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

Ransom Riggs – Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

The world has its outcasts. They often have unique talents, like creating fire out of nothing or transforming David Bowie’s music into worthwhile. This gives them power. Emma can burn you down, and Marilyn Manson has sold a lot of records. Power makes people to react to you in funny ways. Some hate you just because you’re weird, others because you’re a danger. Some follow you, either because they’re afraid or they think you’re some sort of badass God.

How the outcast manages their situation is a question for many authors to answer. After all, not all powers are the same. The hatred people have for Justin Bieber is vastly different than the hatred people have for Manson. People hated Manson because he ruined kids, told them God isn’t real and that they should remain weird. As for Justin Bieber, people hated him because girls loved him. How does this work I don’t know – maybe they were simply jealous. The X-Men series is supposed to be an exploration of this question. It’s about two factions with two different views on their position. Riggs’ novel features almost direct copies of these factions.

Now, the common platitude of “everything’s been done before!” will rear its head if you’re inexperienced in literature. That’s not how originality works. Copy a template, fine. Just fill it with different materials. For a while, Riggs is successful at that. His characters, in a way, live up to their ‘peculiar’ title. Their powers are small, often coming off as genetic defects. The levitating girl doesn’t control her levitation. She’s like a balloon and has to wear weighted shoes so she won’t slip off. The invisible person takes advantage of that, but it’s a radically different life when people can’t see you.

For a while, Riggs is interested by what being an outcast is like. Our hero is thrown into that position and everyone around him calls him mentally ill. They either feel sorry for him or reject him. He’s too confused in that position, so all he can do is shoot everyone including himself. His only solid connection is with his grandfather who’s an outcast like him. He can only connect to peculiar children like him.

There’s an interesting parable here to mental illness. Look at subreddits like Sanctioned Suicide. Many mentally ill people can only connect deeply to people in the same boat as theirs. Pro-ana communities develop their own culture and jargon. We’re so quick to judge them. X-Men was meant to parallel the struggles of LGBT people, but mental illness is different. Even with social acceptance, anorexia and suicidal thoughts and self-harm are weights people carry. Even with social acceptance, peculiar people are a minority. No amount of acceptance will give the floating girl the ability to control her power.

Too bad all these ideas are blended with a dull mix of genres. If Riggs wanted to write a multicolored story, hopping from genre to genre for fun then fine. It never feels like this. He never throws the story convincingly into the elements. There’s some conviction when he dabbles in horror. The spooky monster remains shrouded in mystery for a while, and even pushed aside for some pages. Focusing on the uncertainity of the spooky monster makes the horror aspect more convincing. Unknown things are pretty scary.

All mysteries dissolve when a character just spits out exposition. In fact, no information is actually discovered or figured out. People just hand over the answers to the questions when it’s time to advance the plot. It’s like a Game Master telling you the background and name and disposition of every NPC. The knowledge descending on your character makes it stronger, but also makes the game more boring.

The bad guys want to take over the world and subjugate humanity. That’s fine, since a lot of people in real life actually did that. Why, though? Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Caligula were real people. They had philosophies, personalities, and inner lives. They didn’t laugh maniacally when they ordered massacres but saw their vision of their bright future taking shape. The villains may view themselves as right, but we never get the philosophy behind their desire for power. The reason they want power isn’t because power is attractive, but because that makes them evil and useful antagonists.

Their disease infects all other characters, too. Very few characters have unique reactions or talk style. Some are silly quirks that can’t be taken seriously. The two rapper dudes are straight out of a horrible John Green novel. The natives of an island talk with broken English because that’s how people in the sticks must talk like. Others fare a little better, but Enoch’s cynicism is never elaborated upon.

He’s a great potential wasted. His power is to put actual hearts in material and make it kind-of alive. That’s the sort of power that leads one to view the value of life differently. He can bring back people from the dead but only halfway. He uses hearts as tools. Enoch often slides into a cynical, detached speech. Even among the peculiars he’s an outcast. Yet Riggs never expands on that. What is his philosophy? To which kids he relate to more, to which less? What kind of things did he do besides building a miniature army?

The protagonist is the worst insult to character development. Again, there are seeds of something worthwhile – a little cynicism, insecurity and pessimistic worldview that might lead to something. It plays instead like a side-quest in a cheap RPG game. Person meets dying man, dying man leaves some clues and person goes on to explore these clues to discover a bigger mystery. Video game protagonists are rarely well-written since it’s the player doing all the acting. Fifty pages or so into the novel, Jacob loses all personality and follows clues. He’s sometimes not sure whether he can do something, but the only drive for his decision is the reader’s desire to know more. There’s even a silly romance there that doesn’t pretend to be profound. Green mined the trope of weird girl loving a skinny dude who’s sure he’s ugly (despite skinny people being all over magazines), but Riggs merely puts a few make-out scenes. It’s too boring to be creeped out by the fact the girl is actually 80 years old or so.

The last pages of the book are a long-winded action scene. This is too sad to talk about, because it makes the book seem entirely worthless when it isn’t. The idea of a loop is quite brilliant. These kids may live long but they haven’t matured a bit, and here you have a chance to mediate about time. Riggs occasionally paints a pretty picture in his prose. The few paragraphs about the bombs and reset have enough to suffice for a short story. Why does he fill the last pages with chasing the bad guy, shooting people and a cliffhanger that relies on reading the rest of the trilogy?

Riggs’ prose is easy and pleasant enough. It’s fast, sometimes slides into introspection but never too much. That makes a decent story bearable. It’s not offensively boring, just kind of ‘there’. If Riggs did something wild with his ideas and failed, fine. He barely tries since it concludes in info dumps and shoot-outs. The photographs are actually real, which is cool but doesn’t add anything. Riggs intergates them by saying “here’s a photograph” and showing them. It’s like illustrations, only pictures instead. Maybe if Riggs tried to write a single short story surrounding them, he’ll have a safer but wider space to work his ideas.

It’s not a terrible book but not a great one, either. Maybe, as a distraction, it’s good enough. There are good ideas that may stick around and the prose is pleasant. Life is too short for distractions, though. If you like X-Men or stories about hidden strange worlds just beneath our own you might enjoy this. It’s too inoffensive for me to tell you to avoid, but also too unremarkable to offer it to anyone.

2 photographs out of 5

“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.