A Cyclops Who Likes Anime. A Shameful Cyclops

There are some shows that are good enough to get their own post for every single episode, even though I don’t put much work into them and they’re pretty shitty posts. But then there are shows that can’t even do that, the shows I start off with wondering if I’ll even finish them. I think I’m going to stop doing episode-by-episode coverage of them, because they gum up the works for the other, better shows. And honestly, if someone forgets what happened in one of these shows a year down the line, will they care? The answer is no, of course not. So here is my first episode impressions of a bunch of series that I just started watching.

I am aware they’re all pretty old and most are fully released by now, but I haven’t been watching things for the past few months. Give me a break or go home.

Itazura na Kiss - I started off rolling my eyes. That’s never a good sign. It never became quite as bad as I expected, but the animation, character designs, and story are pretty rubbish. They managed to make it interesting enough (just barely) for me to watch a second episode, but who knows how many more after that.

Wagaya no Oinari-sama - Really not too bad, but still not worthy of full coverage. There’s some family of magical priest dudes and dudettes that have the power of Water. That’s Water with a capital W in case you missed it. The last priestess had two sons then died, that’s probably just how it happened too. Now one of them is being hunted by a demon spirit something. You know, the Japanese demon ghost Martians. So they go to their temple and release some fox spirit who’s been imprisoned because she was acting like a punk. She protects the kid from being eaten by a snake who can cast lightening bolt, and she ends up going home with them. As does the current shrine maiden, who is constantly reminded of how weak she is and how the power of the family has gone downhill since the good ol’ days.

Kurenai - I didn’t have any idea what this show was about for the first 15 minutes or so. Now I can confidently tell you that it’s about a teenage boy taking care of a little rich girl who escaped from her oppressive, potentially evil family through the help of a mysterious agency that the boy works for. Or accepts jobs from, at any rate. There seems to be quite a backstory, and it’s hinted at so strongly here that you might be fooled into thinking that something has been revealed, but it’s just an illusion. The animation is kinda nice in that Read or Dream/Kamichu way. Probably the best of these shows so far.

Main Character runs into that creepy psychic bro, and CPB is all like, “You’ll hit that when they get older.” And Main Character, being of high moral fiber and a true gentleman through and through, says no way dude, no way. No way.

So CPB puts the voodoo whammy on him to see the girls as they’d be in their late teens. Eventually they find out and torment the hell out of him. That’s all!

BOTTOM LINE: Low-brow laughs are laughs all the same.

I know I haven’t been very good about updating Proon in the past…three months or so. That’s a long time! I could go into all the reasons, but I’ll really just mention the two biggest and most believable I could think up. Firstly, my computer was in a very bad spot for any kind of shenanigans. Right in the middle of a room, full view of everyone, in an area with two opposing entrances made it quite difficult to get enough peace of mind to belt out an episode. I’m not sure if my severe anime embarrassment is a matter of public record or not yet, but it’s important to keep in mind that it affects pretty much everything I do regarding Productos de Japan. Secondly, anime is terrible.

Seriously, it’s awful. We all know it’s awful; well, I suppose we all know it’s awful but a lot of people, fans of it in particular, don’t know how fucking bad it is. Which is surprising when you consider the volume of it they consume and the degree to which it sucks on every level, but humans have always had a particular knack for ignoring the obvious. So yes, it’s quite bad. It’s almost always heavily story driven, which makes diving back into a series after a long hiatus like mine difficult in a number of ways. If you skip an episode, you’re screwed. If a friend of yours watches an episode first and opens his obese, pie-encrusted mouth, you’re screwed. If you’ve forgotten what happened in the series (perhaps due to a prolonged absence) you’re really screwed.

And for what? For shit, that’s what. Anime storylines are renowned for being abysmal, so to shed this shameful image the industry at large began making their storylines two, no, three times shittier. I can count the number of series in the past five years that haven’t had, at best, absolutely disappointing endings on one hand. It’s absurd, and when you suddenly get new, non-anime (and non-Asian) shows to watch, with interesting stories and characters and dialog that doesn’t make you roll your eyes and make snarky comments to yourself several times an episode, it’s exceedingly difficult to work up any excitement to go back to that world. Only after such a prolonged absence filled with quality Western programming can I look back on anime with a clean - well, less warped - perspective and declare that, as I suspected all along, it’s all shit. It’s shit shit shit. It is to popular culture what popular culture is to actual culture.

Of course, I knew all this before I jumped into the anime pond. Perhaps not how deep it was, but the water on top definitely had a sickly tint that I knew with absolute certainty hid bodies. It’s like the Great Wall of China, but it’s a lake not a wall and when they had finished digging the gigantic hole they just chucked all the people who had died into it, trapped the people who were still working on it inside for good measure, dumped in five hundred thousand gallons of brackish water and called it a resort lake. Come to Anime Lake, where we have campgrounds and cabins and canoeing and rowing and just don’t pay attention to the bloated floating corpses of Originality or Pacing or one of the dozens of other virtues of entertainment that we hired to dig this hole so we could lure hapless fucks in with false promises only to deliver tits and pratfalls and the same goddamn characters in every single fucking creation for the next ten years because dredging their diseased carcasses out of their watery graves and putting them to work Orienteering or something would involve too much effort so instead we’ll just wait until most of you realize your canoe is a rotting log, your cabin is a ragged strip of canvas stretched over driftwood, your three square meals are a handful of bullion cubes and a pitcher of lake water, and you’re counselors are soulless automatons so obsessed with maintaining the status quo they are rotting from the inside out and for the few of you who are too ignorant, delusional or foolish to leave we have a special reward: we will continue to do the exact same thing while we steadily increase our rates in order to keep our deprecated business model afloat.

With all that being said I will start watching shit and updating more once I’m finished with this job, which should be any day now.