Entry 069: "Saikano"

AKA: "The Last Love Song on This Little Planet"

Dear Internet,

                Everyone dies.  There, Internet.  I saved you four and a half hours of depressing teenage angst filled with plot holes.  I do not like to spoil stories, as I have said before.  But when the story is already a spoiled mess that is not worth the time to view, the argument against doing so goes out the door, gets shot, blown up and dies a somehow slow death being burned alive.  That could basically sum up my feelings over "Saikano," but that would be taking the easy way out, much like how the characters seem to do countless times through the course of the film. 

                About the only thing good that "Saikano" has going for itself is the premise.  Chise and Shuji are two teenagers in high school who are dating.  A war of unknown details breaks out.  Chise is taken by the Japanese government and has a weapon system implanted into her body.  She then fights the enemy forces that wage war on Japanese land.  Shuji find out and deals with the fact that his girlfriend is has been modified into a bio-weapon soldier.  The two must figure out their relationship with the backdrop of war behind them.

The show pours the creative budget into make a different set of wings for each scene requiring them.

                That is where the good stuff ends.  The only thing that I should add to the premise is that Chise spends a considerable amount of time questioning her humanity and sanity.  Shuji does likewise, but Chise really goes in circles.  Speaking of circles, the first half of the show goes around in circles for much too long.  One episode they are together, next they want to break up, and then they miss each other and want to be together but do not want to go back on saying that they only want to be classmates.  The indecision between the two is annoying at first and just gets worse as the show continues.  Take for example Shuji's actions towards Ms. Fuyumi, his teacher from middles school who he had sex with.  She makes advances towards him because her husband is gone for long stretches because of the war, and she feels lonely.  Shuji keeps going back to her, engaging in some action, and then pulls back at the last moment before doing something that would go against his feelings for Chise.  This happens at least three times in the show and each time it kept feeling like a bad plot point that was going nowhere rather than the test of Shuji's love for Chise that it was supposed to be.  

                You can look at Fuyumi as one of a dozen characters who are thrown in as nothing more than trying to show the horrors of war.  There is the fellow classmate that is killed in the first episode before he can give his girlfriend a necklace.  While one would think that this would act as a catalyst to make the two main characters come closer because they would realize the fragility of life and wish to live without regrets, it does not.  In fact, Shuji and his friends decide to completely ignore their friend's death rather than acknowledge it and heal.  There is the female soldier that dies off screen while on patrol, whose gender was only put there to make the viewer more sympathetic.  What about the man who helped Shuji fix the motorcycle just in time to be blown apart by a bomb?  How about the friend who decided to go fight in the war to protect his sweetheart who does not even like him, which is somewhat even more invalidated because of the fact that the war is never even explained fully until the last scene of the show?

                The war is perhaps one of the biggest problems with the show.  The war is shown to the audience in the same way that it is presented to the characters in it.  Which is to say that next to nothing is ever explained.  International, and even domestic, communication is shut down at the beginning which means that the full scope of the conflict is never quite shown unless what Chise says can be trusted.  More on that in a bit.  Planes just show up whenever they want and bomb towns.  There are no air raid sirens or any sort of warning system to tell the residents that the enemy is coming.  Bombs and planes make no noise until the bomb explodes, then they make lots of racket.  The enemy that Chise and the army is fighting is never explained who they are or why they are bombing civilian cities.  Only at the very end does the show do a horrible job of explaining.  Apparently, the big wigs knew the world was ending and are fighting for resources.  How does the world end?  Earthquakes.  What is causing the earthquakes?  Why are the earthquakes occurring?  No reason.  It is a poor attempt at filling a plot hole that the show created to add the feel of helplessness but only makes a bigger hole in the end.  It is worse because the info is being delved to the audience and characters by an even bigger plot hole, Chise's bio-weapon modifications.

                Chise's modifications are the center point of the show.  Without them, she and Shuji would have had a pretty average life compared to her peers who are being blasted apart.  I can deal with the fact that she is implanted with some sort of space-age technology.  That is the free ticket for the show.  However, the show makes no attempt to say WHY she is selected to get the weapon implanted.  She is obviously taken by government spies, but the show never attempts to say if she got the implant willingly or not.  On top of that, the show never explained why she willingly follows orders in the beginning.  Later on, Chise is shown to be acting as a soldier so that she can feel numb to the pain of leaving Shuji, but why she cooperates in the beginning is conveniently left out.  It is not as if she is being forced by some override switch since she is constantly running off and avoiding her military role and duty.  The army cannot even threaten her to do what they want because she is indestructible.  The one thing that the army should have done, and would have made more sense, would be to threaten Shuji's safety, blackmailing Chise to do what they want.  What does occur is even more mindboggling.  No one from the military ever discourages Shuji from interacting with Chise.  In fact, whenever Shuji is anywhere near a soldier while with Chise, he is completely ignored like he is not there.  The single person who interacts with Shuji from the government does so in a jelly-spine, half-hearted manner that it is amazing that he got the position at all.  I just expect my MIB type characters to have more confidence.  

                Then there is the fact that the origin or design of the bio-weapon is never explained.  Even how the weapon works is never quite brought up.  Is it of an alien design, as can be seen in the later half?  Is it made by modern science, since she seems to hide missiles under her shirt?  There is no answer for any of this.  The audience must also conform to the fact that Chise is the only source of information about the world.  How does she know this?  Bio-weapon.  Throughout the show she is constantly getting various powers and abilities and the audience is constantly being told to "just go with it."  The accuracy of her knowledge is never questioned by anyone in the show.  The show just wants to use the excuse of her having a plot device sewn into her to be able to fall back on time and time again.  The problem with this is that unless you explain the plot device to a point, the credibility of it can be called into question.  Even the fact that the show wants to showcase Chise questioning her humanity as the bio-weapon takes over her body falls flat.

                The various things that I have talked about are mostly plot based.  However, the show is supposed to be character driven.  The problem with this is that nearly every single character is completely messed up in the head and has not learned how to grow up.  With the exception of Shuji's parents and the guy who fixed the bike, every character has emotional problems that paint the world as being filled with broken people.  Take the middle school coach who had sex with her student.  How about the character that decided to have sex with a boyfriend she did not love out of pity for that fact, not to mention that he knew she did not love him?  How about the army lieutenant that goes on dates with Chise but ends up crying the name of his wife as he bleeds to death?  When confronted with problems, these characters take a defeatist attitude, which makes even less sense when the soldiers choose such.  It only brings up what kind of training they are giving the recruits if they fall apart so easily.  Even the main two characters are so filled with backwards logic that it becomes grating.  One moment they want to live, the next they want to die.  Each episode feels like a trip down a schizophrenic road with the way that they bounce back and forth.  You might argue that the worst culprits are supposed to be acting so because they are teenagers filled with angst and depression caused by love and war.  The problem with this is that this kind of horrible drama only appeals to teenagers filled with angst and depression.  I did not like that drama when I was a teenager, and it is even more annoying when being portrayed in stories.  Teenagers in stories never have the right answer to life's problems and it takes them forever to reach the right ones.  This is exactly what happens in "Saikano" throughout the show except it applies to nearly everyone.  

At least he was chastised for asking such a dumb question.

                "Saikano" is a screw being turned slowly in my head.  The premise felt exciting and refreshing when I started.  As the show continued, it became bogged down by depressing pessimistic philosophy.  It never shines a gleam of hope, and when it does, the hope is bombed out of nowhere.  The show is not happy in the least.  It is a giant pity party for people who cannot deal with the difficulties of life and would rather wallow in sorrow than better their conditions.  The worst part is that the ending wants to present a picture of some bitter sweet ending, except it fails.  Like I said, everyone is dead, except for Shuji who must wait out his life as the only human alive while walking around in a dream state.  He is trapped in an inverse form of Kurama's Sinning Tree from "Yu YuHakusho," living in a dream world until his death.  "Saikano" would like to think that it can capture the pain of love and war but it feels like a pile of cynicism which spills over into the attempt at romance.  

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Tomorrow is  "The Mysterians" (1957).

Entry 046: "Saki" Ep. 16-25 End

Dear Internet,

                There, I have finished "Saki."  I am done with t and have no desire to go back to it.  A majority of the things that I talked about in my last post continued into this episode.  About the only difference was that some of the gender dynamics were rescinded, but not by much.  There was an elder male character that was introduced as the grandfather as one of the side female mahjong players, who had taught her how to play.  The farthest his character got was admitting regret that he was unable to finance the possibility of allowing his granddaughter to enter a prestigious high school with other high skilled players.  This was about where his character ended.  I am not sure what I was hoping for, maybe some sort of soliloquy about an older generation placing its hopes and dreams upon its children or the value of mahjong as a means of creating friendships.  None of that, and just another male character glossed over.  One step forward and two steps back, however.

                The only male member of the mahjong club continues to be seen as the butt monkey of the show.  He enters a singles tournament and loses in the first match.  Later on, he is shown to be playing an online match and his score is so horribly bad that it defies logic.  How in the world can a player be that bad when he plays in the same club with lightning wielding mahjong prodigies?  Surely, some of that static electricity would rub off onto him.  Is he so busy being the club gofer and buying them tacos that he has no time to actually play the game?  And why does he even play at all if he is so bad?  No one has that kind of patience or could receive any kind of joy by playing a game that they never win at all.  Is it because of the friends he has made in the club?  It would have to be because there is no other reason.  Sadly, they treat him more as a servant than anything else.  In the last episodes, when all the characters from four different schools get together to play mahjong to get better as a sort of "training camp," he gets left behind to play online mahjong.  Why?  The show gives no explanation.  One would think that playing against a wide range of highly skilled players would benefit him, but it is more likely that they figured that playing against him would be a waste of their own time.  This is made even worse when one realizes that there is a player at the "training camp" who is apparently even newer to the game than he is.

Pot and kettle, folks.

                Perhaps, I am stressing the male gender dynamic on this show too much.  The show is supposed to center around the female characters and their relationships, but even that feels awkward and forced to pander to an audience that asks for nothing but brain candy.  For example, there is no conflict on this show that stems from interpersonal relationships.  Everyone gets along with one another to the point that nobody can possibly be considered an antagonist or threat.  When one of the main characters gets her stuffed penguin stolen from her, the thieves admit to their crime and are instantly forgiven.  When the same penguin rips apart, it is instantly fixed like new.  When it is finally returned, there are no misunderstandings or hard feelings anywhere to be found.  Where is the conflict?  Where are the misunderstandings or lack of trust in strangers?  It does not exist.  Problems are barely squeaked out from the plot and are resolved in minutes.  When I saw the penguin stolen and ripped apart, I was hoping to see that it might lead to some sort of ill will and rivalry.  Instead the tension is dissipated before it is even allowed to be made.  This is not the only time that tension falls apart like this.  Numerous times, characters are introduced and given some sort of back story where they had to overcome obstacles.  The problem with this is that all their problems are in the past and have no bearing on the current situation.  Their obstacles have already been cleared.  They are no longer battling the demons of their past.  All it does is add pointless filler in an attempt to create a menagerie of characters that the audience can fawn over.  It does nothing to actually affect the story, but only hopes to account for the play style of the next random character.  

                Another thing that shows how pandering this show is the way characters betray their personalities.  The rich girl who is either composed all the time or a comical wreck blushes beat red when given a compliment.  The strategic calculating girl falls all to pieces when her friend praises her.  This continues so on, and I can understand that there are certain times when one looses composure, but "Saki" does this to nearly every character to the point where it undermines the character traits placed upon those characters.  It is like saying that under every single female's outer coating is a gooey center that is just waiting to be gush.  Every female gets this treatment, even the single one that I thought would actually be a point of conflict.  One of the other mahjong clubs in the show has a female coach to lead the group.  When one of the members of this group does not perform satisfactory to the coach's expectations, the coach slaps the student across the face.  Think about that for a moment, the adult coach slaps the student across the face, not for losing but not playing as well as she should have.  Bells and sirens should have been going off, and the show admits to this drama and creates tension in later scenes.  However, when the team eventually falls out of the tournament, the coach is rather ennui and gives a little praise to one student who tried her hardest to turn the game around.  Not only is there no explanation given as to why the coach has a turn of heart, but it also is a return to the lack of conflict that the show centers around.  No one can be the bad guy, and no one can create over arching problems.  The show could have played up the tension even more by having the coach get caught physically abusing her students or having the players create a united front against the coach to make her back down.  There was something like the latter that occurred at the slapping scene, but it was a single character the stood up against her.  It all just feels so anticlimactic since there is no crescendo outside of the matches.

                The matches is what is apparently the big draw of this show, but it is to the point where all the audience does is sit back and wait until the big hands are played.  I can understand that the show wants to skip through all of the pointless interlude during play in the same way that a baseball show would gloss over the time in between innings.  It would be boring to watch if that extra time was still there.  However, when the good hands are being played, it goes by so fast that I do not even have time to see what is going on.  Perhaps this has more to do with the fact that I am unfamiliar with the game, but making the game speed by to the point where it is a blur does not help it in the least.  On top of that is the fact that the game feels so much like it is based on luck rather than skill that I cannot help but this that I am being had.  Give me a chess board or maybe "Clue."  Those are pure skill games.  I do not have to worry about some sort of "heart of cards" or "feeling the flow" of the game.

So, it boils down to random draws?

                Do I need to point out again the fan service that this show deals out left and right or would one recognize how silly and out of place it all feels?  You do not have to answer that, Internet.  Even the show ponders this question.

The tiles float as well as this plot.

                "Saki" is a bad show.  It is painfully boring and nonsensical to watch.  Even nonsensical shows like "Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo" are at least comical with its nonsense.  "Saki" can either fall into two categories of audience.  Either it is for those who play mahjong, who I imagine would question the purpose of framing mahjong games with such an abysmal plot, or it is supposed to be for those who want to watch high school girls interacting with one another and swoon over the notion that they are doing cute things, sometimes to each other.  As someone who knows nothing about the game and finds the notion of another high school drama that adds nothing new, I would rather spend the time learning the game from an angry elderly Chinese man who chain smokes and yells profanity in a language that I do not understand whenever I screw up.  That would at least be more entertaining if not more educational.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Tomorrow is  the 1963 "Lord of the Flies" movie.

Entry 045: "Saki" Episodes 1-15

Dear Internet,

                "Saki" is a Japanese animation based upon the manga of the same name.  The story follows the titular character, Saki Miyanaga, as she enters her highschool mahjong club.  Saki is not unfamiliar to the game, for she played it with her family, she admits.  However, her experiences were less than enjoyable.  If she won too much, she was chastised, and if she lost, she had her sweets withheld.  To combat this, she learned to play without winning or losing, making her final score plus or minus zero.  This is apparently a very difficult feat that catches the eye of her other club members.  What follows is the journey into the world of mahjong.  

                "Saki" does not feel terribly unique.  There are a few other mahjong centered works out there, not many but there are.  I have not had a chance to watch them, but I definitely feel like I would rather be doing so.  If you examine the way the show handles the game that it centers around, "Saki" falls a bit short.  There is little to no explanation at the beginning episodes.  And before I get any further, let me say this is not solitaire mahjong that most Westerners would think, which is more like a cross between Old Maid and 52 Pickup.  There are a few terms being defined here and there, but nothing is explained from the ground up.  I cannot mark against the show for my own lack of knowledge of the game of mahjong, but it is hard to follow along when I do not even know what all the tile sets consist of.  I am fifteen episodes in and they may as well be making up the rules as they go like the first season of "Yu-Gi-Oh" for all I know.  While I was watching "Saki," "Eyeshield 21" constantly came up in my mind.  You can go back and read those reviews if you wish, but I will try and save you some effort.

                Weighing the two shows against one another exposes a number of things.  They both fit one of the most used formats of Japanese anime/manga, which is to say that they follow a bunch of high school students who participate in a shared extracurricular activity.  Nearly every club, sport, and other group has been done to the point where it is less a format and more a formula.  Take a few tired out character types, throw a dart at a wall filled with club groups, pull a card from a pile to determine that weeks plot, and BOOM you have a show.  This is not to say that having a formula is a bad thing, but adding nothing new to the situation leads to stagnation.  It is even worse if the show is not very entertaining.

                Let me try and weigh a few things between the two shows.  "Eyeshield 21" had plenty use of laser lights.  When some player was racing down the field, clouds of dust would blow behind them having been raised from a field drenched with hours of rain.  When someone would jump three meters into the air to catch the winning pass, an image of the great Mountain Everest would appear into everyone's minds.  If someone was able to run a perfect route, then they would appear as a coal locomotive running at full steam, plowing into any unfortunate soul in its path. All of this was meant to illustrate a point.  A majority of them were meant to give physical emphasis to the actions that the individuals were enacting.  The rest were to illustrate the mental image that other were imagining.  "Saki" does the same thing, or at least it tries to.  Numerous times in the show, a character will pick up or place a mahjong tile and lighting will leave their fingertips.  If they lay down a few tiles, they might spark with electricity for a few seconds after.  One character is apparently able to make all her discarded tiles completely disappear from the sight of the other players because she is so invisible herself.  

Perhaps the Japanese should harness that energy as a new type of energy source.

                The differences between how the two shows handle these overly emphasized actions are minute but the difference is important.  "Eyeshield" was trying to add more effect to pure physical actions.  The characters were running, jumping, catching, etc.  All of these were already feats.  The additional graphics are just there to add some extra excitement.  "Saki" uses similar effects but only because the actions that the characters do are not physical.  Mahjong is a sitting game.  The players only move their arms and never very quickly.  There might be a small light of hand trick outside of official matches, but those are rare.  "Saki" uses the various outlandish laser light graphics not to add dramatics to actions, but to create it.  If there were no lightning bolts shooting out of people's eyes and fingers, there would be nothing to highlight the importance of the hands the characters played.  "Eyeshield" had numerous "special moves" that all had some crazy over the top feel to it, but at least each one was explained as a certain technique and given real world equivalents.  "Saki" just feels like it has to add the effects to keep its audience interested. 

                Another big problem with "Saki" is gender roles, which is only highlighted when juxtaposed with "Eyeshield 21."  The cast dynamics are completely switched around.  "Saki" has a cast nearly completely composed of teenage girls.  At the time of this writing, there are five guys that have lasted longer than five minutes as a passing individual.  There is the male mahjong club member, two fathers of the main cast, a butler, and an announcer.   The male club member is nothing more than a gofer and low skilled player.  One father is a shown to disregard his daughter's feelings about which school she wants.  The other father is Saki's, who by implication is one of those whose bullying led to her refusing to play well.  The butler is only the only useful male, but he only exists as a miraculous problem solver.  The announcer is constantly shown up in his examinations by the female mahjong pro.  Oh, wait, there is the photographer who accompanies the reporter, but he has no real role.  The two shows are supposed to share the same age and gender demographic, except "Saki" is supposed to have a slightly older group.  "Eyeshield 21" is filled with males to the brim.  I think I even counted nearly every female character in one post.  The difference here is that in "Eyeshield 21" the female characters were actually important and significant.  They managed the teams or provided emotional support to the players.  The dynamics of the show would be drastically different if they were removed.  In "Saki," the only reason guys are there are to make jokes about breasts, but even those are mostly handed to other female characters to deliver.  Males are either useless bodies whose roles could be easily completely cut out or are the source of problems that the show does not want to talk about.  Even the most important male character, the one in the club, has no bearing in the games being played since the games are gender exclusive.  He has had no big effect on the plot.  Even when he runs out to obtain food for one member of the club in time for the second half of her match, she still does poorly in the rest of her round.  He introduced Saki to the club, but that is about it.  After that first episode, he is a butt monkey and gofer.

                But why do I mention demographics and "Eyeshield" in all of this?  It is because the dynamics of the two seem so far apart despite its key audience is only different by a few years.  It can be argued that the difference is a big one.  For there comes a time at when boys stop looking at the fairer sex as a foreign concept that warrants self segregation but is instead as a heavenly body come down from the plane of paradise.  Boys begin to like girls.  However, each show handles it differently to such an extent that it highlights the problem with "Saki."  "Eyeshield 21" handles the girls with respect, treating them as individuals with their own problems and goals.  "Saki" treats them as eye candy meant to gawked at.  This is evident by the gratuitous amount of fan service that is poured out like yesterday's bathwater.  Throughout the show, steam clouds, blaring gleams of light, and well placed angles abound.  I can barely see past all that PLOT.  Would "Eyeshield 21" have done such blatant pandering if it was aimed at an older audience?  No, because it aimed for a higher ideal.  It was a showcase of ideals that showed what a male should strive for.  It showed that a man should be determined, hard working, striving for a goal, working together with his peers, creating bonds of friendship, becoming a better individual for its own sake, and so on.  "Saki" on the other hand has nothing to preach or impart on its audience.  There are no model men, just supermodel women to look at who are busy looking at each other.

Expect to be reminded of this by someone at least twice an episode.

                Tomorrow will be the final ten episodes, and try to cover the other glaring flaws of the show.  I do not think that it will get much better in that brief amount of time.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop