[sigh]
I’ve been putting this post off for too long now. I was so desperate to find something else to write about that I ran off to the cinema. You should probably read those posts instead of this one, because there will be nothing of worth in here. No siree bob, nothing of worth in this episodic post.
Oh well, better get writing
Something to talk about, something to talk about…ah I know! Gai dying. Or not dying, as the case is. But I bet you anything he will die before the halfway point. What this episode seemed to be setting us up for was a classic Death of the Tutor scene, in the vein of Star Wars or Gurren Lagann. I’ve talked about this before in relation to Daughter of 20 Faces, but I’ll repeat for all you new readers who haven’t gone back through my archives. The idea is that a young upstart learns under the guidance of a mentor and develops to a certain degree, but in order to grow out from the shadow of their mentor, the mentor has to leave the scene somehow. The classic way to do this is to simply kill off the mentor.
What this episode of Guilty Crown was essentially doing was making Shu empathise with Gai and the struggles that come with being a leader. In that sense, he now theoretically knows what it takes to become a leader, and he even went as far as to take leadership into his own hands with the scene at the end. However, if he’s going to develop further and become the grand leader the show seems to be suggesting he’ll become, Gai needs to be removed from the picture. There are other ways of doing this, such as turning Gai into the bad guy, but it really doesn’t feel like the show is heading in that direction. This episode made him appear more human than he had done so far, so the only way I can see it going is if they kill Gai off.
That is, if this anime is written well. And good writing hasn’t been in abundance so far in Guilty Crown.
Something else to talk about…how about those grunt guards with Uzis in their hands being incapable of taking out one girl with a pair of pistols who can’t even hold them properly. It might have helped if the grunts, you know, actually pulled the triggers on their guns instead of simply holding them in front of themselves and trying to scare Inori off by yelling really loudly.
Something else, something else…you know what the problem with Un-Go is? It keeps rushing through every mystery it has. I know the mysteries aren’t the main attraction. They’re just supposed to be a framing device to explore the world with. But that’s what all mysteries should be. We’ve simply been brainwashed by the Sherlock Holmes style mysteries where solving the mystery itself is the main attraction. But that doesn’t forgive Un-Go for telling its mystery stories so badly. The world is genuinely interesting and has some really DEEP stuff on show, but when I can’t follow the story, I can’t understand what it is they’re trying to say. This is why episodes 3 and 4 were so damn good. Because they spread out the mystery over 2 episodes. Damn, this has nothing to do with Guilty Crown…
Speaking of anime that aren’t Guilty Crown, I should probably have continued blogging Last Exile instead of Guilty Crown. It’s been getting steadily stronger as they flesh out the political situations on both side. This story is essentially a smaller scale Legend of the Galactic Heroes. On one side we have the young upstart ruthlessly taking over the world with strong military leadership and the annihilation of the corrupt aristocrats. On the other side we have a small rebellion force, entirely founded on one ship, who get by on a combination of foppery, whim, and guerrila warfare.
Inori is actually Shu’s childhood friend! What a thrilling plot twist!
It’s not even like this episode of Guilty Crown was that bad. I simply had no reaction to it, which is almost worse. With all hopes of the series delivering something worthwhile dropped, I can’t even sum up the enthusiasm to criticise the stupid plot twists or wonder whether the glimpses of intelligent writing will turn into something worthwhile down the line. Drop all pre-existing expectations for this series, and all we’ve got here is a dull and formulaic action anime with some rather nice animation. It’s not even a trainwreck anymore, it’s just boring. That, somehow, is incredibly depressing.
The Cart Driver 
“HAHA! They are obviously trained at the infamous stormtrooper marksmanship academy. Not only can’t they hit a damn thing! They charge forward like retards. Just watch that scene with Inori dual wielding outside of cover and those two idiots just charge forward.”
Citing a comment of Sandybell on my blog really share my feelings here…:D
WHOA I JUST FIGURED IT OUT TITS MCGEE IS ACTUALLY TOA FROM DRAGONAUT WHOOOAAAAAAAAAAA
Personally, I prefer trainwrecks to boring stuff. At least hte former is entertaining. Also, I think these bad guys were given “how to be evil” lessons from the movie, Battlefield Earth.
Would Guilty Crown’s writers really kill off the only halfway-interesting character in the show? It technically makes sense, as per Death of the Tutor, but what would he leave behind? A wimp, a Rei clone that misses the whole point of Rei by having her dress like a table dancer, Viral’s green-haired cousin and a bunch of anonymous side characters. In my opinion, Shu would need to gain several levels in badass before that becomes an attractive option.
But…I don’t even find Gai that interesting anymore. If anything I prefer Shu, because they are actually developing his character
… It gets better, I swear?
Oh, and Un-Go ❤
Oh that glorious holding-2-pistols stance…
Came straight from Gungrave. That is why I love that stance.
So did anyone manage to figure out:
1) Why it was okay to shoot down both sattelites when at first the plan was only to hit the one that was going to crash?
2) How in the world Shu managed to get the timing and angle right so exactly that he hit both the sattelites, even though they were moving at high speed and very far apart, so that the tiniest of error would easily cause a miss by a hundred meters?
3) Why Gai didn’t think of just asking Shu to rape Inori and shoot the sattelite down instead of even considering suicide?
4) If they didn’t actually care about gaining control over the sattelites that much, why didn’t they just destroy the control room instead of bothering to subvert its security?
(1) It probably wasn’t ok with Segai, b/c the plan he agreed to was the one that’d shoot the falling satellite and take out Gai. I’m sure shooting two of them down was fine with the funeral parlor, though.
(2) LOL it’s TV.
(3) Up until now Inori doesn’t have a gun-blade, just a gun. Gai might’ve known about the gun but c’mon LOL it’s TV.
(4) B/C they didn’t have a way to shoot them down, and screwing with the control system would make them fall or otherwise go haywire like we saw, I guess.
So 1/4 has a clear answer, 2/4 have plausible guesswork answers, and 1/4 is just LOLWUT.
Among the other gaping fissures of logic in this episode, I think the satellite system had to be worst. From the moment it was introduced, every question it raised cascaded down into another plothole.
What is the point of an orbital doom satellite when you have occupied and subjugated the country it’s engineered to destroy? You own that land. It’s like Nazi Germany inventing a nuclear missile that can only hit Austria and Poland.
This satellite’s control panel has an ultra high-tech security system that will isolate itself and become completely invulnerable the instant anyone touches the cores… but it doesn’t do this when armed terrorists assault the building head on?
If the pen Shu was carrying was actually a targeting beacon for this thing, what prevented the people operating the satellite from just firing on him the instant he entered the super secret resistance base? But okay, let’s say only Segai knew what the pen was intended for. Why would anyone give this nutjob carte blanche to fire the death laser at anything he wants without any oversight? He’s just proven that he’ll pass up a perfectly good chance of destroying all of the terrorists at once purely in order to get his jollies.
Why do they need the pen to operate the second satellite at all? Just ring up the operator and tell him to shoot down the other one before it crashes. As hilariously evil as these guys are, they’ve established an Orwellian police state rather than simply killing everyone in Japan ever. They probably don’t want a gigantic satellite falling on Tokyo either, if only because it would be a PR nightmare that could only hurt their plans (even if those plans were total genocide).
I hate it when an italics tag sneaks away on me like that
I can actually come up with a few explanations to those questions. They wanted to control the satellite because making it go haywire would have crashed it down into Japan. The pen was needed to pinpoint exactly where Gai was so they could actually hit him with the satellite. The crazy is in charge of the satellite because lol stupidly evil villains. It’s over Japan in the first place because that’s the only people they are fighting and they don’t care about killing more people because lol stupidly evil villains. As for why Gai didn’t know Inori had that weapon in the first place, my guess is it’s because she has a second girl inside her that has that weapon, which I believe will be revealed to be Shu’s childhood friend
Nobody can accuse me of not paying attention to this show 😀
GHQ falls victim to the classic stupid evil characterization blunder, though. Do they want to rule Japan or do they want to destroy it? They can’t have both.
Hell, it seems like they alternatingly want one or the other depending on which sounds more diabolical at the time. They come off as wanting to annex the country and control the whole place and then blow it up.
Even Disney villains have better planning skills than these fools.
I swear, you and AJtheFourth must have been secretly talking to each other without me knowing, because during the mission brief where they talk about the core or something she says out loud to me “Come on Shu, this is where you tell them ‘That’s not so bad, I used to bullseye womprats in my T-16 back home!’ ”
The moment she said that I totally lost my shit laughing.
And yeah, we pretty much came to the same conclusion that you did in that this was by default the worst episode, by virtue of the fact that it was just so boring. We were kinda depressed too, because it didn’t deliver as many unintentional laughs as the previous episodes, nor was it as spectacularly animated for as long a time as previous ones either.
However, I will give it this: the scene where the satellite was falling had a really neat FLCL vibe to it (remember the baseball ep where I wrote a ridiculously long comment on Bokutachi no Blog?), and the sequence where they shoot the laser and blow it up was reeeeally pretty the way the clouds dissipated.
Too bad it was only one moment, and was isolated in a sea of mediocrity. That’s a crime.
Even the spectacular animation is losing its effect because it’s largely the same spectacular effects. Yes that shot at the end with the big gun was awesome looking, but otherwise the shine is wearing off
I thought that this episode was the best so far… There was tons of character development on gais part, it made me smile to see that someone other than the main character wasn’t just a foil character and actually had his own problems he’s dealing with. It showed that he isn’t the stereotypical heartless bloodthirsty leader that so many animes throw out there, he hates what he does but realizes that it’s the only way it can be done so he puts up a front. I was very impressed by this scene.
You mean he had a motive behind his actions outside of “singing for the selected out”? Woah, super deep. Tragic hero status makes him turbo deep.
Sarcasm aside, I felt like the scene was trying too hard. It would have been cool to let Shu get a glimpse behind Gai’s Iron Man mask, but to have them have a heart-to-heart like and share their feelings like that was kinda lame. It killed any interesting points left in Gai’s character.
Name one anime where the good guys have a stereotypical bloodthirsy heartless leader?
Gankutsuou!
(Or for a less amusing but more accurate answer, Alex Row of Last Exile)
Alex Rowe had a heart too…I think…I can’t actually remember
I don’t really get what you’re seeing in this season of Last Exile. Imo, it started strong, and has gone a little further downhill every episode. Over half of each episode is just girls being insufferably nice to each other, to steal a scamp-ism.
Also, the only plus I had to say about this episode of Guilty Crown: I liked the direction of the two conversation scenes between Shu and Gai in the first half of the episode. The first one especially, felt really natural, like that’s how someone standing up and saying something incredibly awkward and stupid in a room full of people would come across.
I sorta feel the same about this latest episode of Last Exile, but I don’t think it’s been a steady decline so much as an erratic jump of quality between episodes.
For instance, I really liked the scene where the pirates intuited what the capabilities of the Sylvius were purely by analyzing its structure against what components they knew every airship needed to function. I don’t think I’ve seen this sort of critical thinking depicted in anything before, let alone an anime series. It not only felt or seemed smart in character as some part of nonsense dramatic abstraction – it was smart. I wish more anime did the same.
I suppose you’re right, yeah. Rather than a steady decline in quality, it’s had a steady increase in the amount of each episode that’s been devoted to girly moe. This last episode 6 I just watched though was much, much better (though Fam and Milia still grate on me tremendously). So I guess yeah, we’re at “erratic jumps” in quality.
Oh yeah, absolutely. It seems like there’s some sort of moe-gremlin squatting just off the frame with a bloodied axe, mandating that there be at least X amount of aimless “girls being girls” content in each episode. Like… well… THIS. I imagine I’m not actually far wrong in this analogy.
On the other hand, it’s obvious that there’s a writer and director (producer?) somewhere in the pipeline that really knows his stuff and is willing to put out exactly the sort of thing I’m interested in watching in-between. The world building and setting detail is excellent – more like Haibane Renmei, GiTS, or Ergo Proxy than your typical high tech action-comedy series.
It’s interesting actually… I had the same duality of criticism/praise for Sora no Woto. Amazing setting full of neat little subtle details and interesting culture, but framed around the same old directionless moe interactions.
Isn’t the moeblobbery dropping with each episode? Yeah, there was that entire half of episode 4 devoted to them sitting around eating food, but 5 and 6 dropped that quota massively. Yeah Millia ran around in a maid outfit, but that was set dressing to something that was actually relevent to the story. She was trying everything she could to win over the crew and set up the Turan government in the ship. I honestly found the scene rather endearing. Moe is fine and all if it’s relevent to the story, which it was there
You should’ve blogged Persona 4!
Yeah, I should have. It has Gay Hariman Kenji. What’s not to like?
Don’t you know anything about guns? You always turn the gun sideways when you go for the kill shot ESPECIALLY when you have two pistols. I mean how else are you supposed to eject the hot shells right into your face?
At least if you hate something, it means your interested enough to be disappointed. This was just…there.
You think Gai is a mentor figure? I don’t believe he’s ever gone out of his way to teach Shu a single thing, and only rather reluctantly pulls him into the group because of his hax ability. The entire training montage last episode was utterly pointless because Shu didn’t use anything he learned from them to pass the “test”.
Gai comes off more of a cynical anti-hero whose purpose is terribly mishandled by the writing (like most other things in Guilty Crown). I expect him to soften his hardline attitude when Shu uses love or something-to-protect or whatever to show him the error of his ways, and we’ll all share a facepalm together.
It’s not so much that he’s deliberately taught Shu anything as Shu has managed to learn things by watching him.
“I simply had no reaction to it, which is almost worse.”
What makes this so amazing is that I had the EXACT same feelings after watching this episode. I started off with some early criticisms as began to watch, but as the show progressed I slowly slipped into a state of limbo. Senseless action, mediocre writing, and badly developed, lackluster characters. I hoped this show would get better, but it continues to dig itself a deeper hole.
UN-GO’s sixth episode was actually pretty good, I have to say.
Other than that…well, I’m just watching Guilty Crown for the pretty art and music at this point. I think I used to have the strength the criticize this show, but it seems that my mind has also devolved into a pile of jelly because the writing in this show is so bad.
Honestly? I hope Gai does end up being the villain. I hope the eavesdropping, and even Shu saving the day were all because Gai told Inori what to do. Him turning out to be Aizen on crack is the only way I’ll get much enjoyment out of this show.
At least Super Robot Wars will make GC good by letting the Gundam Age cast take over the plot.