It's been a while since I actively despised something I watched. I've seen all kind of bad film and TV recently. Sometimes it's me specifically looking for bad stuff, like my millionth rewatch of The Room, or the slightly drunk decision I made to watch Tammy & the T-Rex. More often, it's me stumbling upon it, like the absolutely awful Prometheus, the incredibly boring and overly edgy Kaiji: Ultimate Survivor, or the nothing that is Yuru Yuri.
But I've watched a lot of shit. One of my favorite pastimes at university was putting on a terrible movie and ripping it apart with my friends. When you've willing subjected yourself to Birdemic, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Beast of Yucca Flats and Smosh: The Movie, it's hard to really be upset at anything for being bad anymore. This rigorous training has kind of broken me. My reaction to bad film and television is no longer to be angry or bored, it's to laugh at it. Even the worst of the worst is amusing in it's awfulness, like that bit in 5 Centimeters Per Second (a film which contrary to popular belief is garbage) where a dude sits on a train for 20 minutes and nothing happens except pseudo-philosophical monologue. That's funny! Why the fuck would you put that in there? This is silly, therefore the idea of it amuses me.
Whether fortunately or unfortunately though, I've recently found out that there is, indeed, still things that will drive me insane with their awfulness. Recently, I made the terrible decision to watch The Asterisk War, which became a bit of a seasonal laughing stock for the community back when it first aired, and which has since become infamous because of Digibro's seminal 13 part bitch-a-thon The Asterisk War Sucks, where he tears the series apart in scary levels of detail.
There's very little I can say about The Asterisk War that isn't covered in this series of video essays. It's puerile wish fulfillment at its worst, designed to make the main character look cool first, and any other concerns are essentially disregarded. As a result, it presents a world full of plastic characters that seem to exist solely to adhere to the archetypes that we expect them to be in, and to fawn over every move main character Ayato makes. Characters act unbelievably and nonsensically, and nothing of real interest happens other than new situations for Ayato to look badass by easily handling presenting themselves. There is simply nothing to sink one's teeth into. All attempts at intrigue fall completely flat due to their resolution being obvious and telegraphed, and thematic depth is simply not attempted.
This is my exact problem with Say I Love You, the 2012 shoujo romance show by studio Zexcs. Say I Love You is only wish fulfillment. It may be less obvious in intent, but a simple watch-through should be enough to demonstrate this. It follows Mei, a girl who was betrayed by her friends as a child and who has distanced herself from the rest of her classmates in order to avoid getting hurt again. She's noticed by Kurosawa, the hottest guy in school who has all the girls hanging from his every word. He finds her interesting, you see, since she's not superficial like all those other girls. He begins hanging out with her, and they soon fall in love and begin dating.
There's nothing particularly wrong with this. In fact, after the first episode of Say I Love You, I was excited to watch more. Mei had a quietly fiery attitude to her, avoiding conversation at all costs and not hesitating to roundhouse kick a dude in the face for annoying her. Meanwhile, Kurosawa seemed nice but had a sliminess to him that seemed to stem from being so effortlessly popular this whole time.
This all disappears after episode one. Kurosawa is just the nicest, hottest, and as we later discover, richest dude in school. Mei is just a shy, plain wallflower who he immediately hopelessly falls for whilst ignoring the advances of much more attractive girls. You know this story, you've seen it before, and you'll see it again.
Unfortunately, that is pretty much literally all there is. There's a bunch of drama, but it all involves either Mei or Kurosawa misunderstanding the other's intentions, or assuming something untrue. The show goes through three or four mini-arcs, but they're all the exact same: Some new character is introduced, who immediately falls, or is established to have a long-time love, for one of the main characters. One of the main couple thinks the other is in love with said new character, and starts acting like a dick. A supporting character, usually the meddler in one of the previous arcs, talks to whoever's being suspicious, tells them to talk it out with their significant order, and they reconcile, inducting that arc's new character into their group of friends.
What's telling is how this is portrayed depending on who is suspicious. When Mei's suspicious, she's full of internal doubt and guilt. Surely Kurosawa couldn't do this to her? No, but he must, the evidence points to it! But then he's too much of a good person for this! I guess I'll just be quiet and wait for the issue to resolve itself. Which it then does, with a token show of effort from Mei, and then the girl who was being confrontational realizes just how great and cool Mei is and becomes one of her devoted group of close friends.
On the other hand, when it's Kurosawa, he's being a dick. Surely he should know Mei wouldn't do this to him? I mean, it's obvious that she's doing nothing wrong. Why would he suspect? Oh, it turns out he was just being too gallant and protective because he just loves Mei so damn much, he can't stand the idea of her being taken away from him. Mei is just so great and he loves her so much. Kurosawa loves Mei, and Mei is the woman Kurosawa loves, so Kurosawa is in love with Mei whom he is in love with and loves.
This really is all there is to Say I Love You. It's childish wish fulfillment, meant to help teenage girls live the fantasy that even though they might be boring and have no friends one day the prince charming they deserve will come and recognize them for the incredible person they are and fall deeply in love with them.
You know what? I have no problem with wish fulfillment. I love a lot of shonen action shows, like Cowboy Bebop or Food Wars where a decent part of the appeal is imagining myself as someone as effortlessly badass as the main character. It's valuable escapism that helps you remove yourself from the problems of the world. But wish fulfillment isn't all there is to art. Bebop's Spike Spiegel is an undeniable badass, yes, but he's also a complex character. Cowboy Bebop is about him dealing with the trauma and pain of living in the real world, and about how his badassery stems from a detachment from the tragedies going on around him that he has to struggle to maintain in order to be able to simply live in Bebop's cutthroat world. Even the much simpler and much more fun-oriented Food Wars' main character Soma has to deal with the elitist structure of the food world, where his cooking style oriented around making the best of simple ingredients and recipes is looked down upon by a culture dominated by fancy dishes made from the most expensive ingredients around. Much of Food Wars is centered around Soma understanding how and why this elitist system came about, and figuring out how to prove himself within it without loosing his own distinctive style. In other words, Food Wars is about an artist struggling to improve without loosing his individuality.
Wish fulfillment does not mean you can't have thematic depth. That's the thing that both The Asterisk War and Say I Love You fail to understand. By centering their shows entirely around wish fulfillment, they become boring. Even if I project myself onto Ayato, there's no satisfaction. There's no feeling that I've figured something out, or at least come out well from some sort of internal struggle. I've simply been a badass my whole life and effortlessly crushed some evil dudes. So what? Me, as a person, what have I gained from being Ayato? I escaped my mundane life for a bit, and got plopped right back in it, none the wiser. After projecting myself onto Spike, though, I came out having thought some more about how to deal with bad things in my past, and with some food for thought about how I should interact with tragedies that happen around me, but not to me, in the future. It hasn't necessarily changed the way I act or behave, but Spike is a character with applicability to real life. He makes me think about things.
Thinking about things is the part of fiction that entertains. At no point during The Asterisk War or Say I Love You did I find myself thinking about anything. I'm not asking to be made to consider moral conundrums. It's fine if all I'm wondering about is how the character will get out of this situation, or what happens next. But these were shows so busy trying to make me want to be their main character that they set up absolutely boring, by the numbers worlds and plots that have no room for surprises.
This is all a long way of saying that there's just nothing interesting about either The Asterisk War or Say I Love You. They're not interesting on a plot level. Their worlds aren't anything interesting. There's no characters in them that took me by surprise. Most egregiously of all, they're about nothing: nothing to say or think about whatsoever. If these weren't both very good looking shows with competent audio mixing, there'd be absolutely nothing reedemeable about either of them. This type of stuff is precisely why wish fulfillment is a dirty word when it comes to talking about fiction. Both The Asterisk War and Say I Love You get
2/10
for being some of the most boring, pointless shows I've ever had the displeasure to watch. I absolutely hated both of these shows.
But I've watched a lot of shit. One of my favorite pastimes at university was putting on a terrible movie and ripping it apart with my friends. When you've willing subjected yourself to Birdemic, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Beast of Yucca Flats and Smosh: The Movie, it's hard to really be upset at anything for being bad anymore. This rigorous training has kind of broken me. My reaction to bad film and television is no longer to be angry or bored, it's to laugh at it. Even the worst of the worst is amusing in it's awfulness, like that bit in 5 Centimeters Per Second (a film which contrary to popular belief is garbage) where a dude sits on a train for 20 minutes and nothing happens except pseudo-philosophical monologue. That's funny! Why the fuck would you put that in there? This is silly, therefore the idea of it amuses me.
Whether fortunately or unfortunately though, I've recently found out that there is, indeed, still things that will drive me insane with their awfulness. Recently, I made the terrible decision to watch The Asterisk War, which became a bit of a seasonal laughing stock for the community back when it first aired, and which has since become infamous because of Digibro's seminal 13 part bitch-a-thon The Asterisk War Sucks, where he tears the series apart in scary levels of detail.
There's very little I can say about The Asterisk War that isn't covered in this series of video essays. It's puerile wish fulfillment at its worst, designed to make the main character look cool first, and any other concerns are essentially disregarded. As a result, it presents a world full of plastic characters that seem to exist solely to adhere to the archetypes that we expect them to be in, and to fawn over every move main character Ayato makes. Characters act unbelievably and nonsensically, and nothing of real interest happens other than new situations for Ayato to look badass by easily handling presenting themselves. There is simply nothing to sink one's teeth into. All attempts at intrigue fall completely flat due to their resolution being obvious and telegraphed, and thematic depth is simply not attempted.
This is my exact problem with Say I Love You, the 2012 shoujo romance show by studio Zexcs. Say I Love You is only wish fulfillment. It may be less obvious in intent, but a simple watch-through should be enough to demonstrate this. It follows Mei, a girl who was betrayed by her friends as a child and who has distanced herself from the rest of her classmates in order to avoid getting hurt again. She's noticed by Kurosawa, the hottest guy in school who has all the girls hanging from his every word. He finds her interesting, you see, since she's not superficial like all those other girls. He begins hanging out with her, and they soon fall in love and begin dating.
There's nothing particularly wrong with this. In fact, after the first episode of Say I Love You, I was excited to watch more. Mei had a quietly fiery attitude to her, avoiding conversation at all costs and not hesitating to roundhouse kick a dude in the face for annoying her. Meanwhile, Kurosawa seemed nice but had a sliminess to him that seemed to stem from being so effortlessly popular this whole time.
This all disappears after episode one. Kurosawa is just the nicest, hottest, and as we later discover, richest dude in school. Mei is just a shy, plain wallflower who he immediately hopelessly falls for whilst ignoring the advances of much more attractive girls. You know this story, you've seen it before, and you'll see it again.
Unfortunately, that is pretty much literally all there is. There's a bunch of drama, but it all involves either Mei or Kurosawa misunderstanding the other's intentions, or assuming something untrue. The show goes through three or four mini-arcs, but they're all the exact same: Some new character is introduced, who immediately falls, or is established to have a long-time love, for one of the main characters. One of the main couple thinks the other is in love with said new character, and starts acting like a dick. A supporting character, usually the meddler in one of the previous arcs, talks to whoever's being suspicious, tells them to talk it out with their significant order, and they reconcile, inducting that arc's new character into their group of friends.
What's telling is how this is portrayed depending on who is suspicious. When Mei's suspicious, she's full of internal doubt and guilt. Surely Kurosawa couldn't do this to her? No, but he must, the evidence points to it! But then he's too much of a good person for this! I guess I'll just be quiet and wait for the issue to resolve itself. Which it then does, with a token show of effort from Mei, and then the girl who was being confrontational realizes just how great and cool Mei is and becomes one of her devoted group of close friends.
On the other hand, when it's Kurosawa, he's being a dick. Surely he should know Mei wouldn't do this to him? I mean, it's obvious that she's doing nothing wrong. Why would he suspect? Oh, it turns out he was just being too gallant and protective because he just loves Mei so damn much, he can't stand the idea of her being taken away from him. Mei is just so great and he loves her so much. Kurosawa loves Mei, and Mei is the woman Kurosawa loves, so Kurosawa is in love with Mei whom he is in love with and loves.
This really is all there is to Say I Love You. It's childish wish fulfillment, meant to help teenage girls live the fantasy that even though they might be boring and have no friends one day the prince charming they deserve will come and recognize them for the incredible person they are and fall deeply in love with them.
You know what? I have no problem with wish fulfillment. I love a lot of shonen action shows, like Cowboy Bebop or Food Wars where a decent part of the appeal is imagining myself as someone as effortlessly badass as the main character. It's valuable escapism that helps you remove yourself from the problems of the world. But wish fulfillment isn't all there is to art. Bebop's Spike Spiegel is an undeniable badass, yes, but he's also a complex character. Cowboy Bebop is about him dealing with the trauma and pain of living in the real world, and about how his badassery stems from a detachment from the tragedies going on around him that he has to struggle to maintain in order to be able to simply live in Bebop's cutthroat world. Even the much simpler and much more fun-oriented Food Wars' main character Soma has to deal with the elitist structure of the food world, where his cooking style oriented around making the best of simple ingredients and recipes is looked down upon by a culture dominated by fancy dishes made from the most expensive ingredients around. Much of Food Wars is centered around Soma understanding how and why this elitist system came about, and figuring out how to prove himself within it without loosing his own distinctive style. In other words, Food Wars is about an artist struggling to improve without loosing his individuality.
Wish fulfillment does not mean you can't have thematic depth. That's the thing that both The Asterisk War and Say I Love You fail to understand. By centering their shows entirely around wish fulfillment, they become boring. Even if I project myself onto Ayato, there's no satisfaction. There's no feeling that I've figured something out, or at least come out well from some sort of internal struggle. I've simply been a badass my whole life and effortlessly crushed some evil dudes. So what? Me, as a person, what have I gained from being Ayato? I escaped my mundane life for a bit, and got plopped right back in it, none the wiser. After projecting myself onto Spike, though, I came out having thought some more about how to deal with bad things in my past, and with some food for thought about how I should interact with tragedies that happen around me, but not to me, in the future. It hasn't necessarily changed the way I act or behave, but Spike is a character with applicability to real life. He makes me think about things.
Thinking about things is the part of fiction that entertains. At no point during The Asterisk War or Say I Love You did I find myself thinking about anything. I'm not asking to be made to consider moral conundrums. It's fine if all I'm wondering about is how the character will get out of this situation, or what happens next. But these were shows so busy trying to make me want to be their main character that they set up absolutely boring, by the numbers worlds and plots that have no room for surprises.
This is all a long way of saying that there's just nothing interesting about either The Asterisk War or Say I Love You. They're not interesting on a plot level. Their worlds aren't anything interesting. There's no characters in them that took me by surprise. Most egregiously of all, they're about nothing: nothing to say or think about whatsoever. If these weren't both very good looking shows with competent audio mixing, there'd be absolutely nothing reedemeable about either of them. This type of stuff is precisely why wish fulfillment is a dirty word when it comes to talking about fiction. Both The Asterisk War and Say I Love You get
2/10
for being some of the most boring, pointless shows I've ever had the displeasure to watch. I absolutely hated both of these shows.
