Comic Girls is Frustrating

Even though I’ve been watching anime in some way, shape, or form for 20 years now,
I never really considered myself a hardcore anime fan until around 2016. This was the year of
my first convention, the first time I made any updates to my profile on MAL, and the year I first
made a concerted effort to branch out of my shonen comfort zone. Even still, there was one
corner of anime I was avoiding, not out of any malicious intent, but because I didn’t see any
appeal in it: the slice of life genre.

But in 2017, I dipped my toe in that water with Recovery of an MMO Junkie. And I loved it so
much, I came back in Winter 2018 to watch A Place Further than the Universe and
Skilled Teaser Takagi-san, and they were great, too. But a little voice in the back of my head
kept saying, “That’s not really slice of life. MMO Junkie and Takagi-san are romantic comedies
and Universe is an adventure story.” And while it might be just semantics, I conceded the
point and let the voice in my head win. And so in Spring 2018, I started watching two new
slice of life shows: Sanrio Boys and Comic Girls.

We'll talk about this another time, don't worry. I have opinions!

Comic Girls follows the life of rookie manga artist Moeta Kaoruko, more commonly known by
her pen name Kaos. After having her most recent pitch rejected, her editor sends her to live at
a dorm for aspiring manga artists like herself. This way, she could observe their techniques
and hone her skills in a constructive environment. Once she arrives at the dorm, she meets
the rest of our main cast. First there is Koyume, an energetic shojo romance artist who
struggles drawing male characters. Then we have Ruki, the team mom who originally wanted
to draw a manga about animals aimed at young children, only to be talked into drawing hentai
by her editor. And finally, we have best girl Tsubasa, who draws shonen action manga whil
cosplaying as her characters.

Comic Girls is a comedy, first and foremost. The characters are quirky and naturally end up
in humorous situations as a result of their personalities rather than crazy outside
circumstances. All of the jokes are perfectly set up with music cues and visual gags,
and the shows penchant for using comic book panels as reaction shots is a cute touch.
Add in a great sense of comedic timing and some good animation, and you have a recipe for
one of the funniest anime I have seen in quite a while. So why can’t I bring myself to like it?

From left to right: Tsubasa, Koyume (in the back), Kaos (in the front), Ruki

At the end of the day, a show like Comic Girls, which is built around character-based humor,
lives and dies on the strength of its character writing. And for the most part, it does very well
in this regard. Koyume is just the perfect blend of peppy and naive to be cute and not
annoying. Ruki being flustered easily when talking about her manga while still acting as a
nurturing mentor is a delicate balance that looks effortless. And everything Tsubasa does is
solid gold, especially when we learn more about her family in later episodes.

But then we have Kaos. Our protagonist. The character we will be spending the majority of
our time with. And she sucks. I can’t stand her. She’s not as good at making manga as
everyone else. Fine, I can accept that. But when we see her pitch future concepts to her
editor, they are so bad it stretches credulity. Like, this isn’t just a matter of her art or writing
not being quite good enough for publication, her pitches look like she threw something
together in five minutes without really thinking the concept through. After the third or fourth
time we see her break down crying over some basic constructive criticism, she stops being
sympathetic. Also, I get that she has low self confidence and all, but did she really not think to
pitch her concepts to anybody else? None of the other girls share an editor with Kaos, so it
doesn’t seem crazy for her to pitch something to one of their editors. But no, she just gives up
and moves on, which tells me that she doesn’t actually believe in any of the projects she is
starting.

But hey, that might be annoying, but at least it’s somewhat realistic. You could take
everything I said above and make it into a likeable character with a few tweaks. But then we
get to her actual personality. Kaos has no self confidence and frequently bad mouths herself.
She puts her friends on a pedestal and refuses to believe that she could reach their level of
talent. In other words, she refuses to learn. You know, the whole point of moving to this dorm
in the first place? She just sees how much farther ahead everyone else is, says “I’ll never be
that good”, and just goes back to her half-assed manuscripts that are gonna get rejected and
thrown away with no further attempts at revision. Then the anime tries to tell me how great
she is because she “never gives up”? She’s given up like a hundred times and is just going
through the motions at this point!

Now, to the show’s credit, we do eventually have scenes of Kaos actively learning from other
characters and her skills do eventually improve. It’s rushed near the end of the series and is
ultimately too little too late in my opinion, but it IS there. Regardless, all this baggage Kaos is
carrying is NOTHING compared to my biggest problem with her: she’s a pervert.

Yeah, I'm calling you out, Kaos.

Perverted characters are nothing new to anime, and they’re almost never funny. It takes
some impressive writing gymnastics to make a character who is partly defined by sexually
harassing people into a likeable character, and Kaos is not likeable at all. She’s frequently
ogling the other girls and making inappropriate comments about them. And look, I’m no prude
or anything. If she had a thing for looking at hentai or imagining her friends in sexual positions,
I could probably overlook it.  People are, generally speaking, hardwired to think about sex.
But Kaos isn’t just thinking about it. She is actively harassing her friends. Just because none
of them call her out on it doesn’t make it okay. How am I supposed to find a character like that
likeable?

That's not something you say when two of your best friends are having a moment!

I keep coming back to that word, don’t I? “Likeable.” A character doesn’t need to be likeabl to
be a good character, we all know that. But a protagonist is a different story. Even when you’re
writing a villain protagonist, it usually helps to make them likeable or sympathetic so I can care
about their story. And I’m not saying that Kaos is a bad character because she has flaws,
either. Flawed characters are usually the most interesting. But when I see nothing redeeming
about a character, nothing that is remotely interesting or well-written, we have a problem.
I shouldn’t be groaning whenever the story focuses on the protagonist.

I have problems with a couple of late game story beats that I want to talk about now, so here
is your spoiler warning. If you still want to watch Comic Girls blind, stop reading, go watch its
twelve episodes (it's on Crunchyroll), and come back when you’re done, cause things will be
spoilertastic over here for the rest of the post.

Okay, I’m assuming that if you’re still here, you’ve either seen Comic Girls all the way through
or you don’t care about spoilers. So, first I want to talk about Kaos’s manga at the end. All
throughout the series she had been pitching manga concepts based on her own experiences
and getting rejected over and over. What finally does get approved though, is a slice of life
manga called…”Comic Girls…”

Are you kidding me? THIS is supposed to be the point where Kaos comes into her own as a
creator? Just telling stories about her life at the dorm? That’s not creative, it’s lazy! What’s
she gonna do when she runs out of stories to tell? And yes, I know that this was just a
two-part pilot and not a serialized series, but that doesn’t change the fact that her ability to
create new stories at the conceptual level, something that has been shown as a weakness of
hers since the beginning, has not improved in the slightest. On top of that, we’re just told how
much she has improved, but we haven’t seen any improvement over the course of the series.
The whole thing just feels rushed and out of nowhere! And even if those things weren’t an
issue, this idea just sucks on a meta level. I mean, seriously? A character writing the events
of the story as an in-universe story is one of the laziest ideas ever, and it’s something people
were predicting here since episode 1! Yes, the actual scenes where the pitch gets approved
and Kaos is overwhelmed with joy are well done, but technical polish can only take a
fundamentally bad idea so far.

But there’s an even bigger problem with the ending, one that has nothing to do with Kaos
(Thank God, I was sick of talking about her). Around the halfway point of the series, we learn
that the dorm is getting torn down because - actually, it’s never explained, but I assume it’s
due to financial reasons. There are some well done scenes with the girls leaving the dorm,
leaving a big old question mark about whether they will see each other again and setting up a
pretty good bittersweet ending. The credits roll and tears are presumably flowing from those
who are a little more attached to the characters than I am. Hell, I’ve been annoyed with the
show this whole time and I had a lump in my throat here, so I know they did something right.

But then, there’s one last scene after the credits. All the girls are meeting up again to...move
into the newly built modern dorm? What? Why? I thought I’d missed something, but I went
back to rewatch earlier episodes and no! They never said anything about a remodel or a
renovation. This entire storyline was being presented as the end of the manga dorm once and
for all. Having Kaos finally get published just as the girls were going their separate ways was
the perfect thematic ending for her character; she learned to stand on her own two feet and
doesn’t need the dorm anymore. But i guess someone didn’t want fans to cry, so they pushed
a big reset button on everything. They even negated all of Kaos’s growth and made her
pathetic again, which undermines the entire point of the story! What an insulting, pandering,
frustrating ending!

But what a pretty final shot.

I’ve been very negative on Comic Girls during this post, but I DON’T hate it. I actually like
most of the characters and the presentation. I just find the show frustrating because I know it
could be better. So I thought I’d end this little rant exploring how I could fix Comic Girls. Step
one: Get rid of Kaos. Okay, she’s not a fundamentally horrible character, but I don’t like her as
a protagonist even if I tried to tweak her ( And I tried, believe me), and I can’t figure out what
to do with her as a side character. Instead, I think Koyume should be our protagonist.
Think about it: she moves into the dorm at the same time as Kaos, has her own obstacles
that can be overcome for the sake of a character arc, and she even has a love interest in
Tsubasa. Sounds like a protagonist to me!  

We open with Koyume pitching a romance manga to her editor. It shows promise and the art
is good, but ultimately she gets rejected because of her struggles drawing male characters.
But her editor still sees potential and sends her to the manga dorm to hone her skills and
revise the original draft. At the dorm, Koyume meets Tsubasa and Ruki. Just like before, she
is immediately infatuated with Tsubasa. She works with the two of them for a few episodes
and presents a revised draft to her editor in episode 3, which is approved for serialization.
But the pressure of having to put out a new chapter every week gets to her, and she starts
slipping up. Her art slowly degrades in quality and her story becomes less and less believable.
This slow dip in quality happens in the background of a few episodes where we focus on
things like Ruki’s first autograph signing and Tsubasa’s family troubles. Eventually, one of
Koyume’s chapters gets rejected for “not feeling romantic enough.” Koyume breaks down and
tells the others that she doesn’t know how to write romance anyother way. Ruki suggests
going on a date to get some more experience with romance, but after a day of her not being
able to find a suitable partner, Koyume decides to quit and starts calling her editor. In a panic,
Ruki takes the phone away and suggests Koyume goes on a date with Tsubasa “for research
purposes”. Koyume gets embarrassed and starts to decline, but Tsubasa agrees and they go
to the amusement park.

The date is a success (relatively), and Koyume’s manga is now better than ever. The two go
on a few more dates to replicate the effect, but neither actually admits their growing feelings
to the other. Eventually, though, Koyume starts to feel “fake” for writing about a heterosexual
romance when she doesn’t feel anything toward boys anymore. This is around the time that
the career forms have to be filled out at school, and when Tsubasa defies her family and
writes that she won’t be anything other than a manga artist, Koyume is inspired to be her own
person as well. She writes a shocking coming out storyline for her heroine and her editor tries
to get her to undo it, as readers are complaining about their favorite ship being split up.
Tsubasa and Ruki stand up for her, giving a speech about how manga is personal expression,
and Koyume refuses to back down. Unfortunately, readership starts to drop, and Koyume’s
manga is cancelled, just days before the dorm is scheduled to close down for good. Koyume
runs away in the middle of the night, and Tsubasa finds her outside the amusement park.
Koyume bitterly talks about how “nobody wanted to see the real her” in her manga, but
Tsubasa counters with how things “always seem hopeless before the hero wins” in manga.
Koyume snaps and screams that life isn’t manga and things don’t always work out. She starts
to leave but Tsubasa gets ahold of her and tells her that she is a hero in her eyes because
she never gave up and always pressed forward with her vision. Tearfully, Koyume denies
being a hero and starts putting herself down before Tsubasa does the unthinkable: she kisses
her.

Yes, I realize that this is all just shipper garbage, but this couple is too perfect and it doesn't make sense for the anime to build it up so much only to suddenly backtrack and do nothing with the setup like it did.

We cut to a few years later, with Ruki on her way to a convention where she was invited to
sign autographs and sit on a panel. She meets up with side characters and learns what
they’ve been up to before reaching the conference room where the panel is taking place.
Sitting at the table are her co-panelists: Tsubasa and Koyume, holding hands and wearing wedding rings while talking about their
new manga: a shonen action fantasy about two heroines in love.

But, hey, this is just an storyline I threw together in a 20 minute break at work. If you
don't think it works, that's totally fine. Let me know how you would fix Comic Girls, if you think
it even needs fixing. I get why people like it. It's mostly a good show, but I couldn't get over
how much I disliked Kaos and how disappointing I found the ending. Next week, I'll be
discussing an anime from Spring 2018 that surprised me in a different way, exceeding my
relatively low expectations to be one of my favorite anime from that season.

And remember, Tsubasa is best girl.

      

Summer 2018 Impressions

Welcome to the Weekly WeeaBlog! My name is Patrick, and I will be having a new post every Thursday with a new anime discussion.

So, we are now three weeks into the summer 2018 anime season. And there are a lot of new anime out, to the point where it can get overwhelming. So, to kick off the blog, I'm gonna talk to you about what I'm currently watching and what my first impressions are. Please note, I'm only going to talk about brand new shows here, since anything that's still going on from last season, you've probably already made your mind up about if you like it or not. That being said, the shows from Spring 2018 that are still ongoing that I'm watching are My Hero Academia Season 3, Lupin the 3rd Part V, Major 2nd, and Captain Tsubasa. All are good and worth watching. Also, while these new shows are mostly only two or three episodes in at this point, you can still expect slight spoilers.

Angels of Death

First on the list, we have Angels of Death. This story follows a young girl named Rachel Gardner who wakes up in a strange warehouse-type building with no memory of how she got there. As she tries to find her way out, she learns that each floor above her is home to a murderer who is holding the key for her to move on. If that sounds like a crappy video game, that's kinda because it's based on one.

I've never played the game myself, but I can tell you that the anime is interesting. Rachel isn't much of a charismatic protagonist, but the narrative keeps hinting that she might be just as messed up as the other murderers in the building. After a while, she decides that she wants to be killed and makes a bargain with the scythe-wielding serial killer Isaac Foster. If she helps him escape, he'll kill her. Though that does raise the question of why she doesn't just kill herself or just walk up to another murderer and get killed by them instead, the show does a good enough job using music, animation, and voice acting to establish an atmosphere that gets me sucked in.

Angolmois: Record of Mongol Invasion

Next up we have Angolmois, a historical action series based on a manga by Nanahiko Takagi. Here we follow a group of criminals exiled from mainland Japan to a smaller island, where they are forced to fight as soldiers against an imminent invasion by the Mongol Empire in exchange or be executed.

There's not much to the story in Angolmois so far. Characters are kind of basic and archetypal to a fault, to the point where you pretty much know who they are and what they're about a minute after they're introduced. Whether or not the story decides to play with those expectations to make the characters more unique remains to be seen. And if not, a simple setup isn't necessarily a bad thing either. As shows like Afro Samurai have shown us, doing a simple story really well is sometimes all it takes to have a hit. 

Angolmois is no Afro Samurai. But it is leaning heavily into style like Afro did. The animation is very clean and everything is covered in a filter that makes it look like traditional paintings. The filter can be distracting at times, but it usually adds to the effect and creates an illusion of watching historical footage of real events instead of a fictionalized account. I have a good feeling about Angolmois, and I hope I'm not disappointed.

Cells at Work

Up next we have Osmosis Jones  Cells at Work. This comedy anime, based on a manga by Akane Shimizu, is about life in the blood vessels of a human body. Our two main characters are anthropomorphic characterizations of a nameless red blood cell and a nameless white blood cell.

Though the internet seems to think that the platelets are the main characters.

This is an action-comedy that leans heavily into the comedy. Every episode follows the cells as they deal with a new crisis that the body is facing, such as a scrape wound or influenza. Those crises are treated more as an afterthought by the show, however, as it's much more interested in showing characters' over the top reactions and silly antics. I jokingly compared this show to Osmosis Jones earlier, but aside from the premise of anthropomorphized body parts, they really aren't that similar. Osmosis Jones is a buddy cop parody that features the humans they live in as active characters in the narrative. Cells at Work, meanwhile, is a pure slapstick show in the vein of things like JoJo's Bizarre Adventure that focuses solely on the cells. It's also very interested in teaching the viewer, frequently taking breaks from the story so that a narrator can drop a boatload of biology lectures on you. I think I can do without that part, the show is good enough on its own without trying to send me back to school.

Hanebado!

Hey, look, a sports anime. I love sports anime! They tend to have a bit of a negative connotation among anime fans, and I never understood why. Do weebs just not like sports? Whatever, Hanebado is a badminton anime based on a manga by Kosuke Hamada. Unlike most sports anime, which feature bright-eyes newcomers or child prodigies in love with their sport of the day, Hanebado chooses to focus on burned-out veterans going through an identity crisis and trying to find their lost love for the game. It's all very melodramatic and I love it.

What I also love is how pretty this show is. This might be the best animated show that I talk about today. The very first scene shows an intense match between our two leads, and every single shot made my jaw drop. Individual drops of sweat are flying off the girls, there are shots of a beautifully rendered CG shuttlecock in slow motion, the movements of the players are so fluid that it almost looks more realistic than actual real life badminton. And the rest of the currently three episodes at this time of writing, while not as visually stunning, are all just as technically well done. Not to mention that it's just nice to have a sports anime about female characters that isn't all about fanservice.

Harukana Receive

Hey, look! A sports anime about female characters that's all about fanservice! There's not much going on plot-wise in Harukana Receive. We got our main girl Haruka moving to Okinawa and making a beach volleyball team with her cousin Kanata (Haruka+Kanata=Harukana). That's about it.

There's really not much to talk about with Harukana Receive. The show is bright and colorful, the effects used on the water and sand are very nice, and the soundtrack is decent, but the story and characters are just a little bit lacking. This is a show that's less interested in telling a story and more interested in creating a laid back experience with pretty girls and volleyball matches. And I'm okay with that. It's nothing special, but it's nothing offensively bad either.

Island

Now, this is offensively bad. Island is supposed to be a mystery about a man named Suzuka who washes up on the shore of an island with a very isolationist community. He has amnesia, but he claims to be from the future and that he has someone he needs to kill. Sounds like a compelling enough mystery to me. Too bad there's all this garbage getting in the way.

Why does anime always have to go out of its way to fetishize little girls? It's uncomfortable and wrong and I can't stand it. And even if they didn't try to objectify these girls, none of these characters are interesting. Suzuka alternates between being a snarky jerk and wandering around like a lost puppy, and neither characterization works for him. The girls are all annoying and trying to be mysterious, cute, and silly all at the same time, and it just leaves me counting down the seconds to the end of the episode. And the actual art and animation is so bare bones that there isn't even anything to look at while listening to this terrible dialogue. I dropped this dumpster fire after one episode.

Planet With

 I have several questions. Firstly, Planet With what? How do you get a title that just stops halfway through like that? It makes me think that someone spilled coffee on the proposal documents and the stain obscured the rest of the title or something. Second question, why does it feel like this is a sequel? I mean, it isn't, it's a brand new original story, but it just sort of starts in the middle. The main character Souya has amnesia and is somehow living with an anime maid and a giant cat. Then out of nowhere, there's a giant flying teddy bear with teeth on its ears, human ears where arms should be, and five human arms where legs should go. Then seven random superhero characters with mechs show up with no introduction or build up and start fighting the teddy bear. Then the maid tells Souya that he has to hunt down the superheroes and steal the source of their power. And that's all the first episode.

So, naturally, my third question is what are they smoking over in Japan to come up with this stuff? Because this is bananas. I can't say that it's very good though. The production values are through the roof, with the animation and sound teams pulling out all the stops to make this a great spectacle. But the story so far is just nonsensical, even with the second episode taking a break to explain a little bit of what's going on. If the storytelling catches up to the animation and soundtrack, then this could be amazing. But right now, it's just a pretty-looking mess.

And that's it! Seven new anime, plus the four I mentioned before that are carrying over from spring, plus a few older anime that I missed and am watching for the first time (Sanrio Boys and Seven Deadly Sins) plus One Piece (which has been airing nonstop since 1999) minus Island because Island is terrible means I'm currently watching 13 anime. Overall, this summer season feels a bit lacking compared to the high quality winter and spring seasons we just finished, but there are still some shows worth watching. At the moment, I'd say that Cells at Work and Hanebado are currently neck and neck for Anime of the Season for me, but Angolmois and Planet With have the potential to surprise me. Let me know what you're watching and what you think about them. Maybe you've seen something really good that I missed.