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Mar 29, 2022

Owari no Seraph (Anime) add

Not Recommended

Wit Studio... what the fuck happened, my guy? Being that you're one of my favorite animation studios and are responsible for creating some of my favorite anime, as well as having heard high praise for this anime from friends, I had high expectations for Seraph of the End. A post-apocalyptic military action drama with vampires? Now that sounds like a good time, and it would've been, had it not tipped it's hand in the second episode, then proceed to drop it's cards on the floor, watch them spontaneously combust, and salt the earth where their ashes now lay. Yeah, it takes a turn for the ... worse, to say the least. So let's get started dissecting the remains of this clusterfuck. Spoilers ahead for anyone that cares.

As you recall me mentioning a few sentences ago, from my expectations, this anime was meant to be a post-apocalyptic military action drama with vampires, and to an extent, it was. That being said, the astute among you may notice, nowhere in that short list I made is the school genre. That's because I never mentioned that Seraph of the End was a school genre anime, and neither did Wit Studio, but for almost half the show, it's in this setting where are protagonist Yuuichirou spends his time not trying to make friends and failing at every turn, having the value of friendship crammed down his throat while building up a wacky cast of archetypes that he can call his new family. I feel like I dozed off between episodes and woke up several seasons later, where the world has been rebuilt and the anime has devolved into a romcom slice of life with supernatural elements. It's such a jarring change from the first episode to the animals detriment, and gives the whole anime this tonal whiplash that gives the impression that the anime doesn't know what it wants to do or be.

This tonal whiplash can also be attributed to the characters of Seraph of the End. See that? That's what we call a seemless transition right there! These characters are all given tragic backstories that give them a motive for joining the JIDA with the expectation for their character to reflect that backstory and motive, only to have them end up as these cliche character tropes who don't develop or have anything meaningful to say unless it relates to the MC, who's literally one of the most blatant cookie cutter self insert wish fulfillment characters I've ever seen. Being incredibly cringey and aloof and making braindead decisions, yet still having everyone around him fauning over him about how kind and brave he is, even though everyone should honestly be repulsed by just how embarrassing and incompetent he's been for the entire show.

Unfortunately, the side characters don't really exist as their own character with their own motive or ambitions, but rather as static archetypes that only exist to prop up the MC. It blew my mind just how many times a side characters would say something completely at odds with their character up to that point, just for the sake of making the MC seem smart or heroic. Shihou joining the Imperial Demon Army solely to make money to help his sick sister who is the only person he's shown to care about at this point, only to refuse to be there for his sister when she's hospitalized until the MC berates him about it (then they become friends). Mitsuba losing people she cared about by her being reckless, only to tell the MC he was in the right for doing the exact same thing because nobody ended up getting killed that time (then they become friends). I shouldn't have to say this, but making your side characters say and do things contrary to their established character just to make the poorly written MC seem superior only serves to drag every other character down into the same level of poor writing, as well as undercuts any decisions they make or development they get later down the road.

With all that said, you would think that with this anime being a 7.5 at the time of writing this, it must at least have something going for it. Maybe it's animation is it's saving grace? Well, it could've been. Both the characters and the background art look great. That being said, when you take vibrant drawn characters and place them over static painted environments, it unsurprisingly doesn't mesh well, and at times looks like someone put a sticker of a character on a wall painting and called it a day, which ends up being equal parts depressing and hilarious to see. Not only that, for a studio renound for great action animation, the animation in Seraph of the End is rather lacking, especially toward the end, where the big battle between the elite moon demon company and vampire nobles boiled down to a bunch of shaky single frames of everyone fighting, then a underwhelming fight between Guren and Mikaela, then everyone gets fucked up offscreen while Yuuichirou and Mikaela are arguing, then we get Yuuichirou's transformation, which looks cool but also ends up being underwhelming and pointless, then we get the arrival the Hiiragi clan to turn the tide, only to have the battle resolved offscreen and talked about in the final episode. That's it. That's the culmination of introducing and building up characters on both sides of the battle for almost the entire anime. To say I'm disappointed would be an understatement, especially with how much all of the JIDA and vampires were being hyped up at this point.

All of this isn't even to mention the more specific moments that made me realize the utter fucking ridiculousness of this anime. Awkwardly mixing a serious backstory moment for Mitsuba with a shower scene between two underage girls in episode 7. Yuuichirou being a psychopath telling a little girl she did the right thing betraying the people who saved her life because she was protecting her friends in episode 8. The battle at the beginning of episode 9 where archers were shooting down helicopters with ease, only to have a bomber show up and destroy the wall to the city because the same archers didn't even try firing at it. Mikaela showing compassion for humans even after being rejected by them, only to lose the plot and start hating humans because he thinks they're manipulating Yuuichirou (thanks for dumbing down what was the only character I liked in the entire show by the way).

The only decent thing about Seraph of the End ended up being its soundtrack. The OP and ED didn't wow me, but none of the music choices were bad either, except maybe the choice of smooth jazz during the wrap up of the final episode. It didn't sound bad, but it felt very out of place and tonally didn't fit with its accompanying scene.

I dropped Seraph of the End years ago after the initial bait and switch from the military action drama I was expecting into a boring school slice of life anime with everything else being an afterthought. I picked it back up with the hope that the show would improve after the point where I first dropped it. I was wrong in doing so. So very, very wrong. At least now I'll never have to think about Seraph of the End again... after I let my friend who recommended this to me know that he has dogshit taste in anime, of course.

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Aug 5, 2020

Toradora! (Anime) add

Mixed Feelings

First review time: Listen Toradora. It's not that I don't like you. Despite what I'm about to say, I still enjoyed the shit out of most of this show. It's not even that you weren't that good. Up to a certain point, I was on-board with giving this show a 9/10, but somewhere along the way, you just lost me.

Before I get to the point where this show lost me, I'd like to preface this by saying, in terms of story, Toradora was fucked from the word go. It's as simple as this, Toradora didn't have enough content for a 25 episode show. This is ... why, especially around the last half of the show, things start slowing waaaaaaaaay the fuck down and you start wondering why some plot moments that should only take an episode start dragging on into the two to three episode range.

However, this didn't kill my enthusiasm for the show. The art was beautiful all the way through, the sound was pretty decent, and I was invested enough in the characters to where I'd gladly sit through these slow episodes just to see how they would progress. If the show had continued like the first 80% of the show through to the end, I would've been content with praising the hell out of this anime instead of edging everyone along with what caused me to lose my love for this show.

That loss of love comes from the last 20% of the show. More or less the last 5 episodes. At that point, the plot progression realizes it's reached the end of the show, but still has to fill almost two hours of watch time, and thus hits the brakes and starts making stupid decision after stupid decision at the expense of the story and characters. The story would trudge along from setting to setting, creating contrived scenario after contrived scenario that only served to disinterest me and have me consider skipping episodes in order to keep me watching to the end. Characters started acting un pushing the plot along by delaying any meaningful dialogue that would sort out the fucking mess that they were in at that point.

It was around this time where my favorite character changed. It started out with Taiga as most people would agree, but once she and everyone else decided to act completely contrary to how they were for the previous 20 episodes, I was forced to realize that I had the most in common with my least favorite character at the time, Ami. Like Ami, I was watching these characters and was done with their childish bullshit. Granted, much of her expressing this was with cryptic one-liners about how braindead everyone was, like she was Gandalf or fucking Yoda, but at that point, she was the only one putting in the effort to push the plot along and the only one I could relate to at that point, and that just killed my sack because of how much I hated her for most of the show and how much I loved everyone else, and it's a testament to how fucked these last episodes were that made me turn my least liked character into my favorite.

But even then, that wasn't enough. Even with how slow everything was moving and how most characters were making the dumbest decisions to progress the plot, I still would've given the show an 8/10 had it not been for the ending. That is to say, the last two episodes, where the plot spirals into fucking nonsensetown and just does whatever the fuck it wants because there's 40 minutes left and J.C. Staff realized, likely after huffing a assload of drugs, that they needed to tie up all of the loose plot threads in the most convoluted way possible while creating more plot threads that they have to conclude minutes later. All of this led to what I can only describe as a clusterfuck of rushed and sloppy writing for the last two episodes that, while not ruining the whole anime, ruined the conclusion by making it as contrived and unfulfilling as humanly possible.

By how I'm making it sound, it would seem more reasonable for me to give this show a lower score than a 6/10, but honestly, if I would've stopped after episode 20, watched the big confrontation between the main characters, and watched the payoff at the last episode and none of the other filler, I would've given this show a 9/10, but this show not being long enough for a 25 episode run, along with very poor story and character writing for the last few episodes, a 6/10 is all I can give.

There, I've said my peace. Now I can stop thinking about this show and move on to something else. Preferably not a romcom (unless it's SNAFU or Love is War).

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