Wednesday, July 13, 2022

Moe Anime could Revive Utopian Science Fiction

The reason Utopian Science Fiction died out is because the Western World's taste in fiction became increasingly over fixated on the importance of things like "Conflict" and "Stakes" and "Character Development".  So settings where our major problems have already been solved are considered "uninteresting" and "boring".

Now there is also the common claim it was also killed by the World Wars and the Holocaust and then further tragic events of the late 60s and 70s made people less willing to believe that a Utopia is possible.  But I disagree with that, horrible events only make us desire optimistic fantasies more.

The most well known and popular work of Utopian Sci-Fi was early Star Trek, but it was never purely Utopian, presumably Earth and other core Federation worlds were, but the stories kept revolving around conflicts with and explorations of more flawed societies.  And in time Star Trek refused to stay even that Utopian and so it betrayed it's roots over and over again till we wind up with dreary depressing shows like Picard and Discovery, or cynical edgy parodies like Lower Decks.

However Anime via the Slice of Life and Cute Girls doing Cute Things Genres has discovered how to make us enjoy fiction that is actually utterly free of any real conflict.  From Lucky Star to K-On to Yuru Yuri and so many others.  And we've also seen a sub genre of Isekai translate that formula into a Fantasy Setting like the 300 Slimes show.

So what we need is a show about Cute Girls doing Cute Things in a High-Tech Futuristic Communist Utopia where Climate Change has been solved and Scarcity eliminated.  And it can be Fun and Cute but also educational about how such a society could hypothetically work.

Sunday, July 10, 2022

I've finished a bunch of Anime I'd been watching

First was Legend of The Galactic Heroes :New Thesis season 3, which was pretty good build up for the next big battle.

Then the Trapped in a Dating Sim Anime which was fun.

Then Estab Life which was pretty good.

I watched Vinland Saga when it went up on Netflix, and finished Blue Reflection Ray a little later.

Then on the 9th I finished both Spy x Family season 1 and Tack op.Destiny which were both great.

With a new season of Simuldubs starting soon, I'm gonna try to wait till I can do 3 episodes tests to start anymore.

In the meantime I have four more shows I'm still watching, two should end this Thursday.

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Animation Supremacy

I am increasingly coming to desire to see Live Action cinema phased out entirely, Animation both 3D and 2D have advanced to the point where they can anything.

And if you want to do something in a realistic style like Noir an Anime from 2001, you can still benefit from the absolute control you can have over even the most minutest of details that you can never have in Live Action.

Every time I see some GenX or older Millennial internet critic talk about how "it's so much better three's something actually there" in their CGi bashing I just see the new Old man yelling at Cloud.  There was never anything physically there, you're always looking at lights reflected on a screen regardless.

But I mainly want to talk about here are some moral reasons why it might be best to just stop Live Action cinema entirely.

1. Child Actors

Learning about the Jennette McCurdy story in the last two years has increasingly come to convince me that child acting should be perhaps outright criminalized, at least anything that puts one in the public eye.

With Animation however, especially in a lot of Anime both in Japan and in English Dubbed, lots of adult Voice Actors have the skills to sound convincingly like children.  But occasionally some people in the Anime fandom will hate the act of having older people voice children, but I really don't feel they fully understand the consequences of what they're saying.

2. "No Animals were Harmed"

A couple years ago I watched a video on YouTube about the "No Animals were Harmed' disclaimer and how in a lot of cases it's kind of dubious and unreliable and many animal advocates think using real animals in making movies should be outright banned.  Once again Animation is the answer, you can still write stories about or that involve animals without needing to use any real Animals in the production.

3. Musicals and Vocal Chords.

Currently the only Live Action film Musical that is watchable to me is the 2012 Les Miserables adaptation.  Ones I used to enjoy more when I was younger have become unwatchable to me as I now can't unsee how obviously dubbed over the actual singing is.  This is why I don't support Dubbing foreign films for LA even though I'm huge Stan of Anime Dubs, because in LA it never looks right, unless it's something campy like an old Italian Sword and Sandal Film or most Godzilla movies then it can add to the charm.  But while Musicals can often be campy in their own way the entire point is the illusion that these people are actually bursting into Song.

However my praise of that film is an outlier, the Sideways channel video on the film and why it's in their opinion a bad idea to actually film the singing on set.  Their arguments for the poor quality of the final product are BS, if you have to have insider knowledge of how musicals work to know what's wrong then it's not actually wrong in fact I probably prefer the very thing you're bothered by.  But the stuff about why it's dangerous for the health and safety of the actors is a different matter.

And in that case maybe Musicals should definitely be only made in Animation from now on, if the Audio has to be recorded separately in a sound booth, only Animation will allow viewers like myself to not be taken out of it by the dubbing.  

First make some concept art and storyboards so the performs can have an idea what it's supposed to look like, then record all the Music and then Animate over it.

4. Dangerous Stunts

I remember in the early days of my Internet activity, certain people saying that anytime a Hollywood film claims an actor is doing their own stunts it's a lie because Insurance companies literally don't allow that.  But in the last few years we've a lot of scandals that involve in coming out that some directors were putting actors in dangerous situation even when they legally were not supposed to.  Animation removes the need for anyone to actually have to do any stunts.

5. Porn

Animated pornography similarly removes a lot of the sketchiness of that industry when no actual sex needs to be performed, the actors may not even need to ever meet each other.

Update: I got TrixieTheGoldenWitch to rant about the subject, and she brought up an ethical concern I didn't even think of when I wrote this which is times when a big Live Action production basically shuts down a whole city in order to film.