#i watched a lot of movies of varying quality over the summer so expect more posts maybe idk

[sofialoren]

MONSTERS, INC. (2001) | dir. Pete Docter

[a34trgv2]

Why Bad Writing Makes Me Mad

So, I just watched several episodes of Robotboy and I found myself getting more and more frustrated with the show with each passing episode. You can read my full review on Imdb (https://www.imdb.com/review/rw6188540/?ref_=tt_urv) but generally speaking, one of the things that made me mad about the show is just how terrible the writing is. I’m often called too harsh when it comes to shows like Robotboy and Summer Camp Island, but I think it’s 100% valid to express how you felt about a movie or TV show that legitimately frustrated you in some way. All the while being fair and not condescending towards the cast and crew, of course. Allow me to explain why bad writing makes me mad and how I express that anger in my critiques.

Obviously there’s no right or wrong way to tell a story. It’s all a matter of taste and how a story succeeds or fails varies from person to person. For me though, a story fails when it’s either sluggishly paced or way too rushed. I’m all for slow burn stories, but something interesting needs to be happening before we get to the best part. I hate it when a movie or show constantly pads the story with pointless segways that lead to nowhere or are otherwise just not funny. Animal Crackers comes to mind of a film that’s loaded with montages and musical numbers that amount to nothing. I also don’t like it when jokes are predictable and have a lame punchline. For example: “Hey, who’s the freak?” “G-Man and Belly Man here; and the freak is Tommy.” That’s from Robotboy episode 2a and I audibly groaned as I heard this. Of course Gus would throw Tommy under the bus being the obnoxious stupid little brat that he is. Perhaps you found that joke funny and I respect your opinion, though I disagree strongly. If a show or movie is going to take its time building up to a climax, the least it can do is be funny/interesting. As for stories being rushed, I get cartoons these days clock in at 11 minutes, but they really need to not cram in so much plot in so little time. The first episode of Chuck Chicken packs in at least 3 episodes worth of plot into one 11 minute episode. I hear the counter argument “well kids have a short attention span” and I feel that undermines kids. Sure, they can be impatient, but they’re not stupid. They will sit down, shut up and watch a show if it’s telling a good story in a fun and interesting way. I was having a hard time sitting still watching Robotboy and I’m 24. I think it’s best to take your time with your story but not too much time that it becomes sluggish and boring.

Another problem that stems from bad writing is forcing a conflict to happen. Remember that episode from Dexter’s Lab where Dexter got detention not because he was being a bad kid, but because some dumb kid kept asking him the question to #1? Yeah, that’s what I call forced conflict. Every conflict needs an inciting incident, but the ones that don’t come naturally are the most frustrating to sit through because the main character can’t catch a break. I recall Trey Parker describing a story outline and saying if the words “and” and “then” belong in story beats, you’re toast. The words “and” and “then” are exactly how you force a conflict to happen. All too often in shows and movies I find this happen and it frustrates me because I get what the writers are trying to do, but they’re not doing it well that’s the problem. The Devil All the Time is full of moments like this and in addition to being a downer it’s also a pretty boring film. Watch the full video of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s writing advice because they’re much more accomplished writers than me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGUNqq3jVLg

Another pet peeve I have when it comes to bad writing is when it tries to tell a good message in a muddled story. The most recent and infamous example is the French film Cuties. The film itself is a boring coming-of-age story made worse by having underage girls twerking and gyrating among other obscene things kids should NEVER do. I get the director wanted to criticize the sexualization of young girls, but in doing so the film became part of the problem. All the film did was give me uncomfortable flashbacks to the Powerpuff Girls reboot in 2016, which did the exact same thing with the exact same results. There was also the episode Nobody Doesn’t Like T.J. from Recess which tried to convey the message “not everyone is going to like you” but did it poorly because TJ never did anything for the kid to dislike like him. I get writers want to teach good lessons and be good influences, but they still need to tell a story. One of Pixar’s rules for storytelling is “Trying for theme is important, however you won’t see what the story is about until you’re at the end of that story. Got it? Now rewrite.”

I suppose a counter argument to my take is “writing is hard” and yeah, I agree it is hard, but that’s not a get out of jail free card. Look, I’ve written my fair share of terrible tales and I’m very critical of my amateur self because I now have the knowledge and experience to do better. This is something I expect every writer to do. If you’re and aspiring writer, the last thing you want to do is make the same rookie mistakes you made when you first started writing. Storytelling 101 dictates that you show, not tell. In my early years, I used to do a lot of telling and not nearly enough showing. On my Booksie page (https://www.booksie.com/users/benjaminfenty-157553) you’ll find I reuploaded several stories I wrote back in the early 2010s. I cringe every time I look at them because I did everything a writer is NOT supposed to do. I told instead of showed, I valued quantity over quality, I crammed in too much plot into one story, I forced conflict and poorly handled good messages. I’m not infallible and I don’t pretend that I am, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to get angry when a movie or show makes writing no-nos because they’re on a tight schedule. I know no ones perfect, but I can’t expect every writer to be an amatuer like me either. Make no mistake, I have nothing but respect for every single writer in the entertainment industry and me getting mad at their work doesn’t mean I despise them. It simply means I see their potential and it makes me bitter that is was squandered. In my reviews, I don’t stoop to the level of calling the writers (or anybody working on the show or movie) incompetent or lazy. I’m frustrated, yes, but I’m also critical and fair in my feedback. Just as good writing makes me happy and proud of the writers, bad writing makes me mad and disappointed in them.

[truly-a-snitch]

What would each character do during quarantine?

thank you for the ask!!

Aoyama: He’s probably been texting Midoriya and looking for something to do. He isn’t really sure what to do because he structures most of his life around school and hanging out with friends, so now that there’s neither, he’s exploring things he never had time for before.

Mina: You’re lying to yourself if you say she doesn’t have a dozen group chats with various people that she’s constantly spamming with memes. She also spends a lot of time with others, but she spends more time with more varied groups and listens to a lot of jpop.

Tsuyu: She’s pretty sad she can’t sit outside in the rain, so there's an allotted time every time it rains to sit by the window and gaze longingly, but when it isn’t raining she stress-cooks. She cooks anything she has the ingredients for.

Iida: Iida dedicates so much time to school and studying that he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He tried to keep a schedule for a while, getting up at a certain time, then keeping up with his studies, but that quickly fell through. He spends a lot of time playing Animal Crossing.

Uraraka: Sleep. What were you expecting? She wants to save money for her parents, and she can’t spend money if she’s asleep or sitting in bed doing nothing. It might not be healthy for her, but she cares too much for her parents to “waste” their money while she’s home.

Ojiro: He’s been working on the strength in his tail. He wants to stay in shape for when quarantine is over, and knowing his classmates, they probably aren’t doing the same. He wants to pull ahead, so he’s been throwing himself into his studies- and since he doesn’t have anything to do, he can dedicate himself to it.

Kaminari: You already know my mans is doing something dumb. He’s probably almost burned down his parents’ place multiple times doing everything from making bacon in the toaster to punching lightswitches. He spends a lot of time in the Bakusquad group chat, appropriately named “Bakugou Fanclub.” (he named it)

Kirishima: Constantly doing one of two things. If he isn’t bothering Bakugou, he’s geeking out over Red Riot, rewatching videos of him he’s seen a thousand times. Not that that’s a bad thing. He’s also been trying to keep up his physique, so he’s been working out occasionally.

Kouda: This baby boy has been enjoying himself, taking care of the animals his parents let him keep. It’s a lot of work- two ferrets, three tarantulas, twelve various fish, a dog, and a cat. He sells homemade stuffed animals on Etsy to afford to keep them fed.

Satou: Like I said in my “killing time” one, Satou bakes and does various cottagecore-type things. He has two pet snails as well. His residence always smells like whatever he’s recently been baking, and his parents just sit back and enjoy the smell and the amazing food.

Shouji: He loves manga, so my man is over the moon that he can stay at home and read manga all day. He’s even working on his own manga series, one he’s been working on since he was in middle school. He doesn’t have a title but it’s about a world without quirks.

Jirou: Music. All the way. Her parents support her writing music, playing it- lots of Guitar Hero in her house, lots of karaoke. She’s also been branching out, trying to find something else that she enjoys so that she doesn’t do the same thing, but so far has had no success.

Sero: Putting how much I love him aside, he’s still been exploring what to do, like Jirou and Aoyama. He plays lots of games- board games, card games, tabletop RPGs, MMOs, idles- any game, any genre, as long as it can be played alone or with his family.

Tokoyami: He’s been researching witchcraft, and recently began working with Horace (from the Egyptian pantheon). He does a lot of witchy things and when he isn’t doing that he listens to true crime podcasts in his free time. He also watches lots of horror movies and reads horror books.

Todoroki: In an effort to stay away from his father, he has a Youtube channel and a podcast. He writes, draws, cooks, reads- if he can avoid his father, he’s doing it. He even started reading American YA novels- the ones that get a lot of hate for being targeted at teen girls (like Divergent and Twilight.)

Hagakure: Hagakure has been doing a lot of clothing looks- she does all sorts of different street styles. Her favorite is lolita, because it covers enough that she becomes impossible to miss, but she also follows a lot of western trends. She learned to skateboard and skates everywhere to stay outside for as little time as possible.

Bakugou: He’s been playing all sorts of video games, like Sero, but he prefers to do it alone. He’s a Twitch streamer, usually streaming Call of Duty or other violent video games, but every once in a while he does a drawing stream- which surprised his classmates. He is actually very good at drawing but doesn’t practice as much as he wants to.

Midoriya: Training. He is exercising, keeping to the regiment he had during the summer between middle school and the UA entrance exam. When he isn’t doing that, he’s spending quality time with his mom, helping her around the house, cleaning and cooking, and watching movies with her.

Mineta: You can’t tell me he isn’t watching porn. I don’t really have any other comments, but it’s really his only interest- his personality doesn’t exactly lend itself well to other interests because of how invested in the girls he is. ;-;

Yaoyorozu: She’s rich. She can do more or less anything she wants- but she spends a lot of time practicing piano and sewing. She likes to make her own clothes and it helps that she can make her own fabric for free. She’s also been on the grounds around her house, tending to the bees she has (just let me believe she has bees it makes me happy)

(sorry for the long post oof)

[beneaththetangles]

Rising and Falling with Japan Sinks: 2020

TWWK: With the possibly exception of DECA-DENCE and its story with a story structure, the most surprising series this anime season may be Japan Sinks: 2020. I tuned in because I’ve become a fan of the director, Masaaki Yuasa, with his other work from this year, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken, locked in as one of 2020’s best anime. Japan Sinks is a different animal, a violent disaster series originally created to coincide with this year’s Summer Olympic games. Netflix premiered the show, and I blew through it quickly, as did a couple of other staff members, Samuru and @thathilomgirl​. But as much as I found the show addicting, I had a challenging time writing about it, and so besides a first impressions post, have avoided doing so. But we three decided to unpack the series together—a good decision, I think, because it perhaps takes three people to really discuss the ups and downs of this series, starting with the why each person tuned in and what they thought of regarding that visceral opening episode.

SPOILERS from throughout the series ahead!

-----

thathilomgirl: Honestly, I watched it because someone in a Discord group I’m in mentioned that the mom was from my home province (XD). The show wasn’t really on my radar early on because I thought it was a movie with a theatrical release, but seeing other word-of-mouth posts eventually made me try it out on a whim. The fact that it was all on Netflix made it easier for me to finish it off so quickly, too. As for my reaction after episode one, well, it really didn’t hold back at all. It seemed fitting for the catastrophic scenario it was supposed to portray.

Samuru: I saw the trailer on Netflix since they constantly preview new anime (I watch a lot of it on that platform.) It looked interesting, and like thathilomgirl, I thought it was a movie! But I was interested more when I discovered it was a series. My first reaction was that the show was not going to be a relaxing one; it seemed to be very serious from the start and it was not afraid to be very realistic and dangerous. The animation was very good (in episode one, at least—more on that later) and it hooked me.

TWWK: For sure! It definitely tried to convey a sense of realism and danger. It felt like 1970s disaster movies, where everything goes wrong and lot of crazy stuff happens, like the bodies falling from the sky—all the death, really—and the disastrous time at the cult sanctuary.

Samuru: I thought the middle section with the cult was out of place. I get that it changed things around and gave the viewer a break from all the destruction, but I didn’t understand why that was even in the anime. Also, the random sexual encounter that was only a few seconds was also unnecessary, but maybe they were just experimenting with ideas?

thathilomgirl: I just thought the psychic cult was just plain weird. Like, even going into how and why it managed to start up at all was kinda strange, even with how well-intentioned the woman was at first. Part of me just wanted to go through the screen and tell her, “This is all well and good, ma’am, but I think you may have gone way off course the moment gold entered the picture.” I thought the best part of that arc was when the old man managed to just nonchalantly broke into the temple to kidnap the woman’s child, just for how tonally different it was from everything else.

TWWK: You know, I actually really liked that section. I think when it comes the narrative, it was the best part of the series. A lot of foreboding and discomfort was building, especially centered around Daniel (Is he really as sweet natured as he seems? Is it like a horror movie, where he was actually just baiting the travelers? Or was he going to be another sad victim?). I think besides giving us a little break from the destruction, and leading to some character development, the section also helped emphasize a theme of the series, which is acceptance of those different from you and the importance of the Japanese coming together despite having different values and being in different generations. Cults have a bad wrap in Japan as they do elsewhere in the world, so this cult not being pure evil in the sense we expected, and their leader truly trying to help, was to me as big a surprise as any in the series.

thathilomgirl: Similar to what you touched upon a bit, I saw a lot of diversity among the characters in the show, whether in race, age, or even the difference in opinion regarding nationalism. It wasn’t that surprising to me, considering the anime was made by Science Saru, who also takes value in diversity as seen from the Eizouken anime. Putting aside any possible bias on my end, having the main characters comprise a Filipino-Japanese family was a good foundation to allow certain issues be addressed in the anime. On the other hand, sometimes it did feel like some non-Japanese characters such as KITE were kind of put on a pedestal because almost every action taken upon by them turned out to be the right decision in the end.

TWWK: Oh man, now I suddenly wonder if this “KITE! Best character of the season!” feeling I have is just feeding into a sense of faux diversity…

Samuru: Good points on the diversity of the characters. I noticed it then but am now really thinking about; I’m glad to have seen it. The anime gave perspectives that some Japanese have with foreigners and just as a people that aren’t often seen in anime. God made us all different, all with varying features, languages, etc. I enjoyed seeing some acceptance of that, especially from Ayumu who just wanted to help others regardless of who they were (as well as her mom and brother, Gō). Gō also expressed how he did not feel very Japanese, and he just wanted to move to Estonia instead. This created friction a few times with other characters, as they thought he either wasn’t Japanese or trying to act like a foreigner. It showed how proud, to a fault, the Japanese are (in the anime) to their culture. I myself am proud of being Hispanic, so I get where they were coming from, but it seemed to be too much on how they were pressuring him, instead of just letting him enjoy other countries and their differences.

TWWK: That’s an interesting thought, though the overall quality of the writing leads me to believe that the writers just didn’t achieve the subtlety in such remarks that may have made for a more intriguing series. But more than that, I don’t think they wanted subtlety; that strong pro-Japanese / anti-everyone else feel from the old man was certainly intentional.

thathilomgirl: There was also that ultra-nationalistic group that refused the Mutohs on their megafloat because the kids weren’t Japanese enough. It was too on-the-nose for me, but if a country did end up getting destroyed one way or another, it wouldn’t surprise me if a group like that started to surface. On another note, the more cynical side of me was wondering if all the non-Japanese characters were inputted in just so the series was able to check off diversity points to get more views and traction from international watchers. It did work on me a bit (and I also saw a lot of that from other anime fans in my country), but I’ve learned not to get too hung up on or cling hard to how certain areas of my identity are represented in the media over the years.

TWWK: Playing on your point, I wonder if Kite, among others, was lifted so highly because Yuasa was looking to strike a sort of balance, one critical of those who would be too nationalistic, to the point of being xenophobic, with an ultimate view that Japan is generally good, and has the potential of being marvelous. We seem to be a little skeptical of their inclusion, but it’s hard not to be when the themes about what Japan is and should be were usually quite bombastic—kind of like all the deaths.

Samuru: Speaking of deaths, I think there were too many. After a while it felt like one of those horror movies where you know who is going to die, except for the main characters (of course!). I knew around the last few episodes who was going to die, but it was still impactful when they did because of the way it happened. I actually felt sad for the loss of those characters.

thathilomgirl: It’s really hard to say for me to judge whether there were “too many deaths” for this show. On one hand, I did at least wish some characters like the Mutoh dad lived for a few more episodes so that we’d be more attached to him. However, realistically speaking, it made a lot more sense considering the aftereffects of what goes on if Japan really did start sinking to the ground and the possible consequences it has for the survivors on the land. By far, the only death I thought was the most out-of-place was for the cult leader’s son. It just came so suddenly like the debris that fell on him, laughter was the only thing that escaped my mouth during that scene.

TWWK: You laughed at that? Oh my gosh haha. I don’t think you were alone, though.

Samuru: I knew that kid was not going to make it, as he barely had any dialogue or interaction so he seemed “expendable” and I noticed that this anime liked to get rid of those minor characters. So yeah, he was on the anime’s “hit list” for sure.

thathilomgirl: There was another thing I noticed regarding death. Among the Mutoh family, Ayumu seems to be the only one who actually visibly struggles throughout the anime, but that’s because she was the only one who actually came face-to-face with watching her entire track team die in front of her eyes as soon as she came to from the initial earthquake. The other family members, meanwhile, were either in a relatively safer area from the ground and/or alone when it occurred. Every other death afterwards just goes on to make the survivor’s guilt she’s experiencing worsen as the story goes on. I also figured out right away that Mari’s seeming indifference to her husband’s death was just her being strong for her kids, because I’ve seen that a lot from the other people in my life. There was never really a good time for her to properly grieve as well, until they arrived at the cult in Shan City.

TWWK: You know, I don’t know…Like you, I noticed the seeming lack of empathy throughout the series, and I think Mari’s final episode or two was definitely meant to show that she hid her emotions on purpose (I think an idea many Asian kids can understand that westerners may not), but I felt like it was too little, too late. It was just so awkward that after the dad’s death, most everyone was kind of okay—even and especially Go. it was just too unrealistic, even with Go kind of in his own world and trying to make sense of it with his dad’s death. It was too disingenuous. Ultimately, I think it was poor writing, confirmed by the fact that Go’s emotional age seemed to drift anywhere between 7 years old and 14.

And I also struggled with the sheer number of character deaths shown. The shock value was important to the series, yes, but it got to be too much for me by the end. The old man getting eaten by the shark was my almost-laughable moment, for instance. And all the self-sacrifice already demonstrated by so many may have taken away some of the emotion of Mari’s death, which affected me, but not terribly deeply. I will say that Haruo’s death got to me, however; I thought that the themes of the show, particularly the idea of the older generation passing their love onto the younger, meant that he and the Mutoh kids would all survive. That was rough.

Samuru: I agree also about the deaths. I think it was somewhat laughable because it just kept happening. I would think, “Uh oh, it’s a new character, he probably won’t last long”. Also, I have new found respect for seagulls, those birds can’t be that ravenous…right? Haruo and Ayumu’s father dying were the most shocking for me. I really thought they would both make it, so once the dad died, I knew all bets were off with this anime and nobody was safe. I thought even Ayumu wouldn’t make it, even though she lost a part of herself in the ordeal. It made it seem very real, unlike a lot of TV shows where the main cast, and only the main cast, escapes just fine.

thathilomgirl: Mari’s death got to me a bit because I was hoping that she would at least last long enough to make it to relative safety before her heart got to her, and because of that storybook she used to read to her kids. But the latter’s just me being really sentimental in general.

TWWK: The show was unusual in the sense that it tried to balance that sentimentality you’re talking about with hard, sudden violence. That’s not an easy thing to do. Comparisons will be made to Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 or other disaster anime and films, like I did earlier, but I also immediately think of American movies regarding 9/11—United 93 and World Trade Center. The earlier had violence and shock on par with Japan Sinks, and it was draining and emotional in a successful way. The latter didn’t feel as overwhelming, nor was it as good a film. I think Japan Sinks found itself somewhere in between those both in how it tried to animate its disaster and in how meaningful the end product is. What did you both ultimately think of the series?

Samuru: I thought the show was excellent and very different than most anime I have seen. I liked the intensity of it, the diversity of the cast, and the originality of the story, even though it’s based on a book from the 70s. A lot of anime try to copy another one, and just add something else to make it standout. This series stands on its own.

However, the animation was off and on for me. There were some scenes in the last episodes that were terrible. I wanted to take pictures of it to share in case I was the only one that was noticing that. I don’t know what was going on with the animators at the end. But how the story concludes in a satisfying way, as I got to see what happened to the survivors and how they were living their lives. It gave hope when there seemed none, which reminded me of this verse: “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful” (Hebrews 10:23).

thathilomgirl: I thought it was a good show overall. Not the best one I’ve ever seen, but it did what it set out to do with its story. Yeah, the animation was a bit off at times, but I thought that was just how Science Saru anime was sometimes (keep in mind that I’ve only seen Eizouken and Ride Your Wave from them so far). I’m glad it ended on a hopeful note with Japan slowly rising back up, and seeing how every Japanese person that survived fared through the eight years since.

TWWK: My thoughts on the series are ultimately not as positive as they were for both of you. After one episode, and based on the studio and director, I commented that this might be the best anime of the year; I was so off that it’s not even funny. What was funny, though, was some of the scenes in the show that were supposed to be serious, as we referred to earlier. And that’s troublesome. Its high moments were extremely high, and could have lifted the show up to a 9 or 10 in my book, while the low moments—like the unintentionally funny ones—were very low, awful even. I gave the series a “7” rating, which is average to mildly good in my book, because it was a balance between those extremes.

Ultimately, though, it’s a major disappointment. Hot on the heels of Eizouken, I thought we could potentially have another classic, which this series is assuredly not. But its mileage will vary, and I very much emphasize that—all of us judged the series differently and felt strongly, one way or another, about many different moments. And there are so many vivid and memorable scenes in this show! Most viewers’ experience will likely be powerful, too, and in that way, I think we can all suggest Japan Sinks: 2020 is well worth the watch.

=====

The entire Japan Sinks: 2020 series can be streamed now on Netflix. All images courtesy of Netflix.

[joyful-soul-collector]

About Me

I was tagged by @theswordofpens! I started a new post for this cuz the other one was getting hella long with reblogs lol. Anyway, let’s get on to the questions!

How tall are you?

5′7 or 170.18cm

What color and style is your hair?

That is a debated topic actually. My hair is dyed bright blue, but the natural parts of it people can never decide if it’s black or dark brown. In the summer sun, it’s dark brown, but it’s not always summer and I’m inside 90% of the time, so it looks black very often. So really depends on the lighting of the situation. Though people tend to focus more on the fact that my hair is blue rather than what color the natural parts are lol. My hair is a pretty basic short haircut, short on the sides, little longer on top, a bit of bangs that get in my eyes sometimes. 

What color are your eyes?

Again, debated topic, and for the same reason as my hair. Sometimes dark brown, sometimes black, depends on the light. 

Do you wear glasses?

Yep! They’re red on the inside and black on the outside. 

Do you wear braces?

Yeah, my family was finally able to get me braces a while ago! I guess most kids get them when they’re younger, before their teeth have the chance to get worse, and they only have to have them on for a year or so? But we were only able to get them when I entered sophomore year of high school, so I have to have them for three years since my teeth had gotten so bad. They’re a lot better now, and hopefully I’ll be able to get them off before I go to community college 😅

What’s your fashion sense?

Does fandom nerd count as a category of fashion? I wear a lot of shirts with references to tv shows. All of my shirts have some sort of graphic on it, and I also have a couple zip-up hoodies that are tv show references. I also wear bright red sneakers every day, big bright red headphones that I wear every day, and a wallet chain that I wear every day. So all of that, combined with bright blue hair, seems to make for a... noticeable person haha. 

What is your full name?

Marko Polo

(Nice try, I’m not saying personal stuff on here haha)

Where were you born?

Not gonna say exactly where, but in the more southern part of California. 

Where are you from and where do you live now?

Alright, so technically I’m from a few different places. I was born in southern CA and lived there til I was 8, then we moved to super north-western WA where I lived until I was almost 13, and then we moved to central PA, where we celebrated my 13th birthday like a week after arriving. I’ve lived here in PA ever since, so that’s five years here in a couple months. 

What school do you go to?

A High School

What kind of student are you?

I’m an alright student? I struggle with school, especially with all the moving I’ve had to do. Different schools have different expectations and vary in a lot of ways. I also have ADHD (more inattentive, less hyperactive) and Anxiety, which has not exactly been a help haha. I’ve always needed tutors and extensions and my 504 Plan, but if I have those I can often get good grades!

Do you like school?

School is meh. It’s stressful and exhausting, which is frustrating because I have other stuff I want do outside school, but I can’t do half of it because I have hw and chores and any other random things that need to get done. But my school is very high quality compared to most public schools! We have so many resources and amazing classes, and I love attending there, but unfortunately the people are not my favorite. Most of them are rich kids who have never attended anything other than really fancy schools, so they often take what they have for granted. I’ve heard kids say “our school is trash” while sitting in our Forensic Science class, in front of a school issued computer that we get to take home every day. It bothers me to NO END how some of these people act, but oh well. 

Favorite subject?

English! English has always been my favorite subject, I love stories. 

Favorite TV shows?

Ohhhhhhh man here we go (in no particular order): Firefly, Dollhouse, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Demon Slayer, Legend of Korra, My Hero Academia, Sense8, Sherlock, Death Note, Lovesick, One Punch Man, Series of Unfortunate Events, The Good Place, Galavant, Parks and Rec, The Office, iZombie, Kill la Kill, Community, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, The Umbrella Academy, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Naruto, Batman The Animated Series, Travelers, Sex Education, Cells at Work, Death Parade, The Promised Neverland, RWBY

Tbh there might be more but those are the ones I could find haha. If you haven’t seen these, watch em, pretend this is a rec list, and then come and yell at me about how good they are. 

Favorite movies?

Again, here we go (in no particular order): The Iron Giant, 10 Cloverfield Lane, Cabin in the Woods, any and all MCU movies (but especially Spider-Man), Into The Spider-Verse, Scott Pilgrim vs The World, anything Bo Burnham, anything John Mulaney, James Acaster: Repertoire, The Prestige, The Usual Suspects, Planet of the Apes, Lars and the Real Girl, Her, Newsies, Baby Driver, Serenity, Liar Liar, Crazy Stupid Love, Bandersnatch, ARQ, Cloverfield, A Silent Voice, Klaus, How To Train Your Dragon, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

There are definitely more, I just couldn’t think of them haha. Again, watch these, and then come and freak out with me about how they’re amazing. 

Favorite books?

Let’s do this one last time (in no particular order, of course): Ready Player One, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Harry Potter, the Gone series, Saga, Sweet Tooth, Chew, Nimona, The Tea Dragon Society, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Lumberjanes, Invincible, Runaways, Calvin and Hobbes, Prince and the Dressmaker, Here, Plutona, Sculptor, Invincible, The Sword, Ultimate Spider-Man, Holes, Saving CeeCee Honeycutt, The Giver

There are definitely, 100% more books that I haven’t listed, again, I can’t think of them rn. Also, if you don’t recognize half of these titles, you probably don’t read comics/graphic novels. You should be reading those. Read them and then come and rant about how good they are so I get to tell you I told you so. 

Favorite past time?

Writing! Watching tv! Reading! Spacing out so much people have to say my name ten times before I come hurtling back to earth! Talking to friends!

Do you have any regrets?

Yeah, I wish I’d stood up for myself when I was younger. I was bullied for a really long time, and even though it’s been a couple years since the last I was bullied, it’s still really hard for me to tell people what I want and and don’t want. I think I’m a little better than I used to be though, which is good!

What’s your dream job?

Author definitely, but I doubt I’ll be able to do that for a real job. Tbh I just want a job that I can do in my sleep. Repetitive, pays well, not too exhausting, that way I have energy and time to do my writing and all the things I want to do at home. 

Would you like to be married?

I think so. I want to have a person I can live my life with, who I want to care for and who wants to care for me. If I’m not married I’d like an S.O. or even just a really good friend to live with. I think I’d get sad living by myself haha. 

Do you want kids?

I want to be a foster parent! I’ve loved helping people my whole life, and I think this is one of the best ways that I can help someone going through a rough time. I don’t want biological kids though tbh, not really for any one reason, just for a bunch of little ones. 

How many?

Dunno man. I wanna help as many kids as I can. 

Do you like shopping?

I do! However I don’t do it often because I have no money. I do like walking around stores and looking a cool stuff though, especially nerdy stores like Hot Topic or Boxed Lunch or any book/comic shop. 

What countries have you visited?

Canada, usually to visit family, once to see Niagara Falls! Never been anywhere else though, but I have a whole list of places I wanna see

Scariest nightmare you’ve ever had?

TW: SELF HARM/DEATH

Oof, see my dreams are always nightmares, and my nightmares are always hella terrifying. Often they’re of my worst fears: family telling me they hate me, finding the body of someone in my family, old bullies coming back, but in my worst one I found my little sister cutting herself in an old warehouse. I don’t actually remember much of what happened after I woke up, it was so bad I disassociated for the whole day. But luckily, I don’t dream often. 

Do you have any enemies?

No? Maybe? I have people I hate, my old bullies mainly, but I’m not around them anymore so it’s not like I spend time hating them. 

Do you have any self doubts?

Yeah I have this hilariously fun thing where I think everyone is just pretending to like me because they can’t pick up the courage to stop hanging out with me. Or that if I talk about what’s making me sad/stressed out then I’m being a burden on other people or being dramatic. Slowly working over that but it’s still hard. 

Do you have any significant others?

Nope

Do you believe in miracles?

Depends. I don’t believe in fate or the idea that something higher up is pulling strings. But I think crazy cool stuff can happen. But that’s just luck and coincidence. For me, miracles are the positive ends of luck and coincidence. 

How are you?

Meeeeehhhhh. School sucks, my sisters stress me out, and my parents are breathing down my neck about fifty different things. But I have a couple good friends and my writing and good stories to read and watch, so it’s not all bad :]

Tag ten tumblrs (tag last ten people in my notifications): @tracle0 @humblesavant @holystudenthologramy @federluftmask @phahbiyah @topazastral @dragon-s-bane @cassius-mortemer @saiko-tsuki @writing-another-star

[bonearenaofmyskull]

How does one write meta? I am someone who is terrible at critical analyses and has trouble even finding themes in books (eng lit was hell for me!!) but I would love write meta for shows/movies. I just don't know what to look for and how to break it down. Please help me, if you don't mind! I want to be able to articulate/explain why I like or don't like and what I think about the work, character, relationship or topic. I feel like I need a guideline. Also how do you know if a work has substance?

Uh…….

Welp, if all your years of education including, evidently, college hasn’t taught you how to critically read a text (written or media) and write about it in a way that you feel confident in, then I seriously doubt there’s anything I can say in a single post to instill that confidence. That said, I can say what and how I do it, more or less. 

1. Watch the thing. A lot. And then some more. 

My typical schedule for when Hannibal aired in S2 (I wasn’t posting regularly in S1 and S3 was over summer so my schedule got shot all to hell) was to watch the episode the night it aired (Friday), read the questions I’d get about it in my inbox, watch it again right after, get up in the morning on Saturday and read the next set of questions, watch it AGAIN, start drafting answers, and watch it again at least once more that day and two or three times on Sunday. I would get an Amazon copy of the episode so when I wrote anything about any detail in it, I would go find that spot and rewatch it again, maybe two or three times. So my meta responses, unless it was something super quick and easy, typically had no less than five viewings. After the end of a week, no less than ten or twelve. 

At this point, I’ve watched “Aperitif” 27 times just for my job. Overall I think it’s around 70. Meta is time-consuming.

(A small tangent: This–along with the fact that each ask I answered tended to spawn two or three more asks–is something that informed my occasional testiness when someone would come along, say something inaccurate that would mislead or confuse people, and then, when I would say something to them about it, would say, “This is only my opinion!” or “I’m not writing for school!” or “I’ve only watched it once and I just wanted to share my feelings!” or “All interpretations are valid and equal!” Well, some of us are putting in a lot of time and effort into our interpretations and into helping people understand things before and in the process of publishing meta, and others’ lack of these directly makes my work more difficult and time-consuming. It’s frustrating.)

2. Look for patterns.

Hannibal has fairly obvious patterns because Bryan Fuller is many things, but–generally speaking–subtle he is not. So you see the same lines repeated (”They know”), the same images repeated (eyeballs with reflections), the same strains of music (go go Brian Reitzell), the same general topics (transformation, consumption, the human propensity for violence, God), and so forth. But this is true in all texts: if it bears repeating, it will bear examining. This is where themes (in books or otherwise) come from, along with the kinds of lessons that characters learn (or should have learned) through their experiences. 

3. Back up your opinions with text.

If you can’t back it up with text, you don’t have meta. You have headcanon. And sometimes headcanons are just wrong interpretations not because anything in the text directly counters them them, but because multiple things point toward countering them. Interpretations are fine, but they need to have multiple and/or significant portions of text to support them. 

I occasionally get into “the author is dead” debates with people, but as a rule of thumb, if you want to maintain any respectability in this endeavor, imo it’s worthwhile to look at a thing from the perspective of what you think the authors (including actors, directors, writers, etc) were trying to accomplish, and then look for details that support that. So like the “Bedelia cut off her own leg” argument–in the sense that you can’t definitively argue that she didn’t cut off her own leg, since they don’t show on screen who did, the claim that she cut it off herself is weaker than the claim that Hannibal and/or Will did it for her. There are pieces of evidence that imply that Hannibal and/or Will did it, but there is only conjecture to support that Bedelia herself did (”she could have…” this that, or the other). You cannot argue from an absence of evidence, and the evidence of an author’s thinking will be there, in the details. 

4. Study, look things up, and learn to write and argue. 

If Hannibal decides to quote Nietzsche, it don’t matter that you ain’t read Nietzsche in twenty-odd years and never read that particular piece at all. Go do your research, cuz somebody gonna ask. Not only that, but somebody gonna read that shit that is a fuggin philosophy major, so you better get your goddam ducks in a sweet little tidy row. 

Read what other people write about the topic you want to write about. If you want to write MCU meta, get your ass in the MCU meta tag (or whatever it is that they use) and read what people are saying. Some of them are going to be hella smart and help you understand things you didn’t know you misunderstood.

Same with writing. Learn to do that shit, if you don’t know already, on all levels: we’re dealing with ideas here, but there are also organization, voice, sentence fluency, word choice, and conventions. Reread and edit your shit. I recommend being linear in your organization–I’ve known people who wrote beautiful meta that you wouldn’t ever get any sense of what the point is till the absolute end. Don’t do that to people. Make a point, support it, draw a conclusion. Writing 101 stuff.

Learn to recognize logical fallacies so that you don’t do them when you don’t want to, and so that when you do want to, you can hide them so people won’t call you out on them. And so that you can call out others on them. 

Make no mistake: meta is argument. It’s only pretending to be expository.

With that in mind, know what you’re capable of. If you can’t run with the big dogs, stay on the porch. Especially if you’re easily hurt and/or have self-esteem issues. So much of fandom is all about lovey feelings and not leaving unasked-for criticism on people’s fic and all that–and I support that–but meta is an exception to this. It just is. Everyone is going to be jumping for a chance to tell you how wrong you are, even if they don’t write meta themselves and only watched the show once and just have feelings. 

5. Know your audience. 

Here’s an example of what I mean: I received an ask some years ago about whether or not Hannibal ever was in love with Bedelia, maybe even just a little? Even if it wasn’t like how he feels about Will??? 

Look, I’m a Hannigram shipper, and I wasn’t making any bones about that matter at the time I got that ask. But obviously that was from someone who shipped Bedannibal and really just wanted their poor soul to be soothed, and I can guarandamntee you I found some way to answer yes, in a way that was honest and that I could textually support, even though I myself would not call that relationship “in love.”

If you can, be on the side of your readers. They will be the people who are asking you questions. It doesn’t hurt to demonstrate kindness, as much as you can, without sacrificing the integrity of what you have to say as a meta writer. I’ll be the first to say I’ve made a lot of enemies on this blog because of various arguments I’ve gotten into, and I haven’t always known how important this is. But the people who come to you with questions deserve the best you can possibly give them.

How do you know when a work has substance?

It should be able to check several if not all of the following boxes:

Addresses the human condition in a non-trivial way (needs to be arguable and worth arguing about)

Contains complex characterization (no black and white major characters)

Displays text complexity (you gotta put in some effort to get it)

Exercises intertextuality (allusions to the greater world, other texts, history, etc.) 

Displays artistic quality (in all areas: writing, cinematography, acting, etc.)

Utilizes multiple varying artistic tools (metaphor, symbolism in writing, for example, or an appropriate variety of camera angles)

Controls and maintains a tone appropriate to subject and message

Note that being contextually relevant (dealing with important social issues) is not something that I listed here. Many on Tumblr would say that it should be. You should be at least vaguely aware of how your particular venue (Tumblr vs. reddit, for example) is going to affect your audience’s expectations of such things. 

[sejinpk]

Top 5 pre-2000 manga/anime, for the ask meme?

Thanks for the ask! I’ve read almost no manga, so this is gonna be all anime. Instead of just making a list, I thought I’d go into more detail on what I like about these shows that makes them my top 5. I actually keep going back and forth about which I like more between my #1 and #2 picks, so you can probably consider them a tie for #1.

1. Great Teacher Onizuka

Great Teacher Onizuka is easily one of the funniest things I’ve seen, whether animation, live-action, Japanese, or non-Japanese. Onizuka’s faces and the noises he makes are absolutely priceless. Uchiyamada’s (the Vice Principal) faces can be equally priceless. The English dub isn’t *good* (and they have a handful of VAs doing multiple roles), but that just adds to its charm for me in this case (I haven’t seen the Japanese dub). I like how Onizuka helps his students through their problems by teaching them how to become good people, not just good students, even though he’s not necessarily a good role model himself. I like how he views them as people, not students. I like how the show keeps its characters around, and doesn’t sideline them after they’ve had their feature episode(s), so we can see how they interact differently with each other as they grow and change.

FWIW, Urumi Kanzaki and Onizuka are tied for my favorite character from the show.

2. Belladonna of Sadness

Belladonna of Sadness (Kanashimi no Belladonna in Japanese) is an absolute visual treat. Its visuals can be incredibly surreal and metaphorical/symbolic, which I tend to find inherently interesting aesthetically. They can also be pretty psychedelic/mind-trippy at points. The movie was released in 1973, and had never had a U.S. theatrical release until last summer (apparently it had a limited screening here in 2009), when it was restored and shown in 4K. Unfortunately, no theaters in my area showed it, which is a huge shame, as I think it would’ve been incredible to see on the big screen.

I like how the movie handles misconceptions of sexuality as inherently bad: The setting of the story is feudal, so its world’s ideas about sexuality, especially for women, are incredibly limiting. The main character, Jeanne, has internalized that mindset, so she views her sexual awakening as being brought on by the devil. There’s a lot that I’m leaving out, but eventually she makes a pact with the devil, and expects to be thrown into a world of fire and darkness and evil, etc. etc. as a result, but she wakes up and it’s springtime, and it’s lush and green and vibrant. I love that way of conveying Jeanne’s misconceptions about (her own) sexuality and her realizations that her previous mindset was wrong.

Jeanne’s journey and growth and change over the course of the story is something I really enjoyed watching and found very gratifying, both emotionally and thematically/ideologically.

I feel like there’s a lot more I could say about the stuff I mentioned above, including about the movie’s source, and how that informs the movie. I’ll probably write a post about it at some point.

I should also mention that this movie is INCREDIBLY sexually explicit. It had a red band trailer, and is rated Rx on MAL (that’s the rating they give to hentai). I’ve heard it also inspired Kunihiko Ikuhara, one of my favorite anime directors, to work in anime, though I don’t think that’s something he’s confirmed.

3. Mega Man

Mega Man is the first anime I ever saw, well before I even knew what anime was. I remember getting up super early before Sunday school literally every week when I was a kid (I wanna say it was like 5 a.m.), just so I could make 110% sure I was awake when Mega Man started. Like, it was usually about an hour early, because I distinctly remember watching episodes of two other shows before Mega Man came on.

I don’t think it holds up well in terms of “objective” quality, but at the same time, I also don’t think there’s really anything bad about it. It’s a very average, typical, episodic kids’ show. The animation and (especially) art quality can vary wildly from one episode to the next. The one-liners can be pretty bad, though I have a massive tolerance for (read: love of) bad puns, so that doesn’t really bother me. XP

It’s simple fun soaked in nostalgia, but I also love some of the really silly/doofy absurdities here and there. For example, in one episode, a vampire robot created by Dr. Wily hypnotizes a human character into believing she’s a vampire robot. And she actually turns into a vampire robot somehow, even shooting lightning from her fangs. XD In that same episode, Dr. Wily creates a werewolf robot that actually transforms based on moonlight. In another episode, a robot dinosaur lays an egg, which hatches. And in yet another episode, there are lion men who shoot eye beams that turn humans into lion people.

This isn’t the case anymore, but when I was a kid, my favorite episode was the one where Mega Man X, Vile, and Spark Mandrill from the Mega Man X video game make an appearance. As a kid, the Mega Man X games (at that point it was just the first three on Super Nintendo) were my favorite, so I thought that the episode with Mega Man X was the best thing ever. :’D I still want a full-fledged Mega Man X cartoon/anime, preferably based on the earlier games (up through X4 at the latest).

My favorite bad robot used to be Elec Man, because I thought he looked really cool, and also Vile and Spark Mandrill when they had their one-off appearance. More recently (yes, I do still re-watch this show from time to time), I’ve come to really like Proto Man. In general I enjoy his attitude, and I find it amusing that he compliments Mega Man from time to time. I’ve also come to like Roll quite a bit.

4. Yu Yu Hakusho

Of the really long-running (70 to 80+ episodes) shounen stuff I’ve seen, Yu Yu Hakusho is easily my favorite. I love the English dub (I’ve never seen it in Japanese), as well as the English-dubbed versions of the OPs and EDs (man, I miss when companies did that). I really like how much character work and moments there are in the relationships between characters. For a show that has the oft-used theme of friendship that so many shounen shows have, I like how Yu Yu Hakusho handles it, where it’s not just characters supporting each other, but it actually feels a bit more…real? Like, I can easily see these characters hanging out or interacting in very normal circumstances. It’s not just, “Yeah, you can do it! Keep going!”

These are the relationships that have stuck out to me the most:

Yuusuke and Kuwabara

Yuusuke and Keiko (mainly in the 4th season)

Yuusuke and Genkai

Yuusuke and Younger Toguro

Genkai and Younger Toguro

Yuusuke and Raizen

Kuwabara and Shizuru

Kurama and Yomi

There are just so many good moments, too. Some of my favorites are Genkai’s “final” words to Yuusuke in season 2 about having to fight with time to find your place in the world; the stuff between Genkai and Younger Toguro (especially in Spirit World) and their backstory; the stuff between Yuusuke and Keiko before he leaves for Demon World in season 4; Sensui’s final moments; the stuff between Yuusuke and Raizen.

I love how the characters all have such distinct voices and perspectives. Like, Genkai’s views of Toguro, what he did, and why he did it are different than Toguro’s views of those things, and both characters’ views of their own past and present are surprisingly nuanced and complex, given the rather limited screentime those things get. And I love how they both, in their own way, sort of become surrogate parents to Yuusuke. And then, at the end of the series, he also has Raizen, and I love the dynamic the two of them have.

I think maybe the best I can explain what I like so much about Yu Yu Hakusho is that it has the fun stuff that a lot of shounen shows have, the fighting and the superpowers and overall energetic tone, but it also has a lot of meat under the surface, and that meat is woven throughout practically all of the character work in the series, which I think is part of what makes the character interactions and friendship themes in the show seem more real and true to life, somehow, than many of the other shounen shows I’ve seen (I think the English dub helps with this a lot, too).

For a long time, Kurama was one of my absolute favorite anime characters because he embodies what I think is sort of the pinnacle of humanity: he has great intelligence, wisdom, and logical abilities, but he also has tremendous warmth, empathy, and caring. And he sort of uses them to augment one another, like a synthesis/harmonization of these two general aspects that we all have.

5. Princess Mononoke

(Sorry there’s no video here. I couldn’t find an AMV I liked, I can’t think of a particular clip that would be fitting, and I wasn’t too fond of the movie’s trailer, either.)

It’s been a long time since I last watched Princess Mononoke, so this entry is shorter and less detailed and/or in-depth than some of the others.

Generally speaking, I like how the man vs. nature theme is handled. It wasn’t simply man = bad, nature = good. Both sides are given depth and nuance. Further, I like how the nature side is depicted as such, where the animal gods behave more…beastly? animal-like?, if that makes sense.Like, I’m thinking of the way that Moro talked to Ashitaka the night after he’s saved by the Forest Spirit. Nature isn’t humanized, but it’s still presented in a way that you can empathize and sympathize with it.

I like how the movie doesn’t sugar coat anything, as well as how the ending doesn’t tie everything up nice and neat with a bow. The way it ended felt very realistic, which I thought was very much in keeping with the movie’s overall approach.

Honorable mentions:

-Revolutionary Girl Utena

-Serial Experiments Lain

-Neon Genesis Evangelion

-The Vision of Escaflowne

These aren’t actually “honorable mentions,”but I couldn’t think of a succinct way to put it. Rather, the first three of the abovetitles are shows that I feel like, based on my first viewing, if I understoodthem better, could very likely have made it into the list. I think this isespecially true for Revolutionary Girl Utena, based on my first viewing, as well as things I’vecome to understand in retrospect about both the show and itswriter/director/original creator, Ikuhara. As for The Vision of Escaflowne, I’m currently watching it, though I’m only seven episodes in.

Again, thanks for the ask! I had a lot of fun writing this! :)

[weekendwarriorblog]

WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND 8/17/18 – Crazy Rich Asians, Mile 22, Alpha and More

I’m going to do things a little different this week, because one of my absolutely favorites from Sundance is coming out this weekend, and after seeing it again last week, it’s probably going to end up in my Top 5 for the year, and that is…

JULIET, NAKED (Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions)

I’ve been a fan of Nick Hornby’s writing for a very long time, but when I received a copy of his new book in 2009, I was immediately caught up in its story of a has-been musician, his diehard fan and his ignored wife. I was really excited to hear that it would be adapted by director Jesse Peretz, who had been making big waves (and got an Emmy nod) for directing shows like Girls, New Girl and GLOW. The general story revolves around Rose Byrne’s Annie, a woman living in a British seaside town married to Chris O’Dowd’s Duncan, an avid fan of an American singer-songwriter named Tucker Crowe. Duncan runs a website dedicated to his idol, but when he receives a previously unheard demo recording called “Juliet, Naked,” he gets into a squabble with Annie, because she is quite vocal about how much she hates it (mainly to get Duncan’s goat). When Duncan sleeps with a co-worker, Annie kicks him out, but then the real Tucker Crowe (played by Ethan Hawke) gets in touch with Annie (over her negative review of the rare demos), they begin a transatlantic correspondence that leads to them meeting and more. It’s another great story from Hornby in the vein of About a Boy and High Fidelity, one that creates an amazing portrait of this woman who feels she’s in a rut and how she connects with the famous musician who walked out of a concert 20 years earlier and has been raising a young son in upstate New York.

This is a fantastic romantic comedy from Peretz that’s produced by Judd Apatow and others with all-star writing team including Peretz’s sister Eugenia, Jim Taylor (Sideways) and his wife Tamara Jenkins (The Savages), who all did an amazing job adapting Hornby’s work.  

Here’s my interview with Jesse Peretz over at NextBestPicture... Enjoy!

INTERVIEW WITH JESSE PERETZ

Juliet, Naked will open in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, expand to more cities next week and then hopefully be fairly wide on August 31.

But that isn’t the only Ethan Hawke movie this week, nope. The actor is having quite a good year indeed...

On top of that, Hawke’s latest film as a director, Blaze (Sundance Selects), will be released in Austin on Friday, as it slowly rolls out to arrive in New York City on September 6 and then in L.A. later in September.

Blaze tells the story of Blaze Foley, played by musician Ben Dickey, who was the lesser-known blues singer who collaborated with his friend Townes Van Zandt. Not knowing much about the Austin native, this is a fascinating film by Hawke that shows a lot of his dysfunctional relationship with his Jewish writer wife (and the film’s co-writer) Sybil Rosen, played by Alia Shakat (who is simply fantastic in the role). Musician Charlie Sexton pulls off a respectable version of Van Zandt, and look for cameos by the likes of Sam Rockwell, Steve Zahn, Kris Kristofferson and Hawke’s long-time collaborator, Richard Linklater.

This is another great music-based film from Hawke, and a much better narrative feature than his earlier features, 2006’s The Hottest State and 2001’s Chelsea Walls. There’s also a connection between Foley and Hawke’s Juliet, Naked character, because the fictional Tucker Crowe similarly became the subject of urban legends after vanishing from the public eye following a concert. (Foley was actually killed in a scuffle after recording a live album at one of his club performances, which acts as the framing device for the film.)

And now, back to our previously scheduled wide releases, and how ironic that the proverbial “Dog Days of Summer” would begin last weekend with an actual movie called Dog Days, and it bombed? And a giant shark movie starring Jason Statham opened with almost $45 million… crazy times! Yeah, these last few weekends of August have never been known as a good time to release movies, and most movies that end up here are ones that studios just want to get off their coffers before their even slower fall months. That would normally be the case, but that is definitely not the case with…

CRAZY RICH ASIANS (New Line)

The first August anomaly is this romantic-comedy based on Kevin Kwan’s best-selling book, which is the first major studio movie since The Joy Luck Club25 years ago to feature a predominantly Asian cast. This one is about an Asian college professor who takes his Asian girlfriend to Singapore for his best friend’s wedding where she discovers that his family is super-rich and he’s a very in-demand bachelor.

The movie features an amazing cast that includes Constance Wu from the hit ABC sitcom Fresh off the Boat, veteran Chinese actress Michelle Yeoh, comic superstar Ken Jeong (Dr. Ken) as well as fresher talent like rapper Awkwafina, last seen in Ocean’s 8, Gemma Chan and newcomer Henry Golding as the male lead. The movie is directed by Jon M. Chu, who has directed an odd number of movies from G.I. Joe: Retaliationto Step Up 3 and the Jem and the Holograms movie, the latter a huge bomb despite being made for not so much money.

Crazy Rich Asians is a romantic comedy, and obviously, there’s a limited audience for the genre normally, but possibly even more when you have Asians in every role, because you’re never sure whether women of other ethnicities will be as interested in this as they might be with Valentine’s Day or other rom-com hits like The Proposal or Pretty Woman. Of course, we can also look at the long-standing legs of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which drew in a large Greek audience at first, but word-of-mouth helped lead it to $241 million domestic, the highest gross for a rom-com ever.

There haven’t been that many successful rom-coms in recent years unless you include Mamma Mia: Here We go Again or Greg Berlanti’s Love Simon, the latter which grossed $40.8 million opening in March with $11.7 million. Crazy Rich Asians is likely to sway more towards the former, I’d imagine.

What’s interesting and maybe not unexpected is that the Asian-American community has been rallying around the movie, whether or not they’ve read the book or even like romantic comedy films, with many entire theaters/screenings being bought up in advance. It’s likely the community realizes that Crazy Rich Asians will need to succeed if they’re going to see more Asians and Asian-Americans in significant leading roles. Even so, you have to remember that Asians only make up 6% of the U.S. population and maybe a little more in Canada, so how much impact can a movie have even if every single Asian person in the country goes to see it? I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

Crazy Rich Asians is opening on Wednesday, which kind of throws a wrench in trying to project how the movie might do, because a.) people who desperately want to see the movie might rush out to see it on Weds if b.) some might not even realize it opens on Wednesday and will wait for Thursday or Friday. (There weren’t any Tuesday previews to give us any sort of hint of what’s to come.) One presumes the point of the earlier opening is to help drive word-of-mouth for the weekend, although New Line also gave the movie sneak previews last Wednesday, which might do the trick.  Reviews are excellent with it currently holding a respectable 96% on Rotten Tomatoes but there are many more reviews to come.

Expect the movie to do big business on Wednesday and Thursday, possibly $9 to 10 million, and then another $20 million plus over the weekend, although it shouldn’t be surprising if it does more than $30 million in its first five days. After all, we’re definitely entering new territory here. Even so, word-of-mouth should help it over the rest of the summer and into September, so don’t be surprised if it ends up making close to $100 million or more, especially if it’s as good as I’ve heard.

MILE 22 (STXfilms)

A movie hoping to bring in the business that will have little to no interest in Crazy Rich Asiansis this new action-thriller from actor Mark Wahlberg and director Peter Berg, who now have made three movies based on real events: Lone Survivor (’13, $125 mil. Gross), Deepwater Horizon (’16, $61.4 mil.) and Patriots Day (’16, $31.9 mil.). That’s a fairly dramatic drop from their first movie to their last one, and Mile 22 is an original story not based on real events about a CIA task force who have to protect an asset from terrorists over the course of 22 miles. (And yes, that does sound a lot like the Bruce Willis-Mos Def movie 16 Blocksfrom 2006, thanks for noticing.)

Besides Wahlberg, it stars Lauren Cohan from The Walking Dead, John Malkovich (who also was in Deepwater Horizon), MMA champ and WWE contender Ronda Rousy, Indonesian martial arts star Iko Uwais (The Raid) and Berg himself. It’s a great cast but we’ve seen similar movies like this one with great casts that don’t do so well from Hotel Artemis earlier this summer to John Hillcoat’s Triple 9 in 2016, although both of them looked like they could be good.

Obviously, Wahlberg is going to be this film’s biggest draw, but his filmography has also run the gamut of hits and bombs. Last year, Wahlberg appeared in Michael Bay’s Transformers: The Last Knight, the comedy sequel Daddy’s Home 2 and the beleaguered Ridley Scott drama All the Money in the World, continuing his run of two to three movies a year with varying degrees of quality and success.

Like so many other movies in theaters and quite a few from STX, Mile 22 is a Chinese co-production, which doesn’t mean a heck of a lot for the film’s domestic success. Last year’s The Foreigner starring Pierce Brosnan and Jackie Chan is a good example as that topped out at $34.3 million domestic after a $13.1 million opening, although that movie did three times its domestic take overseas.

This might be why STX decided to dump the movie into late August, because maybe it isn’t as strong as some of the Berg-Wahlberg’s previous offerings, but is more of a throwaway action-thriller instead. The studio also isn’t screening for critics until Wednesday night, the day before it opens for Thursday previews, so I wouldn’t expect it to be one of “Da Bergs’” better-reviewed films.

On top of that, there’s also just too much competition for older males in theaters, so this might have a hard time doing more than $15 million this weekend, a third place showing, as it struggles to make $35 million by summer’s end.

(Note: I may run a mini-review and make a few changes above after I see the movie tonight.)

ALPHA (Sony)

The odd dog or wolf of the weekend is this big screen adventure epic set during the Ice Age starring Kodi Smit-McPhee (X-Men: Apocalypse), which looks a lot like Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 BC. Hopefully, it isn’t nearly as bad. (See my review below. It isn’t.)

Alphais the new movie from Albert Hughes, one half of the Hughes Brothers, who broke out with urban crime films like Menace II Society and Dead Presidents before making From Hell with Johnny Depp and The Book of Eli with Denzel Washington. After the latter, the two went their separate ways and after a couple failed projects, Albert decided to make this very different movie as his solo dramatic feature as a director. It’s a strange choice for sure, but Sony have doubled down by giving the movie an IMAX release to push its big-screen nature.

There should be enough awareness of this movie being that it was supposed to come out last November and then earlier this year – I was seeing trailers for this in front of Thor: Ragnarok in early November and over the Christmas holidays as well – but Sony clearly doesn’t have much faith in the movie as they moved it to the dumping ground of late August. The studio has also completely changed the marketing as the movie’s release neared, pushing it more for the wolves that might get women and kids excited to see it. Personally, I don’t see the switch in marketing gears helping much, as I was already tuning out about the movie after seeing the trailers too much last year. (Reviews, surprisingly, are STELLAR so far, but there are only eight on Rotten Tomatoes, so that might change?)

Although people might know about the movie, it really doesn’t look that appealing from the marketing, and it won’t help that schools have already started in many places cutting potential business for Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Frankly, it will be a shocker to me if Alpha makes more than $7 million this weekend even with the higher incent and price for IMAX tickets.

Mini-Review: When I was younger, I used to love watching pre-historic epics like 1 Million Years B.C. on television. Hopefully, some young boys and girls will be as inspired by watching Albert Hughes’ solo narrative debut as a director, but Alpha is definitely not the type of movie that should be watched on a television set.

It gets off to a rough start with young Keda (Kodi Smit-Mcphee) not living up to his chieftain father’s hopes as a warrior. When the tribe takes on a herd of buffalo, Keda gets knocked off a cliff and he’s left behind for dead by the tribe. Trying to survive, Keda faces off against a pack of wolves and one of the wolf pack is injured in the melée. The caring young man brings the injured wolf along on his journey of survival as the two of them work together to catch prey and survive. 

This is where Alpha picks up greatly, becoming tale of a boy and his “dog” survival tale that’s charming and heart-warming and not nearly as corny or obvious as the earlier storytelling might lead you to believe. (It doesn’t take long to get over the awkward decision to begin with the buffalo hunt, then cut back a  week as Keda is about to go over the cliff, and then show the buffalo hunt again, throwing Keda over the cliff for real the second time.)

If nothing else, one needs to commend the impressive job by Hughes and team -- from the animal trainers to the visual FX department, sound and music – for bringing this tale to life in a way that keeps you glued to the screen and benefits greatly from the IMAX 3D projection. It might be good to note that all of the film’s dialogue is in some ancient prehistoric dialect, so if your kids are too young to read subtitles, then they may get frustrated by not understanding what is being said.

Though there are problems in the first third, the fact is that if Terrence Malick or Alejandro Innaritu made this exact same movie, it would be thought of as a revelation. The late August release and lesser status of Hughes as a filmmaker will mean this film will mostly be overlooked, which is a true shame.

Rating: 7.5/10

Either way, this weekend could be a close call for #1 between Crazy Rich Asians and the second weekend of The Meg  as both are vying for somewhere in the high-teens to low-$20 millions. Even so, I think the marketing/hype behind the New Line romantic-comedy will be enough to push it over the top to win the weekend.

This week’s top 10 should look something like this…

1. Crazy Rich Asians  (New Line) - $21.5 million N/A 2. The Meg (Warner Bros.) - $19.5 million -56% 3. Mile 22  (STXfilms) - $15.3 million N/A 4. Mission: Impossible – Fallout  (Paramount) - $12 million -40% 5. Christopher Robin  (Disney) - $7.7 million -38% 6. Alpha (Sony) - $7.5 million N/A 7. BlacKkKlansman  (Focus Features) - $7 million -35% 8. The Spy Who Dumped Me  (Lionsgate) - $3.9 million -48% 9. Slender Man  (Screen Gems) - $3.7 million -67% 10. Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again  (Universal) - $3.5 million -40%

LIMITED RELEASES

While I gave some extra attention to Juliet, Naked above, there are a bunch of other limited releases worth checking out this weekend, especially as the wider releases become less interesting to the masses.

First up is The Wife (Sony Pictures Classics), an amazing drama starring Glenn Close as Joan Castleman, wife of the elderly reknowned author Joseph Castleman (Jonathan Pryce), as the couple travel to Stockholm for him to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature along with their son David (Max Irons). Joe can be a handful and Joan finds herself caught in the middle of a domestic feud between her husband and David, while a pesky biographer played by Christian Slater tries to get info from both Joan and David about Joe, a known philanderer. Directed by Swedish filmmaker Björn Runge, best known for his film Happy End, this is a terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside. The Wife will open in New York and L.A., and there will be QnAs in both cities on Friday and Saturday. Glenn Close and screenwriter Meg Wolitzer will be doing QnAs at the Paris Theater in NYC on Friday night after the 7:30 screening, while Wolitzer will also do a QnA on Saturday night. In LA, actress Annie Starke (who plays the younger version of Close’s character) will be doing QnAs on Friday and Saturday nights at the Arclight Hollywood and the Landmark.

A terrific doc worth checking out is Megumi Sasaki’s A Whale of a Tale (Fine Line Media), which opens at the Quad Cinema in New York and then in L.A. on August 24. If you liked the Oscar-winning doc The Cove, this is sort of a follow-up as the filmmaker travels to the town of Taiji in Japan where the dolphin killings continue. AP journalist Jay Alabaster has embedded himself in Taiji since The Cove came out and along with Sasaki, they document the town’s attempts at making necessary changes without giving up their legacy of “whale-hunting” that’s hundreds of years old. This is the type of movie that might make you question your own ecological leanings even as it gives a fairly well-balanced overview of the situation, particularly between the townspeople of Taiji and the world at large.

Another worthwhile doc is Bing Liu’s Minding the Gap (Hulu/Magnolia), a very personal look at the life of the filmmaker over 12 years living in Rockford, Illinois, focusing on two of his skateboarder friends’ whose upbringings affect their lives, including 23-year-old Zack whose relationship deteriorates after the birth of his son, and 17-year-old Keire trying to deal with the death of his father. The film won a jury prize at Sundance for Breakthrough Filmmaking with Steve James acting as exec. producer. It will get a theatrical release at the Metrograph on Friday as well as being available on Hulu before screening on PBS POV in 2019. (I want to add that this is a fantastic film well worth seeking out... Liu is an amazing new and young filmmaker to watch.)

After premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival, the self-explanatory doc Ed Sheeran: Songwriter (Apple Music/Abramorama) will open in select cities. I never got around to watching it, but I’m not really a fan of Sheeran other than him helping to bring the Electric Light Orchestra back together for the Grammys. It opens at the IFC Center on Friday, in L.A. on Aug. 24 and then will be available on Apple Music starting Aug. 28.

A venerable horror franchise returns with its 13th(!) installment Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich (RLJE Films), co-directed by Sonny Laguna and Tommy Wiklund from a script by S. Craig Zahler (Brawl in Cell Block 99). It stars Thomas Lennon from the State as Edgar, as a recently-divorced man who returns to his childhood home where he finds an evil-looking Nazi puppet in his brother’s room. For this one, the unmistakable Udo Kier plays the evil puppet master André Toulon, and it also stars Charlyne Yi, Barbara Crampton, Jenny Pellicer and Nelson Franklin. I hope to watch it soon, but I’ve heard some atrocious things about the overt racism in the movie.

As far as other and hopefully tamer genre films, if you’re in New York City, you can see The Ranger, the directorial debut by Larry Fessenden’s producing partner Jenn Wexler, when it plays at the IFC Center, following its Closing Night premiere at What the Fest?! and Fantasia in Montreal. It will also screen in L.A. on Sept. 7. It stars Chloë Levine as Chelsea, a girl who hangs out with her punk friends who get in trouble when her boyfriend stashes drugs in her bag, so they head to a cabin in the wilderness where they encounter a ranger. It premieres on Thursday night with many QnAs with Wexler, producer Heather Buckley and the cast over the weekend.

A movie that premiered at Sundance that I wasn’t that into was Jeremy Zagar’s adaptation of Justin Torres’ novel We the Animals (The Orchard), about three young boys going through their adolescence under the gaze of parents (Raul Castillo, Sheila Vand) who have their own tumultuous relationship, and are trying to protect the youngest Jonah from heading the same direction as his older siblings. It opens in New York Friday at the Angelika and Landmark 57 West, then will expand to L.A., San Francisco, Boston and Philadelphia next Friday. Although I wasn’t a huge fan of the movie, it is a nice fictional counterpart to Minding the Gap.

Ricky D’Ambrose’s Notes on an Appearance (Grasshopper Films) deals with the disappearance of a young man named David and the two people who go looking for him but become diverted by the strangers they meet on the journey.  It opens at New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center on Friday.

Opening in New York and L.A. on Friday and on Demand Sept. 4is Josh Crockett’s dark comedy Dr. Brinks & Dr. Brinks (Gravitas Ventures) about estranged brother and sister who reunite after the death of their parents.

Based on Lois Duncan’s Y.A. novel of the same name, Down a Dark Hall (Summit/Lionsgate Premiere) stars AnnaSophia Robb as Kit, a difficult girl set to a boarding school to deal with her temper via the headmistress Madame Duret (Uma Thurman) and the other four young women. Also starring Isabelle Fuhrman from Orphan, it opens in select cities, On Demand and on iTunes Friday.

Emmanuel Finkiel’s Memoir of War (Music Box films), opening in New York this Friday at the Film Forum and Film Society of New York and in L.A. at the Laemmle Royal and Regal Edwards Westpark 8 next Friday, adapts Marguerite Duras’ novel The War: A Memoir, and it stars the ever-present Mélanie Thierry as Duras. In 1944, Duras was a Resistance member along with her writer husband Robert Antelme. When he is sent to the Dachau concentration camp, she becomes friendly with a French collaborator (Benoît Magimel)to get information to help her group. (Interesting fact: Duras was the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour.)

A few more odds and ends…

Shirley McLane and Gina Gershon star in a modernized live action adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid co-directed by Blake Harris and Chris Bouchard. Not sure what more can be said about that.

Opening in New York at the Cinema VillageFriday before its digital release on Sept 4 is the doc Davi’s Way (2B Films) about Italian-American Robert Davi, a Frank Sinatra enthusiast and stylist who prepares to recreate Sinatra’s famous 1974 concert at Madison Square Garden.

Actor Peter Facinelli makes his directorial debut with the dark comedy Breaking & Exiting (Kali Pictures / Freestyle Digital Media), starring Milo Gibson as house thief Harry who stumbles upon (film co-writer) Jordan Hinson’s Daisy and tries to save her from herself.

Not a ton of repertory things on my radar other than a Winona Ryder retrospective at the Quad Cinema called “Utterly Winona,” including all her great movies from the ‘80s and ‘90s. I guess there’s a Truffaut retrospective at the Metrograph, but you know what I always say: Truffaut... Tru-cares? (I don’t always say that so don’t write me angry letters Truffaut-fans. I don’t mean to cause a Trufuffle for anyone.)

Last but not least, streaming giant Netflix offers the Spanish film The Motive from Manuel Martin Cuenca based on the novel by Javier Cercas, about an aspiring writer who seeks inspiration for his novel by manipulating lives.

[someguyranting1]

Why Do So Many People Love SAO? The Art of Mass Appeal

Hey! It’s okay! You are allowed to like Sword Art Online. I feel like I needed to explain that before somebody gets the wrong idea and thinks this is just me saying, “I don’t understand how somebody likes an anime that I don’t like!”

I just want to put this on the record: You’re not a bad person for liking SAO. You don’t have shit taste, and you’re not stupid. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to like this show, and, for this review, we’re going to be exploring what those reasons are because any show that can reach over a million people has to be doing something right.

No, this isn’t going to boil down to an insulting and reductive conclusion, like, “Thirsty weebs need wish fulfillment,” although I do think that is part of it for some people. This is a serious, analytical look at the series. The mechanics of mass appeal have always fascinated me, and SAO’s lacking qualities in other departments make it easier to isolate those mechanics than it would be looking at something like FMA.

You really can’t understate the impact that SAO has had on popular culture. It takes a lot of brand recognition for an American product to get a shot on network television, let alone a Japanese one. Much as critics like to downplay popularity as a measure of quality, success like that doesn’t just come down to random luck.

That said, luck is a major factor. SAO is often lauded for its great premise, but that’s only half the story. The most obvious factor in SAO’s whirlwind success is that it hit on the right premise, at the right time. When SAO came out in 2012, eSports and Free-to-Play games were becoming huge in the public eye. League of Legends had overtaken WoW as the most-played PC game of the year, and WoW’s death grip on the MMO market had loosened enough so that the landscape of online worlds was becoming more expansive and varied than it had ever been before. It was the perfect time to release any story about hardcore gaming, hardcore MMO gaming in particular, and with the Hunger Games phenomenon just starting to “catch fire” thanks to the first movie’s release, the market was hot for death game stories in particular. Add to that the exploding popularity of the then-new Game of Thrones and Walking Dead, and any series with a similar sense of lethality was bound to do well. Just look at how many articles at the time compare Attack on Titan and SAO to those two shows.

On top of that, anime was about to blow up in a big way in the West. Crunchyroll came to my attention in Fall of 2011, when they acquired the rights to Fate/Zero. I was hooked enough on the series from watching it on their ad-supported site to bite the bullet on a subscription just to get one episode ahead, and I don’t think I’m the only one. From 2011 to 2012, Crunchyroll began offering a serious value proposition by doubling their seasonal anime library, and becoming the go-to place for basically everything coming out of Japan by the Summer of 2012. It might not have been Fate/Zero specifically, but between huge series like HunterxHunter and quality niche stuff like Space Brothers and Kids on the Slope, the streaming service finally had enough content to pull in and sustain a hundred thousand subscribers by September of 2012, and two hundred thousand by March of 2013. Crunchyroll had become the service of choice for the then-niche community. SAO hit right in the middle of the surge in anime’s Western popularity, right at the point when Crunchyroll had enough content to be worth a subscription, but before it became totally unreasonable to watch everything on the service.

As one of the biggest fish in a rapidly-expanding pond, SAO both benefited from and helped spur on the service’s growth. Since it was one of the most popular shows on the service, Crunchyroll naturally put it at the forefront of their marketing push, which only increased its brand caché among anime fans and casuals alike. At this point, SAO was huge in Japan, and within the niche of Western anime fandom. It had proved its market viability enough to become a flagship title for the recently revived and redesigned Toonami block on Cartoon Network in Spring of 2013, and it was both relevant and popular enough to be added to Netflix in 2014, right in time to hype up the second season.

Anime had become a massive wave, washing over popular culture. Like 2013’s Attack on Titan, SAO had the good fortune to start riding that wave while it was still small, and go all the way to the top. The two series’ similar tone, and similar lethality, meant that fans of one were likely the fans of the other, and the cross-pollination only helped them both.

However, if good timing and an enticing premise were all it took for a show to embed itself in the popular culture, we’d be staring down Season 3 of The Unlimited Hyoubu Kyousuke right now. As much as it pains me to admit it, SAO does do some things very right when it comes to its execution that primed it for its whirlwind success. One of the biggest factors in this regard is the look of the show. A1 Pictures has faced a lot of criticisms from anime YouTubers and critics in general for the uniform look of its productions, and indeed, it can get pretty tiring to see the same faces, in nearly identical art styles, over and over again. However, that’s not going to be a problem for the casual anime fan, whose only seen a few dozen series. Their shows might look pretty similar, but they all look polished and professional, assuming they’re given enough time in production. They might not look or feel as nice as something from Ufotable, Kyoto Animation, or Bones, but they can get most of the way there in less time with a smaller budget, and that’s impressive. People like things that feel polished and professional.

If you haven’t seen a million shows like it before, SAO looks really clean and cohesive. It looks like what you expect a good anime to look like. The lineart is sharp and crisp, the characters blend with the environments well (at least, when the characters aren’t moving), and you can freeze on almost any frame and use it as a pretty decent wallpaper, which is all that many casual anime fans look for in a show’s visuals.

A1’s visual style is also very versatile. Its characters look cool, but they’re still very expressive. The girls can be moe cute, the heroes can look badass and youthful, and the adults can look old and hardened, and they all exist within the same world. Despite its “same-face syndrome” problem when put next to other A1 anime, SAO’s main cast has impressively diverse and easily recognizable character designs.

On the subject of design, while I do think that SAO would be a crappy game in real life, I will credit it for looking very visually appealing. The environments are super varied and interesting, from the flower dungeon, to the ice peak where they fight the dragon, to the trippy cave system where they find the Gleam Eyes. As VR spectacles go, this world would be a hell of a draw. The show’s visuals can really pop with vibrant colors, without looking too silly, and those can be muted down for more serious scenes without it looking incongruous with the rest of the show. SAO manages to sell moe, horror, action, and even Looney Tunes-esque cartoon comedy at times, and it all feels like roughly part of the same series.

That highlights one of the show’s other big strengths: plot variety. Because of the longtime scale of its storyline and the way that its setting creates a sort of blank slate for adventure, it can dabble in lots of different plot concepts, and even genres. One episode might be a short tragedy about Kirito watching all of his friends die, while the next is a cute story about saving a little girl’s pet and beating up some cackling Team Rocket villains, and that can be followed with a two-parter murder mystery, and after that, why not, let’s go on a side quest for crafting materials that blossoms into a short unrequited love story.

None of these individual stories have to be particularly great, hell, they don’t even have to make much logical sense because each one is so different from the last that it’s kind of fun to watch just for the surprise of finding out what they’re going to do next. Even if you really hate one storyline, you can rest assured that something new is on the horizon within an episode or two, and there’s a good chance that at least one of the many things the show tries will work for you.

Because Kirito’s character arc is about learning to open up to other people, all of those different plots feel like they’re moving the central plot forward, or at least a little, even if they’re really just filler. That results in a show that feels like it’s moving forward at a good pace. Emphasis on “feels” because if you look at the actual storytelling and logical structure of events, it’s an absolute mess. Just look at the final fight between Kirito and Kayaba Akihiko, it just comes out of nowhere on Floor 75 and it doesn’t work at all. However, if you’re just sitting down for entertainment, how a show feels to watch is paramount, and what sense it makes doesn’t matter so much.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that it’s dumb to enjoy a show on that level. There’s value in sitting down, turning your brain off, and simply being entertained for the sake of relaxation. Analyzing anime can feel like work. For some, it is work. In SAO, it feels like at least one really important thing happens every single episode, and there’s usually a really cool-feeling action scene every two or three episodes to keep the excitement up. As a result, the show has momentum. Once you start watching, it’s very easy to keep watching without getting bored or confused. The show is consumable, like popcorn or other A1 Pictures shows like Gate.

The show suffers, a lot, when it loses this forward momentum, which I think is a big part of why even fans of the series acknowledge that the Fairy Dance arc kinda sucks. Kirito has a clear goal there, with an obvious solution in trying to rescue Asuna, which means that any diversion from that goal, like going off to fight a random guy in PvP, feels like a true waste of time. Furthermore, Kirito’s character is entirely static during that storyline. He doesn’t grow or change at all. Neither does Asuna, nor anyone aside from Suguha, and even then, only kind of. Therefore, even when the story is moving forward, it feels kind of flat.

Gun Gale fixes this problem in a kind of artificial way of giving Kirito sudden onset PTSD to get over, but it does help the story feel more substantial, and fans reacted positively to that. When it does work, even if it doesn’t actually have any idea where it’s going, SAO’s story moves forward with a bold sense of confidence and purpose.

Speaking of boldness, SAO also excels at setting a strong tone for whatever is happening in its story at any given time, particularly early on. Not necessarily the most appropriate tone, but a tone that is powerful and striking nonetheless. The monsters feel scary and intimidating, the comedy feels fun and lighthearted, the romance feels heartwarming and intimate, and deaths feel tragic and poignant. If you’re not invested in the story and characters, a lot of this can feel cloying and emotionally manipulative, but until something happens to take you out of that (like Yui’s death did for me), watching SAO is an emotional rollercoaster.

A big part of that is Tomohiko Ito’s direction. He is really good at placing the camera and cutting in a way that draws out the maximum possible emotion from any given scene. He needs to work with great source material, like Erased or Gin no Saji to really shine, but even working with Reki Kawahara’s leavings, he does a good job. The use of reflections in windows while Kirito listens to Sachi’s last message to him is legitimately incredible filmmaking.

The emotional impact of the series is further enhanced by the work of Yuki Kajiura, Tomohiko Ito’s most favorite composer, who also crafted the amazing soundtrack of Erased, as well as Tsubasa, Madoka Magica, Fate/Zero, Kara no Kyoukai, and some of the Xenosaga video games. Yuki Kajiura is one the most singularly talented composers working in the anime industry today, and it’s hard to understate just how much of an impact I think she’s had on the perceived quality of SAO. Her compositions for the show give it an air of cinematic quality, but they also feel distinctly, and very appropriately, video game-y. In particular, I’d argue that she is the primary reason that people say SAO has good action scenes. Her compositions make fights that are actually pretty stilted and janky, outside of a few sakuga cuts, feel incredibly bombastic and slick. When SAO’s music kicks up, it gets your pulse pounding, and it’s hard to resist getting caught up in it or even humming along to that memorable hook. Watch these fights without the music, and they kinda suck.

Kajiura’s abilities don’t just improve the action scenes, though. Her work is an integral part of that emotional roller coaster effect, heightening the emotion of each scene and connecting the emotional beats so that the shifts in tone feel less jarring than they might otherwise feel. She makes the scary scenes feel scary, the sad scenes feel much, much sadder, and the romantic scenes feel powerful and moving. That brings us to the big reason that I think people love SAO.

Most of the things I’ve talked about so far aren’t totally unique to SAO, and though they are important factors in getting people interested and keeping them invested in what’s going on, they’re not enough on their own to make people care so much that they’ll tell me to kill myself when I badmouth it. To evoke that kind of emotional response, a show really needs to get its audience to say, “Fuck yeah!”

The thing that makes a lot of people say that, myself included when I first watched SAO, is the fact that Kirito and Asuna get together in Episode 10, after several episodes of buildup where other characters notice they have a thing for each other, and it’s just really cute. That’s just not a thing that happens in anime. Even in shows with a clear OTP relationship, nine times out of ten the romance will be drawn out to its breaking point, and the characters will only hook up right at the end of the story, which isn’t just a lazy way to create an emotional arc, it’s tedious to watch.

The “will they, won’t they” is a story we’ve seen a million times, while the equally interesting story about what happens after, the trials and tribulations of actually dating and being in love, is almost never touched upon. You can justify that in a romance anime where the story is about characters sorting out their feelings and finally getting together (Toradora does that and it’s just about perfect), but even there, after a while you start to crave shows that buck that trend, like Ore Monogatari, My Little Monster, and Golden Time.

Also, with shows that have other things driving the plot, there’s really no excuse. There are few things that could really improve on Fullmetal Alchemist, but Winry and Ed hooking up earlier in the story would probably be one of them. Look at how many people loved Mikasa’s confession to Eren at the end of Attack on Titan Season 2. That was beautiful!

It’s a very pleasant surprise to see two main characters of a show like SAO commit to a monogamous relationship this early in the plot, and I think that most people who love the series do so because, in this respect, it doesn’t waste their time. This plot turn changes a lot of story dynamics, too, since Kirito and Asuna can be explicitly motivated by their love for one another, and that love can be made much deeper than the obvious mutual crushes that drive shows less willing to pull that trigger. For a story so driven by its emotional content, that one change makes SAO feel very different from just about everything else a casual fan is likely to have seen, and from what you would probably expect going into the show.

Now if you’re like me, and you think a lot about story structure and plot logic, that effect of that change doesn’t really last. Reki Kawahara is totally unwilling to abandon his harem anime nonsense, so every arc sees Kirito introduced to a new hot girl who wants to jump his bones. In terms of narrative structure, that really undercuts the importance of his commitment to Asuna.

However, if you’re just watching the show to enjoy a show, then it feels very substantial, to the point that fans get very mad at me when I call this harem anime a harem anime, in the same way that all of the deaths early on make the show feel very lethal and dangerous, so long as you don’t realize that all of the key characters have plot armor. If you do buy into it, the scenes of Kirito and Asuna being a couple and enjoying each other’s company are extremely emotionally satisfying. By the same token, if Yui doesn’t bug you the same way she bugs me, her relationship with Kirito and Asuna is adorable. Hell, Asuna and Kirito’s romance is the only part of the movie that I think really works. To get more cynical for a moment, for the segment of the audience that does use this show as pure escapist wish fulfillment, the fact that Kirito can have an emotionally fulfilling relationship with his wife, while still being chased by hotties all because he’s so dang good at video games that he’s basically invincible, those aspects only improve the show for you.

However, I don’t think that most people who love SAO love it for those reasons. I think they love it because it managed to get them deeply invested in its main characters through one very bold plot turn, and once you care about those characters, seeing Kirito be an unstoppable badass stops being eye-rolling, and starts being cool and fun. I think they love SAO because the world that it creates seems like a very appealing place on the surface to spend time in, and you can imagine yourself being one of the NPCs going off and doing something that’s not vital to Kirito’s plotline, like that guy who’s fishing, for some reason. I think they love SAO because it came at the right time in their lives, right when they were getting into anime. If you’ve seen hundreds of anime, then yeah, parts of it are going to feel played out, but if you’ve seen just a handful, SAO is going to feel fresh, and new, and exciting.

Considering that it’s at the forefront of the anime fandom, even today, I think it will be among many people’s first anime for many years to come, and I think that ties into why so many of us so passionately hate this show as well. Because when we discovered it, it had all of this promise and potential, but at one point or another, be it a poorly-executed death or a very, very poorly-executed rape scene, it let us down profoundly, and we were left unable to enjoy this thing that, at one point, seemed like it could be so great, that was, at one point, so enjoyable for us. That disappointment is a lot more cutting than the overt and unsurprising terribleness of something like The Asterisk War or Akashic Record.

But not everyone was disappointed in it in the same way. While I do think it’s fundamentally poorly made, SAO does some things right that are going to be more important for some people than the things it does wrong are for me.