#sumisama critical

[chaosandstardust]

yo that ask talking about Kyoani was weird. Pretty sure the surviving family members would be thinking about other things than reused animation.

Anyway, I don’t blame the animators at all, they’ve gotta deal with ridiculously tight deadlines and possibly lots of overtime. And it’s Japan so I guess it would be possible overtime x 10. It’s not like they’re the ones who set the schedule and making directing decisions.

As someone who’s been in the industry, would it be fair to side-eye the upper management? I mean, I do question the people who okayed certain parts of the script. *cough* Rion/Rin comparison, comparing harassment to phone addiction, etc. *cough*

This is a layered issue. Because I do understand where people are coming from when they critique a show, and I understand why people use the term "lazy". I've used it. Because there are parts of Yashahime that do feel lazy. It feels like it was only thrown in there to fill time or because they had no better ideas.

But, on the flip side, if they were given no time to come up with better ideas, are they lazy, or are they just not given the time or money?

I'm going to use Naruto as an example here because Naruto would hit my list of top 10 series I would vanquish off the face of this earth if given a chance. Mostly due to how much time I've wasted thinking about it. It's extremely badly written. There are too many characters, multiple bloated arcs, the themes are a mess, and has less and less focus the longer the series goes on. But is Kishi really to blame for all of these aspects, or was it his boss who demanded a new chapter a week for the fifteen years and overworked him to the point where the man couldn't even go on his honeymoon until it was over also to blame here?

Now, it's totally fair to critique Kishi for the writing decisions that he made. Especially ones that he didn't seem to care that much about fixing, like his "I can't write female characters" BS and how he seems to be determined that Naruto be right all the damn time. But I also think the guys over at Weekly Shounen Jump are just as much if not more to blame for how the series went. If he had been given more time to develop his ideas, some of which I to this day find very intriguing and have borrowed them for my own work, it may have gone a lot differently. He's outright admitted that he was making stuff up as he went because his bosses demanded more chapters. I don't like him, and I think he has the tendency to take the easy way out when it comes to his arcs, but he's working on such a ridiculous timeline that I can't really blame him for taking the easier route, you know?

I get disliking Sumisawa. I have my issues with the man. He wrote a good chunk of the original Sailor Moon anime and I'm very bitter about how that show handled certain aspects from the manga, like the Usagi/Mamoru relationship. Like, I get it.

He still made the bad decisions, like putting Inukag away for 14 years, making his favouritism of Sesshomaru blatantly obvious, and worst of all, putting SessRin together without considering the broader implications or how fans of the original would feel. He didn't even have the decency to build up to it, and as far as I'm aware, hasn't made any real statement about it. He didn't hire any female writers to write the "girl power" show (after the 'sexism is bad' arc, I've decided my take on if you want to write about women and the patriarchy is you need to hire women to help you). These are all things he did and he should be called out for that.

But that doesn't mean that he hasn't been overworked and that doesn't mean he wasn't given a very small amount of time to write the show. The show was announced in March of 2020, his last credited show before that was in August of 2019. I don't know how fast the production rate is in Japan or how involved he was in that show (it just says he was a 'screenwriter' and that could've mean a variety of things), but he could've been on it right until it aired. He may have been given the green light by then, he may not have. My personal theory is that he probably only found out he was making Yashahime a few months before we found out; I literally said that in my video. Then there's all the pre-production, getting a writing team together, making sure actors are available, hiring new actors, etc, etc. This can take months or even years to do.

Or maybe that's not what happened. Maybe he was given all the resources in the world and told to go wild and he pissed it away by being prideful (D&D are my mortal enemies for doing exactly this). But I sincerely doubt that it was just that. Yashahime is a show that feels extremely low budget and like it wasn't given a lot of time to be written or the care that it needed to flourish. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that a lot of the writers and the animators on this show see it as a simple paycheque for them. Like do you guys think the people who write hallmark movies do it because they're super passionate about Christmas? No, it's a job. And yeah, you can critique them for doing his job badly, but if they're just looking to bring home some money and they're only given a few months to do it, it's probably not going to be great. All but two episodes of season 2 were written by Sumisama. This is absolutely insane to me, depending on how much control he had over the rest of the production. If there is one thing that all people need to realize about writing is that good writing (and good art!) takes time and care. And all evidence points to that they didn't have the luxury for that.

If I had to point to a person to blame for how bad the show is, I would say it's most likely combined effort. There are way too many factors to consider when making a TV show or movie, it's rarely the actions of just one person that makes something not work. There's producer meddling, prideful writers, editors and animators going off script, advertisers wanting their say, how healthy vs unhealthy the work environment was, it's nearly impossible to put the blame on one singular person. Everything about it screams low budget, though, from the blatant plot holes to the bad animation, and low-budget and fast turnaround rarely lead to good filmmaking.

I do side-eye the high-ups at Sunrise. Just like I side-eye any studio who are currently greenlighting reboot after sequel after reboot after sequel (cough cough, Netflix, Disney, cough, cough) for quick cash by sacrificing the original series and movies because they don't have big fandoms to generate the money that a reboot would. It creates an environment where studios feel like they don't have to try because the "dumb fans" will keep watching because it's more of whatever it was they loved. Just look at how many people are still watching Yashahime because they're grateful that it's more Inuyasha, while still complaining about how bad it is. More and more producers are choosing what projects to greenlight based on marketing and IP, rather than good ideas, and it sucks. Why would studios try when they can make money off of shows that are cheaper to make and take less effort and it doesn't matter if it's bad anyway?

(I'm not blaming fans for this, I've long made my peace with this aspect of fandom. But in all honesty, I'm confused watching how people will be so connected to a piece of media that they'll keep going to it even while they think it's bad. I can honestly say I've never been so attached to a piece of media that I would continue to consume it if I wasn't enjoying it anymore, no matter how much I loved the world or the characters.)

There's also just the fact that a lot of reboots and sequels often turn to the fandom for ideas. A lot of remakes of popular shows/movies (like Cinderella, for example) are going out of their way to "fix" pieces of the original media through reboots, whether it's fixing plot holes or adding more diversity. They're looking to please the masses, first and foremost. A lot of Yashahime was probably written from the perspective of "well, they liked it last time, and look how much they're still talking about this thing, they'll like it here".

So, yes, it's totally fair to criticize and side-eye the guys in charge. Just be fair about it, that's all I ask. Calling them lazy for doing a very common thing that happens in the industry because you don't like them just isn't very fair, in my opinion. Most people who watched the show probably didn't notice the re-used animation. I sure didn't.

The asks about the animation and how "lazy" it was did trigger me a bit, TBH. This culture of saying "lol, fuck the people making it" is very uncool and rampant among a lot of fandom spaces, and it especially sucks when it's coming from people who have no idea how it works. I've seen it time and time again, often over the littlest things like a scene being changed slightly in adapting a movie or a ship not becoming canon or even just things that a writer has absolutely no control over (for example, writers will rarely have much to do with marketing and yet I've seen fans of a certain ship harass a writing team over a marketing decision that "baited them" when again, the writers may not even have been aware of what the marketing team were doing).

My best friend who also works in the industry told me about how in a fandom she's in, the showrunners decided to change a scene from the books that was the beginning of the relationship between a pairing. They provided a pretty logical explanation for why it was changed (one actor wasn't available and they couldn't budget for a different day and it wouldn't have made sense story-wise for it to happen in a different location). She's had to explain time and time again to the people who also ship the pairing why that's a perfectly reasonable explanation. But because they were "too stupid to budget for it", obviously the showrunners hate the pairing and hate the original works and were just too prideful and arrogant with their spending. I've seen the screenshots of fans being like "FUCK THESE WRITERS, THEY SUCK" over ONE SCENE. It's extremely tiring.

Right now, there is a big push for film industry workers to get better pay and shorter hours across North America, and it’s slowly growing. Crew members are starting to wake up to the fact that it shouldn’t be like this. We shouldn’t have to work back breaking hours and never see our families and be told that we only get to have a life a few months out of the year. 

While most of the fandom spaces are in support of this, there was a significant section which are like "you should be grateful! you're working in an industry that you love! does this mean that my favourite show is going to be pushed back a few months? HOW DARE YOU!" And it's very hard for me, as a person who is both a fan and loves fandom while also loving filmmaking and writing and having friends in this back-breaking industry who I want to support to see comments like that. It feels very personal. I love working as a filmmaker. I love acting, I love writing, I love being on set. 

It just brought me back there a bit.

this turned out much longer than expected, LOL. Sorry.

Dunno why I keep apologizing for that because I tell y'all to expect a long answer.