Clearly we need to get a few things straightened out before we continue.  If Haibane Renmei is too much of a sacred cow for you to bear seeing it made fun of, don’t click through to the rest of this post.  If you believe everyone must have the same tastes you do, and you love HR with a lovey-love and don’t have a sense of humor, don’t click through.  Also, I suppose, if you’re not willing to watch the trip from hatred to enjoyment, which I’m still counting on, don’t click through — though, for you, waiting until the last post or two might work.  All of you cool kids, with well-balanced personalities and lovable haircuts, come on in.  

Pre-show:

I saw Coraline last night.  Go watch it, if you don’t suck.  It left me with a pleasant glow, like the best fiction does.  I couldn’t talk afterwards, and you’re right in assuming that’s pretty remarkable.  Recounting to my girlfriend the debacle of blogging this show — specifically, the fanboy response — stripped that glow from me like the guts from a field-dressed deer.  

Episode four:

At least the narcoleptic’s asleep in the OP.

“Bird” is in the title, so maybe the plot starts creeping in here?  I know they’re significant in some way.

So is Reki painting her dreams?  

Haha, Freudian typo…  I almost put “paining her dreams”

I thought Kana was a dude for a second, and was shocked.

While not great, the (very occasional) funny bits are good.  They should beef up the wacky.

Seriously, what is everyone’s hang-up about crows?  How many poems have you had based on you, Kana?

Challenge: some enterprising Super Fanicom reader should write a poem about Kana.

Because they’re smarter than you, Kana.

Huh, basic ecology from the crazy one.  Random.

Also, yes, birds will poop on you.  Jesus, I thought a bee had stung me…

My students are flabbergasted that I carry a pocket watch.  I don’t know why.

You know, if this show would just avoid the classic “living together” bullshit it would immediately get better.  This is why I haven’t gone insane yet — assuming it’s going to.  Because:

This is motivation.  Finally one character has illustrated what she wants out of life (re: Kana and clockworks — plus for clockworks, I love stuff like that).  

And now they’re talking about tea.  Way to ruin a good feeling, show.

I played Crazy Taxi at an arcade yesterday; I ended up driving the way Kana rides a bike.  Crazy Taxi’s more of a spectator sport.

At this point the feeling about the Habane seems pretty inconsistent.  That could go either way.

God no, don’t work with the kids, I couldn’t deal with it.  

The exposition is delivered so badly in this show…  

Hey, at least you learned how to ride a bike at some point…  I still don’t know how.

Break:

I see what the show’s doing — which is the main problem.  The maneuvers a piece of literature makes aren’t supposed to be so obvious.  The effort that goes into a show, or a book, or a movie, should ultimately be effaced by the piece itself.  If you’re marveling at the special effects you’re not paying attention to the story.  HR is very clearly setting up mysteries; it still hasn’t gotten to the part where Rakka is interacting with the setting in an interesting way, but I can see the efforts to set that up as well.  

Let me be clear about what I mean here: Darko Suvin deals with an idea, concerning sci-fi and fantasy, he called “novum” (or “nova” in plural).  It means “new thing,” and comes from Latin; it deals with the things in a fantastical setting that are new to us.  So far the nova of HR are the wings, the haloes (though that’s negated a bit by finding out they’re made — they’re still pretty new anyway), the dreams (which are a standard of the fantasy genre), and the cocoons.  Everything else is basically a permutation of something.  Can’t go past the walls?  Well, fortresses work that way, and medieval towns looked askance at people from outside, or people going outside.  Class issues?  Not a novum.  

I will freely admit my background is part of what keeps me from really enjoying this show.  However, this isn’t special to me: that’s how everyone works, everywhere.  Specifically, for me, I’ve studied fantasy a lot, especially the uses of setting, and HR has set up a subtractive world, that is, one with fewer elements than ours.  Some of them are strange, but the world is smaller, with literally less in it, than ours.  That’s okay, except the show is now behaving as though it hasn’t; it’s having the characters go through humdrum stuff and relying on the strange setting to make it interesting, but the setting is so sparse it’s not working.  

When it finally gets back around to the characters I expect to be intrigued.  In fact, it did, a little, in this episode, and it was better than the first three.  However, I can’t in good conscience say something’s good if it waits until halfway through to deliver anything of interest.  I suppose if each episode is a little better than the previous, cumulatively it will have bested its own crap beginning.  

I’m going to end this one here, for length — I know it’s only got one episode.  I will be sending this and immediately starting the next episode, but the end-of-episode bit ran away with me.