Category: Media

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Fear of a blank planet

I recently saw the series premieres of Terror in Resonance and Aldnoah Zero.

It’s hard to say much about Terror in Resonance since its first episode contained nothing but opaque hints at a story that could equally conceal either complexity or shallow-minded literalness. There are these two teenaged boys, they’re mysterious, they forcibly recruit a classmate being bullied. Props to Funimation for the crispness of the HD streaming. That’s it, that’s the episode.

Oh yeah, they blow up the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, which I mostly know from Digimon Tamers. Despite being a show with terrorist protagonists, the anime is very careful to show that no people were hurt in the attack. I suppose it’s so we can still root for the two heroes.

I dunno, terrorism is inherently a political act, the show better not end up spouting the rote cliches about justice and protecting your comrades that end up getting repeated over and over in anime. Though if the comrades aren’t nakama but are instead tovarishch and the two protagonists are actually part of some Baader-Meinhof communist uprising? That would be a pleasantly surprising twist.

And thinking about it further, it’s been a while since I’ve been wowed by an anime’s opening episode. They seem to be mostly slow burns. I think the last anime that I absolutely wanted to rave about after just one episode was Bakemonogatari.

Aldnoah Zero, however, at least manages to get to the fireworks factory. You see, human colonists of Mars, armed with superior alien technology, invade the Earth and bring the planet to its knees. Meanwhile, a plucky band of high school students use giant robots to defend their tiny part of the world. The anime is basically War of the Worlds with human invaders. In a later episode there’s even a boat full of refugees and a Martian war machine that Earth’s defenders have to hold off. I could almost hear Richard Burton narrating the last battle of HMS Thunder Child.

More deliciously, the tagline for the show is "Let justice be done, though the heavens fall". The self-serious connotations of using such a phrase – the Latin original is most widely misattributed as being quoted in the legal decision that found slavery insupportable in England – clashes so much with the subject matter that I immediately started laughing my ass off. Sweet crap, this looks like an awesome show to watch while drunk. This anime thinks it’s profound! Aldnoah Zero, your hubris is inspiring.

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Old is new again

Somehow I’ve managed to get through life without ever seeing Groundhog Day. I never felt this lack until recently watching Edge of Tomorrow, the plot of which is similarly based on the protagonist reliving the same day over and over again.

I don’t believe Edge of Tomorrow is based at all on Groundhog Day, and in fact in reading the original book adapted for the film called All You Need is Kill (great title by the way), it’s clear that the repetitive nature of the story is based on the experience of dying over and over in a video game and not on any movie starring Bill Murray.

Still, comparisons were made, so out of curiosity I watched a movie that I’d avoided watching every time it was shown on TV – and I remember it was shown quite a lot.

Groundhog Day was okay. It’s pretty funny and enjoyable enough. Had I seen it when I was younger I might have enshrined it with nostalgia beside Home Alone, Ghostbusters, and Big. But that’s pretty much it. I think part of the reason for the regards it’s held in today is the fact that most people will have seen it multiple times over their lives. Nostalgia is built and rebuilt with each viewing.

But there are worse things to be nostalgic for. At least this thing is decent, unlike, say, Thundercats or He-Man or the like. Anyway, I can cross off another movie from my list.

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Star Trek + Facebook = Redshirt, the computer game

Remember that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that shifted focus from the high-ranking officers on the bridge to the entry-level schlubs doing the grunt work? Remember how those saps never knew what was going on half the time? Now imagine if those ensigns had Facebook.

This is the premise of Redshirt, the computer game. You create and roleplay one of the nameless crew members that die all the time on Star Trek (the so-called redshirts).

Spacebook page of Dirk Amazeballs, Maintenance Tube Wrangler

However, the game is not about meeting aliens and exploring space. It’s not even about cleaning toilets and fixing light bulbs, which are the only duties your fearless crew member is qualified for. It’s about playing the Facebook game.

There’s a disaster coming for your space station, you see, and your goal is to get promoted high enough to be evacuated along with the top brass (though the highest rank you can aspire to is the Commander’s Assistant). In the meantime, you have to schmooze with supervisors and keep your spirits up by hanging out with people on your friend list. Essentially the game is an RPG played through a Facebook simulator.

Thus are combined two obsessive activities: checking status updates on Facebook and grinding for incremental level gains on RPGs. I was up until 3 am playing this game and had to call in sick the next day due to sleep deprivation. It’s fun if you’re into Trek jokes and roleplaying, which yes, I am.

In conclusion, if you’re trying this game out for the first time, I recommend doing it on a weekend.

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Plato, Buddha, and Jesus walk into a bar . . .

I’m reading 10 Billion Days and 100 Billion Nights, a classic of Japanese science fiction by Ryu Mitsuse. It’s excellent. It’s one of those books that have so many big ideas, and happily it’s also one of those books that manages to do justice by those ideas.

Briefly, it’s about the universe, from the formation of the solar system to the heat death at the end of existence. In between, humans search for the cause of suffering and the solution to it. Humans like Plato, like the Buddha, like Jesus. They journey together and fight each other to find the righteous path and the better world of our dreams.

When reading this book I sometimes find myself agog at its breadth, its erudition, its cleverness, and its confidence. For example, when he is introduced, it’s revealed that Plato’s obsession with Atlantis is not some metaphor for the ideal state but a literal quest for antediluvian demigods. On the way he ends up debating philosophy with either a time traveller or an alien. This sounds very hokey in a postmodern reflexively ironic “pirates versus ninjas” mishmash, but somehow it’s earnestly un-ridiculous in context.

The book does presuppose a familiarity with the original texts it’s riffing on. You don’t need a degree in comparative theology, but knowing what Buddhist cosmological writings sound like helps in appreciating how deliciously inventive Buddha’s conversation with Brahma is, for instance. And having an ear for techno-babble does help, as well as some basic astronomy, though I understand the science in the book is out of date by now – not unexpected, for science has marched on since the book’s publication in the 60s.

Anyway, read it. I’m seriously enjoying this book. In a word, it’s mind-blowing.

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On violence, on anime, and on violent anime

Most giant robot anime, and most anime in general, seem to be anti-war or anti-violence (barring the relentlessly capitalist shows like Mazinger-Z and Voltron which say nothing beyond “explosions are cool” and “buy our toys”). The shows that luxuriate in violence, like Black Lagoon, make clear that the characters are psychologically damaged in some way. The shounen fight series are either about making friends (like One Piece), are comedic (like Ranma 1/2), or have a stick up their ass and continually remind the viewer that the hero is only fighting reluctantly (like Bleach). I suppose the atomic bombings and the enforced postwar pacifism are ever present in the Japanese consciousness.

Though two series that glory in war and violence are the right wing wankathons Total Eclipse and High School of the Dead. One of the characters from the latter show even remarks, as he’s using a baseball bat to bust open a cash register, “You know, this is pretty awesome”. And he’s right, it would be goddamn sweet to be running wild in a zombie apocalypse with a Humvee full of guns and big-tittied girls in high school uniforms. Or being encased in a mechanical womb and using swords, cannons, and other phallic objects to unleash death and figurative semen on hordes of invading aliens.

Of course, there’s no such thing as zombies or alien invaders, which is to say that there are no faceless Others one can morally slaughter; thus, in anime, the depiction of violence simultaneously demands an apology for its use. But it seems that it takes a right-wing dickwad to not give a shit about such distinctions.

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The Summer of Adventure

I just completed the adventure game Memoria, which I’d bought during GOG’s summer sale. It’s rather old school in its point-and-click control scheme. Were it not for the graphics and for the far lower number of game-crashing bugs (damn you, Quest for Glory IV) I might have thought I was playing something Sierra Entertainment made in the 90s.

But one glimpse of the visuals will let you know this game is from the 21st century. I mean, just look at this game:

A waterfall, a princess, a bound thief, and two Amazons

That’s too detailed to be anything but hand-painted. And this is a screenshot from the game itself. Something from the classic era of adventure gaming would be full of visible pixels. Even a lot of modern adventure games like Gemini Rue still use that older style of giant pixels. I suppose it’s both out of nostalgia and out of consideration for the development budget.

Memoria is about a princess trying to stop a demonic invasion and about a birdcatcher five hundred years later learning about her story in his own quest to solve a magic curse on his beloved. The latter protagonist is somewhat run-of-the-mill, but the princess is more savage and ruthless than the typical bland do-gooder you might get in this sort of game. It’s rather refreshing.

Daedelic Entertainment definitely went all in on this game. Even the voice actors are uniformly good. And as an adventure game it’s satisfying enough. The puzzles tend not to delve too much into that odd adventure game inventory puzzle logic, such as that infamously convoluted Gabriel Knight solution (number four on that list) which involves using cat hair to make a mustache to match the picture on a passport stolen from a man with no facial hair. No, I think experienced adventure gamers should be able to finish this without having to resort to a walkthrough.

However, while the game is fun, it isn’t very long. I only got it last week and have already finished it, after all. I remember taking a lot longer to finish an old Sierra game. This game is actually fairly linear, so you’re not wandering around a lot of different locations wondering which doohickey should be used at which place and in which combination. It’s pleasant to look at some pretty pictures with no real sense of urgency, but it’s hard to justify paying full price for something this ephemeral. It’s not like this game has a lot of replayability in it.

Overall? I say buy it if you’re into adventure games, but wait until there’s a sale on.

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The Angel of Future History

Alita, the cyborg angel rising from the scrapheap of history

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another new recommendation. This one isn’t very obscure but it’s rather old, so it might have fallen off the radar by now. The manga I’m talking about is called Battle Angel Alita. It’s about an amnesiac cyborg making her way in a post-post-apocalyptic world, which is to say a world where the end has ended and a grimier, crappier version of civilization has been cobbled together.

There’s a formula to this type of thing: mysterious hints at the origin of the protagonist, savage battles of survival rendered in loving detail, betrayals, reversals, friendships, death. Alita follows that formula to the letter.

Still, I only started reading Alita on the recommendation of the fellow who makes the webcomic Gunnerkrigg Court – read that posthaste, by the way – so I knew there was something to the manga. And it delivered on that front as well.

Picture a murderous rollerball tournament played by cyborgs (and don’t overthink the premise). Picture our heroine fighting with gritted teeth and desperate urgency. Then picture genuine character growth in the midst of this frenetic shounen action sequence. Whilst reading I had to stop and take a moment to admire what the comic was doing.

There’s a reason James Cameron is making noises about doing a live action adaptation. I think the story is best early on, when its setting and its conflicts are smaller and more immediate. The latter portion of the series isn’t bad but by the end too many battles have passed by to give the climax its proper narrative weight. Apparently the author was dissatisfied with the original ending (something about being ill at the time) and has rebooted the series as Battle Angel Alita: Last Order. I’m only talking about the first series and have no idea if the semi-continuation is any good.

The English translation is from that older era when translators would put more of a stamp on the finished product. For example, in Japanese the protagonist’s name is Gally and the series is called GUNM. I prefer the alliteration of the alternate title, and honestly, what the hell is a GUNM?

Overall, I would suggest reading at the very least through the first four volumes. That’s what made this series one of the early seinen sensations in English. Give the manga a skim, let its images assault you, allow its battles to excite you, and imagine what it would have been like to see this kind of thing for the first time in translation. This series is remembered for a reason.

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World without end

Cover to Volume 3 of Eden: It's an Endless World

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eden: It’s an Endless World is one of the standout manga in my many years of experience with the medium. I’ve wanted to write about this series for years. It’s just taken me this long to digest its ideas, as you can see from the meandering summary I wrote a while back. The story is so big and its scope so grand that I’m daunted at the idea of ever reading the series again, but it’s also so compelling that I know I will revisit this manga someday.

Eden is a science fiction story about a world where the apocalypse didn’t happen, which is to say that it’s a science fiction story about our world.

In this cyberpunk future the Closure virus has ravaged humanity, killing two percent of the global population (which, let us be reminded, means the death of millions). The old order is dead, and the new order – the New World Order of the conspiracy theorists – has descended upon humanity in the form of the leviathan named Propater. Opposing Propater are an eclectic mix of drug lords, terrorists, and gangsters.  Mostly they fight not out of ideological zeal but because they also want their cut.

The near-apocalypse of the setting invites millenarianism in its fictional universe, which the story covers extensively. In fact, the series draws heavily on Gnosticism, though not gratuitously and not gratingly. It’s possible to enjoy the manga without having any idea of the theological significance of aions, for instance.

The creator, Hiroki Endo, is an unrepentant leftist, and his politics suffuses every page. This is the only manga I know of which invites readers to check out Noam Chomsky in the appendix. The story is better for being overtly political. Otherwise it would be the type of reactionary fantasy that makes vague calls to fight for great justice while being so naive and so divorced from the everyday that it invites the opposite action. It’s heavily cyberpunk in that it’s a science fiction story distrustful of the establishment, but it also avoids the provincialism of much of cyberpunk. Be it New York, Los Angeles, or Neo-Tokyo, the classic cyberpunk stories are rooted in particular and specific urban geographies.

By contrast, this manga spans the globe, from brothels in Peru to private schools in Australia, with the story being the most compelling when it deals with the dispossessed. The manga even touches upon what the Zapatistas call the Fourth World, or the indigenous peoples so far out of the orbit of the powerful that they don’t fit into the totalizing categories of First and Third World.

As well, Endo is fascinated by the interface between humanity and its technology, personified in the form of the cyborg. He’s fond of images like the one above, where the hard and mechanical is revealed underneath the feminine and organic.

As you may guess, the subject matter guarantees that this manga is full of violence, but of the more grounded type. This is an example of the seinen genre, which is targeted at men. I guess it might be characterized as a thriller in the vein of a more leftist Spartan or Ronin.

This is not a story for everyone, but at times it felt like it was made for me. Perhaps I misspoke when I said that I’ve taken years to digest the ideas in this story, for I’m still grappling with them. Too many action stories and too many manga retreat into fantasies of empowerment and away from actual political engagement. It’s refreshing to read one that faces the political head on.

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Tetsuo and Kaneda’s Excellent Adventure

Last weekend, I saw Akira for the first time in probably twenty years. It held up very well.

The film is essentially about Japan in the 1960s, complete with violent gangs, mass protests, and regular terrorist bombings. Despite that temporal specificity, it still feels timeless. This is impressive for a sci-fi film made in 1988, especially since a lot of cyberpunk from that era feels very dated. I think an American cyberpunk story from that time would probably be full of coded racial paranoia about the rise of Japan, or it would have embarrassing Orientalist stereotypes about honour or some shit. This movie, of course, avoids that.

Anyway, I’d forgotten that there are no heroes in Akira. Everyone is either an asshole, a fuckup, or both. The protagonists are violent bikers who gleefully engage in street duels that injure bystanders, while the climax involves a guy wanting revenge on his best friend. That best friend massacred hundreds of people and is about to kill an entire city, but as far as the participants are concerned their fight is about nothing more than their petty and personal grievances.

Plus the animation still looks incredible. A festering shithole has never looked this beautiful in cartoon form.

Overall, the movie was a worthwhile thing to revisit. I’m glad I saw it again.

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Ships that sank

I don’t have a good track record in shipping, which in this context means the romantic pairing you favour in a given work of fiction. My tastes don’t seem to align with the majority, as this list of failed non-canonical ships should attest.

  • Zutara (Avatar: The Last Airbender)
  • Harry/Luna (Harry Potter)
  • Haruto/Rukino (Valvrave the Liberator)
  • Akihito/Mitsuki (Beyond the Boundary)

For comparison, Ships that Sailed:

  • Ranma/Akane (Ranma 1/2)
  • Edward/Winry (Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood)

I still think those failed ships were more narratively interesting than the ones that happened in canon. Ah well, such is life.