something’s up, but doesn’t do more than tell Audience In to be careful.

Suddenly, the belligerent man realizes he remembers the Purgatory Bar and takes the child hostage. Pale Man strings up the crazy person with his…magic spiderweb strings? But the crazy was a decoy – the real problem was the boy. He knocks Audience In the fuck out and gets all The Omen real quick.

Turns out the Pale Man never received the boy’s memories, which is a no-no. All humans have memories with which arbiters make their judgment. Child turns into a kind of assholey red haired douche canoe who makes fun of the Pale Man’s incompetence, both by missing the work test ploy and not officially judging Audience In.

Turns out Audience In is actually a human who remembered that she was dead when she got to the bar. She refused to play a game, and the Pale Man couldn’t bring himself to judge her without a complete picture of who she was. Ageless Child manager gave him an extension on judging her soul, erased her memories, and put her to work at the bar.

Red scoffs at this display of unmanly weakness and attacks the Pale Man with…bubbles.

You know, typical arbiter of death stuff.

Ageless Child Manager stops this nonsense, gives Pale Man a goodly dressing down for his failure to follow proper procedure, and tells Red to go back to work arbeting whatever other section of Purgatory he currently runs. I’m assuming he’s the guy in charge of judging fratbros who die of alcohol poisoning.

Anyway, there’s a feeling that maybe the Pale Man is a bit smitten with this human woman, and Ageless Child Manager is letting this shit slide because he’s actually better at his job with the woman around.

We also get a bunch of little scenes that flesh out this facility. Ageless Child Manager has a chit-chat over solar system pool with someone who calls himself “the closest thing to god” about her tenure as head Arbiter. He also says “God is long since gone” which is…ominous. Anyway, I like this closest thing to god dude. He’s like one of those hippies who saw the rest of their generation lose the spirit and decided to escape and open a head shop in some mountain village that’s a liberal island in a sea of red.

All in all, it was a great episode. Little hints about purgatory, little snippets about Audience In, and hey, we may get a small, star-crossed love story out of this show! Woo.

I assume that means the sixth episode will be another flavor of the week, then. Boo.

The Devil is a Part-Timer

   

OMG you guys, I am so excited. Lucifer is a cute lil purple haired adorable teenage demon of the deepest evil! Apparently Hero killed his ass back in their own world, but some high church official totes betrayed her.

Satan stops his Monologue of evil!

Loyal General gets pissed at Satan for wasting his allowance on movies!

Satan won’t take power from the pain and despair of humans in our world!

He gets shot the fuck up!

And then hoooly shit, spaloosh. So many abs.

The Hero and Satan bicker!

THERE’S A THROW DOWN IN THE SKAAAAAAYYYYYY! WOOOOO!

Loyal General shows up for this awesomesauce celestial battle, but only after getting his majestic cape!

Satan complains about the weight of falling debris!

Lucifer is TAUGHT A LESSON!

The high school girl is let in on the whole thing!

Seems the church back home is suuuper corrupt, and a few of the Hero’s buddies come to tell her that shit’s going down over there. She decides to stick around on Earth for now, to keep an eye on Satan.

Not at all so THE TWO OF THEM CAN SMOOOOOCH!!! EEEEEEEEEE!

Erased

So, Kayo, the little girl Satoru tried so hard to change history for, was still murdered. But two days after the original timeline. And he learns two big things – her mother was clearly in on it, given that she threw out all of Kayo’s things long before her body was found, and the child kidnapping has been going on with regular cover ups into his adulthood.

How did he discover this second fact? Because he was pulled back into his own present day – changed slightly by his actions in the past, but not enough to prevent his mother’s murder. As he evades the police and researches as much as he can, his coworker, a high school girl named Airi, lets him crash at her place as she trusts that he’s no murderer.

Unfortunately, this leads her directly into the path of danger. She gets a message from Satoru’s mother’s phone, and the last shot is of her passed out as her house burns down around her.

I assume that Satoru gets another chance to change history, though obviously things seem grim at the moment. What I like is the kind of tin pot-ness of all this historical change. It’s big stuff that Satoru has to try to prevent – the murder of children, and his mother. But he’s just a dude who can look up old articles in the newspaper as an adult and snoop around with an adult’s ability to process information when he’s sent to the past. It’s fun just seeing him flip through a true crimes book and realize he shifted history even a little, if not changing the course of the entire river.

Also, the mystery is really heating up. I have no idea what Satoru’s plans are when he’s a little boy for preventing the murders. But I’m rather excited to see how he does it.

Katsugeki Touken Ranbu
Giant Fuckin Smoke Monster vs. Muscle Man and Rookie – GO!
Smoke Asshole Army Vs Boyshorts McGee and White Hair’d Stranger – GO!

Aaaand, now they’re just talking. Talking at the enemy. Taaaalking about stopping the enemy. Not fighting. Just talking.

And now we’re watching some rando Japanese spectators looking at the ship Boyshorts McGee and White Hair’d Stranger are fighting on. Just. Staring at the ship. Yup, nothing inter –

-FIIINALLY! FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT! White Hair’d Stranger is so good he splits a dude in two and then slides behind him and hits him in the back of the neck! Wooooo!

There’s still a lot of guys, though, so BadBoy and Captain Hair JOIN THE FIGHT!

…aaand they’re talking again. Just talking. Talking a lot. Talking. Good Christ, for as many swords as these … swords? have, they don’t really fight with them much –

AAAW YEEAH, THEY’RE FIGHTING! THE –

oh, COME ON! It’s like a half second hack and slash, and it’s over. And now all the Bishi Boys are just like. Talking. About who’s going to sail the ship back to fucking port. Oh, my god, show. There’s like five minutes of BadBoy being excited about sailing a goddamned ship back to port while the Bishi Team talk shop. And there’s no word on Fucking Giant Smoke Asshole! Nnnnngh!

Don’t make me quit you, Action Bishi Team!

WAIT! The Smoke Assholes are sailing a ship to Edo to try and burn the city to the ground and change history!!

MEANWHILE – Fucking Giant Smoke Asshole, Muscleman and The Rookie continue to fight! Smoke asshole is going after a an important historical figure directly! FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!

Wait, no. Nope. No fighting. Now we’re back on the ship. The Bishi Team are…shoveling coal into the steam engine furnace. And arguing with each other. And running the ship aground.

Meanwhile, Fucking Giant Smoke Asshole signals to his ship buddays and Edo starts to burn the fuck up! The ship team smashes into the Smoke Assholes’ ship!

These Bishis are in trouble! And The Time Crime Team is using anachronistic warfare now to get the job done!

And that makes Muscleman supa mad. We finally get a really swell fight scene between Muscleman And Fucking Giant Smoke Asshole, and Muscleman WIIIIIIIINS –

– to death! Noooooo! Not Musclemaaaan! Your favorite food was Daifuku! DAAAAIFUUUUKUUUI!

OH NOOO – Captain Hair laments at the evil of the Time Crime Team and doesn’t see a Smoke Asshole behind him! He’s ganked! CompuFOX howls in despair! The Action Bishi Team turn into golden smoke and disappear into a sky portal!

SAD CHORAL MUSIC CLOSES THE EPISODE OUT!

IS THIS THE END OF THE ACTION BISHI TEAM!?

Fifth Episodes – COMPLETE

Another

Okay, so! Umbrella girl is ded. Hard ded. And we get the curse laid out for us finally, four moody episodes in. Apparently, someone in the Cursed Ninth Year Class 3 dies, and the curse is triggered – every month for the rest of the year one of the class members dies, or one of their relatives.

So let’s get this slaughterfest rollin!

But first, let’s have a scene where Main Dude has an uncomfortable chat with a nurse he befriended while he was in the hospital. She accuses him of having a crush on Creepy, which OF COUURSE he doesn’t! He’s just really interested in her and follows her around and asks her questions even when she tells him to leave her alone!

And then he runs into a classmate whom we’ve never met in the three previous episodes and they have a polite conversation. I’ve already forgotten her name, I care so little about her. Main Dude saves her from a falling pane of glass Final Destination-style and she weeps about not wanting to die. I assume there’s a big target on her back, and Creepy is aiming for her.

Naturally all of this talk of sexy, sexy death gives Main Dude unnatural urges, and he goes back to the doll shop. Creepy is there waiting for him, and she must have been writing in her Hot Topic journal just for him. “The curse has begun. Are you going to class tomorrow? Then I probably shouldn’t show up.”

Awww, she likes him!

Main Dude goes home to his usually cheery aunt being pissy because she’s been getting bad headaches. So, she’s definitely cursed. I assume her head’s going to explode magnificently.

Anyway, she reminds him that the most important thing to do in Class 3 is to follow…

THE RULES.

Unfortunately, no one told Main Dude that talking to Creepy was one of…

THE RULES.

And now he’s being shunned for starting up the curse. Aggressive Pigtails Chick turns out to be assigned the class duty of preventing horrible, horrible deaths involving her classmates, which tells me that the Japanese school system is seriously on top of their shit. I assume the country is swimming in grudge ghosts, though, so maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised.

Annoyingly, Aggressive Pigtails Chick failed hardcore by not giving the skinny to Main Dude. Unfortunately, the writers forced her into the plot contrivance of not just fucking telling him that talking to the ghost girl in class is like firing a weapon randomly into a crowd, so I blame them entirely for her failure.

And this curse is legit. His nurse friend got smashed the FUCK up in an elevator. Just like last episode, the death happened right at the end of the episode – although this time it was more obvious. As soon as the nurse got in the elevator I knew she was toast.

I’ll say this for Another, the show does not pull punches with the death scenes. They are fucking gruesome.

Despite still feeling a little try-hard, now that the slaughter commeth, the show has picked up significantly. I’m honestly interested in where this is going, now. The actual horror is starting to grow, and I appreciate that.

Death Parade

Cold open on the latest two people in Purgatory Bar. This time it’s some D-list reality show celeb who actually remembers who she is, and some dude. I’m actually wondering how the hell they got to this place – the last two sets of couples were involved romantically in some way.

Anyway, they push the game roulette and are told to play a video game against each other. As the couple plays, the woman gets quite an unpleasant flashback of her life – a beaten wife who became the star of a “giant family” show. And the young man came from some sad broken family who never took to his step mom because he was bitter about his parents’ divorce.

Meanwhile, the Audience In tells the Pale Man not to fuck around with the people, as he does every time he feels it’s pertinent. The Pale Man refuses, saying it’s the only way to get people into tight spots, so that they show their true selves. And we see why, because when the celeb starts to lose the game, she beats the shit out of the young man. And then immediately regrets it. And young man realizes he was a little bitch to his loving stepmother.

This is really a surprisingly touching and kind of fucked up episode. And Audience In seems to be catching on to how this game is played. Gotta get to the darkest deep of a person to know if their soul is worth bringing back into the world. However, I’m hoping that the show moves away from a Judgment of the Week structure, because I’m way more interested in the lives of the people who run this joint. They keep giving hints, and I’d prefer if it went the way of a workplace dramedy.

The Devil is a Part Timer

Satan is all muscly and helping people out of earthquake rubble! The Hero is bemused and incredulous that Satan would help people!

Hero has a flashback to her agrarian feudalist childhood where she’s taken from her loving father by the church to be taught how to fight the demon horde and soon after her neighborhood is burned to ash!

Okay, that’s not as cute. Uuuh.

Yay, Satan’s Loyal General comes and begs adorably for forgiveness for not keeping him from quake injury! He begs for punishment!

The Hero’s friend from the call center reveals that she’s from Kobe, and lived through this earthquake – they share a touching conversation about people not really understanding tragedy when they haven’t experienced it!

Okay. Also not like. Light and cute. UUUUH.

Loyal General wept all night from despair at failing his general! The Hero falls off steel stairs because her heels have no traction! The high school girl who has a crush on Satan catches the Hero and Satan together!

See, the Hero was confronting Satan about his horrible atrocities in their own world, and weeping over the death of her father, as Satan regretfully says –

AAaaww HEEELLL. This show fucking TRICKED ME! It’s undergoing Cerebus Syndrome! It drew me in with Satan’s hijinks about figuring out the ins and outs of living in Japan, and now I care for all these characters!

*grumble* ANYWAY it turns out the nefarious person causing so much damage is Lucifer, one of Satan’s generals. Obviously not Loyal General, who is appalled. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess I’m gonna CARE about all of this now, and get EXCITED about PLOT DEVELOPMENTS.

Stupid, wonderful show. I’m not actually that annoyed – they’ve done well with the comedic aspects while also, surprisingly, building up the characterization, so the dip into more serious matters isn’t really that jarring.

Erased

Satoru is now experiencing a common theme in time travel media – can he actually change the future in big ways, or is he stuck on a rail of time? Are the murders he’s trying to prevent inevitable?

He’s made friends with one of the children who was murdered when he was a child, and has learned that she is physically abused by her mother. While slapping himself around for not realizing this as a child, at the same time he’s relieved that he gets a chance to change things, hopefully for the better.

What he’s not seeing is that by helping this girl, he’s already changed things. In a previous episode, he called out his deskmate for trying to get the girl in trouble by sneaking all of the collected lunch money into the girl’s bag. Now deskmate is sullen and standoffish, certainly different from the last time he lived through this. And the girl is slowly coming out of her shell due to his kindness.

Meanwhile, his mother is much more clued in about his life, thanks to his adult perspective – he knows it’s a good idea to tell the adults around him that something is wrong. His mother comes to his aid to get the girl’s mother to agree to a small date at a science museum, and recognizes immediately the trouble that the girl is in. He’s also gone to his teacher, and finds out that his teacher has already planned with the local child services department to try to pull the girl from her home as soon as an opportune time comes.

I really love that the show explores this aspect of going back in time as an adult into a former childhood. I think everyone’s wondered what they’d do if they were given that chance, and on the top of the tier is the sense that you’d deal with problems with more understanding and with a better grasp of how to solve them. Not to mention simply having the courage to do and say the things you were too afraid to do as a child – which Satoru does in spades. He’s constantly saying things aloud as he thinks them, because his adult mind doesn’t have the child’s fear and social anxiety. Basically, it’s a bit of wish fulfillment for the adults in the audience.

With caveats. There are things he’s still missing because his memory is from a child’s point of view. He doesn’t have a full perspective on just what needs to change for him to truly “win” against history. He thought by staying close to the girl, he could keep her from being taken. Thought that her death was the result of a depraved stalker serial killer, because that’s what everyone assumed. He succeeds in changing history, keeping the girl safe from being taken on the original date of her disappearance.

But then she doesn’t come to school two days later. And now Satoru must rethink his entire plan for changing history, and start digging deeper into what the hell is going on in his town. Start really analyzing things from an adult perspective.

This is getting good, y’all.

Kado

Uuuuuuuuuugh just pressed play and not looking forward to it.

We open on some teevee news guys who have been sleeping in their car to get all they can of the amazing news re: Albino Bishi Alien’s arrival and “negotiations” with humanity. These guys are just about the only characters that feel like actual people in this whole fucking show. They’re rumpled, they bitch to each other, and they talk casually about who the fuck Albino Bishi Alien is. I like them, and they’re adding much needed humanity to this emotionless nonsense.

Unfortunately for me, we cut away from the Reglar Reporter Crew and back to Master Negotiator. His name, by the way, is Shindo. How do I know this? Because everyone in the government of Japan shouts his name whenever he appears. “SHINDO!” they cry, usually with longing or hope. Master Negotiator must have left a trail of broken hearts and love stains throughout the various bureaus – then again, if he didn’t, I guess I’d doubt his abilities as a negotiator.

Anyway, Master Negotiator gives the weirdest looking hug I have ever seen animated to some dude from another bureau.

Listen, I can’t throw a video in this post without upgrading our plan, and I need you to see this. You MUST see this. WATCH THIS HUG.

After this show of…affection? Master Negotiator is told he’s in charge of talking to Albino Bishi Alien. He turns down the job and asks to be fired so that he can work for Albino Bishi Alien with no strings attached.

All of this is total nonsense to me, given that, since I have no fucking clue why Master Negotiator is so into Albino Bishi Alien aside from the magic vomit marbles. But everyone takes this in stride like this isn’t total nonsense. And apparently everyone in the world is losing their minds about the idea of how to deal with infinite energy sources. The UN is demanding they have control of the vomit marbles so that no one monopolizes them.

I mean, it’s not like the Albino Bishi Alien is making as many vomit marbles as he can as quickly as possible, and that a single vomit marble can power a whole city.

Oh, he IS!? And they CAN!? And all of this arguing is POINTLESS!?

WELL, then.

Transporting in a car together to some other negotiation hub, Terrible Purple Haircut talks shop with Master Negotiator about the vomit marbles and believes that people are too evil to have them. Remember, she’s on the Japanese side of negotiation, and talking to her rival. About humans, which includes THE JAPANESE, not being worthy of infinite power. She’s as shit at her job as she is with choosing coiffure.

She’s also made fun of by Master Negotiator in private for…a video going viral of her giggling at the name the scientists give to the cube ship’s … shippiness. There’s ‘haha, isn’t this funny!’ music, and she blushes, and this isn’t at all totally unprofessional. I hate you, Master Negotiator. And your weird hugging.

Oh, fuck. There’s a quirky scientist on screen now. She’s young, wears slippers everywhere, and gets over-excited by everything.

NnnnNNNNNGH Fuck this I am OUT! I can’t stand this show anymore! AAAAAH!!

*Viciously deletes from Queue*

Oh, my GOD. What a release. It’s like removing an abscessed tooth. Goodbye, Albino Bishi Alien! So long, Master Negotiator! Get a stylist who knows how to fucking cut hair, Purple Hair!

Katsugeki Touken Ranbu

We open on UNDERCOVER SHOGANATES CHASING BISHI ACTION TEAM! Whataretheygonnadoooo??

Hide in the bushes. Like true heroes of time!

They escape the shogunates to Edo of the mid 1800s! Aren’t they excited!

They have to make sure some important surrender happens else WAR occurs! CompuFOX is ON THE CASE, showing slides to the Team and telling them their mission! And they wish to do their best on their FIRST TRUE MISSION AS A TEAM! EPIC MUSIC SWELLS!

Boyshorts McGee is caught out for his period inappropriate clothing, and he and Captain Hair are chased away from their stakeout. So far, so good, Bishi boys. Luckily later they get it together, and without needing to change their fabulous outfits, they manage to sneak around and protect the important so and so’s from history for a day.

But NOT SO FAST! CompuFOX has found an anomaly in history! Smoke assholes are on the way! BISHI ACTION TEAM – GO!

They fight one ugly sonofabitch smoke asshole who’s real fuckin’ strong! Oh, no, can the Team handle this shit!?

Despite itself, this fight is actually pretty well animated. Clinging and clanging and near misses and slow mos and all of that fancy shit. But it lasts barely a minute or two before a couple of the team run off to save history and instead of cool fights I’m forced to watch dialog and running and plots. Aw, maaaan.

No, wait, the episode is saved! Boyshorts McGee is fighting smoke assholes all over the place! But more smoke assholes begin to appear! Oh, noooo, will Boyshorts be okay!?

WOOO! Some new young man with white hair and a cheery demeanor explodes into existence from blue lightening! A new bishi has arrived, saving Boyshorts McGee from death! What weapon did he used to be before he was called on to fight time crimes!? Is his outfit as splendorous as the rest of the team? Will Time Crimes be thwarted??

TO BE CONTINUED!

Fourth Episodes – COMPLETE

Another

So, creepy ghost girl in creepy doll shop creepily asks Main Dude if he wants to see what’s under her eye patch. Naturally, no one who isn’t creepy as fuck would ask this, and we’re gonna have to assume that means creepy shit is there – ooooooh yeah, it’s a doll eye. It’s a glass doll eye. Totally normal and not at all terrifying.

Of course, she goths out about the dolls after showing Main Dude her creepy eye – “They’re all hollow, filled with the void of death.” I’m pretty sure I heard that in a My Chemical Romance lyric once. She then tells the Main Dude her origin story, amongst insanely heavy strings, but with just enough ambiguity that we can all pretend that she ISN’T DEAD WHEN WE ALL KNOW SHE IS.

And then she mysteriously disappears, and there’s a flashcut to a bunch of students talking about where they’re going to go to high school. This scene is five fucking minutes long. I don’t care about your grades, glasses kid. I don’t care that you want to go to Tokyo for high school, aggressive pigtails chick. What the fuck does any of this have to do with anything!? AAAAH – oh, hey, it’s 1998. This is a period piece, and I didn’t know it.

Oh, hey! Fiiiinally, creepy ghost girl finally admitted that she’s a creepy ghost girl! Woooo. So much dramatic music! Main Dude is stunned! I am really not! As I’m yelling at the dumbass, some girl leaves her class quickly with her umbrella and – HOOOOOOOOOLY SHIT falls down the stairs and is impaled in the neck with the pointy end of her umbrella!

Well, that came out of nowhere and was a complete freak accident of a death. It’s almost as if Main Dude’s entire class is cursed because of creepy ghost girl.

ALMOST AS IF.

Still not sure what to think of this show – lots of unnecessary scenes, still trying too hard, and no one but the ghost girl tells Main Dude anything even though they all know, which is, as I said about Kado, one of my least favorite bullshit story shortcuts for tension.

But a girl got impaled in the neck with her own umbrella, so. I’ll keep watching.

Death Parade

Looks like we’re back into what I thought this was gonna be – a sort of “Purgatory story of the week” show. Two college age kids, a dude and a lady, show up at Purgatory Bar, and Pale Man and Audience In are there to greet them. Audience In is picking up her duties quickly, helping out the serious Pale Man in his arbitration.

Pale Man is also said to have a hobby creating manikins, which isn’t at all a disturbing thing to be interested in. But hey, he’s an inhuman being of judgement, whaddayagonnado?

Looks like the college kids are gonna bowl FOR THEIR LIIIIVES only not really, because they’re both already dead. The shock of their death made them forget. It’s all a big ploy to get the dead folk frightened enough to reveal their true selves. Also, the bowling balls have a representation of their hearts inside them, and they’re bowling with each other’s hearts. Last time pain was involved, but this time, they’re just like, having a nice, friendly game. Bowling with each other’s hearts. At the Purgatory Bar.

Wuh, oh. Memories are coming back. Which means we’re about to find out terrible, terrible things about these people.

OR DO WE?? Turns out they’re both adorable people and everything is cool! Aaawww, they have a heartfelt goodbye at the reincarnation elevators!

I will continue watching, and continue to gain pleasure from watching. I thought this was gonna be some weird Hell Girl situation, but naaah, it’s not all doom and gloom. Death can be kinda cute!

The Devil is a Part-Timer

Satan had to have the Hero guarantee that he’s an all right dude so he could take back his bike from the police! (Why the police have it is unimportant) They fight!

Satan’s General is dressing Satan for a date with Satan’s coworker! The show makes fun of Uniqlo! His adorably loyal General tails him so that the date goes well!

The Hero discusses the benefits of small boobs for breastplate costs!

The Hero gets into a public fight with the girl Satan goes on a date with!

Oh, and someone’s threatening both the Hero and Satan, something’s going on with earthquakes, and Satan gets some of his powers back.

But that’s not important because Satan’s General weeps over his inability to properly stock a refrigerator!

Man, this show is great.

Erased

The ambiance of this show really moves me. Everything about it feels like an adult reliving his past, the little things that used to be incredibly important to a younger you, and you’ve forgotten completely. But something sparks the memory, and it all comes flooding back  (of course, we usually get this through flashback in real life, not actual time travel, but hey, it works). The details are fantastic – the way the kids move compared to adults, the way the children talk to each other. It’s just a really well-done show aesthetically.

Meanwhile, the mystery is growing deeper, and it’s fantastic watching Satoru navigate the world as an adult in a child’s body. All the helplessness of childhood is mitigated somewhat, but he has to move carefully to not make people too suspicious, or to make himself a target.

And there are legitimately moving moments. Goose bumpy moments. A beautiful scene under a frozen tree, a scene of a child being physically abused that makes you sick to your stomach.

Still watching for sure.

Kado

I just realized one of my big problems with this anime. It’s a 2D computer animation, which feels super creepy. Nothing moves right to my eyes. Also, the art is just kinda bland, aside from the kick ass cube space ship.

Aaanyway. Show is still taking itself super seriously. Albino Bishi Alien wants negotiations for…whatever the fuck it is he’s negotiating for to be public to the world. So some really overworked staff set up a sad conference table in the middle of the air strip. Meanwhile, the media kvetch about whether or not our ABA is a God, and also offer him praise for his openness to media relations.

Purple Haired Negotiator Chick is running a psych analysis on Master Negotiator, Serious Faces abound, everyone is grim, blah blah blah blah. Also, Purple Hair Chick’s haircut is shiiiit – she has some sort of bob laying over hair that reaches her waist. Who cuts their hair like that!? MONSTERS, that’s who.

They’re negotiating whether or not ABA should talk about who he is. I didn’t even know that was something to negotiate. Isn’t that like…just a greeting? Anyway, he’s from outside the universe, and makes his arm itty bitty to steal a water bottle as an example of where he’s from. And he explains that Japan is the best place to negotiate giving infinite energy to humanity because there’s not too much economic disparity. Great. I guess the Nordic states were too chilly for ABA or something.

He demonstrates the power by having his companion cube vomit battery marbles on the table, and then linking a bunch of cords to it. IT’S SUPER CEREAL, YO. THESE BATTERY MARBLES WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING!

Ugh. The tone of this show, and the animation, are starting to urk me. But I’ll watch another one. I GUESS. I’m starting to get eeeeh when it’s time to press play, though.

Katsugeki Touken Ranbu

Oh, no, a Dutch steamer has been attacked! That could cause a war between the Netherlands and Japan, changing history for the worse! THAT CAN’T HAPPEN! BISHI ACTION TEAM – GO!

Muscle Man and Bad Boy are ON THE CASE, saving people on the ship! Meanwhile, Boyshorts McGee turns out to be a doctor as well as a short-shorts wearing anthropomorphic knife made human! The ship sinks, but the people are saved! Yay, probably no war!

Captain Hair informs the team that time didn’t change, and only nameless nobodies died. Badboy is totes angry that people died – really against death, this guy, for someone who is also a sword.

Anyway, looks like xenophobic terrorists from actual Japanese history are being helped by the Time Criminals to change history. Why? eeeeeh, who the fuck knows!? All Bishi Action Team know is that Little Reverse Loli Leader told them to, so FIGHT THEY MUST.

Turns out the terrorists aren’t so bad! Aside from their attempt to keep Japan a “pure” nation and kill any foreigners on their shores. You know, small shit. If only Badboy can make them stop attempting to kill a shitload of people so he can save their liiiives.

But he can’t – the Captain teaches him a lesson in letting dudes die if it’s historically necessary and the terrorists are slaughtered by the city constables. yaaaay.

Anyway, Action Bishi Team has a fight sequence, there’s a hilarious fight between clashing Bishis, they get a three day break before their next history jump and discuss the fun shit they’re totally gonna do, and the blood of Japanese nationalists runs in the river.

HAHAHAHAHAHA! *freeze frame*

MAN this show is stupid!

Third Episodes – COMPLETE

Time to dip into the second episode of these suckers. Spoilers, obvi.

Lost Village

I forgot most of these people already aside from Main Guy, Main Guy’s Potential Love Interest and Girl in Adorable Hoodie. Having 40 plus characters is not a plus, even if they’re given incredibly broad strokes for characterization. All I know about tall angry guy is he’s tall and angry and an asshole. Great.

Bus breaks down on the way to the mystical Lost Village. Mob of Unknowns walks there – we learn more boring backstory about Main Guy. Oh, great, he’s yet another youth who can’t look out for himself and needs someone else to take care of him – thus, his Best Friend With Dark Hair has joined him on this journey.

Now some OTHER asshole in the group – a glasses asshole – has the Mob of Unknowns give all their money to the surly bus driver. I guess because all these people are running away to the lost village to remake their lives, or whatever, and don’t need money anymore? Fine.

Jokes on them, though – they find the lost, abandoned village, and it just looks like some Japanese village from the 50s. Like, straight out of a Miyazaki semi autobiographical film. Shit’s grown over the buildings and stop signs and…is that a fucking school house?? Fine, okay, but they’re treating it like it’s mystical. I was expecting some like. In The Deep Past Village shit, not a post modern village that just needs a bit of cleanup.

Wh – someone is saying “Maybe the people who lived here built this up on their own?” That school wasn’t built without a backhoe, babe. It’s a ghost town, and a little spooky, not something removed from time built by the Hata or whatever. I’m severely disappointed by how people are treating the rusted bus stop as some sort of magic.

Boring flashback boring flashback, possible nefarious something in the town – oh, shit.

I’m watching Lost, the anime version aren’t I!? I refuse to be bored by all but a single episode of intrigue, only to be totally disappointed by the ending!

HARD PASS *swiftly removes from queue*

Let’s move on.

Sengokuchojyugiga.

Okay, see, here’s the deal – these episodes are literally three minutes long, including the credits, so I just watched a shitload in one go. Or, rather, I watched an episode, and then googled the historical Japanese figure who was being riffed on, and then watched another one, and then googled, etc etc. I’ve learned a stupid amount about the Sengoku period now, thanks to this short anime series. I watched like, seven in a row. They’re cute, they’re silly, they feel like the art project of a bunch of friends.

Will continue watching.

The Devil is a Part-Timer

We’ve got the first episode with the theme song. Cuuute! Oh, man, every moment of this is pure joy. The CELESTIAL HERO of the realm Satan is from IS CONFRONTING SATAN! With a 100 yen store knife! She works at a call center!

She’s trying to figure out Satan’s SINISTER PLAN! His plan involves going to the bathhouse on time! There’s cute fighting between Satan and the Hero!

They’re totally gonna dooo iiiieeeet.

Oh, also, there’s some underlying plot shit going on beneath all this cuteness. It’s unimportant because Satan’s bike tire got a flat!!

Will continue watching.

Katsugeki Touken Ranbu

We’re dropped back into the EEEEPPPIIC BAAATTLE That the first episode ended on! BISHI ACTION TEAM – GO!

Ooooh, one of them has a guuuun like a badboy! He’s gonna show these Time Criminals who’s boooooh, shit. That’s a lot of blood and cut up people. So I guess…time has been changed?

Totally unknown! Let’s go to Boyshorts McGee, who is killin’ smoke assholes by talking at them with his weirdly low voice! Badboy is shootin’ smoke bastards and scaring Dutch merchants! But it’s fine, the tiny fox creature who has magical computer powers says time wasn’t changed – just a lot of dead nameless guys, no biggie.

Woo! Tiny Boy Loli Leader has deemed The One With the Hair the team captain! They powwow at an inn and go around a circle to introduce themselves and share their favorite foods. Apparently they’re all weapons that gained sexy sexy human form. Because of course they are.

NOW! THEY! FIGHT! TIME! CRIMES!

This isn’t a great anime at all, but I’ll keep watching the Bishi Action Team for now.

Death Parade

Some chick wakes up in a tree, and a Young Girl Of Indeterminate Age takes her on a magic trolley to the Purgatory Bar. She seems strangely fine with this for not remembering her name or how she got here. INFODUMP – These people are the arbiters who determine who in a pair of humans who die together goes to heaven, and who to hell.

Ah, I see, this episode is the nuts and bolts of how the staff make the decision, showing the back end of the first episode. Looks like the nameless chick is our audience insert here, and is assisting the inhuman arbiters in choosing who gets reincarnated, and who gets sent to the void.

This show is genuinely enjoyable so far. Will keep watching.

Another

Creepy girl with an eye patch is still creepy. And also still a ghost, even if we aren’t supposed to know that yet I GUESS. Meanwhile, the main character is still clueless, and his classmates are acting weeeird. “No, don’t go into that room!” *he goes into that room*

What’s in the room!? It’s creepy ghost girl, who is acting seriously goth. “I’m drawing this picture of a woman with wings. Is she an angel? Who knows? I don’t. Let me tell you this in a monotone.” Being dead doesn’t mean you can’t give us a smile, luv!

Not much happens, and then Main Dude stalks the ghost girl like a fuckin’ creeper. And then he finds out from a nurse that the creepy girl is dead right when he follows the girl to a creepy as fuck doll shop. The creepy string music is turned up to eleven at this doll shop. Creepy ghost girl with an eye patch shows up again and we leave the show with her taking of the patch dramatically. Great.

One actual cool thing about this show is that the main character is into horror, and they keep referencing actual horror and thriller authors. Clearly someone on this show was fanning out.

I’m not sure what I think of this show so far. It’s trying…really really hard. WAY too hard. But I’ll keep watching for now.

Erased

Wooo, let’s get this shit started. So, last episode Main Sad Dude introduced that he is sent back in time a few minutes every now and then to look for stuff that’s changed, when he was a kid a child killer killed two people in his school and a dude was framed for those murders, his mom was killed in his apartment by someone who may be the actual killer, framing Main Sad Dude for murder in the process, and Main Sad Dude was sent back in time to 5th grade, right before the child murders.

WHEW! So now we’re in 1988, and Main Sad Dude has to figure shit ouuuut.

First of all, the art is seriously great. I really enjoy the quiet moments, and the detail. It’s really rather lovely.

And I enjoy that this guy who was such a sad sack and rather angry at his mom for being a bit flighty is now super appreciative of her now that he’s seen her murdered. He’s all “Thanks for dinner, mom!” And “I love you, mom!” And “You really work hard, mom!” I would like to show this to my sisters and give them hopeful feelings that their children at 29 will be launched back into their present day bodies after witnessing disaster and then treat them with respect.

I uh. I should also probably call my mom.

Anywhoozles, the guy goes about figuring out what he should do now – and obviously it’s to prevent the murders that happened when he was a kid. Wooo! Let’s see what he can do with an 11 year old body and the mind of an adult!

Absolutely gonna keep watching.

Kado

Okay, so some Master diplomatic negotiator was luckily absorbed into this giant fucking cube of doom that landed on a Japanese airport strip. How fortunate! Now the telepathic Albino Bishi Alien is talking to all of the people with the help of this negotiator. I guess some chick with purple hair is gonna negotiate for the human side, and this masterful diplomatic negotiator will go for the Albino Bishi Alien? Okay, whatever.

MAN, this show is taking itself super duper seriously. The premise got silly the moment that the Albino Bishi Alien in a Cloak of Awesome appeared at the top of his giant cube ship. And it didn’t help that he goes through a lengthy naked creation scene. Watching him try to learn how to speak to humans was pretty great, though. Lots of whale song. He also has a companion cube! Cyuuuuute.

Master Negotiator was the one who told him to wear a power cloak. This guy is fuckin goood.

We’re given a few silent montage panels of Alien Bishi telling ALL THE SECRETS of who he is and why he’s on earth to Master Negotiator, but get none of them. Great. I hate that in media. It’s a cheap way to create a cliff hanger.

And that stupid ploy worked. Damn it. I need to keep watching. If it bores me next episode, though, I feel no qualms about dumping it like I dumped The Lost Village.

Aight. Second episodes – COMPLETE.

I am, for all intents and purposes, a Casual Fan of the anime medium. I only come to mass on Christmas and Easter, I say I like chocolate but only eat Hershey’s, I can’t even lift, bro. Hell, when my life gets busy sometimes the only anime I’m watching is what’s assigned for the next pod recording (as of now it’s Ergo Proxy – no, I haven’t watched it yet even though it was wildly popular when released and has been around for a decade. Are you paying attention?)

But what I lack in knowledge, I gain from being able to watch each show without the baggage of millions of fan reactions. I get to approach each show and movie with a clean slate and form my own impressions.

So, with that in mind, I embark on a special project: RANDOM ANIME WATCH.

I’ll watch a random sampling of first episodes from the master show list on Crunchyroll. I’m choosing them based on name and description alone – I haven’t looked up anything on these shows in advance. At the end of each first episode of this sampling, if I want to watch more I’ll put it on a master list of shows I’ll be watching and reviewing at my own pace. If the show creeps into unwatchibility for me, I’ll drop it.

With all that in mind, LET US BEGIN

First one was a strike out for me: Alice & Zouroku. Magical girl being hunted by some evil corporation of evil, meets an old dude who makes…stuff for gangsters. There’s a chase scene where she’s in his car in the first ep, and she’s explaining the powers that her enemies have –

“She can summon a bow, and her twin can summon anything with a chain! Like a bike! Or a wrecking ball!”

Nope. What a fucking lame power! A cutsie relationship between an old curmudgeon and a girl dressed like a birthday cake isn’t enough for me to forgive something as stupid as “summoning anything with a chain” as the power that someone was given by some entity. What kind of pointless madness is that!? What, “firestarter” was too derivative? Now our little magical girls need to be able to summon chainsaws at a whim?? RABBLERABBLERABBLE, I refuse to watch twelve eps of that!

Pass.

The second struck my interest: KADO: The Right Answer. A giant cube from space lands at an airport outside Tokyo, absorbing a passenger plane. Scientists and the army and the govt tries to get inside it, to no avail. What’s going on inside the cube!?

HINT: It’s albino aliens.

Will watch more.

Third was a show called Erased. Feels kind of slice of life, dude trying to fulfill his dream of being a mangaka, but at 29, is failing and working at a pizza store. His mom is kind of childish, but loves him, he has a coworker who’s way younger and is a buddy –

– oh, and every now and then he goes back in time one to five minutes right before something terrible is going to happen. And he’s gotten in the habit of trying to prevent that terrible thing from happening. And there seems to be a serial murderer on the loose.

Will watch more.

Continued on with Eromanga Sensei, because it had sensei in the title. A light novel author in second year of high school without parents takes care of his recluse little step-sister. He doesn’t know who the illustrator of his books is – their pen name is the scandalous “eromanga”.

I WONDER WHO IT WILL BEEEEE!?!?!?

Lots of underage panty shots, a little girl draws erotic drawings and I get the impression that she’s a “stepsister” for a possible love interest future plotline.

HARD PASS.

The Lost Village struck my interest next, because it’s about youths looking for mysterious lost villages. Everyone was introduced like on Survivor by their online moniker. There were a lot of them. I don’t remember any of them but the three Yuunas. They’re all clearly tropey characters on the way to some Japanese Fantasy Island.

They sing a song about a hippopotamus. There’s a weird as fuck dream sequence. A bus driver goes crazy. Someone throws up on the bus driver.

I have no fucking clue what’s going on, and need to watch more.

Chose Another because I don’t remember. Looks like horror, I guess? The opening song is teeeerrible. Some kid has a collapsed lung and can’t start school. Creepy classmates visit him. There’s a really long scene in an elevator with an obvious ghost chick. The show’s music is delightfully disjointed. Fucking creepy ass dolls are used as transition pieces. Mysterious mystery is mystifying.

Yeah, I’ll keep watching.

Chose Sengokuchojyugiga because the art style is totally different. It’s pritay great, rando fuckin stories riffing on Japanese history and three minutes an episode. I’m gonna blaze through them.

On to Death Parade. Fancy bar, creepy bartender with white hair, a couple can’t remember how they got in the bar – they arrived on two separate elevators and all they can remember is driving on their honeymoon – and now they can’t leave the bar until they play a game. They’re playing darts, and the regions of the board are linked to parts of their body. They’re risking their lives while playing.

WHERE CAN THEY BEEEEEE!?!?

The art is nice, and I get to watch people argue violently with each other about the problems they had in life. I’m definitely going to watch.

Next is Katsugeki TOUKEN RANBU, which I’m watching straight up because the premise was obviously riffed on by Kiss Him, Not Me, and that made me laugh and laugh.

First of all, holy shit, it’s like, got a kitsune buddy animal or whatever!? He has a computer collar! Aaaawww. And the screen is yuuuuge. The quality was so good that I had to downgrade for it to run properly.

Basically it’s, what… Magical Time Cops? In historic Japan? Yeah, cool, okay. Art is aight. Story is interesting enough. The Child Who Is Learning isn’t too The Worst. His teacher gives him Earrings of Encouragement, and he learns he can’t change history by saving people from terrible things, you know, unless it’s convenient – the typical lesson of the time cop in training. Also, there’s a lot of wind of power. And it’s basically a team of bishis fighting evul. One of them is wearing fucking shorts.

Yeah, I can keep watching this.

Tenth show! I clicked on Drifters because it seemed like a historical drama, which is my weakness.

Art’s real nice if bloody as fuck. Almost ridiculously so. I started giggling at it, because it felt like something from a 13 year old boy’s notebook.

And then, purgatory. Agaaain. Man there’s something about purgatory. Only not? Because Our Main Character From Japanese History was sent to some…elf realm? And then a bunch of historical Japanese people meet and they’re all in this new world? And then they…pluck ducks? And there’s a fuckload of silliness – I can deal with – oh, wait, there’s some sort of autocratic war about to happen in this land.

I don’t have the patience to keep watching. Pass.

Finally, we’ve got The Devil is a Part-Timer.

Wow, the beginning is epic.  I was all, “Oh, no, Satan! Woooo, sky fight of dooooom! AAAH BATTLE INNA CAAAASTLE! OH NO SATAN! Escaaape from those aweful humans!

To Tokyo. Natch. Oh, no! He and his general are now teenagers and have no magic! Wait, no, Satan can still control minds. What the fuck are they speaking!? *googles* Engish, in a word substitution code. THAT must be a pain in the ass for the voice actors.

It’s pretty hilarious. A good fish out of water comedy. Watching Satan acquire the necessary goods to live life in Tokyo is pretty fantastic. Whole scenes of filling out applications and explaining health insurance and discussing the value of buying up front rather than in installments!

I am ALL OVER THIS SHIT. watchwatchwatch

Aight, let’s see what I’ll be watching from my random trip through the Crunchyroll –

• Kado
• Erased
• Another
• Death Parade
• Katsugeki Touken Ranbu
• The Devil is a Part-Timer
• Sengokuchojyugiga
• The Lost Village

To be continued! – Amber

We spend our 16th episode pissing and moaning about a terrible movie we watched. We also spend it praising a fun movie we enjoyed. One of the films is Miss Hokusai and the other is Artemisia. They’re both historical films about female artists – the first is set in the 19th century Edo period of Japan, while the second is set in 17th century Baroque period Italy. Which did we like and which did we loathe? Tune in and find out!

In the years subsequent to their release, the aesthetic and narrative conventions of the science fiction and mecha genres would each be irrevocably transformed by the imprint of these two pieces of art. Is it now possible some 40 years later to disentangle and appreciate their value as individual pieces of art from their larger cultural legacy? How does one guide a Zaku into a death pose when being cleaved in twain by a giant beamsaber? Will Bright Noa’s urge to slap his underlings ever be satiated? All this and more on an exciting episode of Podcastle in The Sky Spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace!

Contrary to the rumours going around the anime podcast community, no one in PodCastle in the Sky is currently being detained in Guantanamo Bay, only some of us are communists, and at worst, only half of us have ever been suspected of planning to overthrow the US government. Don’t believe everything you read online.

So what’s with the delay with releasing the latest episode? Well, your sound editor, Jesse, lives in Ontario and was distracted by the provincial elections. Also, his laptop is busted. Don’t worry, there are backups and shit. It’s just going to suck to start over at the beginning again.

Just to whet your appetites, here’s what we’ve got in the pipe:

• Episode 15: The Mobile Suit Gundam Trilogy vs. the original Star Wars trilogy
• Episode 16: Ms. Hokusai vs. Artemisia (1997)

These episodes are already recorded, they just need sound editing. For the next episode we’ll be recording we are covering the anime Run Melos and comparing it to the poem Die Burgschaft (The Hostage) by Friedrich Schiller.

Anyway, that’s what’s up with us these days. Keep it weird, listeners.

Witchcraft is the name of the game in our latest episode as we cover Studio Trigger’s Little Witch Academia and the 2017 CBBC/ZDF children’s TV show The Worst Witch – two contemporary throwbacks to a simpler time in the media landscape.

Do you remember getting up early on Saturday mornings to watch cartoons and running home after school to catch Full House? Do you remember what it was like to believe in magic and to think that the world would never stop being your oyster? Do you remember when your body didn’t get weird aches, seat belts were optional, and people smoked everywhere? Even if you don’t, you should listen to this podcast.

However, there is a fundamental question we have been obsessing over since attesting like starting this podcast: Who the hell are you people?

We’re clearly filling a (very small) niche in the anime podcast community, and presumably it’s the niche for “overeducated hipsters analyze anime”, but we don’t know that for sure.

We get that. Thucydides and The Battle of Algiers rarely ever get mentioned in anime podcasts. We think that’s the gap that we’re filling. But are we correct?

Please tell us. What brought you to our corner of the Internet? What do you like about our thing? What don’t you like? Anything you say, including incoherent gibberish, will be read.

So tweet us, maybe.

PS

We also accept blog comments, Youtube screeds, iTunes reviews, and Bitcoin.

We go beyond good and evil as we discuss two superhero comedies: the anime One-Punch Man and the 2017 live action Amazon series The Tick. The nature of heroism, the ungratefulness of the common man, and the underemployment of Millennials are all things we cover as we solve all of Japan’s social and economic problems in episode 13 of our podcast. Sometimes we need a hero and sometimes we can’t hold out ’till the end of the night. In those times, we could really use heroes like the ones from these shows.

This past season was a damn near embarrassment of riches both in terms of the expected (Kekkai Sensen, Magus, Garo) and wild cards (MMO Junky, Konohana, Anime-Gataris) among a number of others that all ended up being worthwhile.

This coming season will probably be a return to the standard equilibrium of seasonal quality, but there’s some promising stuff on the docket and some of last season’s strong outings (Magus, Garo) still have their second halves to play out.

As always, some shows that look generic at first glance will probably end up being great and some of the flashier ones will end up just being O-K. So here’s a bunch of preview trailers and dubiously accurate commentary on what you can expect.

————————————————————————————

Do you like KyoAni but bore of earnest high school girls chasing their dreams?* Well if so you can look forward to Violet Evergarden, the studio’s fantasy-drama about an earnest young war veteran lady robot-doll finding her way in the post-war world by putting the experiences of others into the written word.

It looks, characteristically, pretty great on the aesthetic front. Paying your animators living wages pays off, who knew. In a sign that this is the winter (anime season) of our discontent, Netflix grabbed up Violet Evergarden for the U.S market, so if you want to to watch in a timely manner you should probably go to [REDACTED]

Trigger and A-1 collaborating on a mecha anime, named with classic anime incoherence as Darling in the FranXX. It’s definitely got the Trigger look, but we’ll see if the plot and action also match the energy of their best stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWhTQ_eF8Z4

Citrus, a rather successful recent Yuri manga in the English speaking world with a fairly large fan base, is getting its turn at an adaptation this season by Passione, the studio that brought us Rail Wars! (oh no) but also Rokka: Braves of the Six Flowers (Pretty good!). Prepare for all melodrama that comes with Forbidden Love! at a straight laced girls school between non-blood related sisters.

Record of Grancrest War is here for all your probably overwrought strategic war fantasy bullshit needs. Dastardly nobles are using the power of the netherworld to oppress the common people, so do our heroes set out to end their tyrannical ways. Characters will probably reference Not-Machiavelli but also there will be battle meidos.

Pop Team Epic is a very peculiar comedy manga. Here is its preview, of sorts, for its adaptation. We will never forget your sacrifice, Croatian Otaku guy.

A kidnapping in the family unearths long forgotten powers in Kokkoku, spiritual tomfoolery and supernatural horror ensues.

 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X9iTllvrYs

Robots aren’t people, unless they are, and especially if they are cute anime girls, in Moe Runner 2049  Beatless.

Japan in the near future has become a crime infested dystopia. Killers are on the loose, but also killers of those killers that are maybe good? Nevertheless, stylish detectives are here to unearth the truth and also enjoy ramen probably, in Hakata Tonkotsu Ramens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdthHsNEx_E

Do you have a thing for older gentlemen? Well, if so, here’s the romance for you in Koi wa Ameagari no You ni.

Yuru Camp. It’s a low key comedy about camping, there will be big coats and everything will be very cozy.

Sora Yori mo Tooi Basho. Girls doing antarctic scientific research things and probably chasing some dreams. It looks nice.

Tiny fantasy people living in a big tree, doing slice of life things for you and for me.

A manganka was struggling to decide which of his fetishes, monster girls or muscles, would be the focus of his next work and then he just combined them into Killing Bites.

Masaaki Yuasa of The Tatami Galaxy, Mind Game and Ping Pong fame has his latest project dropping this season and that’s never not welcome. Yuasa’s spin on this source material it should promise to be quite the ride.

Cardcaptor Sakura’s back and in pog form to reboot the franchise for the youths, I hope you all enjoy Pogcaptor Sakura.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=70&v=FrF5qt_LBlc

There’s still a bunch of other stuff, shonens, idols, a second season of that zombie webcomic show that people apparently watched, plus shorts. These could be good, or perhaps bad. (Some of them will definitely be bad.)

*Sometimes KyoAni is said to also make other things.

For the 99th anniversary of the Armistice that ended World War I, Podcastle in the Sky looks at two fantastical versions of that war from this year – the feature film Wonder Woman and the anime series The Saga of Tanya the Evil. Women with supernatural abilities, godlike beings engineering conflict, pop culture memory of a war from a century ago – we have all!

Transcript

William: Welcome to this episode of PodCastle in the Sky. In this episode we’ll be looking at two pieces of pop culture from 2017 that deal with World War I in a fantasy way. The anime is The Saga of Tanya the Evil, also known as Youjo Senki, and the other piece is the film Wonder Woman. I’m William.

Amber: I’m Amber.

Tom: I’m Tom.

Jesse: I’m Jesse.

0:30 Hero and villain protagonists, war and human nature, rationalism

A: All right. So I would like to kick things off by actually commenting on both, because one thing I really appreciated about both of these was they both – and maybe because it was both of them are about war – but they both really bring in the idea of humanity being kind of incredibly sucky and reliant on vengeance and things like that. It seems like it’s two characters coming to terms in different ways with the worst aspects of humanity.

And Wonder Woman, she comes to the conclusion that even if humanity has a serious downside, it doesn’t matter, she’ll still fight for what is right because that is what is right. She believes that if she keeps fighting she can help humanity reach a better state, if you will.

Meanwhile, Tanya, her whole deal is essentially using humanity’s worst attributes against her enemies. Anybody who is too vengeful, anybody who is too angry, she flips it and uses it specifically to get ahead for herself only. Everything she does, even the heroic things she does for her team, are for her own benefit. I really like that both shows showed the darker side of humanity and showed what different personalities do with the discovery of that darker side.

J: Well, the thing is that Wonder Woman is a hero – a superhero – and Tanya is basically the villain. We’re watching the bad guy winning, basically, in The Saga of Tanya the Evil. Which, I can’t actually remember the last time an anime had the villain as the protagonist.

T: Yeah, I can only think of – he’s not quite a villain – Overlord, he kind of gradually becomes more villainous over the course of the story, whereas Tanya is evil from the outset. And it is fun, like Amber said, in the sense that Wonder Woman is obviously this strong character who’s always, no matter what the odds or the structural forces against her, she’s a larger than life character who’s going to do the right thing, whereas Tanya is a more relatable character in a dark way in the sense that you are placed into this environment, into this world, and there are all these big structural forces at play that are much larger than you and so you sort of adapt yourself to them in ways that are not necessarily conducive to being a good person. And Tanya’s interesting, in the second episode.

For those who haven’t watched the show, the conceit here is that Tanya is a Japanese businessman who is sort of the ultimate capitalist – emotionless, running purely on logic to promote purely their own interests. And they fire someone, who in an act of rage pushes them in front of a train and they’re about to die but then God intervenes, basically, or this mysterious godlike being called Being X intervenes and basically says “You’re faithless, you believe in nothing but yourself and reason, and so I’m going to reincarnate you into a pseudo-WWI environment where you will learn faith by being put to endless trials and warfare”. Which sounds ridiculous, but it works somehow. But in her character introduction she’s – or he, he/she – is referencing the Chicago School of Economics and all these classical ultra-rationalist views of the world and it’s fun to have those, it’s what’s most compelling, I think.

It’s just a fun show. Tanya’s a villain but she’s also sort of clever but then the world turns against her in a way that’s fun to see her get her comeuppance as well. And it’s fun to see her ultra-rationalist view of society butting up with these deeper emotional aspects or ideological aspects like nationalism that drive people in ways that are much different than the way she understands.

4:55 Theology and cosmology

J: Well, Tanya the Evil, it’s basically the story of Job, except in this story Job is a bad guy. It’s about God trying to make a bad guy into a good person. Or not even a good person, just someone who actually worships God. I think the God in here would still be fine with Tanya being evil as long as she actually worships him.

A: Do you think so? I don’t know, I’m kind of on the fence about whether or not God is wanting just pure worship because during the businessman’s death scene, Being X straight up says that people nowadays not only have no faith, they have no morality; they have no empathy for the people around them and laments this while also lamenting the very idea of allowing whoever this guy is – and will-be future-Tanya – to be reborn at all. Because why have anybody with such an immoral outlook on life live again? It seemed to me that it was not just about belief in Being X, it was also the very idea of being empathetic towards your fellow man. Because he also has a whole speech about morality being for weaker men. It’s not just the belief aspect, it’s also being moral, it’s for people who are weak as well belief being for people who are desperate. So I don’t know, I kind of think of that.

T: I think you’re right. Because with Being X, obviously the show doesn’t really – the series is in progress as a light novel series, so who knows where it is right now or where it’s going. But this mysterious godlike being, Being X, I think their initial intent does sort of map on to what you’re saying.

But there’s an interesting element where Being X and Tanya have this almost-rivalry that develops. And I think you start to see these sort of human elements start to manifest themselves in the way Being X behaves towards Tanya in the sense that Being X themselves is supposed to be a figure that’s above everything, that sees this greater moral picture. But as the story gets deeper and Tanya continues to rebuff the belief in Being X as something that they want to worship because they’re so self-interested in worshipping themselves, Being X starts to do things a lot like Ares does in the Wonder Woman movie where they make sure that the report on how to commit war crimes within the laws of war gets onto the right person’s desk. They make sure to give the missile engineer an epiphany. And so they’re taking these actions that perpetuate war just to get the conversion of this one individual who just will not submit to them, basically.

There’s a fun rivalry element there. It’s a little more interesting than what they do in the Wonder Woman movie with Ares who plays the same role of behind the scenes perpetuator of war but mostly wants Wonder Woman’s power. Whereas what Being X wants from Tanya is more like a theological submission.

8:13 Schlock versus Thematic Depth, poor bloody infantry

J: Well, Tanya the Evil, for me, there was always this tension between the themes it was handling – you know, sacrifice, war, anti-war message and that kind of thing – and the inherent . . . dumbness of the premise.

[Laughs]

Because it’s a Japanese businessman reincarnated as a little girl with supernatural powers to fight in WWI.

T: It’s absurd on its surface, yeah.

J: I mean, it’s really entertaining, don’t get me wrong. I really liked the movie, or not the movie, the TV show. But these debates about morality are wrapped up in this very schlocky story.

W: I think that’s also something that’s true of Wonder Woman in a way that it acknowledges. Like the Scottish character says, “This is rubbish.” I mean, it casts itself as a very highfalutin Greek epic, but it also has its roots in the pulpier elements of comic books. Like, Wonder Woman has this Lasso of Truth and she lives in this island which has been sequestered from the world for hundreds and hundreds and thousands of years until she suddenly decides to re-enter society.

T: And I think in terms of tackling the types of themes that they’re going for, in some ways I think the more schlocky over the top elements were – and having Tanya be more of a villainous character – I think actually works in its favour. Because for me, I enjoyed Wonder Woman, but thematically – I feel this way about a lot of superhero movies that try to have themes in them which I appreciate, obviously I’d rather they tried than just be mindless. But like Winter Soldier was the same thing where there is this tension between the traditional heroic action movie aspect and the more critical aspects of what it’s trying to say.

Particularly with Wonder Woman, it’s set in like the final month or two weeks or something of WWI. The war is about to end. And on the one hand, obviously, her mission and the mission of her allies is very noble. It’s to try and stop a very, very fictionalized Erich Ludendorff from using this weapon that’ll allow Germany to turn the tides and keep the war going.

But there’s sort of this weird tension between the humanistic aspects of it, but then Ares, the god of war who’s trying to perpetuate it behind the scenes, he’s this character, and his plan never made full sense to me. I get what he’s trying to do in the movie but it didn’t really work because he’s pretending to be a peace advocate who’s trying to get the armistice signed. But then he’s trying to interfere with their heroics. And having him be the advocate for armistice didn’t really make sense to me. It wasn’t like at the end of WWI or all throughout WWI, despite the horrible losses there weren’t politicians and generals who weren’t absolute hawks like the real Ludendorff was. To have him, I guess that it makes for a better twist, but it didn’t really work.

And similarly, when you’re trying to tell a humanistic storyline it creates problems when you want to have a traditional action scene where it’s like, Wonder Woman is blowing the shit out of those German soldiers, and it’s not like this is WWII and they’re SS or something. That’s just Fritz from Bavaria and he got conscripted and now he’s getting blown the fuck up. [Laugh] Especially the fact that they kept emphasizing that the armistice is on the way, I was like, “Poor Fritz, he died three days before the war ended, that sucks.”

11:53 Action movies and anti-war messages, Wonder Woman’s politics

And so, there was that tension there. What I appreciate, in terms of what Tanya is doing is that, it is an action show and it does have well-done action scenes that are exciting, and you can’t make an anti-war movie, I can’t remember what film maker said that but –

W: I think it was Truffaut.

T: Yeah, I think you’re right. But by acknowledging the inherently psychopathic aspects of its main character and also the delusional abstraction that her fellow high command generals – except for the one guy – view war, I think it does it a better job of articulating the madness of it on that macro level where the human cost just sort of gets absolutely wiped away. And likewise Tanya does a nice job of setting up characters on the other side who are good people and they die for no reason. It does I think a better job of drawing out that humanistic aspect that, particularly with a war like WWI. Really the TV show doesn’t really touch on why WWI is happening. On some level it’s almost unimportant.

But I think Tanya makes a good choice in establishing the evil of its character because then it can portray those sorts of things and not feel the need to make the actions of its character heroic. Because in a lot of these circumstances, heroism is just not an option for anyone in these situations.

A: Well, yeah, I think that I totally agree with you. The one real problem that I had with Wonder Woman, aside from the fact that it sort of wore its “aren’t humans kind of shitty on their own” aspect on its sleeve a few times. Like, oh look at this guy, he has horrible PTSD. Oh look at this guy, he’s the wrong colour in this era to become an actor. You know what I mean?

T: Right.

A: Oh look, you have to put on a dress to function in this society and you can’t go into a room full of arguing MPs, you know. That was very blatant. And every time I’d be like, “That could be a little more subtle, show”. [Laugh]

T: Yeah, it was kind of, “I’m not an old 19th century peasant, how about that?”

A: Yeah, exactly. But other than that the true thing that I really had a problem with was, it’s WWI, a war that historians pretty much say was just a clusterfuck and had no real bad guys, if you will. And what does Chris Pine say? Practically one of the first things he says to Wonder Woman is, “Those are the bad guys, I’m trying to save people from the bad guys” and pointing at the Germans.

And you’ve got these German soldiers, for instance, in the town that’s under siege. It’s like these German soldiers in town, who are presented as baddies because they were told to take this town.

T: Right, yeah, there’s a tension. There’s the one shot where she punches the guy out the window with her shield all in slow motion. I was like, it’s just really hard to take that real world, people died horribly, and match it with like, “Yeah, punch the shit out of him out that window!” And you know, at the same time, I’m like, “Well, the Austro-Hungarians and the Germans do owe a disproportionate amount of blame for the war.” But that’s not Joe German Soldier’s fault. So yeah, it’s tough to do the action movie thing and the war is horrible thing at the same time.

A: Yeah, and you’re right, Tanya did it so much better. Man, that one episode where they have to go into the town where the occupied people are rebelling and destroy it. And the soldiers who are told that they have to do this – I love the breakdown of the soldiers, I love how to get them past their guilt Tanya said that it was her fault. All of this basically blatant murder to keep terrorists from rising up in the future. I just love that at this point the Germans were the quote-unquote “bad guys” but you see the why behind it.

15:59 Erich Ludendorff’s real-life villainy

T: And I will say that I think they were smart in Wonder Woman to make Ludendorff the villain. Not that real Ludendorff and fictional Ludendorff are particularly similar. They both inflicted the war and all that. But he was a real asshole.

W: He was. But I wonder if they were smart. When I heard that Ludendorff was the villain, I was like, “Oh yeah, that’s a really good idea.” Because we can equivocate about morality all day but Ludendorff was one of the main architects for the stab-in-the-back myth – the idea that the Jews and the Bolsheviks were responsible for Germany losing the war. He partnered with Adolf Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch.

T: Yeah, and that’s why I don’t know why they killed him. Because the real guy lives. He continued to cause war. It would have been perfect.

W: What I have a problem with is that he does all these notorious things after the war. He develops this myth, he was involved in another attempt at a coup, he was also at the Kapp Putsch, he was just a real piece of shit. In fact, the main thing he was remembered for being good at was the victory at Tannenberg, a battle which he won against the Russians. But it was actually a different general, Max Hoffman, who did most of that work but Ludendorff took the credit. And then he blamed Hindenburg for taking the credit. So in multiple levels he was an asshole.

But I thought it was clever, this is as close as you can get to a Nazi in WWI is Ludendorff. But they kill him before he does everything he does that gives him that reputation. And, what I’m getting to, is that he was the leader of the German army at the time near the end of the war. And I got to thinking, is that the only reason they made him the bad guy, because he was the real leader of the German army?

There’s nothing in the film connecting him to his real life villainy. His villainy is all about this poison gas stuff which is not something he’s actually famous for. He’s famous for a lot of bad stuff but he’s not famous for deploying poison gas.

T: They went for the twist of having the peaceful guy turn out to be Ares.

W: One very small point I want to make: the guy had a mustache! He had a real asshole mustache, okay?

A: [Laughs] I do love that that so infuriates you.

W: Well, there’s just no details of Ludendorff in the character other than the name. He’s such a great guy to do a villain and I feel like they probably just had it as like Fritz McEvil at some point in the script and fill in the name later.

18:11 Wonder Woman plot criticisms, WW2 and WW1, lebensraum in Tanya

J: Well also, if we’re talking about poison gas, they also used poison gas on the other side. So they were both using this hideous weapon so why is it just the one side that’s being blamed for it?

T: That’s why it confused me, because throughout the whole movie they’re like, “We’re going to blow up this plant and it’ll end the war.” But then evil guy, who is Ares, is like, “We’re going to sign an armistice and end the war” and I’m like, “Armistice sounds nice, that’s how the war actually ended. Why don’t we stop killing people?”

I guess the idea is that this gas is so powerful it’ll turn the tides but yeah, it’s like, a lot of gas was going around.

This was actually a case for maybe higher stakes. Like, I don’t usually say this with the superhero movies ’cause the high stakes thing gets annoying. I got what they were trying to do but the connection between “this gas will continue the perpetuation” –

What they should have done is Peace Guy is actually Peace Guy and then Ares is, like, Ludendorff and a general on the British side or something. And they’re both conspiring to keep the war going with this new gas technology. That would have been better.

W: It should have been the guy who was Chris Pine’s boss. You know, the one who Wonder Woman blows up against because he’s willing to go send people to die, that being great thematically. She’s really angry at the generals, and one of the big pop culture themes that people take from WWI are these impotent generals drinking tea and sending the working class to go die in their wars.

J: Okay, you know, the original Wonder Woman, her origin story is WWII. She fought Nazis in the comics. And of course here they put her in WWI, which – why do you think they did that? I assume it’s because they were afraid of offending people by suggesting Nazis were just following the orders of a god or something. And there’s also less historical baggage for Americans with WWI because I think the US just entered the last year of the war and weren’t really involved in the giant meat grinders from the earlier parts of the war. But other than that the movie was basically treating the bad guys as Nazis.

W: I really think they just did it because Captain America had already done WWII. And they didn’t want to seem that they were following in Captain America‘s footsteps. Apparently the other German bad guy in the film, Doctor Poison, she was a Wonder Woman villain but she was a Nazi villain because of course Wonder Woman was a WWII character. So they just transported her here and made her a German WWI villain.

I think of the two we’re discussing, the one that chose WWI to avoid the connotations of WWII was probably Tanya the Evil. Because there’s an element of WWII in it, but if it was about WWII, its somewhat more sympathetic depictions of Germans would be way more controversial than it is.

I think the whole invasion of the country that’s clearly Romania on the map but isn’t Romania, for example, parallels how Germany invaded Poland in WWII in some oddly specific ways. Like the whole border attack that looks like the Germans set it up, that’s literally what the Germans did to invade Poland.

A: If we’re talking stuff we just had problems with on either side, my problem with Tanya the Evil was they set it in an era that would have been WWI but it was clearly – particularly by the end of the show – WWII.

T: You know, when the Panzer-IIIs appeared at the end of Tanya – 

A: Yeah, I was like, “Now we’re going to pull out V-1s?” and are you kidding?

T: V-1s I at least accepted since, like, magic! But for some reason the tanks irritated me more.

A: And you know, of course, now Tanya’s in Africa, right, by the end of the show. And also the part that I did not like, the only part that I truly did not like was at the end: Tanya has a whole speech about a country that invaded other nations because they needed a place to live, right? And what was the whole entire thing with Germany was living space in WWII. That was their argument for occupying these nations – living space. They wanted living space for the new Aryan race.

And the way it was presented in Tanya the Evil, it was very sympathetic to this idea that all these guys wanted in this empire was just a place to live and these people kept fighting against them. And now they have a place to live and they don’t want to commit war anymore but now everybody’s just so afraid of their knife, of their sword, that they’re going to try beat them back. And I was like, “Come on, show.” I don’t give a shit if you put it in WWI era, you’re clearly drawing this really problematic idea about WWII German occupation just being something that was necessary for the nation to survive. You know what I mean?

22:56 Thucydides, realpolitik, war crimes, moral relativism

T: Yeah. I mean, I think what they were trying to do there is the classic balance-of-power Thucydides kind of thing where the not-Germany of Tanya is a rising power and it makes all the powers freak out ’cause it’s rising and then everybody goes to war to try to claim and/or retain their level of power in the system. And then in the show, not-Germany kind of wins.

I think what Tanya’s speech is going for there is, you know, all of the sides are completely battered and just decimated by the end of this struggle and on some level it makes sense for everyone to stop fighting. But it’s like, pull out the old hoary Peloponnesian War, where there are like a dozen times in the Peloponnesian War where everybody’s like, “You know what? I think it’s a good time to end it. We should just end it.” And then one of the sides is like, “No, fuck you! We’ve got the upper hand now.” So it keeps on going and going.

And I think that’s sort of what they were going for, like the country and the exiles in North Africa or whatever. It’s like, maybe peace would be a good thing but nationalism and ideology is driving them. Basically what I’m saying, everybody, is Tanya the Evil is a critique of political realism. You heard it here first.

And at the end of the day, the name of the show is obviously Tanya the Evil. But the not-French general is portrayed as a psycho and I was like, “Well, he’s not a psycho, his country got blown the fuck up.” So he’s just a patriot.

W: There’s a certain benefit to the series in having this kind of remove where, because the character is being portrayed as evil, and because there are very few characters who have a recognizable moral centre – and those that do, like her second, are completely overpowered by her – that it can have kind of have its cake and eat it. It can give Tanya a big speech, but does it agree with the speech or not? It can distance itself.

So, the difference with Wonder Woman is, whatever Wonder Woman learns at the end of the movie is the theme of the movie. Because the movie is behind Wonder Woman, it’s behind her story, it’s presenting her as this inspiring figure. The sincerity of the film flattens that distance.

So if Wonder Woman does something problematic we’re all very bothered by it and we’re disgusted, but Tanya in her very first episode finds people that annoy her so she makes sure that they die. And she’s always doing these very unpleasant things. But because they’re being portrayed as unpleasant, because the series is acknowledging this moral messiness, we feel better about it, or anyway I do.

T: Yeah, I think that’s what makes it work on the whole. But when I first started watching Tanya, the second episode really hooked me and that’s when I began enjoying it a lot. But like the first episode I was still unsure if I was gonna like it or not. Because the have its cake aspect seemed to be a little stronger, where, is the distance a shield? – In the sense that you can always say, “Well, I don’t really think the things in my story, they’re bad,” or is it actually part of the thematic texture of the story and they’re saying something at that level of remove? Which I think they are in this case. But there are other properties where they’re not.

I guess even for anime it’s sort of refreshing just to acknowledge these questionable elements at all. Because you said, you get so many overpowered protagonists – what’s that, the magic high school Mahouka or whatever [ed: The Irregular at Magic High School] where like, what’s the Ayn Randy ideology? Mind blanking.

A, J (simultaneously): Objectivism.

T: Objectivism! Objectivist god just blows up evil Chinese people for the entire show and it’s presented as the best thing of all time. So like, oh, this is fucking weird.

You know, it’s not that. So that’s good. But yeah, I mean, there’s space for criticism, of course.

A: Okay, so one thing I did appreciate about the show: I think that my big problem was I did feel that Tanya‘s moral relativism, her complete rational outlook on war and stuff like that, really was used as kind of a shield particularly near the end of the show when the war starts to parallel WWII pretty closely.

And again, it’s the expansionist stuff, occupations and stuff –

T: And even in the light novel artwork the uniforms and stuff look more like WWII than they should. So that’s definitely a conscious decision on the show’s part.

A: Right, yeah. I just feel like they kind of hid behind this. And especially with even the war crimes stuff where their side is doing this stuff but it’s always presented in a “but we had to” kind of thing.

T: Right, it gives it just enough cover.

A: Yeah, just enough cover where it’s like –

T: It’s like, “Well, there were rebels.”

A: And also the Empire never reaches the level of war crimes that the Germany of WWII did commit. I have very little belief that in the second season of Tanya we’re going to have them stumble upon concentration camps and stuff like that.

So it’s kind of whitewashing a bit this aspect of WWII to make it make the German side seem more morally acceptable.

T: Equivalent.

A: Yeah! I’d say more like acceptable. Because, “oh they’re trying to win this war so they can stop the war.” In the show, you know what I mean?

28:09 Tanya’s evil as narrative cop-out, future Tanya plotlines

W: And all the things that Tanya does that are evil, even though they’re presented as evil and even though they’re presented as morally messy, they’re usually consistent with “oh this is a clever thing to do to aid the war effort.”

Like, the people she sends to their death, she doesn’t literally shoot them. She just puts them in a position where she thinks they’ll die. And they’ve also been a problem for her. And when she kills people, it’s in terms of suppressing dissent. So it’s all very logical from a perspective of “I have to win the war so I have to kill people, I have to intimidate people.”

She’s never just going into a place and saying, “Oh, these people are the wrong race. I’m just going to kill them all. This isn’t helpful, I’m just doing this because I’m sick.”

All of her evil comes from this kind of rational logical place. Or it’s presented as such.

J: Well, she specifically said she thought war was a waste or useless or something. But basically she kept being put into that position by Being X, essentially.

A: Yeah. However, I would have to say, despite that one criticism, ultimately I do think that the show – for as bonkers a premise as it is – was really, really good about showing just the weird rationalizations that people have during wartime. And just how fucked up war makes normal life and normal people.

Beyond even just Tanya, I really enjoyed, for instance that one guy who went after her who almost died and then went after her and then, like, really died. And would not stop fighting even though it was his doom. I really loved that they had this guy, he was just a guy fighting for the other side and this one person – this one soldier on the other side – so represented all of the death that he witnessed. Even though she was a nine year old, ten year old girl, he had determined that he was going to get her.

And I love that his daughter, who is truly a child – it’s not just an aspect of some soul who remembers its past life as a thirtysomething dude in Japan figuring out shit in a little girl body. It’s a little girl who lost her father and now war has driven her to vengeance as well. And she’s saying she’s doing it so that no other little girls have to experience what she experienced.

I really enjoyed that the show shows that war perpetuates war. Death perpetuates death.

T: I definitely don’t have any expectation that the story will end well for most of these characters.

A: No. Do any of you have any predictions to where Tanya‘s going to end up?

T: I feel in some way she’ll kill Being X but she’ll also destroy herself in the process. Or be destroyed. There could be like in a – whatsit, the guy with the glasses – Ryugen? The administrative guy who seems to have a conscience or her second-in-command. I think there’ll be some sort of betrayal there. But it’ll be justified.

A: I just call him standard dark-haired glasses man of Tanya the Evil.

W: I don’t know if they’ll do anything with him because one of his main purposes as a character seems mostly to inform us that Tanya’s evil, to provide a kind of moral barometer for how out there she is more than he is a person.

One thing I do think we will definitely get at some point and this will inevitably feed into the WWII comparison is that they’re going to go to war with the Russy Federation as they call it. They’re going to go to war with Russia. Of course they explicitly said that this is probably going to happen, in season one. But I think in season two we might get to that. I don’t think it’ll be in Africa that long because it’s Africa.

But on the other hand they did spend a lot of time in Scandinavia which was not what I was expecting, so who knows.

T: In the light novels they do go to war with Russia. And there’s a handful of shots of some not-Russian generals at the very end of the last episode.

J: Well, about how much fidelity they have to the WWI history, I’m kind of hoping with the Russian one, that they do stick to the real world history. Because one of the Germans’ secret weapons against Russia was Lenin. They specifically shipped Lenin off back to Russia just so he could start a revolution. So I’m just hoping to see how completely dumb their version of Lenin is gonna be.

32:25 Real-life WW1, militarism

T: I think, from what I understand the revolution already happened in the show’s world.

A: Really? Because I thought they were still, uh –

T: No, I feel like I remember. I could be wrong.

W: Well, confusing the matter is that the name of the country is “The Russy Federation,” which aside from sounding silly, it sounds a lot like the name Russia has right now.

I mean, is this Putin’s Russia but in WWI? What is that?

T: I think it’s either like revolutionary or pre-revolutionary. But who knows? Aside from the novels, obviously. Hopefully we’ll get a season two. I think it sold really well.

W: One thing we’ll probably see, which will probably be historically accurate and something that people don’t talk about that much, is that the Germans won in the Eastern Front.

Germans were victorious partly because of the revolution. But before the revolution the Russians were doing very badly in the war. The Germans and the Austro-Hungarians pushed on and had multiple victories. And of course one of the key victories was Tannenberg, the one Ludendorff was present for and took credit for, and of course was never mentioned in Wonder Woman.

In Wonder Woman, although, WWI is almost entirely the Western Front. You get a single reference to the Turks because Doctor Poison is working in Turkey to make her poisons and then never again. The only reason that seems to come up is to give Chris Pine’s character, Steve Trevor, a reason to be in the Mediterranean. So he had to be taking something from the Germans in the Mediterranean so he took it from the Ottoman Empire.

T: Yup. I appreciated seeing a handful of Ottoman uniforms on screen. I was like, “All right, here we go.”

W: I really thought this film would just have Germany and never mention a single other part of WWI. Which is a problem I had with Tanya. In Tanya it’s just Germany. And it’s just Germany to a point that Austria-Hungary, Germany’s principal ally, is also Germany. If you look at the map they just portray it as one big country.

Yeah, they can fudge it, but it also means that it kind of emphasizes this myth of Germany against the world. Because they don’t have any allies at all.

J: They did mention a couple of times allies. Apparently the submarine they had at the end was from their allies. But we know nothing about these allies. Who the hell are they? Where are they?

W: The allies have been so erased from the story that we’re not sure where they are. According to Wikipedia I think Turkey is in the light novels but I don’t think it’s part of their alliance exactly.

J: Right, and even though the whole alliance system is what started WWI in the first place.

T: Yeah, in the show it’s a purely “rising power scares everybody into war” thing. It’s like the fourth or fifth episode Tanya has a little speech and she’s like, “Rising power, everyone’s going to declare war on us ’cause they’re freaking out.” And it’s pretty much a purely macro-political explanation for what happens. Which maybe gets back into why they chose this aspect. It strips the ideology out of at least the starting reasons for the war. So you don’t have the maybe-questionable overtones that people might take issue with.

J: Well, bringing it back to WWII, Hitler was I believe a corporal in the German army at the time. And I’m going to assume there’s no Hitler-equivalent in Tanya. But Wonder Woman, her world is basically our world with superheroes, right? So if she was fighting for peace, obviously she failed because there was WWII in twenty years.

T: Well, you know, humans are just a bunch of jokers.

W: The story apparently, as I understand it, is that Wonder Woman starts out believing that humans are basically good and that they only have war because of Ares. And by the end of the film she learns that humans are more complicated than that, so maybe they could have a war without Ares. It’s a little ambiguous in framing because the film also attributes a lot of WWI to Ares’ behind the scenes machinations for some reason. It’s a little unclear how much he’s to blame. I guess the idea is that ultimately you could take him out of the equation and war will still happen.

A: Well, his whole entire thing was that wars happen regardless of him. He didn’t start the wars, he just, say, gave somebody an epiphany about a certain formula or a certain place to attack, or you know what I mean. So I assume that Ares was correct in his reasoning. He was just kind of behind the scenes helping people destroy themselves but he didn’t directly go like, “Hey guys, wouldn’t it be great if you went to war?”

T: Ares just killed poor old Franz Ferdinand himself.

W: Ares is basically negging people. “Give peace a chance! Give peace a chance! Give peace a chance!”

A: “Yeah, give peace a chance, but oh man, your country’s looking a little weak with all that peace over there. But good for you on the peace.”

W: “Look at how insufferable I am with peace. Wouldn’t you prefer war?”

37:30 David Thewlis, Daniel Bruhl, Joyeux Noël

I guess I have a certain amount of unearned hostility towards David Thewlis because he was in the last season of Fargo and I just want to mention, somewhat gratuitously, that was a terrible character he played. It wasn’t really Charlie’s fault, a lot of it was the writing, but it was just a really annoying character on a series I think is pretty bad.

A: I just feel that David Thewlis signed up because he was like, “Do you realize I’m never the badass? Like, I will be the badass. I want to wear a giant ridiculous piece of armour!”

T: It’s certainly not what you would typecast him as.

J: Yeah, you would not typecast him as a Greek god.

A: No, not at all.

W: Mentally, it was kind of hard to buy that this is how he looks. When they reveal that, oh he’s really Ares, I thought the thing was going to be that this was like an avatar of Ares. He just assumed this form to be an English minister. No, no, he always looked like that! We go back to a flashback, we go back to Olympus and he looks like that but younger? He’s always been –

A: Although they gave him like just all the abs in that scene. I was like, “Damn, Thewlis, you are ripped!”

T: You know, the Greek gods had some great mustaches. You heard it here first.

[Laughs]

W: Thewlis should have been Ludendorff.

T: He really should have been Ludendorff. Oh well.

W: And not just Ares should be Ludendorff. Thewlis should have played Ludendorff. I mean, he’s not German but [Ares’ actor Danny] Huston wasn’t German either and almost nobody in this film was German. And the German accents were, ehh, you know. Well they were trying, anyway.

A: It’s always kind of great when everybody who is probably actually speaking German to each other actually only speaks in outrageous accents. I think that’s one of my favourite aspects of historical movies.

W: And it’s not like there’s a shortage of German popular in Hollywood who could have appeared in this movie. Or they could have just found someone else. Daniel Bruhl came up to my mind a lot because he was in one of the last big movies about WWI [from] like last decade, Joyeux Noël.

Which is an antiwar film because it’s about soldiers at Christmastime observing an armistice. So it frames it as the soldiers are reaching over, they’re both people, and their officers are kind of assholes and the war system is bad.

And it’s also a good example of metatextually distancing WWI from WWII. Because the character Daniel Bruhl plays in that film is a German. He’s a German officer but – record scratch – he’s a Jew. He’s a Jew who’s a German officer and a German patriot.

And they don’t put a literal record scratch in the movie but you have the movie kind of feel that disconnect. Like, “Oh, you weren’t expecting that, audience, were you? We’re surprising you with this.”

A: It’s almost as if before WWII, guys, maybe like German Jewish patriots were a thing? I don’t know.

W: And it’s a direct repudiation of our good friend Erich Ludendorff with his image of Jews living at home not fighting on the front. This whole idea of Jews as a disassociated people from German politics which was popularized by Ludendorff and the Nazis.

And honestly, not that Wonder Woman should have ripped off Joyeux Noël, but it would have been interesting if it had ripped off Joyeux Noël. It’s what I would have done. I mean, it had a sympathetic German character.

T: Write them a strongly worded letter.

A: I was gonna say, Will, you’re basically like, “Hey, movie producers, keep on ripping off other movies that are better.”

[Laughs]

T: Hey, I mean, you know, it’s a winning strategy.

I mean, the DCU definitely needs it from the sounds of it, so . . .

41:12 Superhero movies, Captain America

W: I mean, to be fair to them, the people over at Warner Brothers, they’ve had a pretty rough go of superhero films in the past couple of years. I hadn’t seen the last ones they’d done before Wonder Woman, the 2016 films, the Batman/Superman one and Suicide Squad.

So I just watched those this weekend to prepare myself for this podcast and I watched the full extended cut versions. Just in case anyone asks.

A: Why?

T: My condolences.

W: Well, one person on Twitter said that the extended version of Batman/Superman was the better one. And maybe it is the better one but it’s a bad movie. These are really bad films.

And this one comes along, and it’s competently made. It has a plot that flows together, it has character motivations that basically make sense. Like, we’re picking apart how it’s treating WWI, but what happens with Diana – her motivations, what she tries to do, and what she learns – in terms of the logic of the film, this film –

T: It’s structured coherently.

W: That’s great! That’s really not something the last two films did at all. They just kind of rambled around. What the hell were they going on with?

J: The thing is, these are like the minimum that you’re supposed to be doing with movies anyway.

W: Yeah! It’s a really low bar that the film cleared, but even though that’s a low bar, it’s also a good film. I sat down, I watched it. And with the first two films I mentioned I was on my phone a lot because I was bored.

And with this I was not bored, I didn’t check my phone during watching the film on TV. I wanted to see what happened next. I was engaged. I cared about the characters. And there were stakes. There were even things that happened.

‘Cause one problem I have with superhero films – not just the DC films but also Marvel films – is that often not a lot happens. Like Civil War, the movie where Iron Man fights Captain America – Daniel Bruhl shows up, by the way! See, he was available for these kind of movies – nothing really changes. The most that happens is that one character gets his legs broken but he’s going to be fine in a couple movies because he’s getting help with technology.

But in this film – spoiler alert – Steve Trevor dies. He does the big sacrifice.

43:08 Racism in 1920s Hollywood, feminism and Wonder Woman

A: Poor Chris Pine. I literally wept, I was so sad. Because it was Chris Pine.

T: I’ll give Wonder Woman credit, it’s not like an amazing character study or something but all the characters have little beats, they have full personalities, the romance is kind of cute, that stuff works.

W: Oh yeah. I just want to go back to the actor thing for a moment. ‘Cause that’s a very self-congratulatory moment when the guy says “I want to be an actor but I can’t because I’m the wrong skin colour.”

Obviously, racism existed and racism was endemic in cinema of the 1920s. But it’s not as if there weren’t actors of colour. They just weren’t getting starring roles and they weren’t getting many roles. But what they would sometimes get is a minor supporting role. If you see where I’m going with this.

In fact, I can think of films, even British films, with bigger roles for minority actors from around this period. Or at least a couple of years afterwards. I was going to say Piccadilly, which is a film where Anna May Wong is the second-billed female lead, but that’s 1929 so that might be a little too far in the future to count.

But it seems a little too self-congratulatory.

T: It’s the same thing Amber was mentioning where it’s like, “Oh, you wear these silly skirts! We’ve got to get out the vote, am I right? I’m a lady!”

A: [Laugh] Okay, since we’re mentioning modern ladies, I would like to bring up the aspect of a feminist take on both the show and the movie.

Because as I’m sure you guys are all aware, Wonder Woman has been touted all summer as a super pro-lady movie, right? Female director, female main character, literally an island full of kick-ass women, you know what I mean?

And also you’ve got Tanya, who, while yes the former life was a dude, at the moment, her current life is as a small girl. A little girl who is incredibly competent. And her second is also a woman. Who is also very competent. Like, both of them are very good at what they do. For different reasons. And it looks like in the second season, a main challenger to Tanya will be yet another little girl.

45:28 Badass female protagonists, movie women at war, Riders of Rohan

So I want to throw out here that for any of the downsides of either the show or the movie, it is pretty kick-ass to see a woman on screen kicking ass and never becoming the victim. Because a lot of times if you have a woman on screen, at some point she’s either a sidekick or, say, your Black Widows. Or she’s shown to have some serious vulnerabilities, like, say, your Black Widows. And/or she becomes a victim at some point. And neither Wonder Woman nor Tanya ever become a victim. Or Tanya’s second. They never are the victims. They are always good at what they do.

Even if, say, in Wonder Woman’s case, she’s not right about who to target and she’s not right about humanity. She still has a lesson to learn. But when she is out and fighting, she is on point. And when her people fight the Germans on their island they succeed in just destroying that unit that attacks them. Even with swords and goddamn bows and arrows.

And you’ve got Tanya who is totally doing things out of her own self-interest. But she is very good at what she does.

And I don’t know, it’s just nice to see that. I mean, in Wonder Woman they do mention a few times, “it’s a lady on the field” and stuff like that. But once she shows her competence, that never comes up again. Nobody ever holds her back and says “But you’re still a lady!” It’s like, “Oh no, wait, she’s bulletproof, guys. She’s, like, bulletproof? She can go first.” [Laugh]

So I just want to say, it’s just neat. Because it’s not something that you see very often. And I wish we could see more of women just kicking ass. I mean, there are more movies and TV shows out nowadays where a woman can kick ass and/or lead something without it being a big fucking deal. But the reason why we have so many think pieces about Wonder Woman and everybody like losing their fucking minds is because it’s still not something we see commonly for it to be uncommented on.

So yeah, I just wanted to throw that out there.

J: Well, about the Amazons, I believe the ones in the background are all CrossFit athletes, which is why they’re all so jacked.

And I forgot who mentioned it, but someone who was working on the movie was just saying how unusual it was to shoot something and it’s basically just one army of badass women. They didn’t remember ever doing anything with so many women just doing the fighting.

A: Oh yeah, yes. You’re right. I can’t think of a whole army. Like I’m trying to – now I’m like, legitimately trying to think of a time where I’ve seen a lot of women fighting in a show or a cartoon. I guess Steven Universe because they’re all women fighting, but even that was pretty fucking recent.

W: I have an example that sort of proves your point. A lot of the horseriders of Rohan [in Lord of the Rings] were women. Because they had to get people who rode horses and a lot of women rode horses professionally or as a hobby. And so they just slapped beards on them so people wouldn’t notice.

A: Oh, really?

W: Yeah, yeah. “Forth, Eorlingas!” And then most of them were women. I think, particularly one scene they singled out as being mostly women is the first one when you first see Eomer.

A: Are you kidding?

W: I’m not kidding you. I heard it on the DVD commentary. So keep an eye on those women there.

A: Great. See, now that actually kind of pisses me off a little bit because it would have been kick-ass if they were all portrayed as women!

W: Oh yeah. I think the point is that it’s just kind of funny that women are so involved in these films up to that point of actually being on the horses doing the fight scenes and then being turned into men. It’s utterly absurd in a way.

A: This is totally a sidetrack, but I forgot. In the books was Rohan an egalitarian kind of thing where men and women ride?

W: No, no. Remember Eowyn’s entire arc is about that not being the case.

A: Oh, right, she had to go to war as a man. Okay, yeah.

W: Yeah, she did. Though to be fair, she had a lot of company.

[Laughs]

50:00 Final thoughts

J: Okay, so I think we’ve reached the end of this once we’re on Lord of the Rings. So yeah, the same final question that we always ask: Would you recommend this film and TV show?

For me personally, yes, I did find them entertaining. Wonder Woman is the first DC comic book film in a while that actually you can enjoy without, I don’t know, being a gigantic fan of the comic book character who manages to turn off the critical part of their brain. But yeah, you can like it, you don’t even need to be a fan.

You can watch it, it’s fun, it’s a setting that you don’t really see a lot in Hollywood – WWI. My theory on that is because Hollywood is the US and WWII is the war in the American consciousness.

But anyway, Wonder Woman is fun, it gets you what you want, which is a superhero film.

Saga of Tanya the Evil – it’s very entertaining. I assume the light novels were very popular because it’s very well made. Have you seen how detailed the backgrounds were? And  the action scenes, like, so many angles going everywhere. That’s actually pretty hard to do.

T: I think it was the studio’s first full anime, too.

J: Really? Well, I’m very impressed.

Okay, but yeah. I recommend both of these things. If you’re not wanting to think too critically, you just want pure entertainment, go for both of these. Watch Wonder Woman, watch Saga of Tanya the Evil.

T: I agree with all those points. Wonder Woman, I had my issues with it but it’s a competently made superhero movie and a fun time period if you are interested in WWI and stuff. It’s just sort of fun to see all the uniforms on screen. And the time period and there are some nice environmental shots of early 20th century London and things like that. And it’s well put together, it’s very watchable.

And Tanya the Evil for sure is one of my favourite shows from that season. I think it does interesting things in a medium that’s awash in these hyper-rational protagonists right now. And it gets very boring and thematically very empty, and this sort of tries to do different things. As with Wonder Woman, in a lot of ways, it’s clearly made by some people who are kind of military nerds. And that shows on the screen in terms of the uniforms and environmental art and all that stuff. It’s really kind of detailed and nice.

So yeah, I recommend them quite strongly both.

A: I would definitely rec both of them. I really enjoyed Wonder Woman. There were parts of it that were, again, meh. But ultimately, I really thought it was well done. I thought it was fun to watch. I thought that the character of Diana was fun to watch. To be perfectly honest, it’s a little bit rare to have the protag of one of these superhero movies to be truly interesting.

For instance, I don’t find Thor all that interesting. Or Banner. You know what I mean? It’s the things that are happening around them. But I really like how Diana the character was drawn.

So yeah, it is a pretty typical superhero movie. So you’re not going to see anything really revolutionary aside from the fact that it’s a woman who is kicking ass. But other than that, it’s still fun.

Tanya the Evil I definitely recommend. I think one thing that we didn’t get into at all is it is funny. It’s really darkly hilarious. There are some pretty grim things that happen in this show but ultimately I laughed more than I felt broody while watching this. Especially because Tanya’s plans are so simple. She just wants to rise in the ranks enough to have an easy life. And Being X keeps getting in the way. And her reactions to this, to realizing that she didn’t just excel enough to get promoted somewhere, she excelled to the point that she was promoted into battle – you know what I mean?

T: Yeah, you’re right. There’s a real dark humour to it that keeps it from being grimdark and makes it fun to watch.

W: That reminded me of one thing I wanted to compare about the two things. Diana is charging to war. She’s looking for war at every opportunity. She’s like, “Send me to the front.” Whereas Tanya is trying to get as far away from the front as she can. But these two trajectories get them to the same end. It’s kind of funny to watch.

A: Yeah. And really the premise is so fucking bonkers. I mean, there are like mages using guns in WWI and, like, the flying mechanisms that they have are fantastic! Every army has their own. Like, all of the English people fly fucking broomsticks!

T: Oh yeah, the English fly broomsticks, the Scandinavians have flying skis, and the French have flying horses.

[Laughs]

A: It’s so great!

T: Only anime, everybody.

A: Yeah, seriously, there were a few times at the end of the episode, it’s like,  “What am I watching? This is amazing.”

So yeah. Even beyond the messages of what war is and blablabla, and its details where war nerds are clearly on board with this, and the character itself being an interesting and fascinating character, it’s just kind of fun to watch.

So yeah, recs for both.

T: William?

W: I guess a couple of things I would say in terms of whether to watch these films is, something I generally like about superhero films that we haven’t touched on directly is having a lot of costumes and set designs. The more they lean towards fantasy the more I’m a little more inclined to them.

Because when they’re very real world stuff and all real cities being destroyed, that works if it’s a good movie like The Dark Knight. But if it isn’t a good movie I kind of check out a little. Because I like kind of elaborate fantasy settings.

And this film really goes all in, in some nice ways. It has the historical period of WWI to play with. But it does things like a kind of baroque moving painting about the fall of the gods early in the film. And the kind of Thor-like, Lord-of-the-Rings-like fantasy island of Themyscira. So it has all these nice costumes.

As a film, as said it’s an above average superhero film. This one is well made, has an engaging lead. It also has engaging supporting cast members. Chris Pine was very good in this film. Although generally I think he’s been good in these kind of big franchise films. I enjoyed him in the three Star Trek films he’s done.

So I’d recommend it if you like superhero films. I would also add that it does not require knowledge of the previous DC films it’s notionally connected to. I watched those in prep, as I mentioned, and they’re bad. People told me I shouldn’t watch them and I said “Okay, but I’m going to watch them anyway.” And I’m now going to tell you – don’t watch them, and  if you do, don’t blame me.

As for Tanya the Evil, it’s a lot of fun, it’s funny, and something that hasn’t been mentioned is that it has a decent amount of map porn. Because I really maps. When we get a couple of maps in the series – and half the time I was watching it, I was just trying to figure out how the maps in the series related to the maps of the real WWI. In fact, if you check the tweets of our account and check #sagaoftanyatheevil, a lot of times I’m just trying to figure out how those things relate to each other. And so if you enjoy that tension between a thinly-veiled version of history and history, it has that.

So I’d recommend both of those.

T: We watched good things this episode, guys.

A: Yeah, no, this was great, I really enjoyed both of these. It was a real good runner-up from the crapfest from last time. [Laugh]

W: Hang on. Uh, give me a minute. Just two points.

A: I was just going to say, whatcha going to bring in this time?

W: Well, he didn’t really do a lot about WWI, unfortunately, or did he? As for our good friend Alfred Hitchcock, uhh –

T: The one with the Statue of Liberty was in a war.

W: Yeah, yeah. I’m going to say – yeah, you’re right. In fact, that particular film is named Saboteur. So I’m just going to say Saboteur.

A: You saved it, Tom. You saved the Hitchcock reference.

T: It’s tradition now. Good listening, everybody, but it’s that time again –

58:33 More PodCastle in the Sky, next episode

A: Oh wait, wait. If you like what you hear, please leave a review on iTunes. Thank you to the single reviewer who gave us a positive review. Oh you, stranger, I hope you’re still listening because – shoutout. And we’re available also on our blog PodCastle in the Sky at wordpress.com. You can see us on Twitter @flyingpodcastle. And we’re also available on Stitcher. And Youtube now. So check us out!

J: You don’t see our faces, though.

T: I’m waiting to get my emo hair and a flat baseball cap. And to fill my room with pop culture garbage. And then we can film.

[Laughs]

A: I feel like it’s okay if I’m just a disembodied voice forever.

T: I think it’s better that way for all of us and our listeners.

A: Yes. We can live in mystery for them.

W: And so, our next episode is going to be about superheroes – again! Wait! Well actually it is, but comedic superheroes – the anime One Punch Man and the Amazon Prime TV series The Tick. That’ll be interesting.

T: Yay. Good episode.

A: Okay, I think we’re good.

T: Good.

J: Yay.

A: Yeah, good episode.

W: Yeah, that’s it.

J: Episode Twelve, which only took us a little bit over two years to reach.

A: Oh my god. That’s so crazy.

[Laughs]

W: It’s a wrap on the first season!

[Laughs]

It is strange days when we see Japanese schoolchildren running for their lives in simulation of a nuclear attack from North Korea. The picture in the linked article reminds me of nothing more than Cold War evacuation drills in the US.

Selfishly, as an anime fan I wonder how all this uncertainty is going to affect the anime industry. I never thought the threat of nuclear conflict would figure into my estimation of when we could expect season 3 of Attack on Titan, but here we are.

It’s jarring to think of these things when thinking of anime, which, let’s face it, is mostly just escapist fantasy, like most mass entertainments are. I’m reminded that Jane Austen joked about being tempted to include a treatise on Napoleon in Pride and Prejudice just to counteract how light and frothy her novel was. I’m also reminded of what Slavoj Zizek said about the use of the Christian calendar, which uses the birth of Christ to mark the flow of events: he called it the irruption of the infinite into the historical. Perhaps we might call the imposition of nuclear geopolitics into the logic of anime production as the irruption of the political into the inconsequential.

Of course, this statement is both facetious and incorrect, for anime is already political. It is produced in a web of politics -government grants to aid in translating content for export, industry-wide discrimination to discourage women, a regime of austerity that encourages overwork of animators, and a capitalist ideology that demands crass commercialism – and also expresses statements of political positions – women are always emotional, Chinese and foreign characters can never beat Japanese protagonists, and Koreans don’t exist.

The surprise we feel when placing anime in the same headspace as nuclear diplomacy is a surprise that has been manufactured. Being apolitical is a political stance, and depoliticization is a political action. To divide the world and say these things are of politics and these things are not is an act of power (Michel Foucault called it power/knowledge, which is the power of defining what knowledge is).

The personal may be political, but it’s inconvenient for the powerful to let common citizen remember this fact. Politics is not merely debating tax rates and talking at town halls, which is to say it’s not only for politicians and activists, but keeping it an activity of a small elite certainly makes it easier for those elites to set the agenda. Political apathy serves those who already have power.

And so we come to anime and its role in the politics of apathy. Crudely speaking, anime is just another cog in the machinery of distraction that keeps the masses quiescent in that old Roman strategy of panem et circenses (i.e., bread and circuses). Focus on your pop culture, say the masters of the world, and leave the important things to us. This was, of course, the old politics, before the divisions in democracy were laid so starkly bare, but it was a deal that many thought worthwhile, and many still do.

But even behind this wall of willful ignorance, sometimes the world of politics would intrude, as in the current case of North Korea and its nuclear arsenal threatening the home of anime. We find that we cannot leave politics because we are already doing politics. We are reminded that we live in a political world. The personal is political, but now we see that the reverse is also true, that the political is also personal. In a liberal democracy, to not resist is to consent. Therefore if we wish not to die and to continue watching anime, we must act.

Action begins in knowledge, so I ask first that you learn what is happening around you. What circumstances led to the nuclear standoff threatening our beloved hobby? What power moved us to this impasse?

After answering these questions for yourself, then ask yourself this one: am I okay with things continuing the way they are?

If your answer is anything besides “yes”, then continue asking questions, including the big one – what should I do? The answer is simple: do anything that you can. Speech is action, so even something as minimal as talking online is still a step in the right direction.

My fellow otaku, ignorance is only a temporary condition. I challenge you to look up from your TV and computer screens. Remember that you are not only a consumer. You are also a citizen.

— from the desk of Jesse

We test our fortitude by watching two legendary works of fantasy crapitude: the 1996 OVA series Garzey’s Wing and the 1982 movie schlockfest The Sword and The Sorcerer. Incoherent writing, awful acting, and incoherent writing abound in both of the items we review. Can we actually find anything nice to say about either work of fiction? Is there anything redeeming about either movie beyond their ironic camp value? And is it possible to watch either work without feeling oneself getting dumber? Join us this episode and find out!

In this episode we discuss urban planning and transformative pubescent experiences. Also we talk about the movies Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade and The Company of Wolves. Both adapt the story of Red Riding Hood, with the former being about an alternate history fascist Japan and the latter being a magical realist feminist take on the traditional fairy tale. We had a couple of technical issues during recording, but we soldiered on for your listening pleasure. Enjoy!