Forum - View topicBanana Fish (TV).
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MaxSouth
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Banana Fish (TV) Genres: action, drama, mystery Themes: crime, gangs, mafia, mental illness, politics, sexual trauma, tragedy, yaoi Plot Summary: Nature made Ash Lynx beautiful; nurture made him a cold ruthless killer. A runaway brought up as the adopted heir and sex toy of "Papa" Dino Golzine, Ash, now at the rebellious age of seventeen, forsakes the kingdom held out by the devil who raised him. But the hideous secret that drove Ash's older brother mad in Vietnam has suddenly fallen into Papa's insatiably ambitious hands--and it's exactly the wrong time for Eiji Okamura, a pure-hearted young photographer from Japan, to make Ash Lynx's acquaintance... Streaming available on Amazon Prime. ---------------------------------- Since there was no thread in the Index, here it is. (The post will be split into three parts, as otherwise it will be unreadable.) One of the popular opinions about the anime is fit to be put here as an epigraph:
I. BUT WHAT IS ACTUALLY REAL? I.1. Human experimentation (mostly on blacks as well as on prisoners, in psychiatric wards) as a general principle was big in the USA (and also Canada) in the 1950s and the 1960s, sometimes done by Nazi scientists that the USA have imported from Nazi Germany at the end of WWII. This included semi-open and completely secret programs carried out both within the USA and abroad, in the de-facto colonies of the USA. I.2. Regime change/coup motives are also fully real. The CIA/State Dept and their later cutouts such as National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and other NGOs have arranged over seventy regime change operations that ended up supporting over two-thirds of all dictatorships worldwide (almost all of which are right-wing/fascist/Wahhabi). I.3. Child trafficking, sex slavery, underage sex workers are all real things, as well as politicians using these services. For example, court records show that William Clinton, Donald Trump and many others have visited Jeffrey Epstein's "pleasure island" dozens of times over the years. I.4. The beginning of the anime has a bit of realism in depicting homophobia in the USA, but, of course, it actually reflects Japanese society's homophobia, too, even though more often it is milder and expressed in that the LGBTs have no rights and are invisible just as in South Korea, India, Russia and other countries like that. I.5. Even though the exact way the main lad was show to supposedly spoiler[die] in the end is not convincing, in the grand scheme of things it is unavoidable in terms of realism. II. WHAT IS NOT REAL? Almost everything else. The anime is actually a fantasy genre, not scientific fiction, let alone realism. II.1. The idea that a media company would actually try to expose an establishment conspiracy is unrealistic. It did not happen in the USA for like forty years already. The last time, it was the Iran Contra scandal, weapons sales to Iran and funding/arming of fascist death squads in Latin America by the CIA. Since then, the media of note have become parts of huge monopolistic/oligarchic capital which is in a fascistic merge with the government because of the system where it is buying politicians via legalized bribery scheme: financing electoral campaigns as well as hiring former and future government officials in a revolving door corruption method. This is why a Princeton University study has found that the USA is an oligarchy as since the late 1970s there is no correlation between demands of the public and the country's actual policies while there is nearly 100% correlation with the will of the few that are most rich. II.2. Of course, it is not possible for a white lad, let alone gay, let alone prostitute, to rule a gang, let alone that includes blacks and Latin Americans. The gangs have a severe "machismo" culture that denies LGBTs and there is a strict racial/ethnic division. In this aspect, the show is whitewashing criminal culture. Things were/are not that "politically correct" and "woke" in the real world of crime. II.3. The show supposedly belongs to a scientific fiction genre, though it is unscientific since the creation of the drug described is not even theoretically feasible, including the future, independently of advancements of science. II.4. Besides the typical endless bullets issue (though not always present in this case), gun fights are purely fantastical, even though the ridiculousness is not as crazy as in e.g. Black Lagoon anime, which is the worst in this sense. (Both of those animé are similar in that they address serious matters with cartoonish action.)[/spoiler] Last edited by MaxSouth on Wed Apr 27, 2022 2:13 am; edited 6 times in total |
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MaxSouth
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III. SMALLER ISSUES
III.1. Acupuncture, of course, does not allow things the story is showing. III.2. Cinema-like scenes of shooting from the roof of a truck are not really believable. III.3. The drug in question was already proven to be working many years agospoiler[ on the example of the main lad's brother: he did what he was told to do]. So it makes no sense that it all of a sudden became worse in the following years. III.4. The blonde evil guy's fingers were cut on an outward surface, not on an inward one, which means that the muscles on the fingers can work for clinching movements, so he should be able to shoot at least once without an issue. But he is shown to be unable to shoot completely, which makes no sense. III.5. There is no way an unarmed street gang would go against an armed one, let alone consisting of mature criminals, and no chance that the main lad would have survived the second episode of this anime. III.6. Also, no investigator would claim that spoiler[the main lad is a killer] without checking fingerprints on the suspected weapon, bullet analysis, traces of hair on the spot and other forensic, at least without faking it first. III.7. Autopsy of the corpse would not make it bleed, obviously (unless done like right at the time of death) so it is weird that authors did not know that. III.8. There is no way the main lad would be able to spoiler[escape the psychiatric facility]. And most men would not be seduced even by the prettiest lad ever, so it is unlikely his charms would work on just a random guard like this anime shows. The room would have many cameras, not one, and they are set in a way that you can not hang anything on them to block the view. III.9. The guard would not enter the lad's room in spoiler[the psychiatric ward] alone. The lad would not be able to walk the corridors as there are many cameras. Both the lad and an old scientists show impossible, purely fantastical body strength in the elevator sequence. III.10. It is dubious that the Japanese lad would feel heat from American mustard on a hot dog. After all, wasabi is much stronger, even though the Japanese do not abuse it as much as some Westerners might think. III.11. The anime mentions that the assassin's spoiler[Russian wife's father was executed as a political criminal], but this would be impossible since the times of Stalin. If something was not right, people were ousted to live abroad (in the USA, the same happened to e.g. Chaplin and many others during/after anti-communist repressions) or deported/forced to live in a different city (a practice that was also used in Italy and other places). The hair colour of the Russian assassin is too dark. III.12. Also, the USSR has never banned marriages within militaristic organizations, even though such cases were rare as it was not recommended, so the fantasy is quite weird. And there was no terrorist activity in Crimea during the last years of the USSR,spoiler[ when the assassin's wife was killed]. Last edited by MaxSouth on Sun Apr 24, 2022 1:22 am; edited 1 time in total |
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MaxSouth
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CHARACTERS
The Japanese and the Chinese lads (a new gang leader) are certainly the most adorable characters in the anime, though the latter one is a bit too cute of a character to become a head of a criminal gang. That said, most of the characters, no matter how much adorable they are, are criminals which would have been killed during apprehension or executed or get life-long high security prison term in the USA. The main villain character does not behave logically in some situations, but this aspect can be real, since there are cases of powerful criminals having weird fetishes/quirks that ultimately lead to their self-destruction. It is very rare, but it happens due to human nature. As expected for anime, characters in general are more dramatic than they could be in reality, though it is not really a drawback. STORYTELLING The anime pace allows watching the whole thing in one go, and, despite the many aforementioned drawbacks, they are not so serious to heavily damage the narrative at any single point. It is convenient for the authors that most of main villains do not really want to kill the main lad: they had many chances to do it. It was weird that authors have decided specifically in episode 16 that the anime is a comedy. The authors have forgotten that officially the main lad has died in the middle of the series with his photos being all over media, so they put him back to show up in public as the main villain's deputy, also documented in the media. The ending of the anime with a former gang member deciding to [spoil]attack the main lad[/spoil] is dubious writing since the whole thing was backed by a misunderstanding, which is the worst, the cheapest plot-moving vehicle that every scenario course in schools of art teaches avoiding it as a symptom of "lazy writing". VISUALS Characters have short noses and big chins in profile, which is a rare style. The anime is censored not only in depiction of criminal sexual acts but also blood/torture: despite it having both to some degree, viewers were spared most of the time. I personally not a fan of loli/gore pron, so it is good, though not realistic. MUSIC The anime itself does not have an outstanding music score, but it has a strong outer song selected to be featured in the ending sequence of episodes in the second half of the series: Red by Survive Said The Prophet band. The epigraph in the first post comes from the comments section there. RESUME If not the issues listed above, the anime would have had "Excellent" rating here on the ANN. But with them present, enough people have sensed these imperfections, so the rating is "Very good", which seems fair. An anime can have lots of drawbacks, but if none of them are deadly for the story to be highly watchable/interesting, it can genuinely be very good. |
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