"Let's Coupling"
Oh, yeah, I remember the other thing I wanted to post about...
After totally flaking out last season, I started on four anime series this season, let them lapse for about the past month, and am trying to catch back up.
The first one I caught up on in the last few days is Buddy Complex. It's very much a conventional mecha-action show, but it's fun and competently done (and I've learned to be grateful for that). The unique schtick of the "coupling system" (synchronizing two mecha pilots to unlock super-mode) is interesting and catalyzes character dynamics, and yes, it is a rich vein of innuendo, especially with their fantasy-terminology ("I'm getting a 'nice coupling' reading!" "Proposing!"), but the show itself is actually quite tasteful about leaving the innuendo to the viewer (even managing to maintain an air of perfect innocence when a character made one of those "nice coupling" remarks and then walked away from the camera, just coincidentally offering a nice shot of his backside...).
The show also plays its narrative-hook cards pretty shrewdly in the early episodes to draw you in --- particularly regarding its other particular schtick. Maybe I only just noticed it, but this seemed to be the season to start shows at the end, with a flash-forward to much later or even after the events of the series; World Conquest Zvezda Plot did it, and there it was a good move in preparing the viewer to take any of what followed in any way seriously (that one didn't look bad, but ep 1 was a bit too nonsensical to hook me); The Pilot's Love Song (which I need to catch up on) also did it and needed it less, but I guess it lent a wistful, tragic tone and levered an action sequence into an otherwise-domestic opening. Buddy Complex, however, took the cake, using a time-warping singularity to actually pull off the trope in-universe and playing the resulting cards pretty shrewdly (in recent episodes our hero has been stupidly genre-blind about it, but the issue of time travel was also brought back in a way that I found interesting and well-considered).
So yeah, I wouldn't say it rises above the level of conventional mecha show --- there's like always a mecha fight in the second half of an episode and the bad guys like always have some reason to retreat before the credits roll --- but so far at least, it's a fun and interesting specimen of the breed.
(BTW, the other two series I'm not caught back up on besides Pilot's Love Song are Noragami and Inari Kon Kon; I'll just have to see when I get back to them...)
‡ original post at Dreamwidth ‡
After totally flaking out last season, I started on four anime series this season, let them lapse for about the past month, and am trying to catch back up.
The first one I caught up on in the last few days is Buddy Complex. It's very much a conventional mecha-action show, but it's fun and competently done (and I've learned to be grateful for that). The unique schtick of the "coupling system" (synchronizing two mecha pilots to unlock super-mode) is interesting and catalyzes character dynamics, and yes, it is a rich vein of innuendo, especially with their fantasy-terminology ("I'm getting a 'nice coupling' reading!" "Proposing!"), but the show itself is actually quite tasteful about leaving the innuendo to the viewer (even managing to maintain an air of perfect innocence when a character made one of those "nice coupling" remarks and then walked away from the camera, just coincidentally offering a nice shot of his backside...).
The show also plays its narrative-hook cards pretty shrewdly in the early episodes to draw you in --- particularly regarding its other particular schtick. Maybe I only just noticed it, but this seemed to be the season to start shows at the end, with a flash-forward to much later or even after the events of the series; World Conquest Zvezda Plot did it, and there it was a good move in preparing the viewer to take any of what followed in any way seriously (that one didn't look bad, but ep 1 was a bit too nonsensical to hook me); The Pilot's Love Song (which I need to catch up on) also did it and needed it less, but I guess it lent a wistful, tragic tone and levered an action sequence into an otherwise-domestic opening. Buddy Complex, however, took the cake, using a time-warping singularity to actually pull off the trope in-universe and playing the resulting cards pretty shrewdly (in recent episodes our hero has been stupidly genre-blind about it, but the issue of time travel was also brought back in a way that I found interesting and well-considered).
So yeah, I wouldn't say it rises above the level of conventional mecha show --- there's like always a mecha fight in the second half of an episode and the bad guys like always have some reason to retreat before the credits roll --- but so far at least, it's a fun and interesting specimen of the breed.
(BTW, the other two series I'm not caught back up on besides Pilot's Love Song are Noragami and Inari Kon Kon; I'll just have to see when I get back to them...)
‡ original post at Dreamwidth ‡