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The most stereotypical vanilla experience ever conceived for television is the anime adaptation of Leaf’s break-out visual novel success: ToHeart. I had a kind of crisis realizing its similarities to other present-day romcom shows, right down to its self-aware jabs at the genre and quirky characters. Watching ToHeart made me realize that the human lifespan is not long enough to prevent history from repeating itself. Better to remain ignorant of that truth and avoid watching ToHeart entirely, though credit where it’s due, its capacity to cause a mental breakdown is perhaps unrivalled. I’d expect nothing less from guy who directed Berserk.

Touch is the first of three notable baseball manga made by Adachi Mitsuru, and is easily the weakest of three, which is reflective more so of my good opinion of H2 and Cross Game than any faults of Touch, though Touch does have several faults, chief of which, its insanely slow start. The first sixty or so chapters are a monument to boredom. One slice of white bread (Kazuya) and another slice of white bread (Minami) compete to see which one of them is the more perfectly flawless gift to humanity. Kazuya has a twin, and supposedly he’s got greater talent for baseball, but the ... author is more concerned with teasing the audience over whether or not he’ll join the team than actually doing something with him. Characters like Harada seem to pop into existence whenever the plot demands it (if a plot even exists), the love triangle progresses with excruciating slowness for how predictable it looks on paper, there’s a load of two-dimensional, one-off thuggish villains thrown in randomly for the sake of having something happen, and for the baseball manga, there isn’t a whole lot of baseball being played. The only meaningful toss in these sixty-odd chapters is Kazuya’s body as it’s hit by a truck.

And so, the story really begins. Uesugi Tatsuya is compelled to take up his dead brother’s dream to take his middling highschool baseball team to the summer Koshien. It is an excellent idea that lends a great amount of weight to each match, but it takes far too long to set up, and most of the set-up is superfluous to the rest of the manga. A new rival shows up to reinstate the love triangle, and somewhere along the way Minami and Tatsuya’s relationship seems to reset, as if they had never kissed. While I’m on the subject, Minami and Tatsuya’s relationship is the worst thing in the story. They have no chemistry together and their interactions are unbelievably dull. I was always rooting against Minami, yet I wanted Tatsuya to be with her, and this, I think, just barely justifies her presence in the story – it gives Tatsuya another reason to try, and gives the reader disinterested in baseball a relevant goal to see through to completion. Outside of this function, she’s simply too perfect, too flawless, too bland. She would be more believable as the Koshien trophy.

Minami’s hectoring and lecturing may only provoke a series of terse one-note responses from him, but Uesugi Tatsuya is otherwise the most complex and endearing character that Adachi Mitsuru has created. Forced to play the role of his dead twin brother, Tatsuya’s situation represents a whole lot more than just stepping into the role of being Meisei’s ace pitcher. Like a child forced to shoulder the responsibility of adulthood in one way, or someone pushed to do something unsuitable to who they are in order to please the expectations of others – either way, his honesty in expressing his unwillingness to conform to expectations, and his selflessness in sacrificing who he is for the benefit of others, is sympathetic, even heroic. Anyway, it lends a lot more depth and richness to what, in another author’s hands, would be a straightforward story about loss and baseball. Tatsuya’s predicament could’ve been easily spelled out, but Mitsuru respects the reader’s intelligence. This may not seem anything special, but in the medium of manga, this sort of subtlety just doesn’t exist. On a more basic level, Tatsuya gratifies the belief (or delusion) that “I can do it if I tried.” He’s lazy, but when the chips are down, he gets the job done, and this is clearly you! The reader! Regardless of the realism of this sort of thing, it is great to see Tatsuya’s transformation from a lazy guy to a hard-working member of the baseball team. Watching this unfold is one the main reasons to keep reading, aside from the natural progress of the plot.

The plot, after the death of Kazuya, picks up the pace. Characters still pop into existence without any foreshadowing, but there is a lot less of the one-off two-dimensional villains required since there’s some actual baseball matches that are played to focus on instead. None of the matches are particularly memorable aside from the final game, but they don’t progress too predictably for them to be dismissed entirely before their respective conclusions. Akio and his sister liven things up even if they are stereotypes, and even if it reintroduces the love triangle. The conflict they introduce is completely artificial, but at least it keeps the ball rolling in a direction related to baseball instead of the arbitrary conflicts that were before.

Mitsuru must’ve been worried that there wasn’t enough excitement because he also introduces a major villain, who happens to be Meisei’s new coach. His inclusion is so completely unnecessary, but regardless, he exists, he stirs up trouble, he’s comically evil, and has a comically tragic backstory. His development is so predictable, and trite, yet he still manages to be a great character, who contributes to some of the most tense and exciting moments in the story. In the end I don’t know if Mitsuru justifies his inclusion but I can’t deny that he adds a redemptive quality that raises the emotional quality of the narrative. Other developments of this nature happen throughout, and have a similar quality to them, where they’re ham-fisted, and are clearly contrived, yet still, are undeniably effective in moving certain parts of the story forward.

None of this really matters though. The story could’ve gone to the dogs and I’d still read it through to the end because once Kazuya dies you are locked in with Tatsuya whether you like it or not. You have to see him succeed so badly that you’ll endure any number of bland conversations with him and Minami, or the numerous fanservice shots, or the innumerable faceless, nameless side characters who exist to waste space, or the fourth wall breaks that are nothing but filler. Touch manages to work in spite of all its flaws for this very reason: Tatsuya is someone worth rooting for: for who he is, who he wants to be, and what he wants to achieve. The ending closes this all out in as perfect a way as it can manage, and is as satisfying as you could hope, with Tatsuya defying the expectations of everyone, even the reader. Though it is less polished and overall less enjoyable than the following two baseball stories Mitsuru penned, Touch has a literary quality to it that neither H2 nor Cross Game retain, and for that reason, it is worth reading. Worth reading over a book is debatable, but books are books, and manga is manga. You can’t expect one to be the other, and you wouldn’t want that anyway.

While ‘Spring Passes’ is a very good short story and the best of the collection, to say it is the best thing Adachi Mitsuru has ever created is going a bit too far considering the greater complexity and lasting enjoyment that his longer work gives to the reader. But ‘Spring Passes’ is still excellent, the way its plot twists and twists again past the point you expect it to stop ensures its impact and memorability. The visual metaphor at the end justifies the subject matter of rugby in fantastic fashion.

‘The Current State of Affairs’ is another highlight, and similarly, accomplishes a lot in a short ... space. Notable for its pleasant, festive atmosphere, believable drama, and bittersweet ending. Lacks subtlety maybe, but that would be out of place for a highschool reunion.

In ‘The Runaway God’ Mitsuru goes into the memories of his youth and Shinji Nagashima, a manga author that Mitsuru’s brother (and eventually Mitsuru himself) worshipped as God. Interesting both as an insight into Mitsuru’s career trajectory, and as a story itself.

Lastly, I’d throw in ‘Love Confession’, which represents the best of Mitsuru’s older short stories. A pretty sweet love story.

I’d recommend to read these four stories, I think they’re all worth reading. There are some others like ‘Angel’s Hammer’ that you could argue are worth reading as well, but Spring Passes covers the same ground and is generally just better.

Some lunatics decide it’s a pretty good idea to go to war. One batch of lunatics is led by a man named Four Vagina. Four Vagina thinks it’s a good idea to employ a teenager, (with a GIRL’s name) with no control over his emotions, and no experience in combat, to pilot a tank, shaped like a man, that can fly, in the hopes that his flying tank skills are better than the other side, who, coincidentally, also fly tanks. Obviously this goes very well, for our heroes and for our viewers, until the story hits a brick wall, by trying to juggle too many ... characters at once. Also it introduces a series of thoroughly unconvincing romantic subplots between the aforementioned teenage lunatic and stand-ins for Tomino’s mistresses. Eventually, things devolve into a kind of trainwreck that only the GENIUS Tomino can produce, where everyone starts acting so out of character that you wonder what their original characters were even supposed to be. There’s a scene where one robot impregnates another robot with its metal spike, so I guess it’s a masterpiece.

Clannad Afterstory is the portrait of a life with a sense of scale and scope not often found in the anime medium. In its latter stages you feel a sense of history with its characters that accentuate and heighten their ordinary conversations, giving them a dimension beyond their original meaning. More than a story about family, it’s a story about the passage of time, executed with about as much intelligence and skill as you’d expect from a very talented toddler.

Right yeah, so Maeda watches the film ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, yeah? And so he watches this film, yeah, and it’s about this guy, you know, ... and he marries this girl, yeah? But they’re kinda broke, but they have to run this bank, and there’s this big evil rich guy who’s trying to develop the town, he’s trying to get a monopoly on things, and our main guy’s trying to stop him. And he sacrifices all these things to stop the evil guy, yeah? But he gets sad doing it and gets to feeling that he wishes he was never born. So some fat fucker who’s an angel in disguise says “Alright, bet” and he creates a world and invites the guy to view this world, a world where he doesn’t exist. And this world is on some 1984 shit, you know? Major dystopia. His brother’s dead, his cat’s dead, sister’s dead, mother’s dead, father’s dead, Biff has married his mother and owns Trump Tower and is also the president of the United Nations of the World. Main guy goes “nah fuck this go back” and the fat guy goes “Alright, bet,” and he brings him back to the real world and they all go celebrate Christmas.

It’s a good movie, sentimental for sure, but its sentimentality is offset by the fact that the miserable things that the guy James Stewart is playing goes through still happen, and that their outcomes still exist in the fictional world they inhabit. It also displays the power of fiction, of how an alternate reality with no tangibility can have a tangible impact in the reality we inhabit. By viewing a world where he doesn’t exist, James Stewart is made to realize that his life is very valuable to the people around him. You could argue Hollywood peaked with this one. It is a perfect sort of story, for film especially, having the necessary simplicity required for mass appeal while still retaining the depth necessary to remain relevant past the fashions of its era.

Yeah, so this is relevant because Maeda saw this and tried to emulate it. Source: telepathy. Source two: there’s a Tomoyo Afterstory visual novel with the subtitle ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. And the plot bears many similarities to the film. Guy meets girl, marries girl, is happy for a time, encounters hardship, is met with tragedy, wishes that he never met girl, encounters further tragedy, renounces his wish, which reverses the tragedy, and they all live happily ever after. Not a one-for-one copy, but the same beats are hit. The way Maeda does it is out of wack obviously, because the tragedy that occurs happens in the story’s real world, and so when it is reversed, it reverses what caused the wish in the first place. This is why many people feel that the ending in Clannad Afterstory feels so cheap and hollow – it doesn’t build upon what has happened before. Instead, it overwrites it with a new reality, that’s happier, but also less meaningful than the reality that existed before.

The characters have regressed. Tomoya is arguably the most interesting person in Clannad’s story, giving the moeblob atmosphere a harder edge with his delinquent status and his troubles with his father, and so to see him here as this kind of goofy kid in the middle stages of the story and a punching bag in the latter half is a bit too one-note to be interesting. Same with Nagisa, she’s sweet and kind and kind and sweet and that’s all she really is. A puppy to be run over. Same with Ushio, but here it’s a non-issue. Ushio is a really good part of the story. Maeda here is able to achieve a perfect union between the way Tomoya feels towards her and the way the viewer feels, which results in many emotionally fulfilling moments. Her introduction is the starting point of a good stretch of episodes where the show is plainly, really good.

Outside of that stretch, the rest is dubious. The girl and the robot has got to rank as the single most superfluous narrative of all time. Each time the story transitions to its world, it kills off any and all momentum the main narrative has generated up until that point. They walk and talk and – whatever! None of it matters. To the very end, nothing that happens in that world matters in the slightest. It is the source of the fantasy elements in the story, but the viewer never sees its influence. It exists to give off a pretentious magical, ethereal air, an aesthetic of something profound, for something as hollow as bird-bones.

And as usual for Maeda, things take too long to get going anywhere. There is an exorbitant amount of time spent with Tomoya at his new job for instance, ad the first episode takes its entire runtime to reintroduce characters who aren’t even important to the main plot, and the two story arcs preceding the main story are entirely irrelevant to the main story. All this superfluous detail dilutes the quality and impact of the important story moments.

I’m not going to say some shit like ‘I wanted to like Clannad Afterstory’ as if it was Maeda’s job for me to like what he’s written, but it’s true that I liked the idea of liking Clannad Afterstory. I’m not going to say ‘admirable’ either, because that’s just patronizing, but I like the idea of a story like Clannad Afterstory. For people don’t like the ending of Afterstory for another reason: there are no consequences for any of its characters. Tomoya gets to live happily, with his beautifully kind wife, and his adorably loving daughter. Somehow, there’s a feeling that this isn’t fair, a feeling that Tomoya is a criminal who has hoodwinked the detective called Realism. There’s almost a sense of jealousy. ‘I don’t want this to exist, because I don’t want to acknowledge that such a thing could be real.’ Because if miracles were to exist, if magic really was real, then what value does your suffering hold? If all your pain could be reversed in the flick of a wrist, then what was the point of the pain to begin with? I think such thoughts are besides the point. Pain and suffering has meaning because a choice is made to imbue these moments with relevance. The meaning itself is not real, yet there is a choice made to believe that the meaning is real. The belief leads to a change in the real world. Through the belief in something un-real, something real occurs. That, in a way, is a kind of miracle, which is what the ending tries to capture, though obviously, the miracles that occur in real life are not as miraculous as Jun Maeda’s success.

Though there’s little to like, there’s plenty to admire in this particular Ikuhara series, usually in the aesthetics, occasionally in the writing too. Everything’s set at angles in Yurikuma, which tie in with the dividing lines made quickly apparent between the bears and the humans outlined in the opening narration. Despite carrying around a reputation for being obtuse, Ikuhara is as subtle as a sledgehammer here with his themes – pretty clear pretty early on what’s being implied with the divide between human and bears, and the devouring and so on, and in case it isn’t clear Ikuhara will make the character repeat the same ... thing about six or seven times, just to make sure that you understand, just in case you didn’t hear it the first, or fourth, or fiftieth time.

Ikuhara’s characterization here though is terrible, but he’s always been very weak at that in all his shows. He eschews realism in favour of having his characters represent some sort of idea, and he will twist time and space to make sure that they act in such a way that adheres to this idea, using whatever justification necessary for having a character act in a certain fashion regardless of whether or not the justification itself makes any common sense. Results in a lack of relatability, and a lack of personal connection to any of his characters beyond the idea they represent. Putting it another way, you like Ikuhara’s characters not for who they are but rather what they represent. By extension the same logic applies to his works as a whole. There’s very little, in my opinion, for the viewer to latch onto as something relatable, some situation that’s grounded in reality.

Take the main girl, an orphan who lives alone, is ostracized by her peers, is bullied – can’t care. No attention is drawn to her plight beyond what is necessary to the core message of the show, so none of it seems real, there’s no chance for any sympathy to form between you and the character, because Ikuhara doesn’t allow her to have a life outside of the story. Broadly this applies to everyone in the show. The resulting lack of an emotional attachment to the characters naturally leads to the adoption of a very indifferent attitude to the majority of the events which unfold in Yurikuma’s story.

Like the characters, the story is a farce. There are bears who want to eat humans, bears disguised as humans, bears who want to kill other bears disguised as humans, all very grizzly. The bears are lesbians, the humans don’t like lesbians, but some humans do like lesbians, but those humans are excluded, by the other humans, because they don’t like lesbians, because they think lesbians don’t like them, because they’re lesbians. Something like that. Ikuhara uses this circular irrational line of thinking as a baseline for circling around the various reasons for the irrational hatred of lesbians and draws some pretty obvious though nevertheless valid conclusions which the show explains in obvious fashion.

Personally not a fan of these open-and-shut social/moral questions with obvious right answers in fiction because it makes the story very predictable and also very rigid, with very little to interpret beyond what Ikuhara wants you to interpret. Granted, there is more to Yurikuma than that theme of loving what/who you love regardless of what other people think, but its nothing that Penguindrum hadn’t covered already from another angle. It’s all very agreeable but merely being agreeable isn’t really anything noteworthy.

With Ikuhara, you never really get the feeling you’re getting what’s been promised. He’s someone whose works I admire but never personally like. His shows never really seem to come together when they should, they’re always aesthetically pleasing but uneventful, always lacking in concrete action. Things seem to happen in Yuri Kuma Arashi, and they do happen, but it never really sets in and leaves an impression in the mind. Watching it is like witnessing a dream, but a really bland dream, where you just sit in a room, on a chair, and stare into space, and then wake up. And then you go about your day as usual. And then maybe in a few days time you think about it again in a vague sort of way. Not hard to believe that it happened, it’s just hard to really care. But in the end, I suppose it’s bearable.

Though hyped as a massive trainwreck, Darling in the Franxx is more like a gradual derailment, culminating in the train falling on its side with a bang, the wheels spinning in space. Plot is a sterile soap opera. Magical vampire alien girl Zero Two and childhood friend blue girl compete for the heart of some carbon copy clone they fished out from your office’s Xerox machine, and in that conflict, there’s only ever going to be one winner. There’s some other schmucks. They all don’t know what sex is. They fight in Diebuster robots. They fight against aliens.

Core issue is a lack of inspiration. ... Franxx has this vague goal to be like Eva, and be a mecha show like Eva, and that’s as far as it got in the minds of their creators. Trigger tried their best, I guess, in the animation department. Probably told them a good lesson to not to attach their name to a bad script and partner with a studio incapable of producing anything worthwhile to watch.

The issue with Rumihiko Takahashi’s works is that it’s only going to be a matter of time before the latest entry resembles what has come before and in Ranma 1/2’s case a good fight is fought which lasts around fifteen episodes before it devolves into another version of Urusei Yatsura. From there, it’s the standard episodic fare featuring slapstick as the main form of humour and bickering as its main source of dialogue. I’d suggest you’d watch the first eighteen or so episodes since they’re pretty consistently good, and then look up some episode guide somewhere if you’re still interested. There’s no pull to the ... narrative after Akane cuts her hair and no conclusive ending, so if you’re thinking about soldiering through 161 episodes, I’d advise against it. The last two episodes are worth watching on their own, the last episode in particular has a very beautiful scene near the end that makes no sense but is still very beautiful regardless.

Ping Pong is about ping pong. Sets up three ping pong players to follow through the show: Peco, Smile and China. Peco is ass; his friend Smile is way better, catching the eye of the school’s ping pong coach Butterfly Joe, who sees something of himself in Smile, and wants to bring out the best in him. Various intersecting character motivations run into one another as a result, all culminating in essentially one question: “Why do I play ping pong?” China plays ping pong to get back to China, Dragon plays ping pong to not lose. Smile isn’t sure. The story’s journey is essentially everyone ... realizing that at the end of the day, they play for fun, something that the seemingly stupidest character in the show, Peco, does already, which is why he’s the hero. Yuasa’s best animated work for sure. Manga’s better.

Golden Time is set in college. A big deal. Tada Banri’s the main idiot. He’s fairly stupid. Don’t like him because his character design is poor. You’ll like him because there’s no reason to dislike him, but you’ll dislike him eventually because the story involves him in some altogether stupid arrangements. He’s had a mysterious accident. He meets Kaga Koko and she’s a representation of a sort of ideal woman that forms inside the minds of the deluded. She’s beautiful, fashionable, attractive, rich, sociable, and yet at the same time has no close friends.

To balance out this unnatural combination an equally unnatural explanation ... has to be invented on the author’s part. The justification in this case is that Kaga Koko is head over heels for this guy who later dyes his hair blonde and so she has no time for anything else. Some other flimsily constructed pretences sort of justify how she is. But not really. She falls in love with Tada Banri early on. Generally the show is enjoyable up until that point. I would even say things were promising.

I consent says Tada Banri. I consent says Kaga Koko. I don’t, says the manifestation of Tada Banri’s amnesia. Wondering as to what this source of stupidity could possibly be, my guess is that the story was looking an awful lot too similar to Toradora, so the supernatural had to be thrown in because I suppose making something originally terrible is better than making something unoriginally good. The story nosedives with Banri’s amnesia ghost, leads to some of the most contrived nonsense melodrama of the 21st century. Quality resurfaces at the very end to say that, hey, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all. I’m halfway inclined to agree. Dialogue is still pretty good. Pretty fun to watch the cast interact with each other, on the rare occasions when the story steps away from the love triangle. One of the shows of all time.