Here I shall finish what I began — namely, the listing of things that might’ve made my cadre of moments, but did not, for whatever reason. And then I shall rest, satisfied in my yearly contribution to the grand ambitions of Master CCY (or is it Master Canon these days?).
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou
Somehow I can't call YKK out on its anthropocentrism.
YKK is, in a manner of speaking, Aria at the end of the world. It isn’t some grand and glorious apocalypse — there are simply less people than there used to be, and though humanity lingers on, who knows how much longer it’ll be around? Otou-san explains:
What’s pervasive in your mind throughout YKK is an almost-overwhelming sense of melancholy, of sad nostalgia. The earth itself seems to long for the glory days of humanity, even as it’s in the last phase of reclaiming itself from them. As 2DT mentions [here], it seems very Japanese to quietly accept the end of the world like this; after all, we don’t see what anyone’s doing elsewhere on earth, but something in YKK does give the impression that this is… just how it is. After all, what can you do? Nothing. It’s over. This is the twilight of humanity, and I only hope that we go with such grace and poise. [Otou-san, "Twelve Thingies: A whimper, not a bang"]
In one sense, humanity is charged with dying well. But in another, it needn’t concern itself too much with death, as it has produced successors — humanoid robots, one of whom is the story’s central character. Are they effectively successors, or are they a plot convenience, allowing us to witness longer periods of time in more consistent settings than might have been practical with a human narrator? I’m not sure it matters, as YKK makes the end of the world — or, because the world will certainly carry on without us, the end of the reign of humanity — seem like an okay thing at any rate. We have to wonder if we’d be better off if there were fewer of us.
I can’t really specify a single moment of note here, as YKK is too…fluid, maybe. It feels more than anything like a coherent and consistent whole. And that is by no means a bad thing.
Clannad ~After Story~
I stand by my final verdict on Clannad’s second season (mostly). Your mileage may vary, obviously, but I found the ending downright annoying — it made the whole thing feel disjointed. But still, I have to give it some credit for a few great moments.
All conflict should be resolved like this.
I liked the entire Sunohara arc, but the ending was especially good. I mean specifically the part where Tomoya and Sunohara lay everything out on the table while punching the hell out of each other, then laugh about it the next day. This kind of resolution — total honesty, total retribution, total forgiveness — strikes me as very brotherly. And that’s how I wanted to see the two, ultimately. I couldn’t help feeling a little let down when Sunohara barely showed up again after the graduation.
Don't hesitate too long, Tomoya; you only have 22 minutes.
And how about that Kyou Chapter OVA? This and the Tomoyo OVA were both executed brilliantly, I think, especially considering the constraints of a 22-minute episode. And anyway, a focus on Kyou is pretty much an instant win.
Haruhi 2009
Kyon-kun, denwa~
I really enjoyed Endless Eight. Yes, honestly.
Is it because so many people didn’t? Maybe, insofar as E8 gave us all something to talk about, and I can’t fault it for that. Or maybe it’s because E8 was a pretentious move on KyoAni’s part. I can’t deny my admiration for the size, shape, and luster of the balls of whomever greenlighted the thing, and I certainly enjoy it as an experiment in episodic story structure. I’ll admit that I, too, felt the tedium during those uneventful eight weeks, but I suspect it’s the sort of thing that’s best enjoyed in retrospect. I realize that’s arguably more a fault than a virtue, but what can I say? One of my favorite novels is Ulysses.
And you have to admit that the ending is pretty satisfying.
At that, I can now call it a year. Don’t hesitate to check out other bloggers who have paid homage to the highest and lowest points of 2009 — including Otou-san, Schneider, doctordazza, Gargron, Scamp, zaon47, kevo, rabbitpoets, drmchsr0, ghostlightning, 53RG10, Vii, Seinime, Eternal, FuyuMaiden, Eater-of-All, Shinmaru, calaggie, yumeka, Nazarielle, Cuchlann, Jinx, Janette, stringedsonata, animewriter, prototype27, and probably others.
Compared to waiting for Taiga to finally be honest, Lawrence to talk some sense into Horo, or the guys to accept themselves as customers at Eve no Jikan, I found the conclusion of Endless Eight to be amazingly anticlimactic. But then you’re right, here we are talking about it, right on cue. I sure as hell didn’t buy it, though. If KyoAni can’t come up with something better than that and K-On, then I won’t give them anymore of my time or money. Then again, people also ate up Bakemonogatari’s pretentious editing and direction, and bought it like they were compelled by the voice of Horo or something. I guess I’m just getting old…
I won’t rank the end of E8 among my favorite climaxes, no. And I realize that the whole drawn-out ordeal can take the edge off the ending, to some degree (though I think it can do the opposite, too — it depends). I was probably just ready for some pretense when KyoAni delivered E8.
It must be said, though, that Bakemonogatari (which I liked well enough, I guess) got on my nerves at times. It makes me wonder about the nature of “pretense” as such. Maybe a pretentious post about pretense is in order.
The conceit in YKK is how there isn’t a compromise between extinction and robot succession. Such advanced mechanization could be preceded by ‘augumented’ humanity. It would actually create the opposite problem: there would be less need for new births because the old (and particularly the mature and powerful) will be holding on for far longer to their holdings. There will be far less actual succession — the next generation will take longer (if at all) to take control of franchises, holdings, property, and other vestiges of power.
Youth and vitality may no longer be sought after, since it can by synthesized by the old. There are repercussions for this, and perhaps it becomes more difficult to live so long and let live those one can’t stand.
YKK gave humanity some kind of dignified exit, a slow fade which is somehow attractive in a morbid way.
But, alas, how can accepting a morbid fate ever be ‘dignified’? If there were no humans left to perceive it, is it really ‘dignified’? After all, dignity is just a concept.
I’d rather be scrappy, and try to stay alive, than be calm and accept our fate. Isn’t that the essence of life? It’s a struggle. And when you give in, it ends, regardless of weather you have died or not. In a sense, to die without struggling against your fate is the least ‘dignified’ way to die.
But that’s just me.
Well, the humans in YKK aren’t exactly marching off into the ocean. They’re doing the best they can with what they have — that’s probably the gist of a good death. YKK doesn’t suggest that accepting death means giving up on life.
Also, in a manner of speaking, death is the essence of life. By now, philosophers have pretty much rendered suspect every system of metaphysics ever, but there is one absolute, one transcendental signified that brackets life and makes it anything at all — death. On some level, life is only definable as life as we know it relative to death.
@ghostlightning — I also thought it was strange that YKK didn’t present any trans-humans/post-humans/whatever we want to call them. But then, maybe that’s where the androids come from in the first place…damn, now I feel like combing the thing for shreds of evidence of that.
Well, I can’t really tell, as I have not yet read YKK. Would you recommend it?
Absolutely, if you really like slice of life and are in the mood for melancholy.
and secondly, we are alive. We must be alive to pass judgement. If we cease to exist, how can we say that death is the only “transcendental signified that brackets life”? If we take the rationalist approach, that is, to ignore the deaths of other people, we cannot say it is a defining factor, since we have never experienced non-existence and death. It is only the human mind that defines through contrast, and that surely is not active when dead. Therefore, death is not the ultimate definition of life.
Meaning-production is something that takes place only in the human mind — I’m with you there. What I’m saying is that death as a concept, a thing of the mind (and, indeed, perhaps our concept of death is incomplete or flawed if we haven’t experienced it), gives meaning to life as a concept. I’m not speaking in purely literal, physical terms — that is, I’m not saying that the physical reality of death gives meaning to the physical reality of life independent of human beings. These things don’t happen outside the mind.
Now, here’s the thing. Let’s say humans all died out. At that point all human-supplied meaning would cease to be, of course. But YKK has its androids with minds modeled after the human example, minds that seem to make meaning as ours do. The end of humanity would mean something to them — perhaps something we can’t anticipate from our limited point of view, but it would mean something nonetheless. It’s a setting set up to allow humans to die without meaning itself dying along with them.
So it’s kinda like “they aren’t gone as long as you remember you”
And to say that (or rather, imply, as you are doing) death is the only thing that defines life… isn’t that a bit deterministic? To say that life has no meaning, outside of death. I mean, life is a self-defined experience. It contains more than enough content to qualify itself. Listening to Feynman play the bongos. Winning a statewide tournament. Attending a school festival with a childhood friend (last one never happened to me, unfortunately)… Is that not enough to give life meaning by itself?
In saying that death gives meaning to life, I wasn’t really clear — what I mean to say is that death allows life to mean at all. The “actual” meaning would come from the kinds of things you list, but it wouldn’t be able to attach to life as it does without death putting life into perspective. Now I won’t say this still isn’t a little deterministic, and anyway, what I’m doing is stretching Derrida’s work with the presence/absence binary perhaps a bit thin. But it does seem roughly consistent with the preoccupation we see in some Japanese stories with dying a good death, or the knowledge of death allowing a character to enjoy life.
Wasn’t he that French guy who wrote “Of Grammatology”? I never read any of his works, unfortunately.
And I still don’t understand your views very clearly. Care to elaborate?
Hmm…I didn’t bring Of Grammatology home with me for the winter break, but I’ll try to explain a little, assuming I can remember enough.
Derrida attacks the presence/absence binary on the basis of the inadequacy of presence alone. His example in “That Dangerous Supplement” is from Rousseau, who professed in his work two things that Derrida picks out as similar: a fixation on his foster mother and a preference for speech as more true to the speaker’s intentions than writing. In the former case, despite living with his foster mother and seeing her daily, Rousseau still felt the need to undertake rituals, of a sort, to feel close to her — he’d kiss the ground she walked on, for example. Her physical presence did not diminish the absence of her that Rousseau perceived; in effect, he supplemented presence with absence, and his doing so gave presence perspective. Rousseau couldn’t conceive of one without the other. In the latter case, Rousseau’s stated distrust of writing doesn’t really hold up in his work. He seems to look at speech through writing, and writing becomes a presence in itself, one that reveals that speech, too, has inadequacies.
The title “That Dangerous Supplement” refers to masturbation, actually. But that part of the chapter is pretty nuanced, and I’d need the book to say much about it.
Basically what I’m saying here is that death, as the absence to life’s presence, supplements life, makes it finite, brackets it within the realm of conception — and, once life is conceivable, our minds can work with it, can attach meaning to it. Life would still be something minus death — it’d be the supplement to pre-existence, I’d imagine. All this relies on the Saussurean idea that we define things based on their relationships to other things.
Geh, now I want to do a balls-to-the-wall Derrida post. Maybe I will when I get back out to school, and that will make a lot more sense than what I’m pulling out of memory here.
But would this apply even when referring to something as abstract as life and death?
I’d think life and death are more concrete than absence and presence. The former are, at least in some capacity, functions of the physical universe; the latter depend in large part on how things are perceived, particularly in the examples Derrida gives. If anything we might run into problems insofar as life and death are less subjective, but it all depends on how we define the terms we’re using.
Robots in a post-human world will remember love.
Another mystery in YKK is the complete absence of cloning. Sythesizing humans will be a robot pastime, with the humans serving them as entertainment, in a cultural fashion.
Otherwise, we’d be too inefficient.
Would they?
Totally
Would They? O.o
Well, I tend to look at Alpha and the other robots in YKK more as the observers of the human race’s decline rather than their successors. I finished reading the YKK manga a few years ago so my recollection might be a bit fuzzy, but my impression was that while the robots don’t appear to age physically it was sort of implied that they aren’t immortal because we see that alpha can be damaged. Also, the fact that the owner gave Alpha a camera seems to suggest that eventually even her robot mind will lose data, so important memories must be preserved.
I strongly disagree with your final verdict of Clannad, but that’s discussion for another time. I think the real reason why the Kyuu and Tomoyo OAVs work so well is because of the time constraints placed on them forced the writers to get to the heart of the matter instead of wasting time on nonessential plot elements.
http://animewriter.wordpress.com/2009/08/05/clannad-after-story-episode-25-kyous-special-review-the-power-love-holds-over-us-and-the-cost-of-lies-500th-post/
http://animewriter.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/clannad-24-review-a-walk-down-the-road-not-traveled/
I like to pretend that clannad’s end was all a delusional fantasy conjured by Tomoya from Lack of oxygen. It makes so much more sense that way
I think one has to look at Clannad as a fairy tale or myth in the mold of Big Fish. Since Clannad AS episode 24 ends with Tomoya telling their story to Ushio and Fuko under the trees I look at the whole series like I’m maybe Ushio’s granddaughter listening to my grandmother telling me a story under the trees. This sort of storytelling dynamic was used in Nadia, the Secret of Blue Water where the series begins with an old woman telling us a secret, and we come to find out in the last episode that we were hearing the story from Marie who was five years old at the time of the adventure telling us her impressions of the adventure as a very old lady. For people who didn’t like the ending of Clannad I wonder if we were watching the same series, Clannad was infused with the idea of magic and myth from the very earliest episodes.
In the first episode we see Nagisa bathed in light talking about the place where wishes come true, and by the second and third episodes we see Tomoya being called drawn/called by the dream world. Within a few additional episodes we get linkage between the dream world and Nagisa’s play, and we also find out about the legends of the orbs of light. So, I feel that those who liked Clannad but hated the ending conveniently ignored a large part of the series setup, they saw only the story and ignored the myth. Clannad is a story where you need to see with the heart instead of analysing with the logical brain. Myths tend to be stories about the hero’s journey’s and the hero’s submission to fate/destiny where he becomes part of/or agent to the greater forces surrounding the world that most are unable/or unwilling to see. If one looks at Clannad as a fairy tale or myth then the story makes perfect sense, it began with once upon a time, and ended with they lived happily ever after, storytelling at its finest.
http://animewriter.wordpress.com/2009/12/25/12-moments-in-anime-2009-12-tell-them-stories-clannad-a-triumph-of-storytelling/
And that’s exactly where its weakness lies. For a story so Human, this sort of ‘Deus ex Machina’ Doesn’t quite fit. It just broke the realism of the story-telling.
My problem with Clannad isn’t the magic, which indeed was there from the beginning (of the first season, even). It’s that the time travel conceit doesn’t feel consistent with the rest of the show — even with the rest of the show’s magic. As I see it, there are two reasons for this. Firstly, Clannad is so heavy on low mimetic tragic elements for so long that the ending feels like a bait and switch. I’m not saying Tomoya would’ve had to wallow in his misery and die or anything — if they’d positioned Nagisa’s death (or Ushio’s death, or both) as a major tragic climax, Tomoya could’ve ended up relatively okay and the thing still would’ve been tragedy. Hell, I’m not even saying it had to be tragedy per se — I think the core of my problem is that Clannad’s tragic elements are low mimetic — in other words, involving regular people doing everyday things — and the ending is mythic, and there isn’t exactly a smooth transition between the two. Which brings me to my second complaint: the ending’s time travel panacea isn’t consistent with the magic we see all along. I always figured Clannad’s magic lived beneath the ordinary — it’s a literal realization of the “magic” of day-to-day life. Tomoya earns those lights by forming connections with people, or repairing connections that need repairing. The lights themselves don’t make life a little better for Tomoya’s friends; he does, and the lights are born from his efforts. I wasn’t really prepared to accept the big reset — in other words, the direct intervention of magic — when nearly every major plot resolution preceding it was an immediate result of human struggle and triumph, and magic itself or magic-as-such had thus far been fairly passive (even in Fuuko’s case, really; the magic that kept her going was reliant on people, if I remember correctly).
But, so we’re clear, I’m not trying to invalidate your reading of Clannad; I’m just explaining why it isn’t mine. A lot of people got more out of it than I did, and in a way I wish I’d been able to see in the show what they saw.
I have to disagree with you here in particular, though, insofar as logic/emotion is a problematic binary. We can’t really separate the two.
Anyway, YKK — I’m with you in that the camera implies, in a way, that Alpha’s mind doesn’t record the minutiae of experience perfectly. That is, the camera is the “addon” she needs to accomplish that. I don’t think that her being susceptible to injury means her lifespan isn’t effectively indefinite — she’ll just need routine maintenance and replacement parts, I suppose, and I’m inclined to think that, given how the camera works, data transfer would be possible when her hard drive or brain or whatever we want to call it starts to wear out. It would indeed be problematic if none of the androids are trained in android-craft, I suppose.
My question is, once Alpha has seen the end of humankind, and has decided what it means, will she decide that she, too, would like to die eventually? And if her death is voluntary, surely it wouldn’t mean the same thing for her that it meant for her human makers.
My, that was a really verbose version of my thoughts on the matter.
Well, you know — that’s sort of my specialty :p
I agree with you that the transition from the small human magic that Nagisa & Tomoya had been performing throughout the whole series to the mythic ending is quite jarring. But, at the end of my review of episode 22 I had speculated on the possibility of another theory other than the “big reset” or “the omega point” causing the happy ending. Just consider for a moment that the second Nagisa died Tomoya activated those orbs of lights, and Tomoya’s mind entered a higher state of consciousness, and all the pain and torment from the very moment of Nagisa death to the moment of Ushio’s death only occurred inside his mind. Also, consider the possibility that when Tomoya acknowledged/re-validated his love for Nagisa, even after all the pain and sadness, he was able to fully discharge the magic of the orbs paying back Akio’s and Nagisa’s debt to the city/land, and Nagisa never really died in the “real world” but Tomoya still feels that those “illusionary” five years really occurred to him.
Aren’t you just looking at it in a roundabout fashion, in order to construct a convenient ending? Occam’s Razor, people!
Sure, I can see that. The show seems to indicate that Tomoya retains at least some memory of the ordeal, anyway. If everything that was “erased” by the end took place only in Tomoya’s mind, though, I have to wonder why. What did he gain from it all? For one thing, I suppose we could say that he learned what kind of person he might be when faced with hard times, and his being able to rectify that in illusion-space saved his family trouble later on.
My problem, though, is purely one of narrative structure. I’m not hung up on Tomoya’s journey; I’m hung up on the journey of viewing through which the show carried me in a way I found ultimately disagreeable. The caveat here is that I really did enjoy most of the show for what it was; I don’t outright dislike the whole thing because I’m dissatisfied with the ending.