Tentative Inspiration
Jun. 20th, 2003 09:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aeanagwenBought another X DVD last night, and it's given me a ghost stir of drive on the Sakura/Kusa fic. Cross your fingers, anyone who cares.
On a totally different note, while talking with a friend last night, I think I realized why I don't care for a lot of the anime that's been coming out lately, and for a lot of the sci-fi genre.
For starters, so much of anime these days has a very simple set-up--boy meets girl, antics ensue, some drama results, happily ever after. Now, it's not so much this set-up that I mind, although I much say that there's a limit to my tolerance when it comes to things classifiable as 'antics'; Ranma's about the only exception to this. It's the fact that the girl and the boy are, from all I can see, taken from a very simple set of stereotypes. The boy is the 'average joe' type, generally with a healthy set of hormones (cue the nosebleeding gags), generally nice, if often abused by the whim of circumstance, but with some underlying nobility. The girl--at least the main one--is sweet, innocent, often the blushing virgin type, sometimes naive, often put-upon by the rest of the cast. And speaking of the rest of the cast, they often fall into these simple molds as well--the sexy one, the smart one, the demure one, the blonde one, the genki young one, the exotic one, the stoic one, and so on and so forth.
I don't know if Tenchi did this first, but it certainly popularized it, and, I think, did it best. There's something genuinely and convincingly noble about Tenchi, something far more sincere. I'm not sure what it is. Other main boys have their moments, but always at heights of drama, or at the moment when the girl is threatened--and it almost always revolves just around that girl. With Tenchi, at least what I've seen of it, you can see that he treats EVERYONE with the same respect and dignity, at least until they've earned otherwise. It's more consistant and it makes him, in my eyes, far more likeable.
On to my next point, art-styles. An artist friend of mine has several series that she just can't watch because she doesn't like the art style. Normally this doesn't hold true for me (although there is an exception, not that I remember it at the moment), but I think I can understand what she means when I look at a lot of new anime. For me, though, it's not a specific art style, but the LACK of one that bothers me. Oh, you can differentiate the characters well enough, because they all look different, but the basic STYLE is the same. If you showed pictures of side characters from some different shows to a person who'd never seen them, they couldn't tell you what character went with which show, because the styles are all too similar. Yu-Gi-Oh! has a very obvious style. You can recognize Toriyama, Takahashi, and Miyazaki work a mile away. Watase Yuu is distinctive enough, Naoko Takeuchi's pretty obvious, and god only knows CLAMP's easy to recognize. Escaflowne has its noses; Utena its sharp chins and featureless colored eyes. I LIKE a distinctive style. There's something about all this featureless anime that bothers me immensely.
Nextly, I've figured out that it's not so much sci-fi that I have a problem with as it is most sci-fi anime. I mean, I absolutely loved Macross Plus, I enjoy Gundam Wing and Cowboy Bebop, I'm getting more into Eva as I see more of the manga, and I'd like to see Memories. Obviously, it's not sci-fi that's inherently the problem. The problem is the characters. I don't want another girl+boy story set on a space backdrop, first of all. Secondly, I like the focus to be ON the characters, not the heap big mecha and space battles. GW is not about the mecha, but about politics, the nature of war, and humanity's ability to attain a so-often transient peace. Cowboy Bebop barely comes off as sci-fi at all, because it's not where the focus is. Eva is far less a sci-fi series than it is a mind-fucking run of character studies against a sometimes very surreal backdrop. Macross Plus was more a story about the love triangle at its heart than it was a massive sci-fi action flick. The point here is that I like my series to have complicated CHARACTERS. Fanservice in the form of jiggling boobs, hot guys fucking, or big explosions is all well and good, but there should be more to a cake than icing, after all. If fanservice is the main allure, I can guarantee you that I don't want to hear about it. If it's more about working out an alien race's secrets in time than it is the characters involved it, I probably am not going to care. I want SUBSTANCE, characters that can't be accurately summed up in five word phrases (I suppose this makes Angelique a guilty pleasure; so be it), a plot more interesting than boy+girl+hijinks. Even for comedy, I want depth--see, Valgarv, Slayers TRY. I want characters I can sink my teeth into, and a world I can analyze into the ground. I want debate, possibilities, drama, characters that grow and change in convincing ways, characters that make me CARE about them because there's more at stake than a faceless, featureless 'humanity' or a lone love interest. What do I like about FY? The CHARACTERS, the plot and world full of possibilities, the fact that there is more at stake than just the characters themselves, something you're shown in a horribly jarring way when Tamahome's family is killed. This isn't just about two girls and their opposing factions, but about two entire countries full of people. Sure, the focus is on Miaka and Tamahome, but there are a load of other things riding on the plot, and FY manages to make me interested in those other things.
I'm rambling, I realize, and I highly doubt anyone cares about my random anime preferences. But it's my LJ, so there.
On a totally different note, while talking with a friend last night, I think I realized why I don't care for a lot of the anime that's been coming out lately, and for a lot of the sci-fi genre.
For starters, so much of anime these days has a very simple set-up--boy meets girl, antics ensue, some drama results, happily ever after. Now, it's not so much this set-up that I mind, although I much say that there's a limit to my tolerance when it comes to things classifiable as 'antics'; Ranma's about the only exception to this. It's the fact that the girl and the boy are, from all I can see, taken from a very simple set of stereotypes. The boy is the 'average joe' type, generally with a healthy set of hormones (cue the nosebleeding gags), generally nice, if often abused by the whim of circumstance, but with some underlying nobility. The girl--at least the main one--is sweet, innocent, often the blushing virgin type, sometimes naive, often put-upon by the rest of the cast. And speaking of the rest of the cast, they often fall into these simple molds as well--the sexy one, the smart one, the demure one, the blonde one, the genki young one, the exotic one, the stoic one, and so on and so forth.
I don't know if Tenchi did this first, but it certainly popularized it, and, I think, did it best. There's something genuinely and convincingly noble about Tenchi, something far more sincere. I'm not sure what it is. Other main boys have their moments, but always at heights of drama, or at the moment when the girl is threatened--and it almost always revolves just around that girl. With Tenchi, at least what I've seen of it, you can see that he treats EVERYONE with the same respect and dignity, at least until they've earned otherwise. It's more consistant and it makes him, in my eyes, far more likeable.
On to my next point, art-styles. An artist friend of mine has several series that she just can't watch because she doesn't like the art style. Normally this doesn't hold true for me (although there is an exception, not that I remember it at the moment), but I think I can understand what she means when I look at a lot of new anime. For me, though, it's not a specific art style, but the LACK of one that bothers me. Oh, you can differentiate the characters well enough, because they all look different, but the basic STYLE is the same. If you showed pictures of side characters from some different shows to a person who'd never seen them, they couldn't tell you what character went with which show, because the styles are all too similar. Yu-Gi-Oh! has a very obvious style. You can recognize Toriyama, Takahashi, and Miyazaki work a mile away. Watase Yuu is distinctive enough, Naoko Takeuchi's pretty obvious, and god only knows CLAMP's easy to recognize. Escaflowne has its noses; Utena its sharp chins and featureless colored eyes. I LIKE a distinctive style. There's something about all this featureless anime that bothers me immensely.
Nextly, I've figured out that it's not so much sci-fi that I have a problem with as it is most sci-fi anime. I mean, I absolutely loved Macross Plus, I enjoy Gundam Wing and Cowboy Bebop, I'm getting more into Eva as I see more of the manga, and I'd like to see Memories. Obviously, it's not sci-fi that's inherently the problem. The problem is the characters. I don't want another girl+boy story set on a space backdrop, first of all. Secondly, I like the focus to be ON the characters, not the heap big mecha and space battles. GW is not about the mecha, but about politics, the nature of war, and humanity's ability to attain a so-often transient peace. Cowboy Bebop barely comes off as sci-fi at all, because it's not where the focus is. Eva is far less a sci-fi series than it is a mind-fucking run of character studies against a sometimes very surreal backdrop. Macross Plus was more a story about the love triangle at its heart than it was a massive sci-fi action flick. The point here is that I like my series to have complicated CHARACTERS. Fanservice in the form of jiggling boobs, hot guys fucking, or big explosions is all well and good, but there should be more to a cake than icing, after all. If fanservice is the main allure, I can guarantee you that I don't want to hear about it. If it's more about working out an alien race's secrets in time than it is the characters involved it, I probably am not going to care. I want SUBSTANCE, characters that can't be accurately summed up in five word phrases (I suppose this makes Angelique a guilty pleasure; so be it), a plot more interesting than boy+girl+hijinks. Even for comedy, I want depth--see, Valgarv, Slayers TRY. I want characters I can sink my teeth into, and a world I can analyze into the ground. I want debate, possibilities, drama, characters that grow and change in convincing ways, characters that make me CARE about them because there's more at stake than a faceless, featureless 'humanity' or a lone love interest. What do I like about FY? The CHARACTERS, the plot and world full of possibilities, the fact that there is more at stake than just the characters themselves, something you're shown in a horribly jarring way when Tamahome's family is killed. This isn't just about two girls and their opposing factions, but about two entire countries full of people. Sure, the focus is on Miaka and Tamahome, but there are a load of other things riding on the plot, and FY manages to make me interested in those other things.
I'm rambling, I realize, and I highly doubt anyone cares about my random anime preferences. But it's my LJ, so there.
