Yes, this is another fairly random post where I have collected my favourite quotes from this season (so far) in one place. I’d love it if you would share your favourite lines or quotes from the season in the comments.
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Thanks,
Karandi James.
Review:
Realistically I should have dropped this one earlier but I was kind of intrigued about what they might do with this set up even though I hated the characters and the story so far. Well, this week kind of convinced me that all they plan to do is be horrible to one another over and over again and somehow call that entertainment. Maybe there is some overall story that will eventually emerge but I’m not hanging around any longer to find out.
See, you can have a story about horrible characters doing horrible things to each other, but the audience needs to think something is going to change or some point is going to be made from it all. Evil or Live doesn’t give any indication it wants to do that. Though there seem to be plots bubbling within the school environment, they mostly just seem to be plots to do more horrible things and I somehow doubt we’re going to get to any kind of moral or message other than don’t be complete scum and treat others like trash.
So this one is now dropped and I’ll be catching up on some shows from previous seasons so hopefully I’ll find something to review in this one’s place.
Thanks for reading.
If you enjoyed this post and like the blog, consider becoming a patron to support further growth and future content.
Thanks,
Karandi James.
Review:
This show is not good. It didn’t start well, but at least had an interesting kind of premise even if the execution was questionable, but at episode 3 I just have to admit that this is going to be kind of terrible. I also have to admit I kind of need to know how it ends so here I am condemning myself to another Bloodivores type experience.
The main problem (there’s a lot of problems but the main one) is that Hibiki is an inconsistent and just plain uninteresting lead. Episode one he was rebellious and jerk of a teen taken away from everything and scared. Since then he has been up, down, and all over the place but this week he tries on cowardly but just minded human. They also attempt to give him some back story with Shiori hinting he used to run but he didn’t really want to talk about that so while that may come back later for now it is just a random point thrown in to a character that makes little sense.
Even if I choose to ignore his inconsistencies and put those down to the extraordinary circumstances he has been dumped into, he’s still an idiot. He can’t do anything by himself and yet he burns Shin. He continues to think things will be okay like when he goes to collect food for the guys in his room, despite every bit of evidence so far being that nothing will be okay in this place. So far his actions and thoughts have just been too dumb for words.
It doesn’t help that other characters are horrible just for the sake of being horrible so far. Maybe motives and reasons will emerge but at the moment we are just watching horrible people be horrible to other horrible people and the plot isn’t going anywhere fast. This week we see Hibiki promise to save Shiori but he has zero possibility of achieving that and everyone knows it. Even he knows it. So where exactly is this story going?
Anyway, if you haven’t started this train wreck I would recommend avoiding, however should it get better I’ll let you know.
Thanks for reading.
If you enjoyed this post and like the blog, consider becoming a patron to support further growth and future content.
Thanks,
Karandi James.
Review:
This week we move away from the instructors and their deliberate acts of cruelty (though they do get one fairly ominous looking scene) and instead we focus on the cruelty that people can inflict upon one another once they start forming packs and seem to have absolutely zero empathy. It wouldn’t be so hard to watch except that each new character you meet seems to be more warped and twisted than the previous, to the point where for a moment I kind of thought Hibiki wasn’t so bad (then of course I remembered he’s an obnoxious little rat of a human being).
This is certainly not comfortable viewing as we have female ‘students’ publicly groped and stripped and deals involving females sleeping with a male in order to gain access to a phone. Though one has to wonder where the instructors were during any of that and how purple hair has seemingly unlimited information access (which opens up a whole other series of issues).
Visually this remains odd and from a story point of view, uncomfortable. Yet it is kind of like watching a train derail in slow motion so I somehow don’t think I’m going to look away just yet particularly because despite finding every character in this show so far to be hideously obnoxious, I still actually kind of want to know what happens to them (even if what happens turns out to be very bad things).
So, not recommending this one but not dropping it either.
Thanks for reading.
If you enjoyed this post and like the blog, consider becoming a patron to support further growth and future content.
Thanks,
Karandi James.
This was not my intended post for this week however having started two shows that both seem intent on killing off their cast members in spectacularly gruesome and unrealistic fashions for the entertainment of the viewers this season the importance of the characters in making these sorts of stories anything more than visual spectacle has been thoroughly on my mind. This month my features are all focussing on horror and so far I have looked at visuals and the unnamed victims so if you missed either of those posts be sure to check them out.
Starting with a non-anime example I want to look at a movie from my teens, Scream. Scream is not complicated. It is self-aware of its derivative nature, to the point of having the characters openly list the rules and requirements of a horror film even as they themselves go through the motions of being in a horror film. There isn’t a single character in the film you can point to and claim they are unique or particularly interesting as it is an ensemble cast of horror tropes and they work beautifully together to craft a story that actually makes you want the designated heroine of the story to survive and leaves you feeling happy when the killer is ingloriously shot down before getting his final jump scare.
This is where we as an audience need to understand that these trope like characters serve a valuable narrative purpose and their most important role is to get the audience to react to them. You are supposed to be suspicious of this one, disgusted by that one, roll your eyes at her, and feel sympathy even as you want that one to stand up for herself. It is manipulative viewing and evokes the same emotional response in more or less any other decent teen horror but it is a formula that works.
When you throw competent people into a horror/thriller kind of story the struggle becomes giving them an opponent they can’t easily defeat. This is seen quite clearly in Predator. Here we have tough, trained soldiers who don’t come off as inept as soon as things go awry. They are just severely outclassed by an alien. All except Arnold but I think most of us suspected that he could beat off an alien hunter even before watching this movie.
And that kind of brings us to King’s Game and Juni Taisen: Zodiac War. King’s Game lands squarely in the high school students being terrorised by unknown forces and freaking out whereas Juni Taisen has trained warriors who have walked into and signed up for a death match (for reasons still unknown). Both shows have their flaws and strengths but in terms of the characters drawing me into the story, King’s Game is kind of winning even if the story doesn’t seem as strong (okay, it is rubbish but no one ever claimed horror was a genre filled with examples of brilliant writing – there’s some and we do appreciate it when it exists, but basically we’ll take what we can get) and the presentation has been far rougher. So what is actually going on here?
For me the issue squarely comes down to how the characters are reacting to the horror of their situation.
King’s Game may suffer from pacing issues, character over-reactions and general poor writing, but the kids are scared. Inexplicable multiple deaths in a single night have them gathering in a panicked mob willing to lurch toward any potential solution. They want to stop the horror and they want out of the situation. That makes the horror feel real to me as a member of the audience. What is happening is actually a threat and one that is causing these characters to freak out. It makes me wonder what I would be feeling in their shoes or wondering if their idiotic actions might be justified even as I roll my eyes at mob-mentality. So far very few of these characters are anything more than a name (when I remember it) and a type (if they’ve even had a line of dialogue) but as a class of teenagers they excel at grounding the horror into something that becomes relatable and therefore something I am more likely to invest in emotionally.
Episode two was not good. There is no way around that as a reviewer. It was not a good episode by any measure. Yet, there was this one moment where a character is forced with a choice of not following the King’s Order and dying, or of texting ‘die’ to someone and have them die. She knows the game is real now. She knows it won’t just be a joke to text someone that single word. The look on her face, even through questionable animation and visuals, is one that brings the horror of that choice straight to the audience. What would you do? Do you die or do you sentence a classmate to death? Does it make it okay if you choose someone that the others don’t like? This is the best part of these sorts of horror stories, these small moments that drive the emotions home. Admittedly, King’s Game is hiding these small moments under a pile of mud and other unpleasant oozing substances and there’s a reason quite a few people have dropped the show.
Juni Taisen however hasn’t had one of these moments. In the first two episodes we’ve met characters who are arrogant, cool, confident or disinterested. They aren’t shocked or scared by their situation and they don’t feel like they are in over their head. In fact, a lot of them just seem bored by the situation, or gleefully and unpleasantly excited by the prospect of killing. Even Boar’s surprise death lacked impact other than a momentary shock because she didn’t see it coming, had no time to feel helpless or pathetic for failing. There was no moment for the audience to empathise with her plight and even though she was in over her head the audience never had a moment to feel that way.
The fact that the Zodiac Warriors aren’t helpless teenagers isn’t a deal breaker in terms of making that emotional connection. Even trained soldiers can feel helpless or cornered and it is brilliant when done well because you can’t criticise the character for being useless. You know they are strong but the enemy is stronger or has managed to get the upper hand. This actually works impressively well when done well, but so far Juni Taisen seems fairly determined not to really allow the audience that connection that would make these deaths anything more than spectacle.
Moving to the second episode and we meet the Dog. He’s as arrogant and self-assured as the Boar, possibly more so, and once again he never once sees his death coming. It is over in an instant. If I was to map out my emotional responses during the second episode it would be mostly a flat line as we go through rounds of exposition, introductions, waiting around, and then a quick blip when the inevitable death occurred before returning to base.
So while I’ll admit fairly readily that Juni Taisen is far superior to King’s Game in terms of its animation quality, so far from an emotional point of view and from just wanting the horror to actually connect, King’s Game has been winning out for me. I know others have a different opinion and that’s what makes discussing these shows so much fun. It has been great reading about how others have taken to these two shows (or not). Neither show is particularly great yet in terms of narrative as there’s still a lot of unknowns and a lot of potential for both to fall pretty flat. The thing is though, when you set up your story with the understanding that the characters exist mostly to die, if the audience doesn’t care about these characters that makes it pretty hard to care about anything else.
Before finishing, I just want to touch on the other ‘horror’ I started this season: Evil or Live. I use quotations for a reason on that horror because other than the fact that it is listed as such, I so far haven’t seen any evidence of it being a horror (unless you count the writing as being horrific and maybe that does scare you). While the characters are horrible and in a horrendous situation, the show is far more teen drama than horror. A very dark teen drama where rape is a possibility and vomiting in someone’s mouth is potentially supposed to be a comedic moment (possibly?). Maybe it will later shift things up a gear but all things considered, I somehow doubt it is going to hit the mark if you look at it being a horror.
Okay, handing over to you and your thoughts on characters in horror and whether they can make or break your enjoyment of a horror story.
Thanks for reading.
If you enjoyed this post and like the blog, consider becoming a patron to support further growth and future content.
Thanks,
Karandi James.
Overview:
In this modern society, a new kind of “illness” is striking young boys and girls; Loneliness, disbelief and outrage push this generation to get more or more attached to Internet and technologies. The experts called those symptom “Net Addiction”. To prevent that, a certain Rehabilitation Facility has been set up to “Lead the young man back to the right path”. Enrolled to treat is addiction, Hibiki had no idea that this Rehabilitation Facility is nothing more than a prison. In this place where it’s not permitted to escape, how will Hibiki challenge despair in this hell?
– From Crunchyroll
Review:
I read a number of reviews of this before I watched the episode so I kind of knew what to expect. At the same time, a lot of those reviews were by people who found the basic violent nature of the setting off-putting. While the thought of any school actually embracing such actions as a means of ‘reeducating’ is despicable and clearly the violence in this episode is there for shock factor, the basic setting isn’t a deal breaker for the show so far, mostly because this episode didn’t seem to want to have the audience side with the instructors in instigating the violence but also didn’t make much effort to try to get us to sympathise with the ‘students’.
Unfortunately what that leaves us with is an unsympathetic lead who so far has moved between horrible, delusional and pathetic at various points in the episode and while that actually makes the events somewhat more palatable it doesn’t really help get you into the story. Mostly because the synopsis claims Hibiki is going to try to challenge things and yet this episode seemed to imply he was merely going to be another character’s patsy and he could later come into his own but so far he seems too pathetic to ever succeed in that sort of role.
While I’m not really sold on the characters or the premise (though haven’t been thrown off by them either), the visuals do some interesting things. Note, in this case interesting doesn’t actually mean good because while there are some great shots and cuts at times that actually help the story along, a lot of the visuals leave you feeling like they were trying for a look they haven’t quite pulled off.
Still, I kind of feel this one is worth at least another episode though if they actually start trying to justify the instructor’s cruelty I am definitely checking out.
Thanks for reading.
If you enjoyed this post and like the blog, consider becoming a patron to support further growth and future content.
Thanks,
Karandi James.