…thirty minutes pass…

Crazyface Yukiteru

So, the death of his mom wasn’t enough, but with the death of his dad, too, Yukiteru has finally decided to get his head in the game and start playing for real.  He was acting like Yuno, he just went nuts on those thugs.  I guess now he has in common with Yuno a lack of parents, and the death of both parents is a leading cause of juvenile batmanism.  So we’re into the endgame now.  Yukiteru has finally realized that, hey, the powers of a God might actually be a useful thing to have, now that two people he actually knew died, instead of merely hundreds of thousands of strangers every day.  So who’s left?  Yuno he gets for free, as that adorable sequence between the two of them showed.  (Nothing more romantic than offering up your neck to your lover’s knife.)  Minene he thinks he gets for free because she lets her guard down around him, but she has a diary, so she’ll be warned in advance if he decides to try something.  Minene will probably be tougher than he plans on.  Still, he’s beaten her before, no reason to think he couldn’t do it again.  He thinks he knows where the server for Eighth is, but so did the police?  And they were wrong?  Would have been nice to have asked his dad some probing questions before he died, but he was too caught up in the death of his mom.  And then Eleventh is supposedly making his move, and we’ll have to see what that entails.

We also got some Yuno backstory.   It’s nothing too surprising – she was being abused, so she killed her parents, and if she wasn’t already nutty from the abuse, the enormity of her actions did it.  We still don’t know the whole story, though.  There’s a third body, and Yuno’s evasive about its identity.  Just someone who pried a little too much?  It can’t be one of her old boyfriends, she’s been fixed on Yukiteru since her parents died.  Someone who wasn’t as smart as Moe and didn’t reject Yukiteru’s advances?  Oh goodness.  In the flashback, Yukiteru was a lot more outgoing and friendly than in the series proper.  Maybe Yuno has been driving people away from him all this time, cleverly disguised in a variety of animal outfits!  It’s not Yukiteru’s fault he’s not popular, it’s Yuno!  Why would we think that Hinata’s the first romantic interest of Yukiteru’s that Yuno’s attacked?

(Side note – I was shocked at the way Yukiteru’s dad talked about seeing the stars with him after he got out of prison, but then I remembered that Japan is a civilized country with reasonable prison terms and it’s only in the US that they’ll lock a man in his 30s away for most of the rest of his life because of a crime of passion.)

Bonus Image Corner:

I guess she knows he won't kill her, or her diary would have mentioned it.

Crazyface costume!

Am I the only one a little offput by how similar Yukiteru's crush looks to his mom?

…thirty minutes pass…

Communication is impossible. I don't know why I bother.

This episode was definitely a more laid-back, slice of life style episode than the previous.  It still had some good gags in it, though.  It was funny to watch the student council gradually becoming a victim of their own helpfulness.  A lot of the humor was visual there though – Ringo getting catfaced, the random neighborhood girl with her oblivious expression, and then the subtle sight gag of the big pile of money in the eyecatch shot.  I enjoy looking at funny faces and laughing at them, but if that’s all that’s on offer, Kill Me Baby does a better job.  From Danshi Koukousei no Nichijou, I want character driven comedy.  And there wasn’t enough in this episode.

Normally when a Christmas episode of an anime is aired at an inappropriate time it bothers me, but actually, I think airing this episode close to Valentine’s Day worked.  Christmas is more like Valentine’s Day in Japan anyway – a special day for lovers to be together.  Valentine’s Day is also like Valentine’s Day in Japan, I guess?  The giving and receiving of chocolates is  more ritualized over there, as I understand it.  And then there’s White Day, which is like a second Valentine’s Day, or a third if you count Christmas.  Japan gets three Valentine’s Days, huh.  I guess that’s why they have a reputation of being so passionately romantic.

The horrible bullying continued in this episode.  Not only are they bringing a significant female presence into a show that was billed as being about High School Boys, the girls seem to only exist to push the boys around, beat them up, and mock them mercilessly.  You can argue that it’s more realistic that way, that girls in real life are sometimes terrible to people for no reason, but the boys in the show are comparatively angelic.  They’re protecting the weak, finding lost dogs, and trying to cheer up people who are lonely, while the girls are shaking them down for their lunch money and responding violently to imagined insults.  It’s unrealistic in the opposite direction, and seems a little misogynistic.  Hopefully if they continue having a strong female presence in the show they’ll let the girls be a little nicer in the future.

Bonus Image Corner:

Actually, it's new games that are unreasonably easy.

High school girls are funky.

…thirty minutes pass…

Actually, prior to this episode Yukiteru's diary holder kill count was 3 to Yuno's 2, so I'm not sure that's fair.

A pretty intense episode.  It turned out that the hypothesis I generated and discarded earlier, that Marco set up this whole thing just to be a dick to Yukiteru, was correct.  What a dick!  He swore to protect Ai, but then he got her killed by insisting on a stupid prideful gloating fest over a defeated opponent.  Marco went on and on about how Yuno and Yukiteru’s love wasn’t real, but it was his own love that was the fake.  His “true” love was nothing but a narcissistic desire to have an identity as the sort of person who has the sort of love he imagines true love to be.  It was a love story he made up so he could play the hero in it. That’s why he reacted so violently to Yukiteru and Yuno – their relationship is a deconstruction of the genre Marco is trying to play straight.  Their existence undermined the core way Marco related to the world, so it wasn’t enough for him to defeat them – he had to utterly crush them and demonstrate the dominance of his story over theirs.  And in doing so, he placed the person he loved pointlessly at risk, in the end killing her.

Contrast this with Yuno’s behavior.  Yuno says she’ll protect Yukiteru, and then she actually does.  She’s not just making a show of staying by his side in a fight, she’s doing things that Marco would never even think of. She’s weighing his tomatoes in case of possible poisoning, she’s proactively killing people that seem like they might eventually be a threat, she’s locking him up in a rape dungeon where he’ll be safe.  Earlier, I criticized Yuno for this last decision, saying that at some point while she was planning the kidnapping she should have realized that what she was doing wasn’t really love.  Now I realize I was mistaken; it is precisely because Yuno’s love is so deep and so pure that she goes beyond the conventional thinking on love and kidnapping.  If she was trying to justify her love to the world, like Marco was, then she would look to the world for guidance on what love is, and the world would tell her, love isn’t kidnapping, and it would be the world’s opinion that mattered.  But she actually loves Yukiteru, so who cares what anyone else thinks?  Who cares if holding your boyfriend prisoner in an abandoned hotel doesn’t meet the textbook definition of love?  All that matters is if it works, if it keeps him safe.  It’s only hypocrites and posers who should ever pause to wonder if what they’re doing is really love – if you’re actually in love, how could what you’re doing be anything else?

(Just to really hammer the point home – Marco tries to torture Yukiteru to death out of vengeance for what he perceives as an insult against the idea of love, and as a side effect, he endangers Ai.  Yuno tries to torture Ai to death as part of a strategy to rescue Yukiteru from peril, and ultimately succeeds in that goal.  Which one would you say truly loves their partner?)

And then, at the end of the episode, Yukiteru’s mom dies, I guess to demonstrate that Yukiteru was right not to reach out for his father and that you can never trust anyone.   I guess next episode he’ll have a total breakdown, which will only be interrupted by one of the few remaining diary holders (maybe the guy who bombed the building?) coming after him and him having to protect himself, even though, what’s the point, because his mom is dead.  Actually, you might look at it from a different direction.  Now, more than ever, he has motivation to fight, to win, so that he can become God and bring his mother back to life.  Just like Kurusu, he said at the start that he didn’t want to play the game, he wasn’t going to murder people to become God. Perhaps now, like Kurusu, he’ll change his tune now that he has something concrete to fight for.

Bonus Image Corner:

Marco, staring at the end of his ridiculous hair.

Yuno, trying to make three different facial expressions at once.

…thirty minutes pass…

First they chip away at the "boys", now the "high school". Soon the characters will be dying on a monthly basis and we'll have left the premise completely behind.

This episode was pretty amazing.  I enjoy this show even when the gags don’t really work, because of the slice of life aspect of it, but this episode the gags pretty much all worked.  Some of them worked really well, the bit where the main characters were scoping out middle school girls (pictured above) had me dying of laughter the whole time.  One thing I guess I didn’t really enjoy in this episode, though, was how much bullying there was.  Motoharu being bullied by his older sister and her friends, Toshiyuki being bullied by the genderswapped main characters, and Hidenori thinking back nostalgically on how he was bullied as a young child.  Bullying is pretty awful!  It’s not fun to watch, and it sort of distracts from the humor of the bits if I am too busy feeling sorry for the characters to want to laugh at them.  I guess I wasn’t really bullied much growing up, so maybe I never had a chance to build up a thick skin about it, but man, you shouldn’t have to.

Apart from bullying, the other major theme of this episode was social expectations, and the extreme effort that people put forward to make sure nothing socially unexpected happens.  In a given social situation, everyone has an idea of what’s supposed to happen – they are reading from a script, basically.  In this scene, the girl is being harassed by punks in an alley and a young gentleman comes along to save her, in this scene a boy meets a girl by a riverbank and romance begins to blossom.  And even if what’s written in the script has little to do with reality, nobody wants to be the one to throw away the script and ruin the show.  They end up lying, not because they want to trick their interlocutor, or because they have anything to hide, but just because the thing they’re supposed to say next happens not to be true.  Which is sort of sad, how cheaply we humans throw away our honesty.  Man, for such a great episode it sure is making me feel bad to think back on it.  Let’s skip straight to the bonus image corner.

Bonus Image Corner:

"Bonus image corner" usually means "favorite facial expression of the week".

…thirty minutes pass…

That's our Yuno! *laughtrack*

Ok, so the reason Minene is allying herself with Yukiteru and Yuno is because they’re friends with Nishijima, and Minene had an obligation to Kurusu after he freed her, which Nishijima inherited on Kurusu’s death.  I’m not sure that obligation extends to life counseling, though.  Trying to mend Yukiteru’s relationship with his estranged father seems to be beyond the call of duty, and well beyond her skill set. It seems a little dangerous to go to an international terrorist for inspirational advice, you know?  “Don’t give up, even if the cause seems hopeless, because thanks to the magic of asymmetrical warfare it only takes one guy to bomb a subway station”.  OK, thanks Minene.

I gotta say, I’m a little mystified as to what Marco and Ai are playing at.  Some of the stuff they’re doing makes sense – yeah, you want to keep Yukiteru and Yuno alive so that you can keep tabs on Yukiteru’s future.  Yeah, you want to talk to Yukiteru’s dad so that you can find out who’s controlling him.  You could try to get Yukiteru to interrogate him remotely while you watch over his Future Diary, but if you don’t trust him to do a good job, that’s fair.  But what I don’t get is, why have them come to a tower booby-trapped with bombs?  And why prepare fake diaries? Either you want to kill Yukiteru and Yuno or you don’t.  If you do, then it’s really easy to.  If you don’t, then couldn’t you have just grabbed his dad and left?  I guess you could argue that Yukiteru really really really pissed Marco off with his false romance with Yuno.  So Marco wanted Yukiteru to suffer as much as possible before he died.  Yukiteru would struggle passionately to reclaim his diary, enduring a brutal beating, and finally when he reached the goal, he would grab the diary, and he would look at it to see what the future was going to be, and then he would see a blank screen, and Ai would draw out the real diary and slowly break it as Yukiteru looked on in his final moments of despair before being erased from reality.  But Marco didn’t really strike me as a cruel enough person to want to do that, and that also doesn’t explain the bombs.  So it’s a mystery.

I don’t like Yukiteru’s father.  You can say, oh, he didn’t know that breaking Yukiteru’s cellphone would kill him, and I’ll believe you.  Yuno probably should have been a little slower to leap to murderous conclusions, although that’s part of her charm.  But still, he should have suspected something was up when he was offered $30,000 to break it.  Even if he didn’t have reason to suspect that it was Yukiteru’s life, it could have had like evidence of corporate malfeasance, or celebrity blackmail info, or something else of value on it.  He should have at least checked with Yukiteru beforehand, if only to see if he could get more than thirty grand for the contents of the phone.  Maybe he doesn’t want to have to split the profits?  It shouldn’t be hard to browbeat Yukiteru out of his rightful share, though.  Look at how he let his dad walk all over him when he was cheating at the contest of physical strength!

So that gets at the more-literal-than-usual cliffhanger at the end of this episode.  Who should Yukiteru trust, Yuno or his dad?  Well it hasn’t been two full episodes since he was locked in Yuno’s rape dungeon.  That has to sort of count against her.  But his dad was also denying him agency, treating him like an object, deceiving him and secretly searching for his cellphone instead of just asking him where it was like one human being would ask another.  Society considers it more normal to treat your children this way than to treat the object of your romantic affection this way, but is it really any better?  Maybe Yukiteru should choose neither, and just fall.  He can’t rely on other people to save him forever, they’ll betray him.  It’s time for him to stand on his own two feet.  Or lie crushed to death under a pile of rubble, but at least for those last couple of seconds he will have taken ownership of his life.

Bonus Image Corner:

I got a new monitor just in time for some amazing Yuno crazyfaces.

This face isn't even crazy, it's just adorable.

…thirty minutes pass…

Every episode of Joshikousei in a single image.

This episode was great!  A culture festival is a much better concept to hang a whole episode on than summer vacation.  The various booths and events at a culture festival match up well with the general structure of the show, just going from one funny scene to another without much continuity.  Culture festivals are exciting because there’s always something to do!  As opposed to summer vacation, where you’re expected to make your own fun, and the writers have to come up with their own premise for jokes.  A culture festival serves you up everything on a platter.  You have a haunted house?  Bam, that’s one scene.  A maid café? That’s another scene.  A music club concert?  Heck, that’s half the episode plotted out already.

The premises might not have been earth-shakingly original, but they were well-executed.  I was glad that this show avoided the common trap of always having your comedy come from the foolishness of your main characters.  Eventually you start to wonder how these bumbling fools manage to survive!  Instead, in this episode, the titular high school boys played the straight men, while the visiting high school girls played the role of the fools.

I guess that’s a bit of a naive way of looking at it, though.  This episode’s main theme was about the costs of dignity.  Tadakuni was drifting away from his friends because he couldn’t honestly admit that he wanted to spend time with them. The student council president lost the battle for his school’s pride because he tried to fight a girl without hitting a girl.  Yoshitake didn’t call girl-Yoshitake on her nonsense because it wouldn’t have been polite.  The straight man, in a comedy duo, has the harder of the two jobs, and yet it’s the fool who everyone remembers, who gets all the glory.  Doesn’t that make the straight man the real fool?  Isn’t there, in some sense, a great sense of dignity in being fully open and honest and displaying your undignified side for all to see?  The boys’ school is full of cowards who fear what people think of them so much they will politely serve them tea and cake, whereas the girls’ school, for all their inferiority complexes, displays true courage by inelegantly eating fast food (pictured above).

Bonus Image Corner:

This would have been a great screencap to use if this episode hadn't been so good.

I would have given this such a witty, biting caption, you do not even know.

…thirty minutes pass…

It's not like there's an absolute right or left on a planet's surface, either.

So, I’m gonna drop this show.  I know I’m not following very much from this season, but maybe I would be following more if whenever I thought about watching anime I didn’t instinctively flinch at the idea of watching more Mouretsu Pirates.  It’s a shame, too, because I like almost every aspect of the show.  The characters are fun, the character designs and general animation are high quality, and the setting seems interesting.  But the plot just drags and drags and drags and nothing happens.  Bad pacing kills shows. The yacht club started preparing for a flight in episode 2 and they noticed an irregularity like maybe there was an enemy lurking somewhere.  At the end of episode 4, where are we?  We’re still preparing to fight against this lurking enemy, after two full episodes of dancing around the subject.

I guess a similar thing happened in Fate/Zero, where they set up a confrontation and then six damn episodes later they went on hiatus right before actually playing it out, the fuckers.  But Fate/Zero can get away with it because Fate/Zero is amazing at everything but pacing, rather than just competent like Mouretsu Pirates is.  And in Fate/Zero, at least when they delayed the confrontation, they did other things, like the Holy Grail Dialogue, rather than just slowly inching towards it while talking about radar and cafeterias.

I’ll miss Marika’s positive attitude and her determination.  I would have loved to have seen how they served her as a pirate captain.  The best part of this episode was when she was vigorously initiating active radar scans by slamming her fist on a big red button on her touchscreen.  I liked that part!  If there were like, seven of those sorts of bits per episode, instead of one or two, I would definitely keep watching.  But I’m spending far too long waiting for the next interesting thing to happen while I’m watching this show.

Bonus Image Corner:

The aforementioned "punchscreen" interface.

…thirty minutes pass…

Crazyface flambé, what a delicacy!

Well they explained things more quickly and completely than I expected.  I feel a little foolish for not figuring it out on my own.  So the eighth diary is in the cloud, it’s survival games as a service.  On the one hand, that’s really powerful, because you’ve got arbitrarily many people feeding you data from the future.  On the other hand, that’s not as powerful as it might seem, because all the stuff you get is stuff that your users care about, like how awesome they are about to be, or the middle-school boys they’re about to flirt with, or the currently-airing anime they’re about to watch.

Yuno was great this episode (pictured above).  She just won’t let Yukiteru cut her out of his life! They can’t have ordinary romantic moments together anymore since the rape dungeon incident, but it’s still sweet when she breaks into his house to cook him a delicious meal, or when she cuts power to his important gadgets in order to make him pay attention to her, or when she offers to  murder his enemies in exchange for a hollow facade of affection.

I guess she’s in breach of contract, though.  I dunno what to say, I really expected her to win, even after those bastards cheated by having two sets of diaries. I expected Yuno’s power of Deep Love to overcome their power of True Love.  Things were looking pretty good there when she was getting all Nagato Yuki on those flying knives, but I guess she’s shown in the past when she lost to Tsubaki and to Akise that she isn’t some sort of unstoppable force.  Yukiteru focuses too much on not wanting to rely on her because she’s crazy and has values that diverge significantly from his own, when really he should be afraid to rely on her because she’s not entirely reliable.  He wants someone to save him, to absolve him of the responsibility of living his life and playing in the survival game.  But even if someone offers to save you, that doesn’t absolve you of anything.  It just changes your responsibility from “win the survival game” to “make sure the person who is playing in the survival game for me wins”.  Marco scorns him for not protecting his girl, but I’ll reproach him for not protecting his underling.

So I wonder where we go from here, now that both Yukiteru and Yuno have their diaries captured.  That means that the enemy has perfect information about Yukiteru’s surroundings, so the first order of business would be to lock him up in a dark room somewhere out of the way.  It’s too bad Yuno’s in a coma, her experience might come in handy.  I guess Minene is going to try to get them to ally with her, but like, why?  What do they have to offer her, without their diaries?  Yukiteru is one giant surveillance device, Yuno is handy with a knife but out of commission.  Maybe Minene could profit from the cunning plans of Akise Aru, Boy Detective, but this most recent cunning plan didn’t turn out so well, did it?  Maybe she’s going to try to spoof the diaries to help her sneak up on the enemy?

Bonus Image Corner:

That's sick, he's like fourteen.

…thirty minutes pass…

But somebody already said the Kenyan president!

This episode was maybe a bit too laid-back.  The summer vacation bits really didn’t have much of anything going for them, except maybe the fourth-wall breaking discussion of how silly it was to air a summer vacation episode in the middle of January.  And even then, the temperature outside was in like the mid 50s today.  Maybe not exactly bikini weather, but if you wanted to you could pretend it was a freakishly cold June instead of a freakishly warm January, so even that bit, which I thought was sort of clever on its merits, didn’t really work.  Plus, there was an insert song, ugh. I guess you could argue that the summer vacation bits are supposed to be boring, just like summer vacation is boring for high school boys and all the interesting parts of your life happen during the school year, and all of the activities you had planned to do over the summer that you thought would bring you happiness amount to nothing more than a clip show over which an insert song plays. But probably they didn’t put quite as much thought as that into it.

I did really enjoy the bit with Hidenori and the girl on the train, though.  My god, I would listen to Kyon’s voice actor do an internal monologue for hours.  Hidenori is no Kyon, he’s not quite as sardonic or as prone to runon sentences, but he has his own charms.  He gives serious thought as to how to deal with girls socially, which is adorable.  He did this with the writer girl, too, in the first episode, sitting there trying to think of how to deal with her intense fangirl stare.  Although, he sure blurted out some thoughtless things to Tadakuni’s sister when they were stealing her panties.  That time he could have stood to have thought a little more before he spoke.

I guess they are just going to have some weird nonsense at the end of every episode?  This time it was a genderswapped version of a scene from the first episode.  Hey, I love exploring society’s unconscious sexism and gender role prejudices through the medium of genderswapped anime.  I think there was at one point a semi-serious effort to do a scene-by-scene genderswap of Haruhi.  The female Kyon was pretty amazing, but all the instances where Haruhi beats up on Kyon went from “funny” to “awful”.  Makes you think.

Bonus Image Corner:

Biting social commentary.

Listen to the cool track featured above!  There used to be a DDL link in the Youtube description, but I guess the forces of government oppression have shut down Megaupload forever.  We’ll see how long the Youtube link stays functional.

This song is off of the character album for Aioi Yukko from the anime Nichijou.  Specifically, it references and extends upon one particular scene in Nichijou in which Yukko, the “class clown” type character, tries telling her friends a pun, but they do not show any reaction, and continue to do such even as her comedic efforts escalate.  The song consists of a bunch of puns in rapid succession (the title claims there are a hundred, I’m not sure I believe it but don’t intend to count) alternating with impassioned pleas for her friends to laugh or smile or show some kind of reaction to the gags she spend all night coming up with.

I guess I sort of identify with Yukko in this song.  This year at Christmas, my young cousin told me that I was not funny like my brother.  I told her I liked to believe I just had a more subtle sense of humor, but it still sort of hurt my feelings.  I tell lots of great jokes!  Consider the following: two groups of waterfowl walk into a bar. The third one ducks.

I also identify with Yukko’s love of puns.  Unfortunately I only understand maybe a third of the puns in the song, but they mostly seem to be puns playing on one native Japanese word that sounds like a foreign loanword.  There’s one that plays on two foreign loanwords that sound alike, though, which is translatable: “My tire got a flat, so I had to retire”.  That might give you an idea of the quality of the rest of the puns.  But, you know, the worse a pun is, the better it is!  The same goes for music, which is why I enjoy the denpa genre and crave as many anime character albums as I can get my hands on.