Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: After the Rain
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#Verso.Sciolto
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Ryutai
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There's a feeling called empathy, that isn't something everyone knows.
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#Verso.Sciolto
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Panino Manino
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I really wanted to see my ship fully realized, but I believe that the anime was successful in achieving it's goal, thanks to that masterful direction (see KyoAni?). |
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#Verso.Sciolto
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Yamamoto
... and while on the subject of clever little boys and brief appearances. "Mom! Dad had to go away for a bit today but Akira told me how I can run really fast while I waited for him to come back!! Akira said I was really good at running fast and .... " Do you think his dad talked to his mom, briefly, when Yuuto was dropped off at home, after the manager returned from the head office of the family restaurant chain? Midori was probably busy at that time - preparing her new novel, pre-occupied with a looming publication deadline, or something, giving her little time to talk to her ex but they might have exchanged a few brief words ... about amazing Akira and Yuuto's running or about child daycare arrangements for single parents ... theirs ... or in Japan in general.... briefly. So little time. |
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5831 Location: Virginia, United States |
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Sexual hysteria, No. First off that is implying something else than what is being discussed. Also, what is happening applies to other areas, not just the sexual. Your a bad person if you liked the Hogan's Heroes TV series. Your a bad person if you make your kids walk to school by themselves, and you are a bad person if you liked that classic Coopertone Girl ad. These are all things I did and liked when growing up. The NAZI Germany thing should be a bellweather sign as to where our culture and society is at now. We are now more super sensitive about NAZI Germany 70 plus years after the end of World War II, than we were 25 years after World War II. My main beef though is we keep bringing up American moral and cultural values in reviews and discussion of Japanese anime. I have no problem if ANN wants to do opinion pieces of this specifically, but it really has no place in reviews. Its inclusion in reviews is basically saying this; "If you are a 'good' person don't watch this, if you watch it you are a 'bad' person. |
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pip25
Posts: 151 |
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...Who is Yamamoto-senpai? You mean the guy Haruka ran into a couple of episodes earlier during club practice? The side character with about 5 minutes of screen time, who has never even met Akira on-screen? If you are referring to that person... well, if you think he explained everything you wanted to know about, great. I can't really agree with that. I apologize if I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but we've spent entire episodes on discovering what makes Kondo tick. First we found out he was interested in literature, then that he was actually writing novels himself, and finally that his marriage collapsed because he became consumed by his obsession. That was well-paced, interesting and rewarding. A couple of sentences from a random character is anything but. That's more like bad storytelling, to be honest. I don't know if the manga does a better job overall, but this adaptation failed to give equal importance to its two leads, and I feel that's a huge shame and missed opportunity. |
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Ryutai
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Yamamoto senpai only made obvious something that to me, was clear already. Because of her injury, she had fear to come back to run, even though it was her biggest passion. Anyway I respect your opinion. |
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Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 23779 |
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@ pip25 - I think your basic assumption is flawed. You seem to think that Akira's situation received less attention and development than Kondo's. I don't think that's true. First, Akira's "deal" was established much earlier than Kondo's. We knew from almost day one that Akira had sustained a serious injury while running and that this was a real problem for her. We saw how it affected her relationships and her general outlook. That was established long before we knew what Kondo's problem was. It's true that it wasn't until later in the show that we realized that Akira's inability to run was actually grounded in fear as opposed to a permanent injury, but that information came out not from what's his name's five minute appearance, but from things like the discussion that Kondo and Akira had about abandoned sparrows who refuse to leave the nest.
As somebody who really enjoyed the show, I have no sense of needing to have had more examination of Akira's deal than I got, nor do I feel that Kondo's story - overall - got more development than hers. I think the fact that Kondo's situation was laid out in a few concentrated episodes as opposed to over the course of the entire show's like Akira's was, may give the impression you have of an imbalance, but I don't think the impression is actually founded when you look at the show in its entirety. |
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pip25
Posts: 151 |
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By the same logic, we also knew from almost day one that Kondo was a guy apparently out of his element, working with little concentration and with even less sense of self-worth. We of course had no idea whether he was always like that or not, but nonetheless he looked rather miserable overall.
Relationships, most certainly, but general outlook? To this day I'm not sure how much of Akira's aloofness was caused by her injury and/or how much of an introvert she was to begin with. She was likely more sociable before, but to what extent, I have no clue, because we weren't given many pointers to work with - and by the time she got better, the show ended pretty much immediately. In contrast, while Kondo still remained forgetful, we saw multiple examples of him getting along better with his coworkers and having the motivation to take charge of a situation as a manager should.
Did we? When? And if we did, fear of what? Fear of repeating her injury? Fear of losing her edge, as per Yamamoto-senpai? Fear of hurting people around her even more? If the discussion about the sparrows (or any other part of the show, really) made this clear to you, then great, but it sure did not make things clear to me at all. Even though her own issues were at least as bad as Kondo's: it's not even about the track club really, it's about a high-school girl consciously choosing to remain crippled, possibly for the rest of her life. To simply say that "well, she was afraid" does not really even come close to explaining something of that magnitude. |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23779 |
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@ pip25 - sure we knew that Kondo was floundering but we didn't know that his specific problem was that he had had youthful aspirations to produce literature, and that the failure to meet those aspirations ruined his marriage and left him in a position where he no longer felt he could write. That's what I meant when I said that Akira's deal (or most of it) was set in motion long before his.
Really, you have no idea how much of Akira's aloofness was caused by the injury and how she was an introvert to begin with? Wow, those flashbacks of her and Haruka together before the injury made it pretty damn clear to me. Akira seems like a totally different person in them. Friendly, fun-loving, excited. I guess you just need to be hit over the head with a hammer or something. To me, Akira's fear was no longer having an identity or a future she could imagine without running. Before the injury, the arc of her future must have seemed pretty clear. Afterwards, it was a big question mark and she didn't know how to handle that. I think your problem is that you have little ability to infer things. You clearly need to be spoonfed information or conclusions. After the Rain is not that kind of show and hence your frustration. A lot of information was conveyed atmospherically and in images, as well as in dialogue. It was all there, you simply missed a lot of it. |
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pip25
Posts: 151 |
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I think I'd prefer to skip the hammer treatment.  Akira was definitely happier in the flashbacks (which is, well, unsurprising) and it was shown to us multiple times that she and Haruka had been close friends since quite a while. Neither of the above is very relevant to how much of an introvert Akira is/was.
Remember when Yoshizawa started a conversation with her, glanced the other way, and when he looked back, she was no longer there (since she likely did not even notice him to begin with)? That's the kind of attitude I'm referring to. Was she always like that or not? I'm not sure we can tell.
That's an absolutely believable explanation. Do note however, that Ryutai seems to have reached a markedly different conclusion, and both of you were watching the same series. To me, this seems to indicate that at the very least the root of Akira's issues left quite a bit of room for interpretation.
Perhaps you get that impression based on what I'm arguing for, but I don't actually enjoy being spoonfed information in story. On the other hand, there's quite a lot of middle ground between spoonfeeding and being totally vague. To me, Akira's situation was closer to the "totally vague" category than what I would have preferred, a trait that was made even more apparent to me by how differently the other plotlines were handled. That's all there is to it. |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23779 |
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@ pip25 - fair enough. I probably shouldn't be so definitive about my interpretation, but I saw enough evidence to support it. In any case, I'm sure I'll rewatch it at some point in the future and without an enforced one week wait between episodes and with the benefit of knowing the story ahead of time, I'm sure I'll glean a ton of things I missed the first time around. I'm sorry the show fell short for you... here's a classic Captain Obvious statement, but it is always so much more satisfying to really like a show than to be disappointed.
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#Verso.Sciolto
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You've seen the term of phrase, "sexual hysteria", used here, though. Did you think it appropriate when first introduced here, in this thread? To me, a crucial element of the start of the series’ narrative is that the injury of 立花あきら was depicted as self-inflicted. Through whose eyes do we watch and into whose eyes do we gaze? What are we supposed to see, in either direction? What are the colours in Akira’s eyes? あきらの目. Japanese eyes? Reflections? 諦める. 諦めない. 終わらない花占い Flowery language. Inferring, peering into the future or attempting to - Pissing in the wind. Haruka may need to use the toilet, based on her expression. Hashire! Haruka. Fortunately there is a young man who can see right through them and point her in the right direction. Empathy or mind reading? Did it need to be a boy to come and deliver such insights, to her, in that brief insert moment of that particular character? Kanji and hiragana that too is where we start. Character naming conventions and the series title in translation too features into that. Noting here that there are no alpacas indigenous to Japan. It is not possible to talk about Souseki without talking about his time in England. Can we talk about him without mentioning, Nakane Kyoko, his wife? It is not possible to talk about Akutagawa without talking about Buddhism. It is not possible to talk about Kurosawa without talking about John Ford. All quintessentially Japanese. Iconography of Japanese culture. How can we not talk about what is going on in the rest of the world when Japan is quite clearly not just an island nation, no matter how hard certain Japanese people may try to portray it that way, and this series is so clearly and recognizably set in our present time? How can anyone watch the first two episodes of 恋は雨上がりのようにand already object to the logical and reasonable caveats? Akira emulates the cook at some point in the story. Their "date" is a teaching aide, for her - or so we were told. In the same context and manner, the cook was recently described as annoying. Strong language. Flowery visuals. Running in the clouds an echo from an earlier episode. How far do we back up? What was being discussed and when did that discussion start? [Miyuki Nakajima, Taniguchi Naohisa, Kuroneko, credits where they are due.]
Tsubame 燕 http://jisho.org/search/燕 Tombi 鳶 http://jisho.org/search/鳶 鳶に乗て春を送るに白雲や Last edited by #Verso.Sciolto on Fri Mar 30, 2018 11:42 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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Crisha
Moderator
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All right, we've had 29 pages to discuss the sexual/cultural morals of those watching and the countries they came from. We're at the end of the show. Let's move on from the conversation, because it keeps getting further off-topic.
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