09.23
Someone took "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" literally.
So I’ve been slacking off on some anime recently. Haven’t watched the latest Durarara episode. Yet to see Shimoneta beyond the first few episodes. And don’t even talk to me about Overlord. But there’s one show that has confused me so much that I must witness it week after week hoping for an answer but only receiving a sucker punch. This show was not just bad, but horrifying in its fumbles and mistakes, creating a world without human emotion and instead dictated by a seemingly alien morality. Characters going on quests kookier and wackier until you can barely remember what happened even ten minutes ago. It’s unsettling. It’s inebriating. It’s not Charlotte. It’s the dreaded Seiji Kishi’s latest production.
One would think it’d be so simple to take Edogawa text and put it on-screen. Even the most off-colour stories could be translated through some censorship and refreshing. And if one were to go another step further, setting it in the modern day, that’s just one more hill to reach. Any fucker trying to make a new Sherlock Holmes knows that from experience. Furthermore, take some unrelated stories and fuse them together into an overarching tale. That’s worked before, so why not try it this time? But here in our quaint Noitamina block, something went wrong. What was trotted out as a celebration of Ranpo Edogawa became an artist’s lust over bloodshed and boys. And why be surprised? After Assassination Classroom and Dangan Ronpa, why be surprised at all?
Only Seiji Kishi could take the classic “Two guys solve mysteries while going through sexual tension” vehicle and mutate it into this. I suppose I should admire someone adding his personal touch to the formula, like watching someone sculpt pottery with their feet. You can’t make a character like Kobayashi without having as fractured a mind as Kishi’s or scriptwriter Makoto Uezu’s. He was simultaneously one of the most complex and simple-minded characters we’ve had this season. He’ll be so nonplussed by police corruption or terrorism, but puts on dresses to sexually confuse his friends. His interactions with Akechi and Hashiba were torn out of a mistranslated Kafka text. He’s so boring, yet acts like no real human. Not even the cheapest first draft could make something as stupid as the ass chairs or the cement daughters or even Twenty Faces’ origin. I have the feeling the creators have some dissociation syndrome happening in their works, where they think one word means something else and no one bothers to tell them otherwise.
I sense this disconnect in an episode almost like clockwork. Grisly murders shift into slapstick. Expositions happen through dance. Wacky caricatures are treated with the utmost seriousness. High school girls being dismembered and reassembled into furniture only elicits mild amusement from our sleuths. Rapes are given the equivalent value of an eyecatch. Only once did a character react to any of these crimes with an emotion I could even recognize, and it was the wacky substitute teacher. To have one character treat these misfortunes as a game is an expectancy. To have all three and most of the supporting cast do this is just delirious.
Which is to say this is all a grand indicator for how out-of-touch with humanity this show is. For something obsessed with the worst things people could do to each other, the lives of actual people are given no insight. Everyone who isn’t part of the cast is just another one of the literal faceless masses, with those even supposedly central to the plot given little definition or reason for their actions. Why is there a purple-haired girl re-enacting the death scenes? Why does Kobayashi keep flaunting his ass at Hashiba? Why does that one cop keep holding his sides in? None of these have clues or any steps into understanding why they happen. Instead, we get paper cutouts and bizarre animation choices in some fool’s attempt to distract from the plot at large. I’m sure someone will defend these as choices meant to enhance the story or something like that. Perhaps I need to go back to college and take film studies to comprehend these directorial decisions.
But it’s not hard to decipher the theme at all. It’s how humans are naturally predisposed to uncivilized chaos. This show yells it out to the sky, demanding the audience to know how ugly human society is. People are just expected to publicly relieve themselves when talking to a fellow human. Kidnapping children and forcing them to be your daughters is definitely a low-level crime in the scheme of things. Horrible things happen, and they happen so much that it’s merely a shame to Kobayashi and crew. But Ranpo Kitan never delves into this misery. They occur, get solved, and are forgotten the week after. This show’s like the angry kid who talks tough about why the world sucks, but knows nothing of how it actually works. And if you’ve been reading this far, you can tell I know this all from experience. This is not a critique on mankind’s flaws, but a trivialization. It is condescension coming from a halfwit savage. And that doesn’t enlighten someone to the world’s troubles. It just increases them, so what’s the point?