I mentioned the other day that there are good sides and bad sides to having commenting enabled. Right now it seems to be going well on Chizumatic, and let's hope it stays that way.

I find myself frustrated right now because Author doesn't allow commenting. I fully understand why, but it leaves me in the position of having to quote essentially all of his most recent post about Shingu: Secret of the Stellar Wars so that I can respond to it. Alas.

Anyway, mild spoilers, so it's under the fold.

When I just started with Shingu, one oddity I noticed immediately was how it featured no defective characters. Sure, some had issues, but overall they are very different from common characters in contemporary anime. Nobody is neurotic, and it feels like something large is missing.

Another facet of the same thing is that stereotypes, upon the development of which anime creators worked so hard and so long, are practically absent. We can formally classify characters, but it’s not who they are. Nayuta is not a tsundere, she is just proud and shy and traumatized; Harumi is not moe.

This is a virtue, not a fault. Stereotyped characters are a crutch for lazy or uninspired writers. You go to the shelf, take down the tsundere mold, the ditz mold, and the emotionless girl mold, pour in the cement, wait for it to harden, slightly vary the paint job, and you have your cast for the show. Cast in concrete. There's no flexibility.

Sato didn't do that. Instead, he sat down and thought about each of his characters and decided what he wanted them to be. He came to know them as people -- as complex and realistic people.

As Author says, Nayuta is not a tsundere. It's true that she beats up Hajime a couple of times, but there are legitimate reasons not related to "unconfessed love". What drives Nayuta as a character is that she feels the weight of responsibility that fate has placed on her shoulders. And she doesn't like it; she's rebelling against it, but doesn't quite know what alternative there might be. And that's why she is a study in conflicted motives; she hasn't figured out what she really wants.

Nayuta and the other characters in the series are so memorable and so rich and believable precisely because they are not stereotypes. Sato didn't need that crutch.

Someone (maybe a commenter) wrote that kids seemed too mature. I don’t think so, they seemed exactly matching their age, except for Shun. That guy is definitely way too sly, but fortunately he is too good-natured in general. I think the unusual normality was mistaken for maturity by these observers.

I think that was me. (I did say something like that.) Part of what I was talking about was the fact that Shun is the only boy in the story whose voice hasn't changed yet. While I like having male seiyuu doing male parts, fact is that it's a bit strange when you're talking about 13 and 14 year old guys. My voice didn't change until I was 16.

It also strikes me that Hachiyou is entirely too together, even amongst a well-adjusted lot. However, Hachiyou is also one of the least realized characters in the series, and part of why he may come across that way is just because we never really learn very much about him.

Shun is fun. He does like jerking people around (though it's pretty much only Moriguchi and Nayuta that he needles). But he's not fundamentally a bad person, and when it really hits the fan he'd do anything for his friends. He just has a different way of dealing with people. (He gets some of it from his dad.)

I liked the fact that his approach to trying to find out about Muryou was to go straight up to Muryou and start talking -- and not to play dumb. It was obvious that Muryou knew a lot more than he should, and Shun didn't insult Muryou's intelligence by pretending to misunderstand things Muryou said. (And that scene was a case of foreshadowing. Isn't that interesting?)

Aside from being stable, most characters are also exceptionally nice, which is incredibly odd, considering. In Figure 17, for example, we have no less than two actively present assholes: Aoyama (the guy with glasses who courts Hikaru), and Mina (the pretty girl with complex braids). In Shingu, however, there aren’t any.

It's another crutch that Sato didn't need. His story is about characters, but he didn't need any annoying ones to create dramatic conflict and comedy because his more normal characters were so well conceived. Watching Nayuta's "NO! No. Yes. A bit." act, for instance; I love it (and her) every time it happens. It's funny, but I'm laughing with her as much as at her.

Making comedy and drama by making the audience hate a character is easy. It's another stereotype, and Sato didn't really include any stereotypes in the story, at least that I can remember. (Hikaru, the media otaku, is probably the closest to a stereotype in the series but even she isn't.) Sato actively breaks the mold any time he thinks his characters are starting to get too channeled. For instance, it would have been extremely easy for Harumi to be portrayed as constantly miserable and angsty -- but she can smile and laugh even in the early part of the series.

What Author is responding to is the quality of the writing. The ideal case in fiction is for the author to create his characters and his scenario, and then let them tell him what happens. He just writes it down. If his characters and situation are well conceived, and if he lets those characters be what they are, the story will be a good one.

But that's not easy to do. It can't be done at all if you stock your cast with stereotypes. But it's what Sato did. His story flows from the characters, because his characters are well conceived. Nayuta goes through a lot of changes in the series, and so does Harumi, but it's all completely believable. Every bit of it makes sense, and that's the case for all the other characters too.

Jirou, for instance. He's a minor character, and it would have been easy, and lazy, to make him a monochromatic "class clown". Sato didn't do that. Jirou is a class clown, but there's more to him than that.

Such characterization contributes to a feel that I rather expected from “The World of Narue”. It took me about five episodes to get desensitized to this Hello Kitty world and stop wondering what is wrong with everyone.

As an example, Cowboy Bebop is an opposite of Shingu: everyone is defective in it (even Spike), but its characterization constitutes an anime norm.

And "the norm" is mediocre writing by talentless hacks, who fill their stories with disfunctional eccentrics because it's convenient and fast. Shingu isn't like that, and it's one of the big reasons I gave the series 4 stars.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in at 11:52 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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