#and then it switched to story 2 with the messy yuri. and it got an interesting setup for it | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

expshared · 6 years

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Fall 2017 had some of my favorite anime from the year as a whole—draws big ol' hearts around Girls’ Last Tour and Land of the Lustrous—so how did Fall 2018 compare?!? this is clickbait.

Starting with the leftovers from Summer, Golden Kamuy manages to be strong and intriguing despite being a project wholly mismanaged by studio Geno, who simply don’t have the staff give this show what it needs. I dream of a Golden Kamuy given to us by a Madhouse or a Bones. That said, I love Golden Kamuy very much, it is so unlike anything else in anime. Historical edutainment, cooking show, slapstick comedy, grotesque body horror...the sum of its parts is so strong that the horrible CGI bears almost don’t even matter. The season ends on such sequel bait that I’m just dying for more, oh god please.

You guys like sports anime???!? Run with the Wind sold me on its premise by virtue of taking place in college, which is just different enough to be interesting. I didn’t realize this one was a 2-cour, and when I did its glacial pace made a lot more sense. I do love a good underdog story, and no one in this club is looking to become an Olympian, that’s for sure. There’s something to be said about doing something just for the sport and community of it, and I like that a lot. Speaking of sports anime that are about coming together as a community and not so much about being The Best at This Sport Ever, Anima Yell was a delightful show about cute girls learning how to cheerlead!. It’s not inspired by any means, but it’s cute, fun, lively, and super enjoyable to watch. I was afraid there would be many opportunities for upskirts and raunchy gags, but Anima Yell is wholesome and just really invested in getting you to enjoy cheering on other people. GO FIGHT WIN! Tsurune is, unlike Anima Yell, just not fun to watch. It’s dreary, moody, and I ask myself wondering why anyone in this show has any friends at all. If this were my first sports anime, maybe I’d be more tolerant, but its biggest sin is that it’s just so boring. If it weren’t Kyoani, I’d have dropped it at episode 2.

Iroduku: The World in Colors was an incredibly pretty time travel story about opening yourself up to the world and the people in it after trauma. I felt it dragged a little in the middle, and some episodes felt just plain compulsory (gotta have an episode per club member!! unfortunately all club members are not equally interesting) but the last three episodes were clinchers. It came together to be quite a nice little package, if you don’t mind a little bit of melodrama. I wouldn’t necessarily go out of my way to recommend this one, but I would put it nicely on the shelf with comp titles like Angel Beats and After the Rain where it could hold its own.

The worst thing I watched this season was Girl in the Twilight, which was like a really bad episode of Black Mirror that just wouldn’t end. The plot involved some very convoluted alternate world hopping with cassette players of all things, but it also gave us Evil Amazon, Westworld: Japan, and a canon gay couple I Guess. While I wanted to like it for its sheer chuzpuh, unfortunately, everything about this show was Bad. Bad CGI. Bad character design. And worst of all: a Bad ending that never bothered to tie up any of its loose threads. Bangin’ OP though?

Oh my god you guys, watch Bloom Into You. I read a lot of GL manga and Bloom Into You is generally agreed upon as being one of the best: more of a character piece than a romance, uninterested in the noncommittal will-they-won’t-they agonizing of its peers, committed to saying something about the world and its characters more than just being fluff. As a manga reader, I had highish hopes—I’m quite fond of studio Troyca—and you know what, I actually felt I had a more enjoyable time watching this than I did reading it. I found it an incredibly sensitive and inclusive watch (ace, aro, bi, and lesbian characters??? In ONE SHOW??), and was, many times, struck by how true to LGBT experiences it was. A lot of GL manga either take place in a world where there are no bigots or in a world that erases the sexuality of women altogether (there’s a reason why “pure yuri” exists) or else exist in a “fanservice bubble”, but Bloom Into You is none of the above. GL anime are incredibly scarce and so few of them nail the actual, terrifying, honest-to-god experience of growing up and realizing you’re not experiencing romance or youth like other people are. I really, really hope the success of this show starts a trend of further adapting GL manga, because there are some excellent ones out there for the picking. My only complaint about this adaptation is that it ended too soon.

SSSS Gridman was the strongest directorial effort this season—a love letter to kaiju and the tokusatsu genre, a show about playing with toys and fantasy and escapism, bloated with so many references to mecha anime and old school Ultraman and a dozen other unrelated properties that the showrunners loved to buy toys of when they were kids. This is a show that rewards repeat viewings, as the first couple of episodes are hidden behind 5 layers of foreshadowing, red herrings, and referential Easter eggs. The bait and switch is delicious, and even though I felt like a lot of it went over my head because I am not in the know about all the extremely specific references this show was making, the journey is worth it. The scale feels huge, the reveals are all great, and the characters are engaging. Akane Shinjou is one of my favorite villains because she is also technically the protagonist, and also she is an emotionally messy kaiju fucker who lives in garbage and that’s delightful.

My favorite this season was a dark horse: the never-to-be-imitated-again Zombieland Saga. The incredibly vague descriptions and trailers that were put out before its release did not gear me up for the first episode. This was on purpose. The first episode had me so fucking floored I couldn’t believe I could still be surprised by anime. Even after a picked my jaw up off the floor and resigned myself to the fact that I’d been tricked into watching an idol anime, and I liked it, the show didn’t stop surprising me. It understood physical comedy in way that never got tired, but didn’t sacrifice any heart (hehe). I learned more about the idol industry than any other idol anime I’ve ever watched combined. There’s also something very tongue-in-cheek about having your idol anime--a genre done to death-- star zombies. It was a constantly surprising delight to watch, and I loved every episode more.

#chitchat paddywhack #animoose and mango #lost post /#boy i hope that read more is working

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museicaliteacup · 7 years

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The Correlation Between Expressions of Love and Program Depiction for Minor Characters in Yuri on Ice

A year on from Yuri!!! on Ice, I want to discuss something that I’ve seen floating around various fandom circles through the months. It’s a general dissatisfaction that the show chose to highlight characters like Georgi and Michele by way of showing both their skating programs, and spent less time focusing on other minor but more easily accessible or representative characters: Guanghong, Leo, Emil and Seung-gil.

This inequality of screen time—but moreover, skating time and character development time—is an issue that doesn’t have an easy solution. The anime follows standard broadcasting time limitations, and as such, there are only so many skating programs you can show when considering the ones you have to show (Yuuri and the other eventual GPS finalists), and also all the off-ice time and story progression. Making the decision to show five programs per episode in the qualifying events makes sense, logistically. But how do you select which characters’ stories you are going to develop that little bit further, and which ones you need to condense?

My proposal is that the content of the programs, in a way, reflects the two focal points of Yuri!!! on Ice: how characters embrace, develop and view life and love. When you look closely, there’s actually a very clear distinction in the programs we are shown with regards to love in particular: some skaters emanate love in a way that is love beyond themselves, love for other people; and others either emanate love that isn’t related to people, or don’t express love at all. And that distinction is the line that is drawn between the characters that get more skating time, and the characters that get less.

However, just because characters don’t get skating time, it doesn’t mean they don’t get further development. Many of the characters get a lot of off-ice time and development, and all of the six characters I am going to analyse draw either draw parallels with or become foils for Yuuri. I think this last point is particularly poignant: Yuuri is the main character for a reason, and the ways each of these six characters skate are designed to highlight certain points of Yuuri’s own skating, storyline, and relationship.

Cup of China

Georgi: what happens when romantic love goes wrong

Georgi is our two-program non-finalist in this event, and his entire program is themed around his breakup. His programs are more than overtly about love: they juxtapose two extremes with regards to feelings, with him turning from an evil witch who wants to curse True Love because it doesn’t exist to a Disney Prince™ whose main objective is proving the Power Of True Love etc. And while people think this is boring or unnecessary to watch, it kind of makes sense. Breakups are complicated. They can be really messy, and especially if the other person was the one who initiated the break. When you still harbour very strong affections for someone, it really hurts when they leave you, and those two extremes that Georgi portrays are very much the two extremes you can end up feeling for that person.

Georgi’s performances also serve another purpose: echoing Yuuri and Victor’s relationship. His second program in particular serves as a poignant aftermath to Yuuri and Victor’s messy and difficult conversation in the carpark. Their relationship is strong enough that they are able to go from Yuuri crying and Victor saying all the wrong things to him to walking into the rink with Victor’s hand on Yuuri’s shoulder. A friend commented, upon watching the episode: “That’s not a level of physical closeness you can achieve after a fight like theirs unless you’re really close” (paraphrased). “I’ll always be, be there for you, I promised…” That’s one of those timeless statements that says I love you and this is how I will show it. Having Georgi skate this program about love overcoming obstacles and being a strong force beyond anything that might test it is a natural parallel to where Yuuri and Victor are in the story, and where they’re about to go.

Yes, Georgi seems like a bit of a comical, overly dramatic character and yes, he’s very hung up over his breakup, but he was the one who got dumped, and he has good reason to still be conflicted about it. Yuuri is constantly shown to process his thoughts and come to important realisations while skating; it’s no big stretch to imagine that other skaters might try and do the same. And, after all, Georgi’s emotions didn’t go to waste: he got bronze in the Trophée Eric Bompard, so there you go.

Leo and Guanghong: parallels to some of Yuuri’s subtler skating traits

The interesting thing about Leo and Guanghong is we actually see a lot of them off the ice. Although we get a glimpse of Georgi on the street, it’s Guanghong getting jianbing and Leo on a mission from Phichit to find Guanghong to come and translate for drunken Victor that we first focus on in China*. Guanghong is shown commentating on both Leo and Christophe’s programs alongside Yuuri and Phichit; and the two of them are shown to be trying to stream the GPF together in episodes 11 and 12, which is like, #friendshipgoals.

*(A note here regarding subs: although all the translations lean towards Leo saying that Phichit asked Leo to go to the restaurant and translate, apparently—according to a post from way back when—what Leo says has a much looser interpretation, and can actually be constructed as Phichit asking for Guanghong to go and translate; and since Guanghong hasn’t been answering his phone to Leo, we can presume Phichit tried Guanghong, got no response, then texted Leo to go out and find Guanghong for him. A different kettle of fish, but a useful clarification—after all, it makes a lot more sense that Phichit would be seeking out native speaker Guanghong to translate for him.)

But on the ice, despite their clear friendship off it, their programs either aren’t really connected to other people or aren't connected to love.

Leo’s short program, Still Alive, harnesses his prowess as a choreographer and his connection with and love of music. It’s a program that is very much about him, and what he wants to give to the world. It’s not selfish, but it is self-directed and self-focused, and the focus of the commentary is on Leo’s coolness and ability to switch up choreography to suit the competition from his friends, and about the way music influences Leo and his drive to continue and his courage from Leo himself. It’s about a thing Leo loves and is good at, but not about a person. Leo’s interpretation and self-expression are highlighted, a small parallel with Yuuri being historically noted for having higher PCS than TES; it’s not a large parallel, but it is something you see Yuuri focusing on, and all the skaters focused on here do have things that tie them to Yuuri.

Guanghong’s free skate, Shanghai Blade, is a delve into Guanghong’s thoughts about how to construct a framework for your skate that you can believably sell both to an audience and to yourself, and a look at his own hunger to improve himself and prove his worth in the world of skating. Again, it’s a very self-focused program, and features a brilliant montage of Guanghong’s internal fantasies: himself as an assassin, and then Leo as his ally who Guanghong takes a bullet for. (Also, Georgi as the bad guy. I don’t know why, but it makes me laugh.) It is interesting to note how much admiration Guanghong holds for Leo: he openly comments how cool he thinks Leo is and then fancasts him as his fantasy ally and takes a bullet for him. Even though the program is not about Leo, it is a nice piece of friendship development.

But again: the program is focused on Guanghong’s own imagination, limitations and aspirations, and in terms of the skating, not on anyone else. Now, I said all these six skaters had parallels/foils with Yuuri. Guanghong’s is that little trait of Yuuri’s mentioned in episode 2 and exemplified in episodes 5 and 12: he really, really hates losing. I don’t think in Guanghong’s case it’s hugely significant to Yuuri’s journey, but it is a reminder halfway along the line that losing is frustrating, and eventually that question is posed to Yuuri when Yuri wins the GPF: what do you do when you lose?

(Agree to stay in skating for one more year and compete against your coach/fiance until you win gold at five world championships, that’s what hahahaha.)

Rostelecom Cup

Michele: the foil to Yuuri and his relationship with Victor

I think the most animosity I’ve seen in this series is actually towards Michele, and I can understand why: he’s brash and rude to almost everyone, he’s attached to Sara almost to the point of obsessiveness, and he spends most of his time in a grump. People wonder why the series had such a key focus on him as opposed to, say, Emil or Seung-gil, the other eventual non-GPS finalists at the Rostelecom Cup. And I think there are a number of reasons at play here.

The first is that Michele is basically on par with Yuuri, and could almost be seen as Yuuri’s equal going through this competition. Recall that Michele was also at the GPF the previous year, and came in fifth (so, only just above Yuuri), with a score of about 253, which isn’t really all that high. He doesn’t have many quads, and yet he’s regarded as one of the really good skaters. He’s also the closest in age to Yuuri: 22 to Yuuri’s 23. Michele and Yuuri will have been competing against one another their whole competitive lives. He’s someone who is most likely in Yuuri’s competitive vision.

And recall also that Michele and Yuuri are, on points termed, tied for qualifying for the GPF by the end of the Rostelecom Cup. Yuuri only makes it to the final by virtue of gaining one second placing over Michele’s two third placings, and Yuuri recognises this; he recognises that he was on a knife-edge with regards to placing at this competition because everyone at this competition was on a knife-edge with placing. Michele was the one pre-determined by the creators to gain bronze, and thus there’s just cause for a focus on him.

But also, Michele’s programs are about love. It’s a different kind of love to the romance and Yuuri-and-Victor-something-beyond-coach-student-beyond-mere-lovers that we’ve seen previously. This is familial love, and moreover, it’s sibling love. It’s protective love; and it’s love which is Michele learning about letting go. I think it’s also a foil to where Yuuri and Victor are at this point: where they’ve only been mutually knowing one another and living together for eight months, and realise after a short separation that they basically cannot be apart, that’s how much they love each other and need each other and make each other better, Michele and Sara have spent their entire lives together because… well, because they’re twins and compete in different divisions of the same sport. And after 22 years, Sara knows that she doesn’t need her brother to protect her from bullies anymore, that she has her own desires and goals that are separate to his, and that it’s healthier by far for them to exist independently.

Michele processes this, as so many of the skaters do, through his free skate. He takes the time to process Sara’s message to him, and to process what it says about him and how he needs to act from there. And it’s while he’s going through this mental process and making himself let her go—and thus, actively changing the way he views his love for her and the way he needs to perceive their relationship—that his skating becomes mellower, and he begins to emanate a strong and affecting love that brings Sara to tears as he skates for her for the last time.

Michele is a foil to Yuuri, in short. He has to go on the opposite journey to Yuuri—letting go, as opposed to letting in—and in doing so while being Yuuri’s most constant competitor, falls naturally into the spotlight. Personality-wise, maybe he isn’t widely regarded as a favourite or even particularly likeable in Western fandom. But character-wise and in the way his and Sara’s relationship foils Yuuri and Victor’s, he is important, and definitely important enough to warrant displaying both his skating programs. It's healthy love via independence versus healthy love via interdependence: both options are valid, but which one is the healthier option changes between for different people and different kinds of relationships, and this is so well illustrated here.

Emil and Seung-gil: reflections on some of Yuuri’s indisputable skating strengths and weaknesses

Can I just say, Emil’s theme and music are both AMAZING. (Delving into my own bias but Anastasis is my favourite piece of music from the entire show.) Emil’s competitive but positively competitive: his aim seems to be to make friends with his rivals, and he’s basically focused on running in the Make the Program all about Quads race. He pulls off four quads, including a quad loop for the first time in competition (which, incidentally, is one of the events I think may have thrown off Seung-gil in his free skate).

Although Emil is shown off the ice to goofily and readily attach himself to Mickey and to be someone who loves hugs and generally embodies a light, friendly, open sort of love, his program doesn’t actually reflect this at all: it’s all about bigger and more and ceasing to be human, and the question is whether he can actually pull off his four quads and successfully complete his program. He gets to the end, but falls on two jumps and misses a planned combination, all in the second half; which, incidentally, is Yuuri’s forte, and where Yuuri plans all his big jumps for maximum points value.

Seung-gil performs a program that is based entirely around its objective audience appeal score, and he spends the entire program calculating his base scores in his head. He’s not trying to do a mambo because it has any personal connection or emotional meaning to him; he’s doing it entirely because it will look good and if he can physically interpret it well, up his score goes. He’s the most detached of any of the skaters to the emotive side of skating, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing; after all, strong emotions can get in the way of the technical elements, as we saw when Georgi’s distress caused him to fall landing a jump halfway through his free skate.

But Seung-gil still has emotions under his calculations; he’s shown to be visibly apprehensive and nervous before his free skate, and after it’s over, he starts crying over how badly it went. To come back to my main point, Seung-gil’s focus isn’t even on himself: it’s on his numbers and technical elements, and yet we do get to see a very human, relatable side to him. And with regards to parallels and foils to Yuuri: although Seung-gil’s focus on calculating his element scores aids him in success, it’s this detachment from musical interpretation and focus on points that hinders Yuuri in episode 11 when his short program gets a lower score than usual. Additionally, remember that Yuuri knows very well the pain of losing, the pain of not being able to do your best, and there’s a reason Yuuri’s the one that looks up and focuses on Seung-gil’s upset after his free skate.

I have one further point to make, and this pertains chiefly to Leo, Seung-gil, JJ, and, as it happens, Yuuri. It’s to do with the point I just left off on, and explains in some part why certain programs weren’t featured: what happens when a skater messes up their program really, really badly?

Leo, Seung-gil, Yuuri and JJ: loss through failure and why it isn’t shown onscreen

We know from interviews with Sayokan and Kubo-sensei that Leo messed up a lot of his jumps in his free skate, which eventually put him in eighth place. We see that Seung-gil falls on a quad loop, his signature jump, and gets up with a tight jaw and a look of desperation in his eye before his final, very low score is revealed. And we all know that Yuuri came in sixth at the GPF the previous year; that he was grieving for his dog and that he messed up his jumps; consider that the only shots we get of Yuuri’s GPF free skate are those of his falls. This is also likely in part because Yuuri is a horrifically unreliable narrator and wouldn’t want to show us the things he did well; whether he even remembers the things he did well is a mystery.

But apart from that, I recall something Kubo-sensei once said: she didn’t want to portray injuries on the show, because she didn’t want an angsty show (or something to that effect). And in a similar vein, imagine what it would be like if we saw characters fall from multiple jumps and grow visibly more distressed throughout their programs. It would be uncomfortable to watch and it would hurt to watch—we’d be in the same distress we might be in if we saw characters get injured. Yes, there are programs where Yuuri has a lot of flubbed jumps, but he usually has a broader focus, a more secure mental outlook, or Victor does most of the narration there; Yuuri flubbing his jumps isn’t intended to make us or him angst, but to help push his character development. The one time we see a program really go wrong is JJ’s GPF short program, where he unintentionally downgrades all his jumps and basically has a panic attack on the ice. And it’s really powerful to watch, because this is the first time we’ve actually witnessed someone messing up to this extent.

I think Kubo-sensei and Sayokan are trying, in part, to preserve the characters’ dignity when they fail. You don’t always need to see what happened to understand what probably happened and to feel for the pain it caused. And by showing glimpses of what can happen when you mess up, but only glimpses, they then set a really good scene for giving us JJ messing up and what the repercussions of that are. And, as ever, it leads back to Yuuri and his journey: he recognises that this is in a way similar to how he messed up the previous year, but also recognises that JJ isn’t giving up or letting himself become defeated on the ice the way Yuuri did. The other failures tie in less closely (or not at all) with Yuuri’s storyline; therefore, there isn’t a reason to show them.

In conclusion...

The most significant parts of Yuri!!! on Ice are Yuuri’s journey through improving his skating, and the development of Yuuri and Victor’s relationship; thus, the other skating programs that take the focus in the limited amount of screentime available become the ones which bear the greatest significance to where Yuuri and Victor’s relationship is currently at in the storyline. Georgi and Michele, in their respective journeys in love, provide the clearest parallel and foil respectively to Yuuri and Victor’s relationship at the competitions; and accordingly, their skating programs get more screentime than those of the other non-GPS finalist characters.

#georgi popovich #michele crispino #katsuki yuuri #leo de la iglesia #seung gil lee #guang hong ji #emil nekola #yuri!!! on ice #my meta #some thoughts i've held vaguely for the last several months #and now i've finally got them in order #so here have some analysis

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