Friday, April 4, 2014

[Ended] Senki Zesshou Symphogear

HOLY SHIT THIS THING IS LATEI'm so sorry...I can't believe I never published this post. This was suppose to be posted October 5th, 2013. woops...

Now where have I seen this fabulous scene before
Too much. This, was too much. This last episode was the back breaker. Just one episode before this, I would have believed someone telling me they wrap everything together for a solid, coherent ending with a feeling of satisfaction. This show almost deserves a reward for how fast and hard it spontaneously combusts and spirals out of control.

When you pick up and wield the power of Fantasy for your story, in whatever medium you choose, animation, movie, book, it's the same: You greatly increase the reach and depth of your story and its message. You allow it to touch many more ideas and topics, and quickly plumb their depths than you otherwise would. But, if you use too much Fantasy, then you Trivialize the message. If you pump too much fantasy in, then you make everything it touches so disconnected from reality that anything you were trying to say is 'lost in the magic', so to speak.
Senki Zesshou's final episode is going to be my Go-To for showing this idea off for the next few months, maybe year. I don't know if this shit happened because they ran out of time, or they just had to clip it short and ad-lib to make it fit into 13 episodes, but that was the largest amount of bullshit pulled out of an ass plothole power in my memory. There have certainly been singularly worse plothole powers before this, but Symphogear takes the award for sheer quantity of bullshit.

They've been pushing the 'Unity and Friendship' message hard since day one, and that's a dead horse that's already been beaten well past the 'pulp' stage into the 'now you're just beating on the dirt the horse was laying on' stage. People have heard this message from anime from any vast number of other sources. Previously, Symphogear stood out from the crowd because it did a very good job of putting a lot of very solid emotional weight behind its reasoning and scenarios. The main heroines ideals and endeavors have always been way out of touch of the harsh reality of the world around her, but she was always reacting to and affected by it. She was worth caring about because she struggled to reconcile her ideals with her surroundings. Previous to this last episodes train-wreck, the powers in this show bordered on science-fiction, rather than fantasy. Now, they've just pulled out all the stops and summoned up full blooded God Damned Magical Girl Transformations. Doing things had consequences before. Now: Just because we need to, we can, and without a problem.
I'm going to stop myself here, but if anyone is unconcerned with spoilers, or wants to team up and share in beating the piss out of this seasons finale, feel free to leave a comment, and we can have some fun blowing off steam on this.

Because I was somewhat enthusiastic about the first season, and foolishly allowed some of that to carry over to this season, I could reason out how they could do what they did, and I even started to mid-episode. But, ya know what? To hell with that. When you need an invested fans enthusiasm and knowledge to explain how things are happening, you're fucking doing it wrong. It's even worse when just a few episodes ago, you proved you knew how to do it right, executing things with coherent cause, effect, and reasoning.

Pros: Music and Action
-Musics obviously always been key for this show, and they certainly haven't started shirking on it yet
-For all I've said, everything has at least been very spectacular to watch, nice fights, animation, Et C.
-Plot. Even if the story tellers voice could kill a deaf person, that doesn't mean the story he has is bad. The ending is crap, but up to that point the plot was well made.

Cons: Finale, Tone, and Execution
-Massive. Tone. Shift. It goes from believable and reasoned, to off the wall nonsense so fast heads spin clean off necks.
 -Lots of plotholes, the worst kind: Unnecessary Plotholes. There were more than enough plot elements in place for them to have done the same thing, but had it explainable or understandable.
-Plagiarism. I heard bloody Mortal Combat energy sounds, and one of the characters spontaneously curves a bulletshot. I'm not even going to try to go into detail about the number of times I've seen the unified-rainbow-of-power sequence before in anime. They may be fully authorized to use all of this, but it's still bad taste to do so. Any one of them wouldn't have mattered as much and would have been tasteful if it wasn't for the massive lineup of unoriginality it takes place in.

My Opinion: If you enjoyed Senki Zesshou Symphogears first season, at all, you should strongly consider watching it. It's not bad, just very very stupid. At the minimum the musics awesome in my opinion. I'd say 'just don't watch the last episode, anything you could imagine up would be better than that nonsense', but the visuals at least were great. Even if they were visualizing the embodiment of homicidal plot negligence. Take everything I've said with a grain of salt to tone it back a bit, and then weigh it against your opinion of the first season, and the two kinds of show in play here.
Impartial Judgement:  Ugh...Good. I guess. It annoyed me royally, and left me very unsatisfied, but it was from a technical view, well made. I cannot deny that I really enjoyed watching some of the action scenes during this season, and even if it was bullshit that they existed, I like several of the final forms they flaunt in the finale. The show is overall still very enjoyable this season, just expect the ending to leave you unsatisfied, if not with an outright bad taste in your mouth.

BUT BY THE POWERS THAT BE, if they presume to try and make a third season of this, I will ignore that thing so hard it will cease to exist in my universe.

1 comment:

Savory Tart Recipes said...

Thank you ffor writing this