Shelf Life

Chaos Theory

Chaos;HEAd loses points for starting off promising and then getting worse until it is no longer watchable. The show winds up severely disappointing rather than staying consistently mediocre. The rate at which Chaos;HEAd declines could probably be expressed using a mathematical curve (I'd like to see an equation representing this curve, which is neither exponential nor linear – perhaps cubic?).

Takumi is a nerdy otaku high school boy who mostly skips school to hang out with his delusional fantasy girlfriend in his rooftop storage container apartment in Shibuya. His already loose grip on reality starts to slip further when he inadvertently opens a link in a chat board message that shows a gruesome murder that seems to have already taken place – in the future.

You can get all of that out of the Funimation trailer for Chaos;HEAd, and I would've been perfectly happy if the show stopped plotting from there. Takumi has serious problems. Maybe he has multiple personalities. A teen detective at school thinks Takumi committed the murders. If this were just a schlocky teen-detective-serial-killer-story, I could still go with it.

But no, that's not enough for Chaos;HEAd. The story starts to spin out of control; a potpourri of conspiracies are dumped into the plot. A Goth star attending Takumi's high school writes lyrics that might relate to the murder and it happens she can also pull a sword from thin air. Uneven gravity in Shibuya may be why teens are buying ugly frog charms for phones. An evil corporation is committing conspiracy on a grand scale. Characters start trying to convince Takumi that he has godlike psychic powers which can affect reality.

The show stops making sense about two layers in. Each additional conspiracy makes Chaos;HEAd less and less coherent and more laughably bad. (As in The Simpsons episode 2F07, “…the Rand Corporation, in conjunction with the saucer people -- under the supervision of the reverse vampires…”) I suspect all the layers might work well in a visual novel, but in an anime series they come off more like bad later seasons of The X-Files or the end of Lost. (And I liked the Lone Gunman!)

My biggest problem with the show is that once you introduce a nearly omnipotent character, it raises too many plot questions. It's hard to discuss without excessive spoilers, but when the show introduces a class of character that actually can manipulate reality, all further plot actions by the villains seem pointless. Why don't the good guys just rewrite reality however they see fit?

The plot's ambitions are far beyond the scope of the budget. This was clearly a mid-to-low budget production, yet the script calls for scenes of city-wide Armageddon. It's the best the animators can do to keep the major characters on-model. Perhaps because this was based on a visual novel, the complex character designs weren't simplified enough to do big action scenes. Takumi in particular starts to look unintentionally ugly in the second half of the show as, I assume, the budget for retakes was exhausted.

At least there's a dub. Overall, the dub script makes it easier to understand the massive conspiracy network. Plus Brittney Karbowski puts in a good performance as Takumi's sister Nanami. In Japanese Nanami sounds like a stereotype of a sister from an eroge (perhaps a dateable character?), but in the dub Karbowski sounds much more like a realistic sibling.[TOP]

Glass Maiden has some of the worst character designs I can remember since I started writing Shelf Life. I may have once complained that the characters in Neo Angelique Abyss were unmemorable, but at least they were sharp-looking. The characters in Glass Maiden are generic to the point of being instantly forgettable, and I think that's a cardinal sin for anime, where so much of the appeal of the medium is in the character design.

The plot centers around a “we do anything” detective agency (picture an unfunny Gintama, a more age diverse Sket Dance, or an un-sexy non-alcoholic RIN - Daughters of Mnemosyne - I am so sick of “do anything” companies!) who stumble upon the mysterious case of the glass maidens. Shady underground medical experimentation (…or something) has lead to a scourge of glass bodies turning up around town. The agency meets a real live one of these urban legends and starts sheltering her from the mysterious men who would kill her.

Our “wacky” ensemble cast includes Manami, the spunky teen sleuth who wets her pants on the first adventure (and far too many jokes are made of it); Akira, a young man Manami calls “mini-boss” who is subjected to the most unfortunate forms of sexual harassment; a grizzled world-weary ladies man named Shun; a perverted old doctor running a clinic with a sexy nurse named Monica; a muscular drag queen who runs a bar; and Ayaka, a personality-free Marcy to Manami's red headed Peppermint Patty. They name their glass maiden Sara (plain and tall, perhaps).

The plot unfolds in a fairly predictable way. The last couple of episodes have some action stunt scenes that won't dazzle anyone, but at least it's written in a partially believable way, unlike Chaos;HEAd. Chaos;HEAd's ambition outstripped its budget, but Glass Maiden's director and writer seemed to know exactly how much money they had for what they could get away with. As such it plays like a second rate cable series (I picture The Net, or any other USA Network action show).

I did not metaphorically flip the table over Glass Maiden in part because it never showed any promise at all. It was certainly a paycheck for somebody. No one was counting on this show to make their name in the industry. It has the air of a series that was created to keep a late night time slot open, or to keep a production pipeline going for the next series.

Glass Maiden has the feel of a light novel adaptation, but I can't find any evidence of this. I want to believe that the show's original creator/writer pictured his characters less generic than they were ultimately drawn, and the production just couldn't afford a better character designer (or someone was granted the position out of favoritism or nepotism, which are my favorite explanations for lousy entertainment). Glass Maiden was OK, but if it had an ambitious character designer or a crazy art director (like Cowboy Bebop or Jojo's Bizarre Adventure or Soul Eater or Tatami Galazy), it could've at least been slightly memorable.[TOP]