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REVIEW: She, The Ultimate Weapon DVD

Themaster20000 wrote:

^I agree. It always a treat when Zac does a review.Haven't watched this show at all,but it sounds like it does as poor of a job as Elfen Lied did when it came to pulling at the audiences heartstrings.

the only reason why elfen lied's ending failed cause like with most anime series , it ends very short and isnt faithful towards the manga version do people will have to resort to the manga to continue on with the story.

also from the looks of thing, it will have to assume that you wasnt an anime fans during 2002-2003 cause it was definitely the best anime series of that year and it was the most talked about series during that year other than elfen lied. sure the ending is definitely hard to watch considering most if not almost all of the characters are either dead or psychologically scarred forever, but considering the effed uped endings for the end of evangelion movie and X, its a really really mood point.

EricJ2 wrote:

"Tragedy porn"...I like that. I must remember to use that sometime when some old-generation fan tells me I "have" to watch Grave of the Fireflies because it's such a classic!

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.

Well the ending was beside the point. Elfen Lied tried so damn hard at pulling the audiences heartstrings that it became laughable.Along with it's use of the always cheap killing of a puppy scene.

Here is where I chime in and explain my ardent love for the show, so I can defend my precious Saikano.

To me, Shuji and Chise's love is not perfect. In fact, it's incredibly broken, shallow, and messed up. They don't know the first thing about love, or being in a relationship. When they finally bang at the end, Chise asks Shuji something like, "That's love, right?" and he says, "yeah," because they're dumb kids, and they think that love means just "going all the way." She even doodles a note on the ground about how they boned that day, even though the world is IN SHREDS at this point, and her f-ing arm falls off. She's killed half the world, but the only thing she cares about is that she finally went all the way with a boy.

Then there's a third group of people who like the play and argue that of course the play and the playwright are even more ironic than on first glance and you're supposed to realize that Romeo and Juliet are silly kids who don't really understand love. The argument is that it's a criticism of the shallow conception of love rather than a celebration of it.

Like Bamboo, I think that Shuji and Chise are both pretty terrible flawed kids who don't understand love. I also think that that's a pretty common situation (though if it results in tragedy, it's usually not to this level) and that, while flat characters, they're not unrealistic.

It reminds me of the reaction to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. There are some people who find the basic idea of the tragedy as romantic. Then there's a third group of people who like the play and argue that of course the play and the playwright are even more ironic than on first glance and you're supposed to realize that Romeo and Juliet are silly kids who don't really understand love. The argument is that it's a criticism of the shallow conception of love rather than a celebration of it.]

If the ending had ultimately had something - anything - in it that would suggest the show is actually about teenagers misunderstanding love and then putting them in extreme circumstances to show how deep that misunderstanding can run, then it didn't do much of anything at all to present that. I think Bamboo's points are valid, and as a deeply subtextual reading of the show I think it's valid as a conceptual exercise, but I don't think the text itself really supports that conclusion.

"Tragedy porn"...I like that.
I must remember to use that sometime when some old-generation fan tells me I "have" to watch Grave of the Fireflies because it's such a classic!

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?