Warui Deshou Episode 4 Part 2 - Macross Frontier Spectacular: The Final!
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It’s the second and final part of Warui Deshou’s Macross Frontier Spectacular! In it, we dive deep into spoiler territory, discussing such burning questions as: Ranka or Sheryl? Can music really make a social impact in our own world? Would we watch Macross without the alien warfare? We also talk a good deal about the Macross “canon,” Kawamori’s view of humanity, the power of culture, Klan Klang and more. Also: email and twitter.
Time codes and more show notes after the jump!
Special thanks go to Jimmy Gnome, and normal, usual thanks go to Shadon. I had so much fun! I have deeply enjoyed working on this two-part episode and feel proud to celebrate Macross Frontier with all of you through it.
Time Codes
00:00:00 – Nyan Nyan
00:00:35 – Macross 82-99 “Miss Macross”
00:01:22 – Macross Frontier in-depth discussion. Spoilers alllll over the place.
01:37:57 – Toshiki Kadomatsu “Sea Line Rie”
01:38:32 – The Giant Beastcast is over on Giant Bomb Dot Com. It’s great!
01:39:57 – DEBIRUMAN
01:40:27 – Lynn Minmay “My Time to Be a Starrrrrrr”
01:41:28 – Yasunori Iwasaki “Kisei”
01:41:50 – Correspondence, which just means more in-depth, spoilery discussion
@TheSubtleDoctor - Not many surprising things happened this episode, so I’m going to be a bit more comprehensively reflective than usual here. Last week I lamented the fact that Scum’s Wish didn’t take the path to putting Akane and Hanabi on similar moral standing in order to challenge its audience. Well, this week the show is doing its level best to telegraph that it will get there eventually, though the side effects of the method it seems to have chosen will be drastically different than those of the one I suggested. Hanabi is being put through an emotional grinder that you feel will inevitably culminate in her becoming Akane-like or at least having a kind of moment of truth in which this is a live option...
@Josh_Dunham - Color is love. We saw that last episode, and we see it again this episode when Hanabi is on the swingset near her beloved Kanai-sensei. And while it’s not a unique or uncommon technique to use the contrast between color and greyscale to represent joy or emotional fulfillment, it works well here; visuals matching the narrative down to the very lines of dialog. Hana says, “He brings my world color,” and the world becomes colorful. But as we see with abstract shots of muddied paint, some of those colors are confusing, and even ugly...
@savevsjared - Meanwhile, back in the minds of our heroes, Hanabi’s reflection on her mother’s grief offers an important insight into Hanabi’s emotions and bears some discussion. It’s worth pointing out she blames her mother and the way her mother handles her divorce, not her father, for her bottling up of emotion as a child. She views her mother as “taking away her grief” and now sees Kanae’s love for Akane as a similar betrayal. Hanabi longs for an adult love, but she still has the emotional intelligence of a child. It’d be easy to say that as a teenager she’s splitting the difference between the two, but this would be disrespectful to actual mid and late teenagers. Of course, when the drama of a show largely rests on the lack of self awareness on the part of the principal cast, a bit of plot-mandated blindness isn’t out of place...
REVELATION!! The Ending of Slayers Is More Than You Bargained For!
by The Subtle Doctor
In some ways, I hate the start of a new anime season. This isn’t because I feel new anime is somehow inherently inferior; in fact, my feelings on this have nothing to do with the product itself. No, what bothers me is the community experiencing brand new anime only through distilled tweets or YouTube videos and then speaking authoritatively about that anime going forward. For example, let’s say the first episode of Exciting Anime X was exactly as bad as Critic A thought it would be. A then pens a piece definitively writing if off. Huge swaths of fans follow suit, despite the show being between seven and eight percent into its run. Opinion on the show proliferates over time and consensus calcifies into conventional wisdom, even though the people spreading the belief have no experience with the show.
I’m very much pointing a finger at myself here. For whatever reason, there are people out there who take seriously what I have to say about anime. Given that astonishing piece of information, I ought to take care with not only what I say but also how I say it. I’m not saying fans or critics aren’t free to drop shows that don’t appeal to them. Folks are totally within their rights to do that. However, those with influence should be mindful of the subjective nature of their own tastes and viewing experiences when making conclusive pronouncements about a show based only on one or two episodes.
All this is on my mind because I recently finished a show that reminded me that anime－no, that media－can still be truly surprising. Its ending helped me remember that I should give anime more rope and second chances. The show I’m talking about is The Slayers.
