Welcome to the NHK! (NHK ni Youkoso!)

Here it is, people. This is no hyperbole. NHK is the worst anime of all time. It is one of the worst pieces of media you can conjure. A reality show about the Kardashians must be better than this. Pathetic YouTube parodies are better than this. In order to make something worse than this, you’ll need to let Ian Watkins brag about his pedophilia in the Lostprophets album that was never made.

There is no correlation between artistic quality and morality, as Lostprophets have displayed. Yet, you have to wonder what kind of awful person would subject the world to this. Worse, what kind of person would make an anime whose purpose is to make fun of anime watchers? Imagine if your ordinary school bully made an anime. There is so much wrong that I want to rant about it, shoot up heroin and watch Texhnolyze. That one was also bad, but it looks like a better version of Digimon Tamers over this, and Digimon Tamers is already brilliant.

I’m not sure where to start with this mess, so let’s get with the art style. Art style is important. If not, you wouldn’t use a visual medium. Why, then, are the artists so unimaginative? Something makes me worry it’s on purpose, like those East Coast rappers who are so afraid of sounding ‘not real’ their beats barely have a drum. Everyone in this series is black haired and has no distinct facial features.

This may sound realistic, only it isn’t. People in real life actually look distinct. Even if you eschew wacky hairdos, your characters must not look like they came out of the assembly line. There are no odd touches to the hairstyle, different body structures, or an arrangement of facial features that stick out. In fact, the artists are so unimaginative that they can’t come up with a basic sexy design. Our main characters work on an eroge, and the design they come up with can barely touch the most obscure visual novels. Even when they could use anything in the artist’s arsenal – twintails split into 4, floating hair, purple lips – they still end up with a dull design. It’s worse than visual novels that have ‘same face, different hair syndrome’ because at least Da Capo’s girls have pretty hair.

Everyone in this show is also fit and quite hot, despite being hikkies. Satou spent days in his room doing nothing (literally nothing, he’s not aware of the existence of porn). He doesn’t cook for himself and drinks a lot of beer. If you expected an overweight dude who looks like George Martin, you’re bound for disappointment. Satou looks more like Brad Pitt in his Fight Club era with a shirt on and a less aggressive stare. If these guys opted for anything realistic, we would’ve seen the consequences of isolation on Satou’s body. Instead, he looks like a side-character from Free!.

As for the story itself, don’t expect any understanding of what pushes people to be hikkies. Don’t expect a deep, dynamic psychology that reacts to the environment and is an active agent in the story. Any comparisons to WataMote are null, since this is the complete opposite. Tomoko struggled. She was lonely but she had to act and do things. We saw her failures, saw her difficulty and it made it so dark. What Tomoko goes through is our every social awkwardness, only every day.

Satou doesn’t really have to struggle. In fact, he’s not much of a character at all. He has no desires, no life outside the story. He exists so others could pop at his door and force him to get help. It’s not much of a struggle if all you do is react to situations. Sure, it’s not enough to just be offered sex. You also have to go through the dilemma whether to say yes or no to that.

These are two different struggles. One man struggles with getting something, the other is being offered something and needs to accept it or reject it. The creators aren’t aware of the difference. They don’t know how to let a character drive a story, so they offer external conflicts he has to solve. The dilemma of whether to choose yes or no is hardly there, because the anime relies on events and not characters. If Satou chooses ‘no’, nothing actually happens. He doesn’t have a personality to move on from that ‘no’.

Satou, as a character, isn’t an exaggeration. He’s inconsistent. Despite spending years locked in his room, he doesn’t know anything about video games or internet porn or, well, anything. Keep in mind Satou isn’t an Unabomber-style hermit. Hikkies tend to have a hobby that keeps them in the house. Satou should’ve done something during all this time, should’ve gained some knowledge even if it’s only about non-canonical Star Wars planets. He’s completely ignorant of culture that it’s most likely he spent the entire time staring at a wall.

That’s not impossible, but shouldn’t such a person be affected with a major disorder? Shouldn’t that disorder affect every aspect of their life? Socially, Satou is perfectly fine. Whereas Tomoko struggles every second, Satou is relatively confident. The only time social weakness rears its head is when the creators need him to scream for comic effect. Oh look, a hikkie yelled bullshit and emberassed himself! That’s some high-class humor!

The anime isn’t really about the pains of being a shut-in. The conflict is solved in a few minutes around episode 23 – no psychology, no development. Suddenly there’s a problem, so Satou walks out and he’s no longer a hikkie. Rather, it’s about the joys of conformity, how the world is a beautiful, welcoming place and you all should stop watching perverted anime and get in line. That’s ironic, coming from a country where people ‘conformed’ and let the military run the Rape of Nanking and Unit 731.

The ‘highlight’, if you can call it that, is the anime’s treatment of suicide. The idea life may not be worth living crosses the mind of the creators for no more than 5 seconds. Except for a brief moment, the creators go hammer about how irrational it is. The people in question have their reasons, but it’s pushed aside using ‘irrationality. At the end of the arc, some dude goes hammer about how their suicide will harm others and so they should stop. What an original argument. All of the philosophy behind is being shattered to pieces the size of the atom. Too bad the logic that fuels it can also be used to coerce people into rape, but better shut up before the thought police come.

Darkness does exist in this anime, but it’s either skimmed over or played for laughs. Misaki’s and Yamazaki’s darker sides exist, but Misaki’s is barely allowed to surface. By the time it does, it reaches its expiration date and Misaki is the redemption. Her dark side never truly hurts Satou. The monologue that supposedly exposes her is to exaggerated, too comical to be a true confession. Like any other piece of darkness, it’s more funny and has zero insight.

Black comedy shouldn’t just have unpleasant topics. It should illuminate them. If you’re going to laugh about sensitive subjects, you need to do more than be funny. So WataMote put us in Tomoko’s shoes, dissecting her failures into little details, showing the absurdity and the pain. Even Borderlands takes violence seriously. Some of it is commentary on how lightly we take violence. By shocking us with how casually the characters treat violence, it gives us a mirror.

Yamazaki is a lonely dude who’s inept with women. You don’t see his failures, or the pain of rejection. You see him spit monologues about how awesome 2D girls are. It’s quirky, funny and makes you feel good about yourself that you’re not such a loser. Satou’s inner monologues aren’t unhinged enough to show a mental instability, but also not coherent enough to show deep thought behind them. It’s funny that he ‘hallucinates’ weird, Doby-like things. Perhaps the voice actor is to blame. Satou reacts mostly by screaming, but that’s once in a while. In general, he functions well enough.

When they fail, it’s always because they were too weird. The world is mostly benevolent, with the occasional schemer here and there. A few scenes comment on the isolation of the modern world, but it’s always implied the characters brought themselves to this eternal isolation. It’s such an optimistic view, a ‘pull yourself by the bootstraps’ crap people tell others because they think luck doesn’t exist. Characters rarely deal with failure that’s caused not necessarily because they’re to blame, but because that’s how the world works. Things just sometimes don’t work.

Based on Satou’s situation, he could’ve easily grabbed to Misaki and use her to increase her social skills. As a later character displays, in this world you can do anything if you only try. Said character starves from shutting himself in, so he crawls out and immediately finds a job. What a friendly world that is, where people walk to your door and offer to develop your social skills and where you can apply for any random job and be accepted.

is a ridiculously optimistic anime that refuses to acknowledge the world isn’t a happy happy joy joy place. Characters who feel bad are mocked or written as irrational morons. As we know, everyday other people walk to others’ doors and offer help. What? It didn’t happen to you? That’s odd. Perhaps this anime isn’t so realistic. Perhaps what makes something truly unrealistic is not things that cannot happen. Rather, it’s when the meaning underneath the symbols – in this case, the optimism – is completely detached from reality.

0.5 out of 5. I don’t come up with a unique phrase for this crap

“Perfect Illusion” – The Downfall of Lady Gaga

When Lady Gaga first broke, I heard decent but not unique Pop. Then the The Fame Monster and Born This Way came and suddenly, she was some sort of icon for outcasts. Her fanbase was called ‘monsters’. The myth was, Pop was a genre with zero originality and weirdness dominated by conformists. Lady Gaga brought a revolution and made Pop accessible for the nerds, goth kids, ugly people and so forth. If you were ever bullied in school or didn’t fit in, Lady Gaga was here to elevate you.

I never bought that. Sure, her music videos featured a lot of weird outfits. They were also always sexual outfits. Lady Gaga confirmed nicely to the ‘sexy woman’ imagery. No matter how weird an outfit was, it always provided people something sexy to jerk off to. She didn’t look weird or dress weird. Her music was even worse. It was as generic as Pop can get. Lady Gaga has a nice, smooth voice with no real personality. She sang about sex, but so did everyone else. All her teasing and tough girl posturing are hardly any different than what Rihanna or Katy Perry did.

Lady Gaga isn’t just unconvincing because beneath lyrics of ‘be yourself’, she’s as conformist as you can get. Her image is misguided. She took desirable traits – strength, beauty, dancing – and wrote songs about them. What defines outcasts are undesirable traits – vulnerability, weirdness, perversion, anger, intellectualism. ‘Vulnerability’ is a key trait. Vulnerability is undesirable for evolutionary reasons. A vulnerable individuals is a burden on the pack, and we learn to hide our pain and weaknesses so we won’t get cast out of the tribe.

Artists who did sang for outcasts, or at least had such a fanbase were proud of this. Compare her to Marilyn Manson who also predicted his fame in Antichrist Superstar. His stomping anthem, “The Beautiful People”, is hateful, angry and a cry of distress. He sang from a position of weakness, of being ugly and undesired. His whole image is about that. His look is, on purpose, disfigured and often androgynous. While Gaga sang about the virtue of sex, Manson mocked us with “User Friendly” and “Slutgarden”. Manson also had a raspy, slightly mechanical voice so that every song he sang would sound odd. The newbie that is Melanie is another great example. Song like “Cry Baby”, “Dollhouse” and “Pity Party” take all these undesirable qualities and bring them to the surface. When Martinez makes strength anthems, she takes pride in admitting how vulnerable she is. Lady Gaga never does it. She’s everything we expect from a Pop star – in love with guys, perhaps girls, having a lot of sex and dancing at parties.

Imagine if the excellent “Government Hooker” was performed by Manson or Tove Lo, artists with a better sense of darkness than she. Songs like that hinted that perhaps there was a weirdo there waiting to come out. There is aggression flowing through that song, chopped vocals and a sense of dread that the sex isn’t all positive.

The new song is ironically titled “Pefect Illusion”. It describes Gaga perfectly. All my suspicions about her were confirmed. She got tired of posturing like a party girl, pretending that drinking and sex is new. So now she imitates Sia. Sia was already a pale imitation of Lady Gaga, singing with ultra seriousness, showing off her voice without a hint of emotion (“Chandeliar” isn’t about alcoholism but about Sia’s ‘awesome’ voice).

Lady Gaga looks back on the disco songs of heartbreak and triumph. She takes the sound and themes with none of the fun. The song barely has a melody or a chorus. The hook is a repetition of “It wasn’t love/it was a perfect illusion” and behind it only a banging drum. If this sounds minimalist, it’s not on purpose. You’re supposed to dance to that dull drum. Gaga sings with technical finesse, pointing out that she’s, in fact, not that hurt at all. Heartbreak may have been tough, but she can still try to impress the judges at American Idol.

Truth is, even if she brought actual pain to the song it wouldn’t be anything original. A little after Gaga came Lana Del Rey, who was sexier, more vulnerable and more dangerous. She was also a party girl, but she stared straight at the dark side of it too. If “Perfect Illusion” was the comedown from her image, she’ll just be running against Lana. That’s a race she can’t win, since Lana has a concept she develops and plays with. Lady Gaga has anthems of strengths and seriousness, like any other Pop star.

In the past, Lady Gaga at least tries to be weird. It was easy to see through, but there was effort. “Bad Romance” had scat singing. “Government Hooker” has already been mentioned and it’s quite excellent. She took influence from Latin music on “Americano” and other songs – “LoveGame” and “G.U.Y.” were unbashedly about sex. It wasn’t subversive, but it wanted to be and if you’re unfamiliar with Pop music it is attention grabbing. “Perfect Illusion” is a regression to “Just Dance”, a song so unimaginative that it becomes memorable because of that. Remember, that song had the lyrics of “Just dance, gonna be okay, dodododododo”. I love songs about dancing, but they need to be passionate about dancing.

To her defense, it’s better than her competition. If Lady Gaga tries to amaze me with her voice, she does a decent enough job. There is vulnerability in that song that’s startling and more naked than Sia. She doesn’t hide the weak lyrics. Hearing her bellow out “I can still feel blow” sounds like she’s dying to be over it. Although her singing is triumphant, there’s something very noisy about it too. Some said the song is about a recent break-up, which wouldn’t surprise me. It’s generic, derivative and nothing original but Gaga occasionally sound like she’s trying to heal herself with singing. Maybe that’s why it’s so original. It’s a vehicle for Lady Gaga to vent. At least she beats the horrifying Sia in her own game.

Poul Anderson – For Love and Glory

Some think fun adventures and depth don’t go together. That’s a silly thing to think. Nothing in the adventure structure prevents it from showing us new ideas and make us look at the world in a different way. Adventures are, after all, tend to be an intense series of events that highly influence the character. This novel is a good enough example of such an adventure, but it’s the only good thing about it.

Anderson has some interesting ideas. His Created World feels like something that needs more novels written about. Inventions don’t exist just for convenience, but their effects are apparent. Life can be extended for almost eternity, yet a human can’t contain all these memories. It also doesn’t stop the gap in perspectives. Those who were born when the invention first kicked in got a different outlook and a different culture to draw on.

Anderson also takes the Multiple Alien Civilization to an interesting direction. He can’t come up with interesting organisms (They are basically Argonians and Khajits, from Elder Scrolls) but the behavior is. There’s a stab at racism here. Authors often use races to represent ideas. There is a race of strong, a race of stealthy, a race of intelligent and so on.

Anderson acknowledges that, unless a race has a hive mind the effect of intelligence will result in individuality. His approach is like the Elder Scrolls. A rule may apply generally, but there will be plenty who will deviate from the stereotype. He also creates a barrier between the races. Two species are too different in mindset to ever form a close relationship.

Such ideas and others rear their head, but they tend to go back down. For Love and Glory is a Foundation novel without Asimov’s spare prose and with a hefty dose of The Power of Love.

I wonder if Anderson also avoided sexuality in his early books, like Asimov. We get here the excitement of the discovery. Sex is fantastic, and it’s always around. Nothing can stop it. No adventure is too intense to be put on-hold for a romance.

Unlike Asimov, Anderson’s view of sexuality is closer to reality. The people who will fall in love and have crazy sex with be the beautiful and skilled. They will not be social outcasts and iconoclasts who are stuck on their hobbies. They will be low-fat adventurers and women of royal birth.

It never occurs to Anderson that the Beautiful People are just another elite. Money is great when you have it but it sucks when you don’t. The same goes for sex. It’s harder to imagine an alternative to sex, though. Currency is something human came up with, but sexuality was imposed on us. You can’t get away from sexuality.

That’s why I see no one questioning the promise that we will all get a hot women (or men) in the end. No one dares to acknowledge the existance of the unattractive. The only time we talk about them is as People We Will Never Have Sex With. In sex talks with guys, they talked about these girls like they’re low-quality products in a shop. They never thought that they are just like them, and that being in such a position isn’t fun.

Anderson halfway acknowledges the reality of the ugly people, but the result is insulting. Esker is what you’d expect from a social outcast. He fits nowhere. He’s ugly. He’s also very good at his field and that’s all he has. He’s pretty unpleasant, which is the result of being constantly spat out by society.

Despite all his rage he’s a rat in a cage, and Anderson is fine with that. He never stops to show some empathy for the poor thing. He appears once in a while and we’re invited to be disgusted by him, just like Lissa and Torben are. I couldn’t be disgusted. I saw in him what I am and what many people are. It’s the disgust that Anderson shows for Esker that makes him act that way in the first place. You can extract a meta novel out of this. Esker is mad at the God who created him and then scoffs at him. The result is a ‘metaphysical rebellion’ and, if we get a film adaptation a soundtrack full of Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson.

There’s also descriptive prose that tries to be unique but just ends up as gibberish. Exact descriptions of machinary are boring. Novels are not a visual medium and the writing shouldn’t try to do what film does better. Anderson understands that, but his descriptions are too abstract.

Authors should describe outer space with such wonder. There is no other way to talk about a ball of gas with beautiful rings surrounding it, just hanging there. The description often slip from expressing wonder to abstract word salad. It often hits scenes whose descriptions are supposed to be precise. There is a collision of ships in this novel, only the word ‘collision’ doesn’t appear. The purpose of langauge is not to obscure the event. If you’re not going to use the exact word, use words that imply and make us feel it. Anderson just skips the collision.

These problems are not a result of the novel’s background. It’s composed of fragments, some which were supposed to be a part of a Shared Universe project. The story is fragmented, but plenty of authors write fine fragmented stories. Good writing will take a fragmented structure and let the story come out of it. Anderson’s ambition for a literary adventure are appreciated, but the result is either incoherent or insulting. The few interesting ideas make me want to see what else he has, and hope this is just the product of an old man who’s past his prime.

2 alien civilizations out of 5