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.

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.

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.

https://youtu.be/_d5bc0BIp1M?t=3420

Sailor Moon Musicals are difficult to recommend

At least difficult for me to decide which to recommend first.

I'm talking about the old run of Musicals from 1993-2005, those are retro and legendary as this piece of the franchise we Western fans knew little about for a long time but are now about as easy to watch as the show itself.  The new ones don't interest me as of yet and they're harder to find online anyway.

Usually when a fan decides to start checking out the Musicals they either start with the actual first Musical, which was an underwhelming prototype mostly, or they go right to the Last Dracul Musicals because as soon as we hear that exists we think "Sailor Moon vs Dracula as a Musical, how can I not start here".

Now I love the Last Dracul Musicals, they might just be my favorite single saga of the entire franchise.  But some people don't, I've listened to two Sailor Moon podcasts, Sailor Business and Love and Justice go on about how they hated it.  Maybe I'm just more into Sailor Moon going absolutely insane then the average American Moonie. 

But I also wonder if the problem here is partly the first Last Dracul Musical simply not being the best entry point to this particular version of Sailor Moon.  It is after all from what I can tell a much longer and more convoluted story then the prior Musicals, and it's sequels only escalated things further, because there is a lot more going on in this trilogy then just Sailor Moon vs Dracula.  

At first the Musicals were pretty much just glorified bonus episodes of the current/most recent season of the 90s Anime which occasionally reference Manga details, and that can be fun but what really makes these Musicals infamous is when they start doing their own thing.

Kaguya Shima Densetsu is the first Musical that is basically it's own original story with original antagonists, and it's a shorter musical compared to the Draculs.  So I figured that might be the perfect sweet spot, the ideal entry point.  But I just watched the Spring 1999 version and my feelings are mixed.

I mostly enjoyed the entire first half.  But then the fact that the Senshi are left unable to transform for much of the runtime starts making it drag.  This one also just didn't sell me on it's original characters as well as the Dracul saga did so I quickly got bored when the focus was on them.  Still the songs that are performed by the fully transformed Senshi were all bangers.

I'll check out more in the future and hopefully find a more ideal entry point.  There are also other versions of this Musical, maybe they somehow fixed my issues with it.  It'll take awhile to find out though, these aren't the kind of thing I can just spend all day watching, a good Musical kind of drains you, while a disappointing one makes you question why you liked the genre in the first place.

What movies I've seen recently.

The most recent movie I've watched is Morbius and it was good, I think the best live action theatrical Superhero movie since Endgame, it's refreshing to see one that isn't about the a plot to destroy the entire city or world or universe and also isn't a semi self parody.

The first almost 40 minutes were flawless, then when it became clear Milo was gonna be the villain I felt that could have been handled better.  Giving them the ability to Fly when they don't grow wings was stupid, and I didn't like the fridging at the end, but plenty of flaws comparable to those exist in great movies.

I think the hate this movie gets is mostly just the weird hate boner much of Internet fandom has developed for Jared Leto.  What flaws this movie did have were not on Leto at all, he was great.

I also re-watched The Batman, and I still think it's decent. I had commented before on it being the most like a Film Noir of any Batman movie so far, and it is.  But a pure Film Noir would have ended during the scene of Batman talking to Riddler in prison, a good Film Noir ending would have ended on Batman reacting to the revelation that he inspired the villain, and Riddler's hysterical reaction to learning his idol doesn't approve.  It even had already had a full feature length runtime.

The final act with the plot to drown the city is the typical Superhero movie BS, and I increasingly feel Batman is exactly the Superhero who doesn't need that.

I also finally watched Cloud Atlas, it was a great movie, but the best Wachowski film is still Speed Racer.

Sonic The Hedgehog 2 was also great fun, I highly recommend it.

The Anime films I've watched I'm pretty sure I've already talked about on this blog.  Except maybe the latest Prisma Illy movie, that was pretty good, didn't disappoint, but I am getting annoyed at the cliffhangers and wondering when this Arc will finally end.

Incase I hadn't mentioned it anywhere, I also saw Redline and it was phenomenal.

I now own the Heaven's Feel movies on VUDU, I may give them a rewatch in the near future.

Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha and Family

Occasionally when it comes to Nanoha the opinion is expressed that the first movie which redoes the plot of season 1 is the superior improved version of that story.  I have to strongly disagree.

It certainly seems plausible for a 1 cour show with a pretty basic plot and arguably some filler to be refined into a movie,  I feel like you could probably fan-edit season 1 into a decent movie.  But the official Movie remake we got choose to add some stuff it shouldn't have and made some unfortunate choices in what to cut.

What was added was a fully dramatized backstory for Precia Tstarossa, Fate's mother.  Why Precia is doing what she's doing and is the way she is was perfectly inferred in the original show, the movie feeling the need to flashback to all of it is exactly the kind of thing that makes me hate "Show don't Tell".  In this context it distracts from the fact that this story isn't about Precia, it's about Fate as a victim of Precia's abuse, it confuses the emotional resonance of the story to make us sympathize with her too much.

Lily Orchard has a YouTube video on Zuco of Avatar The Last Airbender where her thesis is that Zuco was never actually a villain who needed to be redeemed of anything, his nominally fighting for the bad guys is a product of the abuse he was subject to, and so she hates the way most people talk about Zuco.  Thing is even this interpretation of Zuco is something actual Anime had already done far better, because he was basically just Fate Testarossa's story from season 1 of Nanoha, Fate is never actually a bad person, just in a bad situation, she never seeks to hurt anyone, she's just seeking the Jewel Seeds without even knowing what her mother plans to use them for.

Lily also expresses the opinion that it would be fundamentally problematic to write a story where a victim becomes an abuser themselves, I don't agree with that but Fate's story would meet her standards, in Arf she had someone she has authority over she could have abused and she did not.  But Lily would hate the movie version because she hates when a show or movie asks us to sympathize with an abuser's sob story.

Now as far what the movie cut from season 1, the only thing I really miss is the removal of Nanoha's family. 

Nanoha began as an AU spin off of a Visual Novel where Nanoha herself was just the Imouto character.  So I imagine when making the movie it was easy to assume including the other characters of that VN were just Easter Eggs for it's fans and not relevant to the story at hand, but that assumption was wrong.

In Clearandsweet's video on the first episode of Madoka Magica, Nanoha's pilot is one of the older Magical Girl pilots he makes comparison to, after all they are directly connected by Shinbo.  One point he makes is that the lead Magical Girl in a show usually comes form a pretty stable healthy family while the supporting characters tend to have less ideal family situations, then the lead provides them with the family they need by essentially adopting them into hers.

And so that's why these two complaints I have about the Nanoha movie go together, Nanoha's good family situation is supposed to be a stark contrast to Fate's horrific one.

Legend of The Galactic Heroes and WWI

I wish more Space Operas and other Sci-Fi antiwar War stories would take inspiration from WWI rather then WWII, since their desire to equally condemn and sympathize with both sides is going to be completely disregarded by much of the audience once you've made them see one side as "Space Nazis" even if only aesthetically.

The Anime Legend of The Galactic Heroes. which I'm still only watching via the newer more faithful to the books reboot New Thesis, is a perfect example of a WWI inspired Space War.  But the best context to understand how it draws that inspiration is the sense in which WWI is in part a rematch of the Franco-Prussian War, especially in how many in France initially looked at it.

It's not a 1 to 1 allegory, for one thing in LOTGH this is a conflict that's been going on for centuries.  So all the inspiration is applied somewhat creatively, maybe sometimes mixed around.  The first Emperor of this Germanic Empire is referred to as having been a Democratically elected leader who then made himself an Emperor, and that is why some analyzing this show may want to see that as being Hitler inspired, but during WWI there was already precedent for someone doing that however it was on the French Side, Napoleon III.

Most important to the not a 1 to 1 allegory part however is that the two topics I'm about to discus for how the Free Planets Alliance resembles The Third French Republic before and during WWI are in their real history analogues not as directly connected to each other as they are in the show, they were both Anti-German War Mongers but still represented overall completely different ideologies.

First is the Patriotic Knights Corps. when an American watches this show for the first time the first thing they're likely to compare them to are the KKK and then various Fascist/Nazi paramilitary street gangs many of whom were named after the color shirt they wore.  I however have familiarized myself with some of the more obscure groups who operated this way and in terms of both what they call themselves and the focus on being anti-German war mongers I think the Patriotic Knights Corps most resemble The Chamelots Du Roi who were active in early 20th century France, they were initially the Youth Wing of Action Francaise, a French far right organization.

Second is Job Trunicht the corrupt war mongering President of the Free Planets Alliance who I think can very easily be argued to be based on Raymond Poincare the President of France leading up to and during WWI .  He gets referred to sometimes as a Liberal or a Centrist but that's in the context of how actual Royalism was still a factor in France's political spectrum, in a political compass like modern Americans are used to he'd absolutely be considered Right Wing and maybe even Far Right.

[Update: I've since learned there were other Revanchist groups in France during the period in question, the original as the Lique des Patriotes.  But none of them wore Klan like Hoods, the first French group to do that seems to La Caqoule during the 30s]

There is this popular mythology that WWI was a war no one wanted to fight but sort of blundered into because of complicated political alliances.  This is the premise of the series Extra Credits did on YouTube about the how the war started, and is also a part of the premise of the short story Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier wrote to be an epilogue to their translation of 813.  However studying historical figures like Poincare has shown me what a lie that is.  The common people may not have wanted war, but all the major players in how it started were lead by powerful people who had been itching for it well before Ferdinand was shot.

In France people like Ponicare wanted another war with Germany to restore France's dignity from it's loss in the Franco-Prussian War.  In Germany the Kaiser wanted war with Brittan because of his weird inferiority complex about them, while the Prussian Junkers who dominated the military already supported the Lebensraum policy that we today mostly associate with the Nazis.  And in all nations there was a growing capitalist military-industrial complex.  And those alliance treaties people talk about were not left completely unaltered from how they were when Bismarck retired, they had absolutely been altered to increase Military obligations by Politicians who were hoping getting a war out of it is exactly what would happen.  Also Italy wound up getting involved on the opposite side of what their prior treaty obligations were.

Even in the case of my country who came into the War late, leaving aside the endless debates about how genuine Wilson's reluctance to enter the War was, there were powerful voices in Congress from both parties who wanted to get involved even before the Lusitania sank, Henry Cabot Lodge on the Republican side and then Southern Democrats like Benjamin Tillman and Ellison D. Smith.  Even the beloved Teddy Roosevelt proved to be a viscous Nativist War Monger during this period.