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Is The Lost Village Actually A Comedy?

I've seen plenty of anime shows just as ... divorced from how humans actually act.

A campy B-Movie style horror anime from the director of Squid Girl and Girls und Panzer.
Where is the argument coming from that this isn't a comedy again?

do you know the difference between a myth and a folklore?

and do you know the writer's intent on this show because every watcher that try to explain or do a review fail to understand the writer.

also it is sad that people care for fan service.

It was implied for a while that Yottsun, ostensibly a black-coded character, was the only actual casualty when "the black guy dies first" trope is basically a joke in itself because of how ridiculously often it happens.

JustinTaco wrote:

It was implied for a while that Yottsun, ostensibly a black-coded character, was the only actual casualty when "the black guy dies first" trope is basically a joke in itself because of how ridiculously often it happens.

That's a interesting cultural trope that you've brought up there. Would a Japanese national actually recognize a "black guy dies first" horror movie cliche? Their media tends to skew sooooo homogeneously Japanese that I feel that this was completely unintentional on their part. I read that plot line more as the "creepy potential rapist and bad guy" dies first, which seems like a more universal trope.

The rest of your points... many of them individually just seem like "just bad writing", but I agree, when you put them all together, it's hard to argue that everything in Lost Village is simply unintentionally bad. Especially with a staff who SEEMS to know what they are doing.

On the other hand, this makes me wonder if maybe I need to go back and rewatch Another. Maybe that was also intended as a comedy and I just completely, totally missed it. And now I feel kind of ill thinking that.

Honestly I'm having trouble seeing how people don't think it's a parody.

When they're discovering what Nanakis are and why Masaki doesn't have one, one of them literally says "Oh, so she doesn't have a tragic past?"

The villagers agree on absolutely nothing until they all make the totally rational decision that Masaki is a goddamn ghost. Prior to this they can't even agree on what to call Rock Paper Scissors.

It's been mentioned before, but Lovepon calling for violent executions and even attempting to drown Mitsumune but receiving not even a single ounce of suspicion. In fact, Mikage even invites her to his secret cabal meeting with Nyanta and Hellfire. You even expect Lovepon's flashback to explain why she's so crazy but it's written to specifically not do that.

Mitsumune. Mitsumune. If he's not a parody of himself nothing in this world is real. After probably one of the biggest verbal conflicts between the villagers up to that point his only thought is "Wow I talked to a lot of girls today". Without batting an eyelid he asks Masaki if she wants him to come with her to go to the bathroom, presumably in a bush or some ruins. Not to mention his backstory involves him casually impersonating his brother for half his life because he doesn't want to rock the boat. He's trying to get through the tunnel with Masaki and gets ready to face his fear incarnate... right before it punches him in the stomach and he more or less says "Screw this I'm out of here!". Lovepon is drowning him but the reason he overpowers her is not because he's going to die, it's because he saw her bra through her shirt. That is art.

The bus is this unstoppable force of nature that the bus driver can wield with complete impunity. Several scenes are devoted to the hawks of the group devising ways to hunt a goddamn bus. When it first bursts in to capture Masaki, Mikage orders them to attack a speeding bus. It never runs out of gas and never gets stuck after the first time.

The villagers are literally too tired to care about flaming arrows being shot at them. They're just loafing around as Hellfire handwaves the entire assault while an intense electronic beat plays in the background.

It was implied for a while that Yottsun, ostensibly a black-coded character, was the only actual casualty when "the black guy dies first" trope is basically a joke in itself because of how ridiculously often it happens. To top it all off, he was not only alive, he was reaching personal enlightenment almost 8 episodes ahead of everyone else while they were staging actual witch hunts.

In a 12 episode anime, where time is extremely limited from a production standpoint, groups of characters trail off into totally meaningless tangents with no connection to the plot during important moments. This happens constantly. Certain characters are highlighted in the unique ED sequences with unusual facial expressions that imply they'll play a role in the next episode but it all means absolutely nothing. The next episode previews are pretending to foreshadow events next week, but actually serve no purpose. The episode titles are equally irrelevant to anything that happens in the episode. The sheer amount of clearly and intentionally wasted effort would never fly during modern fast-paced anime production unless it was exactly the point.

The show ends with them happily driving away in the bus while Lovepon jokingly yells out "Execute him, I say!" and they all laugh in unison like the end of an episode of a dorky family sitcom.

Believe me, I've watched some terrible shows. You can tell when someone's trying and failing miserably. It's not funny, it's painful. Mayoiga is comedic genius.

I think that the question of comedy/not comedy and parody/serious story is a bit of a false dichotomy...If I were to try to boil down, what I think this show is...Taking shots at the kind of symbolic and overwrought capital L 'Literature' that is often praised as being the 'great works' and taught in school and the like. These shots are supposed to be funny, but at the same time the show is also intentionally trying to tell (and in my opinion succeeding) a more heartfelt and meaningful narrative than those things do...

Ultimately, what makes the comedy so funny for me in this that it's also serious enough that I actually care about and engage with what's happening. The most common reason that comedy falls flat for me is when everything is a farce and nothing serious happens, and the characters are all incompetent and only exist as joke vehicles. Comedy done like this (which to me seems to be most of it) always makes me disengage and stop caring about what's happening, so I don't find it funny. On the other hand when I care about the characters, events and setting, and when there are some serious themes and weight being thrown around, the unexpected and jokes pack a lot more punch.

If you had to think for minutes at a time about why what was happening was funny then you were probably watching on autopilot.

The immediate problem to me with the claim that Lost Village is comedy is that all of this stuff is explained just as well by another much simpler hypothesis: The Lost Village is a bad show.