I’m referring to cases where the first episode of an Anime ends on a twist revealing even the genre of the show wasn’t what we thought it was.
They are often pretty entertaining the first time you watch them, but when I rewatch a show I find myself wanting to just skip it and start the show with the first episode that actually represents what the show is.
The more I like the rest of the show the more the fact that they start with these kinds of pilots annoys me. Because in an online culture obsessed with treating not spoiling something as a moral value, these become shows you are supposed to recommend to people without even accurately telling them what genre they are getting into.
School-Live! is the ultimate example of this, its mere inclusion in my posts recommending Horror Anime is technically a spoiler, but it shouldn’t be.
The impact of watching the School-Live! Pilot blind without knowing you are actually watching a Zombie Apocalypse show works only if you like both Cute Girls Doing Cute Things and Zombie Apocalypses as genres, someone who only likes the former will be upset you got them into that show only to take it away, and someone who only likes the latter will be annoyed they had to sit through a Moe show for 20 minutes.
Maybe some will argue it's good to filter out the Slice of Life haters in the pilot because it is still structurally largely a CGDCT show even after the Zombie shoe drops. But as someone who is an enjoyer of vanilla Cute Girls Doing Cute Things shows I think it’s perfectly valid that some people can enjoy those antics with a Genre element mixed in but not on their own, I have no desire to Gate Keep the joy of School-Live from people who can’t also enjoy Lucky Star and K-On.
A more recent show where this applies is Quality Assurance in Another World. I haven't rewatched this one yet at the time I’ve started writing this but I’ve been planning to, and I keep wondering whether or not I should just skip the pilot and start with episode 2.
In both cases there is an artistic/narrative reason for starting the show this way beyond just shock value. That it’s important to sell a certain character’s perspective. But that really doesn't take away its lack of rewatchability. A single 20 minute episode of Anime doesn't have a lot of time to do anything that truly feels interesting to rewatch knowing the twist. The twists in Anime that have a good set up and pay off are the ones that span multiple episodes.
I said the more I like the rest of the show overall the more I dislike it starting this way, so let’s look at a reverse example.
Talentless Nana’s twist pilot works pretty well. But my excitement for the show early on did not maintain itself.
So this was hyped by some of its fans early as being an example of “Death note but better” because Death Note has a certain type of hater, people who want an Anime with its basic appeal but where the female cast is treated better. I’m no Death Note fanatic, I’ve never called it one of my personal favorites and I too prefer Anime with that are more feminine at their core. But in the case of Talentless Nana watching it while comparing it to Death Note does not do it any favors.
Some people complain about Misa in Death Note being a Chaos Factor that made Light’s defeat unfair. But she does not show up as people are making it sound when they say that. Light had already made the key mistakes that made his downfall inevitable, L was already treating Light as effectively his only suspect. A Chaos factor is kind of what the show needed at that point to keep it from getting boring. Seriously everyone who says they wish Misa wasn’t in the show, what do you think it would have actually done without her?
Talentless Nana actually does what people falsely accuse Death Note of in this regard. It introduces way too many not remotely foreseeable factors way too early. I think the show would have been better if it took two cours to cover what it wound up covering in only 1. And I’m saying that as someone constantly annoyed at how often people online are saying that about every single show lately.
The Executioner and Her Way of Life is a debatable show to include here because the equivalent twist happens more like half way through the Pilot. I feel like this show I might have convinced myself I liked more than I really did originally out of some obligation to it being a Yuri. But the truth is I kind of want more Yuri Isekai that are the same as regular Het Isekai in how the Romance is integrated instead of always having some other quasi subversive element to it.
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