Open Fire: Some Unfounded Arguments

What is eternity doing tonight? has become Mega Megane Moé. For the latest posts, please change your links accordingly.
It's been and is going to be a busy weekend over at Eternity, so there hasn't been a lot of time to plan out another argumentative post. Likewise, the moe fountain has dried up with most of the shows on the hitlist making only incremental progress (ah, the wonders of watching current season shows), so series summaries/check-ups are out of the question.

As such, it's time to go on a random tirade. There's not enough material nor time to form a full-fledged post on any of the following vaguely controversial comments, so instead they will just be let loose into the open for people to debate and flame mercilessly.

So put on your dueling gloves and get ready to be offended.

1) "Anything you can translate, I can translate better..." // The fansub debate
So I understand that Nyoro~n fansubs has come under a lot of heat recently for providing less-than-correct translations. This, as one would imagine, would be a bad thing. As usual, the Internet Police have turned it into, for maximum political cross-referencing, the next Iraq.

"HAY GUYS NYORO~N HAS FANSUBS OF MASS MISTRANSLATION"
"KILL KILL KILL"

Like the political situation (to speak in American terms) over There, there are definitely bad things going on, but it's not like the anime community need to hang, draw, and quarter them on the spot. They've admitted their wrongs, and hopefully they'll crank out some more quality subs from now on.

Biting the hand that feeds you, even if the food is kinda crap, is a silly idea. You can always starve, or try to cook it yourself.

To equally attack both sides though: quality check is your friend. Make sure things make sense. Don't pretend to know something you don't. And if you're doing fansubbing more for the fame than for the community... maybe you're in the wrong place as well.

(By the way, I have no fluency in Japanese.)

2) Decision 2007 // SaiMoe drama
To be honest, I could talk about internet drama all day, but that would only create more drama.

Yes, it sucks that the Kanon crew / the Lucky Star girls / the Shuffle set / whoever else you were rooting for lost. No, this doesn't call for an angry rampage.

Personally, I kind of enjoy liking characters that no one else does. Maybe it's a bit of that anti-'the man' phase that every teenager goes through, but I don't see why it's such a big deal that Your Character is more popular than Their Character.

It's not like sports or any other competition where there is a clearly defined goal and rules. Here it's kind of more of a free-for-all, where some people vote for their favorite characters, others for the moe characters, and some for the sexy characters.

It's all different, and so it shouldn't matter that much that a character lost. It's just as fine to support them on your own, without resulting to some 'competition' to put your character out there.

Also, the final vote tally was something like 15xx-14xx in the finals. That's only 3000 people voting, a small drop in the pond of the anime community. AnimeSuki alone has double that in active members, not to mention the likely massive anime community in Japan.

3) Sinking the nice boat // School Days and harem shows
School Days is a great show with harem elements. School Days does not set the bar for other harem shows.

It's just too different for it to become the norm, yet so many people talk in every show with a hint of violence about "a Nice Boat ending" or "pulling a School Days". It's not going to happen, guys. Not every harem show is as dark, as twisted as SD is, and it shouldn't be.

Yes, drama is interesting, but SD achieved a lot of success by breaking the mold, by turning the 'one guy and many co-existant girls' idea on its head. If we had more Nice Boats, soon it would be the opposite. We'd have a harem show where nothing violent happens and that in itself would be revolutionary.

So let the happy shows be happy. Feel-goods have a place too.

Also, it's not just School Days that pioneered the "extreme harem conflict" concept, y'know... (Although it is one of the more popular ones)

4) ADV hoping to get lucky? // Lucky Star R1 licensing
First Haruhi, then AIR, then Kanon...now Lucky Star. Sensing a pattern?

Obviously someone's caught on to the fact that Kyoto Animation is a pretty well-respected studio in the anime world, and as such is trying to get every property they own, but Lucky Star just feels a bit of a stretch.

Now, I'm not to say I'm against licensing, or against buying R1s. But Lucky Star just doesn't feel like the type of anime that has a widespread appeal.

It's a lot more obscure than other slice-of-lives, with Japanese culture, both geek and not, referenced constantly. While it does have a lot of relatable aspects where one can really emphasize with the character, many parts of it (Comiket, going to the shrines, random Initial D/Haruhi/etc. references) will fly over casual anime fans' head.

Lucky Star's core audience likely only consists of the hardcore US audience; the people like you and me who watch fansubs and live on the cutting edge of anime culture. But the more casual viewers, the ones who survive off solely the R1 releases, might not find Lucky Star to be quite their thing, especially with the amazingly slow choco coronet beginning.

Not to mention, a lot of the hardcore fans might skip on the purchasing because they 'own' the fansubs.

I'm not sure how well the equally obscure-ish (to the average fan) AIR sold, but Lucky Star is probably going to be another uphill fight for sales.

Still, props to ADV for giving titles like these a shot.

5) Status of the mental correctional facility // Clannad continues
They're getting to me.

Just like in any piece of apocalyptic-future fiction worth its salt, resistance and fighting the man is futile, and the mass-produced thought wave of hailing Big Brother will eventually break its way through. And so in Clannad, the moe propaganda is finally hitting.

Nagisa is making herself a worthwhile character to be honest, the kind that any shy person can imagine themselves to be. She's a person that seems introverted on the outside, but is really good at opening up to people who talk to her and share her passion.

Kotomi is beginning to feel slow-witted more than mentally retarded. Being the 'genius' of the school, I have unrealistically high hopes for her (yay, smart girls), and as such, combined with a adorable comic strip, she manages to escape the hate pile.

Fuuko is still way on the dense side and now scoring points towards being a clone character, as it seems 3 for 3 that a Key girl that appears to be a functioning human being is actually a living dead of sorts. But, she's the first arc, so first in, first out, and moving on to more interesting / amusing characters.

That's the good thing about Clannad, is that so far through four it's functioned equally well as a plot-type show and a comedy show.

6) Make way for the loli // Shana II chugs along
OK, seriously, at this point Shana and Kazumi are just rolling over and dying in their own tsundere and shy ways.

I read the second Shana light novel (translated by Viz) between episodes 3 and 4 of Shana II, and it's really a world of difference. In the second light novel, Kazumi can really sense that Yuuji has something for Shana, yet she resolves to keep fighting. Meanwhile, Shana and Yuuji build up their typical "tenuous" (but actually really strong) relationship.

But in the second season of the anime, some green-haired girl who is Absolutely Not a Villain At All barges her way in to some weaksauce relationship ("hi, I'm going to be naive and pitiful and you're going to pay all your attention to me") with Yuuji, and the girls just sit and take it! And Yuuji, who displayed some excellent reasoning before, especially when it came to action scenes, is your typical dense harem lead who cannot figure anything out.

There are some interesting points to Not Hecate, such as her like of birds / animals / nature in general, but that's only because that's a side to her that's not completely disregarding of the world around her (except Yuuji).

Speaking of, where's all the action scenes, anyway? Love drama is fine, but not this thick, nor dense.

8) Intriguing Bullet Hell // Touhou
Where have you been all my life!?

-CCY