Gate is Fun and Problematic

Gate is an Anime adapted from Light Novels in 2015 and 2016 that aired as two 12 episode seasons but really feels more like one 24 episode season.  It's a show I enjoyed even though it's political messaging is very messed up.

Breadtube is constantly criticizing shows and movies with premises like this of not being critical of Colonialism and modern post WW2 Imperialism enough, they criticize stories trying to be critical of those things but falling short because they are starting from a Liberal rather then truly Leftist perspective.  Gate however is what it looks like when this kind of behavior is actually unapologetically lionized.

The story is written so that every intervention that takes place is justified.  But all those justifications are exactly what modern Democracy espousing Empires try to paint their interventions as being.

It's also such an idealized take on modern Soldiers in general, making clear to the audience that not a single one is partaking in this other world's native sex workers.  

There's a lot in this show that's good, lots of individual characters I like and some interesting world building, more interesting then most generic Isekai of the last decade.  And just look at this Screenshot.

I love the fact that I can show this to people and then explain how we know from earlier episodes that each of these Bas@$$ Lady Knights is a Fujoshi.

I think the Main Character of this show would have came off much better if they'd allowed him to be more like Captain Kirk.  What do I mean by that?  Once I watched a handful of episodes of the Original Star Trek with my Dad, and we observed how most of this set of episodes happened to follow a similar pattern where Kirk is unable to get a quick response from Starfleet so he has to make a decision to act in a way that could prove controversial, but then after things are resolved they finally get a response from Starfleet giving him permission to do what he already did.

Gate however keeps taking the opposite route, where our protagonist is basically given unofficial permission to go beyond the official limits of his orders in advance so the SDF can have the excuse they need to intervene further.  This approach besides just making the "good" side as a whole look a lot shadier then the writers intended also makes the MC less of a Maverick then they intended.

What really bugs me is the use of Rise of the Valkyries, I suspect that Zack Snyder's critics accuse him of in Watchmen not understanding the Irony in how Apocalypse Now used that song, but he absolutely did.  Gate however I don't think properly understood it, because I suspect a lot of people in Japan have only seen that movie through references to it in other movies and especially don't have the context for how it's a satire on Birth of a Nation's use of that song.

Update April 2023: Gate's Pilot and the 3 episode test.

Gate was a big part of YGG's How to Tell a Bad Anime from just one episode video, and even though that has little relevance to the original premise of this post I have thoughts on it and I don't want to make another post specifically about Gate.

The premise of the Gate part of the video is that Gate's pilot is bad and the rest of the show is still bad in the same ways and does nothing to retroactively fix anything.  However there is one reason to be bugged by the pilot that she actually failed to mention.

I did not realize our main character was already a trained SDF solider before all this happened, I thought we were supposed to believe he knew exactly what do during this Fantasy invasion because of what he learned playing Fantasy Games, and then got sorta drafted because of his actions in this battle.  But several episodes later it becomes clear he was already a solider.

Maybe it's my fault, maybe the shirt he's wearing which I didn't notice the first time was supposed to tell us that, but other characters he interacts with didn't pick up on that either.  And so much of YGG's criticisms of the Pilot are that it tells rather then shows or does both which she consider redundant (Goodfellas shows right after telling in the exact same way as these scenes she complains about all the time).  But for this piece of information the show does the opposite and only shows.  On some level maybe I was supposed to pick up on it because of the fact that he knows what to do, but this Genre of Anime absolutely would do what I assumed was going on so I was not inclined to consider that.  In both Anime and western media I'm frankly not used to Solider characters who aren't telling people they're Soldiers every chance they get.

A lot of YGG's criticism of the pilot is it's structural incoherence and that definitely becomes less of a problem.  Or at least to whatever extent it still is a there it's less of once one's actually gotten into it.

YGG is correct that it's mainly the Premise that often takes 3 episodes to figure out, or in Gate's case the premise wasn't unclear in the Pilot but a lot of the meat of how it will function takes time to clarify.  I'm however the opposite of YGG in that I'm more interested in watching a flawed show with a premise that interests me then a perfectly executed show with a premise that doesn't.

So she talked about how the only reason someone would like the rest of the show but not the pilot is if they're into it for a specific character who didn't show up yet, as if that's irrelevant.  And yes it is irrelevant to the actual quality of the writing or animation.  But that doesn't change the basic point that most of what's "Fun and Problematic" about Gate isn't in the Pilot yet and therefore you are potentially missing out if you dismiss it based on the Pilot alone.

I think YGG's least valid criticism is her simply hating that the SFD beats the mediaeval army so easily.  Yes that technically does play into my criticisms, but I do not inherently have a problem with stories where the Protagonists are not actually challenged by the Antagonists physically, I think there are interesting stories to tell with that premise and Gate does sometimes kind of tell some.  YGG mentions some old Japanese movie where a time isekaied SDF unit gets totally beaten by Sengoku era Samurai tactics.  But that's not better, that's just the other side of the same coin, one panders to people who want to believe Sengoku era Samurai are the most awesome warriors ever while Gate panders to people who want to believe the modern SDF are the most awesome warriors ever.