So, on my post talking about “Happy Death Day 2 U”, malcolmthecynic recommended that I watch “Stein’s Gate” if I was interested in time loop stories. So, I went out and bought the original anime and concluding movie, and watched them. And what I’ll say about it first is that the anime is far more interesting for its description of how this sort of thing works instead of for its plot or how the time loop impacts its characters.
The first thing to address is this comment by malcolmthecynic on the show:
Japan often uses sudden, massive tonal shifts. It’s something frowned upon in American TV.
And the reason I mention it first is because … the comment seemed odd to me since I hadn’t notice any really huge or jarring tonal shift. I’m sure it’s there — the party to the invasion of gun wielding attacks that results in a critical death is probably an example — but it’s not something that stood out to me. Then again, I have watched a fair bit of anime and am a huge fan of JRPGs, so it’s probably just something that I’m used to (Persona 5, for example, does this where the team is having a celebration party at an expy of Disneyworld and watch Haru’s father die during that).
The overall plot of the show is this: a very eccentric scientist, Rintarou Okabe, is running a “lab” as a self-proclaimed mad scientist churning out inventions, and ends up discovering time travel. As part of testing it out, he ends up generating a world where a very bad event keeps happening, and so he keeps looping himself back in time to try to prevent it, and eventually discovers that the only way to do so is to undo all of the changes — many of which undid things that the people who undid them desperately wanted undone — that he did while testing the time machine … one of which, it turns out, will result in the death of someone else, forcing him to choose between the lives of the two people he cares most about.
What’s interesting about the time travel is that early on the show explains away any notion of a time travel paradox. Time travellers don’t actually change the past, but instead cause themselves to be shifted to another “World Line” where the changed events are the ones that actually happened. Thus, they never eliminate the timeline where they went back in time to change things, and so there’s no causal paradox. But what’s most interesting about this is the implication: time travellers never change time, but instead merely choose the World Line that they want to live in, that works out best for them or is the one they most like. Thus, time travellers can never actually “Save the World”, because the destroying world or totalitarian state world still exists and goes on as before, and in fact the people who the time traveller knows still have to go through everything that they go through in that World Line. It’s only the time traveller that doesn’t have to have those experiences and doesn’t have to see the people going through those things (unless the time traveller is a “Steiner” and remembers everything, but that’s another matter). But if someone dies in a World Line, the time traveller is not going to prevent it. All they are going to do is shift themselves to a different World Line where it didn’t happen to that person.
Unfortunately, the anime ends up ignoring that while still bringing it up every so often. The time traveller Suzuha asks Okabe to save her timeline from destruction multiple times, and yet when she returned to her time nothing could possibly have changed for her (unless she was the one shifted). So saving the world only saves it for a future Okabe, not for her, despite the drama being built around making things better for everyone. And even the deaths are portrayed more as him trying to prevent them rather than him simply choosing the World Line that makes him happiest. The anime, then, in its drama is relying on tropes that don’t actually apply to the version of time travel that it’s using. It would have been nice for Okabe to explicitly realize that he’s just picking the world he likes best and at least have a debate over that, not use “Save the world for all my friends!” as an unironic spur to get him back into the game. At the least Suzuha should have acknowledged that she wasn’t going to benefit from it, but the anime makes her, at least, certain that she, herself, would have a better future from the changes.
Another interesting thing that I thought of and the anime didn’t seem to was the fact that they were making minor changes that had strangely disproportionate effects. For example, everyone lampshades that it’s not possible that telling Luka’s mother to eat more veggies while pregnant would have her have a girl instead of a boy. They explain various odd changes as “The Butterfly Effect”, but what if that was false? What if, instead, a time traveller could never actually create a World Line with a time travel action, but only ended up being moved to a World Line — the “closest” one — where the event they changed had happened? This could explain all sorts of odd little changes without having to trace it back to the specific thing changed. It also could have explained the issues saving the lives because in the one case there was a cluster of World Lines where the character died in some way and so a radical — and completely unrelated — change would have been required to shift away from that cluster to make a World Line where the character lived the “closest” one, and for the other character finding the closest one required actually limiting the changes so that it didn’t hop to another World Line where the character died. The anime doesn’t really address this, but it does seem to work given what happens … at least most of the time.
But now, onto the anime itself. The anime suffers early on because none of the characters are particularly likeable. Okabe is an annoying nut. His friend Daru is a bit of pervert. Hikase comes across as … I want to say “Tsundere” in the way she reacts angrily to almost everyone at times — or, at least, Okabe and Daru — but then they act so badly towards her that her getting angry is almost always the right response, and when it isn’t it’s understandable that she would overreact. The only really likeable character is Mayuri … and she’s so relentlessly positive that it’s a credit to the work that we don’t end up disliking her, because that can get really annoying. As Cookies once commented — in old “What The?!?” comics — “Milk’s so perky, so bubbly … I’ve never seen anything like it. Sometimes I just want to … slug her REAL hard.” Mayuri could have easily been annoying, but they limit her prominence so she remains likeable, which is important given her role in the plot.
As for the others, they don’t really get developed very much and so it’s hard to relate to them at time. The two that stand out the most are Yugo and Moeka. Yugo is a semi-antagonist for most of the work, but the reveal of his big secret — and how those events shake out — pretty much comes out of left-field and is never really referenced again. As for Moeka, I liked the character but we don’t really learn much about her in the first part, which makes her big reveal and her breakdown in later episodes emotionally hollow: I like the character but didn’t really see all of that coming and so it really makes her seem a little nuts instead of someone with serious issues … which was probably the intent. Still, the ending she gets works well for her overall.
There’s also not much plot or characterization to hang your hat on. Okabe doesn’t really change much over the course of the anime, and in fact a part of it — mostly in the movie — is justifying his odd behaviour. He has a hard time with the time loop and its implications, but at the end isn’t really nicer or more stable than he was before, nor is he — at least by the end of the movie — inherently unstable either. The closest we have to a character arc is developing the relationship between him and Hikase, but that’s something that probably would have happened eventually without the time loop (by comparison, that was unlikely to happen for Bill Murray’s character in “Groundhog Day”). There is some development, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not enough to carry the work. And the most interesting plot detail — having to undo all of his friends’ desires to save a life — is touched on and given importance in that subplot but then is never really addressed again.
I also don’t really feel that the movie added anything to the series. Yes, we do get to find out more about Hikase, and she’s a character that I did come to like, but none of that adds that much and it somewhat contradicts the end of the anime by having Okabe and Hikase profess their feelings for each other there and then having them ignore each other for months to make that lack a plot point. Also, the actual time travel related crisis — Okabe fading out of existence — seems a bit muddled. The best I can unpack it is that in some way which World Line you feel you’re a part of determines whether or not you can be there, and Okabe’s experiences left him feeling that he wasn’t part of any, and so he’d fade out of at least one if not all of them. So Hikase goes back in time and kisses him to make him feel that this timeline is the one he belongs to. Kinda. What was funny about that, though, is that she does it to his teenage self and then sends him off to help Mayuri, and my reaction was that his teenage self was more likely to think “I wanna stay here and make out with the hot older woman some more!” [grin]. Anyway, I don’t regret watching it but don’t think the movie added much to things.
So, what’s most interesting about the anime is the unique time travel aspect, and unfortunately the anime muddles that up a bit for the purposes of drama. Still, it worked pretty well. The characters can be annoying but for the most part we don’t have to actually really like them or be able to relate to them to be able to relate to the issues that they’re facing. The idea of having to undo all of your friends’ dreams is meaningful even if all of the characters annoy you at some point. The plot, though a little screwy, moves enough to keep the interest up and not bore the viewer. It’s not the greatest anime ever, but it’s certainly more than serviceable. It was worth getting, I enjoyed watching it, and I’ll probably watch it again at some point.
Two final little odd notes:
1) Last night I finished the end of the first season of “Charmed”, which also features a time loop. It’s a interesting coincidence and also shows just how common that sort of thing is.
2) Carrying on from “Happy Death Day 2 U”, the aforementioned plot about undoing all of the dreams of the friends to save the character would have been a far better plot for that movie to use than what it did use. It’s interesting that it’s such a small plot in the anime but could indeed have carried a full movie.
Thoughts on “Vampire Princess Miyu”
December 6, 2018So, the other anime that I managed to finish was “Vampire Princess Miyu”. Like “Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok”, this is an anime series that I first saw parts of when I had access to an anime network on cable where I could watch episodes on demand, and found it interesting. So when I saw it in a local anime/manga store I decided to buy it and give it a try … and then didn’t watch it. This time I got through it and I have to say this about it:
It’s probably the most depressing show I’ve ever watched.
There will be spoilers for the show after this point, so be warned.
To be fair, what makes it depressing it also what made it interesting and work as a horror anime. The basic premise is that there are a number of evil creatures called Shinma out there who prey in some way on humans, usually by granting them some kind of desire that allows them to feed off of them and that leaves them usually dead or in fates worse than death when they are done with them. Miyu is a good Shinma and the Guardian, which means that it’s her job to defeat these Shinma and protect humanity. She arrives a new town with her allies Larva (a European Shinma that she defeated at some point) and a mascot-type creature called Shiina to do so, and ends up going to school and meeting some new friends Chisato, Hisae and Yukari. Another, more ambiguous Shinma named Reiha is also around and alternatively helps Miyu, with commentary from her talking doll Matsukaze who doesn’t care at all for Miyu. There are character threads and backgrounds for pretty much all of these characters in the anime, which will lead to an issue that I’ll get into in a little bit.
Why the show is generally depressing is that in order to build up the horror the show needs to gets us attached to the human victims, so that we feel the horror that they are being threatened with. However, the show goes a step further and has it be the case that things rarely, if ever, turn out well for those victims. One of the earliest episodes has the viewpoint character getting a beauty makeover by a Shinma who turns her into a mannequin. Her and all of the other women that the Shinma did that to remain buried as mannequins and it is implied that they are aware of what is going on as you can hear them whimpering in the dark, underground chamber where they are hidden. In fairness, that they did that was one of the more memorable things from when I watched the show the first time, but that sort of outcome is the rule, not the exception, which is one reason why the show is overall a pretty depressing one.
That they need to develop the plots and characters more to pull off the horror but also have a lot of backstory and character arcs means that the episodes tend to be a bit overstuffed, which means that the end resolutions often seem to be a bit rushed, and also make Miyu look weak. What usually happens is that Miyu confronts and reveals the Shinma, they banter a bit, it attacks, Miyu calls in Larva to attack it, and then she sends it back with her fire spell. There are relatively few cases where Miyu is the main combatant, which one would expect the Guardian to be. But after developing the horror and potentially things about the backstory, there really isn’t that much room to do anything more, which thus makes the confrontations a bit anti-climactic and disappointing.
All of this stuff, though, only adds to how depressing the series is because nothing turns out well throughout the entire series. Here’s where the big spoilers come it:
With Reiha’s arc, we eventually find out why she allies with Miyu even as she wants to kill her, and literally wants to kill her herself and not allow anyone else to do this. This is because Reiha’s father sacrificed his own life to protect the Guardian’s, who is Miyu. We also find out that the doll represents her dead father to her because her father told Reiha that it would protect her now that he couldn’t. We find this out something like five minutes before the doll is destroyed protecting her, which makes that a complete gut punch even taking into account that neither of the characters were all that sympathetic up to that point. And this is a major plot and character arc for the series.
But the worst is what happens to Miyu and her friends. Chisato gives her a friendship bracelet thing early in the series, and this represents their growing bond throughout the entire series. It’s even used to help defeat a Shinma later, with the claim being that its representation of friendship is what was responsible. The series also portrays Miyu making friends and fitting in as part of human society as character growth for her. Later, Chisato’s brother comes home and is revealed to be Shinma empowered by a cult or family of Shinma that are trying to kill Miyu. In defeating him — which she acknowledges will devastate Chisato because she cares for her brother so much — she ends up revealing herself to Hisae and Yukari, ending on a cliffhanger. At the start of the next episode Hisae has been killed mysteriously — which annoyed me because she was my favourite character in the series — and there is a debate over who did it. Yukari, then, is killed as well, and it is revealed that the murderer was Chisato, who in reality is a Shinma of the group that’s trying to kill Miyu, which she then proceeds to try to do. After a big confrontation, Miyu finally defeats Chisato, but the other two friends are dead and Chisato gets locked into a dream world — that the series established earlier that Miyu could create by having her lock some of the tortured humans into it, which places them into comas — where she is human and not a Shinma. Miyu and Larva then move on to the next town, alone again.
So, yeah, depressing.
Still, for all of those issues, it’s still fairly entertaining, if you’re in the mood for or can handle being depressed. Despite the fact that they killed off my favourite character, this is a series that I might watch again at some point.
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