Forum - View topicREVIEW: She, The Ultimate Weapon DVD
|
Goto page Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Next Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | ||
|---|---|---|---|
GWOtaku
 Posts: 678 |
|
||
|
All I could think of after reading this is how Madoka Magica will age and look in retrospect a ways down the line. One could say that it too is driven by drama based on horrible things happening to cute-looking, empathy-inviting characters without relief. What really separates it from the "tragedy porn" charge leveled at Saikano, if anything?
Then there's those Key anime, Clannad and Air, where all the drama is sad stuff and sad girls. Maybe this entire area of storytelling needs to just go away. Pack in too much tragedy and it's just too hard to take, or to take seriously. It's that much worse when the most victimized ones are always girls. |
|||
|
|||
RGaspar
 Posts: 239 |
|
||
|
Lol! Awesome review, I laughed all my way through. It was so fun and so spot-on.
I've been saying the same thing for years in both real life and online. I don't like Saikano and thought it was a trainwreck from the very first episode. There's no emotional investment with any of the characters, and the background sci-fi story is just...incomplete and full of plot-holes. Btw, if anyone wants to check out my own Saikano review, that I did many years ago, here's the link (Warning, my english was really weak back then, and the site might be a bit NSFW): http://www.hongfire.com/forum/content.php/211-Review-Saikano-%28She-The-Ultimate-Weapon%29 I'd lol at how much stuff my (lame) review and Zac's have in common. Great minds think alike, heh? Last edited by RGaspar on Thu Apr 23, 2015 12:26 pm; edited 1 time in total |
|||
|
|||
zawa113
 Posts: 7358 |
|
||
|
Glad other people don't like Saikano either. I've never seen the anime, but I did come across the manga cheap maybe 5-6 years ago. And the manga has also been praised absolutely all over the place. I can assure you, the emotion manipulation porn isn't something the anime made up, it's all there in the manga too and I thought it was ungodly boring and terrible. When I finished it and went online, only to see how much everyone loved it, I was stunned. I actually read it again to make sure it wasn't just me. I found it hilarious how "let's have sex! That'll make everything better" was a solution the characters seemed to come up with every single time. At least the manga didn't have the animation and dub issues you mention, so it at least has to be a bit better than the anime, though being 7 volumes long is a crime unto itself. Of course, it's still out of print and all shiny to collectors, but even as a collector, I need things like Banana Fish on my shelf, not this. So I sold this away almost as soon as I got the whole thing and found myself disappointed (I had somehow found the most expensive vol, #7, for cheap and thought I'd stumbled upon this great thing, thanks to everyone on the internet buying its garbage so many years ago. If anything, this re-release shows how poorly its aged and is making everyone think twice, so even if that's all that comes out of this, good!)
|
|||
|
|||
Sly05
 Posts: 26 |
|
||
|
I went into this hoping for something like Now and Then, Here and There and instead got this horrible attempt at a tragic love story. Shuji and Chise are unironically presented as destined for each other despite the fact that Shuji spends half the show cheating on her. None of the characters have personalities and their actions never make any sense. I was always surprised this was praised as highly as it was when it first aired.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Madoka Magica has inventive visuals, solid production values, and a memorable antagonist. It also has an underlying theme of hope and characters who are actually sympathetic. Even if it doesn't age well, I think the series has enough going for it that it will remain fondly remembered. {Merged consecutive posts. ~nobahn} |
|||
|
|||
Merxamers
 Posts: 720 |
|
||
I can see where you're coming from with PMMM, especially some of the stuff in episode 10 spoiler[ (Mami sure is quick to resort to murder-suicide :/)], but I disagree that Madoka could be considered 'tragedy porn'. The main characters find themselves in tragic circumstances, but the heart of the story isn't about these circumstances, but how the characters respond to them. Yes, tragedy is involved (i wept like a child for 2 weeks after I finished the show), but there's an underlining theme of hope in the face of that show's tragedy that keeps the whole thing from being miserable. I also think that Madoka separates itself from 'She' because unlike that show, Madoka has very tight and plot hole-free writing (at least i haven't been able to find any), and the character writing is done well enough to make me care. The tragic twists have elements of foreshadowing and feel believable in the context of the story, without feeling like they were randomly pulled out of a hat to make the audience cry. All of this is subjective of course, and I can understand why you'd feel that way, but i disagree. 
|
|||
|
|||
|
Merxamers
Posts: 720 |
|
||
lol, we both wrote pretty much the same response at the same time 
|
|||
|
|||
Levitz9
 Posts: 1022 Location: Puerto Rico |
|
||
I think the Doke's main defense is that, even though the show is piling on the crap on Madoka, part of the show itself is about how she's borderline-Mary-Sue levels of pure in a show about Good Vs. Evil and how to prevent suffering. Dokes works because Madoka is a counterpoint to all of the crap the Witches spoiler[and Kyubey] are up to. She had to be saintly for the climax to work, else it would have felt exaggerated. The show also underlines how these are kids in life-or-death situations. The stakes are shown early on; spoiler[Mami's death] is a gut-punch, but it also shows to demonstrate what the girls are up against. Also: the plot makes sense. She? She's just about Clannad-style gut-punching. |
|||
|
|||
|
DmonHiro
|
|
||
|
Out of curiosity, why would Zac's hatred of Saikano be "well known"?
|
|||
|
Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18252 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
|
||
|
For the record, Bamboo isn't the only person on staff who liked this one a whole bunch more than Zac did. I am not as big a fan of it as she is, but I got into it enough when it was first released on DVD that I bought the whole series (on singles!). My opinion hadn't changed much when I rewatched a few episodes a few months back.
That being said, I'm totally with Zac's assessment of the artistry. I always did think that it was one of the uglier-looking series to come out of that time frame. (The original manga isn't any better, either.) I also fully agree that the music is the series' best aspect. The closer features the lovely song "Sayonara," which is one of my all-time favorites for anime themes. It's a shame that singer/composer Yuria Yato never did any other anime work. |
|||
|
|||
SahgoDN
 Posts: 86 |
|
||
|
Well, I too was one of the poor saps who really loved this thing when it was hot and new, and...yeah, I too can't fathom why. Because everything Zac says in the review is absolutely true, yet for some reason 14-year-old me thought it was so powerful and emotional etcetera. I remember crying at Akemi's death scene (and I don't cry easily), but now I can't stand to watch it without going on a rant about everything that is wrong with that awfully written sequence. Urgh.
This show is bad memories. |
|||
|
|||
tangytangerine
 Posts: 439 |
|
||
|
Glad to see I'm not the only one that hated it. While wondering why Sentai re-released it(are we low on tragedy porn shows being released?). It's one of those shows that I finished and never looked back on.
It makes me wonder if they changed the name of the show for this release to avoid confusion to another similarly named show from last season, Saekano.
I think he might've made a passing comment on an old ANNCast about how bad it was. But that's all I remember Zac talking about it. Last edited by tangytangerine on Thu Apr 23, 2015 1:10 pm; edited 1 time in total |
|||
|
|||
Videogamep
 Posts: 564 Location: CA |
|
||
What makes Madoka work is that it tells a good story that's also sad instead of just a sad story. It actually gives the characters some screen time before it gives them so much trouble, which makes the viewer invested first. |
|||
|
|||
|
Key
Moderator
Posts: 18252 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
|
||
Oh, there's no getting around SaiKano qualifying as "tragedy porn." (It just didn't bother me that it was.) Applying such a label to something like Grave of the Fireflies would not be appropriate, however. Just because a show is a tragedy doesn't mean that its whole purpose is to milk the tragic aspects, and Grave definitely had far greater and broader ambitions than that. Put it this way: GotF is not a movie you should see because you'll like it (I don't, frankly) but because it's a well-made representation of history. Not the same at all with SaiKano. EDIT: And boy, I never realized how much this series was reviled. It certainly seemed popular enough and praised enough back in the day. |
|||
|
|||
|
Zac
ANN Executive Editor
 Posts: 7912 Location: Anime News Network Technodrome |
|
||
I had a paragraph in the review about this before I realized it was already a little too long, but yeah, the show isn't interested in exploring the nature of grief or loss or what people do to cope, it's only interested in what sort of painful tragedy it can come up with. All this death and loss and the show is only interested in the surface-level gut reaction crying that events like that provoke. If it had loftier ideas about grief, maybe it'd be something, but nope. |
|||
|
|||
|
Akane the Catgirl
Posts: 1091 Location: LA, Baby! |
|
||
|
@ keichitsu0305
I get what you're saying perfectly. The point of entertainment is to, well, entertain. It's supposed to get a certain emotional reaction out of you. The difference between classics like Tutu and Madoka and stuff like the KyoAni moe dramas is that for the former two, the emotions don't feel forced. You care about these characters and what they're going through. They're feel like people you'd meet in real life, not cliches or flat archetypes. Emotionally manipulative stories use sad ideas in lieu of any actual character writing. They'll introduce moe blobs who are just so darn lovable and aren't they the cutest? Then they'll put them through the wringer just to make the audience cry, rather than having them go through any development whatsoever. For a good example of "kicked puppy", let's use Sayaka Miki from Madoka. She goes through all amounts of horrific s**t and spoiler[turns into the very monster she's been fighting during the story.] However, being that this story is a tragedy and all, Sayaka's misery is often self-inflicted. She's self-righteous and puts up pretenses of being a knight of justice when all she wants is for this guy to notice her. The world does not care for her black-and-white views, and so she suffers. (As you can see, I will defend Madoka until the end of time. I'm really excited to start Fate zero this summer, since I'm a huge fan of Urobuchi-sensei. And all because of a twelve-episode magical girl series.) |
|||
|
|||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group