Code Geass
May. 5th, 2015 10:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackHalf way through season 1 of the Code Geass anime box set dvds. Random thoughts, without much spoilers:
Thank you to Alex for recommending it, it's exactly the sort of thing I like.
It makes much more sense than it sounds like! The premise is like, two paragraphs with national politics and magic and giant robots and resistance groups and high-school politics and chessmaster protagonist and antagonists all in one thing and sounds ridiculous. But when I actually watch it, it flows very naturally. The new Britannian empire has conquered most of the world, including Japan. Partly by using the next generation of military hardware, giant robots. The protagonist is a minor Britannian noble at high school in Japan with a grudge against the emperor. He gets caught in up the japanese resistance. He also acquires a mysterious power from a secret research project in a resistance operation gone wrong, which he exploits ruthlessly and effectively. The characters are about 18 (I think), at just the age when it makes sense they might both be in high school and also in the military or secretly in the resistance.
But also, everyone's uniforms (military and school) are ridiculously sexy all the time for no reason.
It does chessmaster strategists ever so well. There's a common problem of _saying_ someone is a clever strategist, but everything they do is basically magic "hi, I did stratego-babble and now we're winning". But a surprisingly high amount of the time, it manages the magic sweet spot of me going "oh, of course, that was clever" when something happens.
And the worldbuilding hangs together too. You see two people in a giant robot, and you immediately know which is better than tanks but worse than the other giant robot and how much of a chance it stands. Good pilots are clearly more effective but not magical.
It's interesting to see what genre conventions are new to me and I consciously notice and which ones I don't. Presumably Britannians are supposed to look western and the Japanese are supposed to look Japanese? But I can't tell by looking between western and japanese and indian (?). It's hard to imagine a british animation about britain being conquered by a foreign empire, and primarily about characters from that empire living in britain.
OTOH, I'm very curious to know more but not as emotionally engaged as I might be -- fewer and fewer things make me genuinely get excited about the fate of the characters. And I'm worried it will descend into moral greyness and things not mattering (but don't tell me I know there's still a lot of plot changes coming up and I'm going to watch it without wanting to know more).
Thank you to Alex for recommending it, it's exactly the sort of thing I like.
It makes much more sense than it sounds like! The premise is like, two paragraphs with national politics and magic and giant robots and resistance groups and high-school politics and chessmaster protagonist and antagonists all in one thing and sounds ridiculous. But when I actually watch it, it flows very naturally. The new Britannian empire has conquered most of the world, including Japan. Partly by using the next generation of military hardware, giant robots. The protagonist is a minor Britannian noble at high school in Japan with a grudge against the emperor. He gets caught in up the japanese resistance. He also acquires a mysterious power from a secret research project in a resistance operation gone wrong, which he exploits ruthlessly and effectively. The characters are about 18 (I think), at just the age when it makes sense they might both be in high school and also in the military or secretly in the resistance.
But also, everyone's uniforms (military and school) are ridiculously sexy all the time for no reason.
It does chessmaster strategists ever so well. There's a common problem of _saying_ someone is a clever strategist, but everything they do is basically magic "hi, I did stratego-babble and now we're winning". But a surprisingly high amount of the time, it manages the magic sweet spot of me going "oh, of course, that was clever" when something happens.
And the worldbuilding hangs together too. You see two people in a giant robot, and you immediately know which is better than tanks but worse than the other giant robot and how much of a chance it stands. Good pilots are clearly more effective but not magical.
It's interesting to see what genre conventions are new to me and I consciously notice and which ones I don't. Presumably Britannians are supposed to look western and the Japanese are supposed to look Japanese? But I can't tell by looking between western and japanese and indian (?). It's hard to imagine a british animation about britain being conquered by a foreign empire, and primarily about characters from that empire living in britain.
OTOH, I'm very curious to know more but not as emotionally engaged as I might be -- fewer and fewer things make me genuinely get excited about the fate of the characters. And I'm worried it will descend into moral greyness and things not mattering (but don't tell me I know there's still a lot of plot changes coming up and I'm going to watch it without wanting to know more).
no subject
Date: 2015-05-06 02:00 pm (UTC)It makes an interesting contrast with Death Note, which was about the same time and approaching some similar themes from a very different angle, and which I am about a third of the way into right now; most notably in that when Death Note wants (or feels obliged) to do something because it's a conventional anime trope rather than because it makes particularly much sense at a realistic level, it puts a lot of effort into tortuously setting it up to kind of sort of rationally hang together, whereas Code Geass feels to me to be coming from a perspective of "OK, you want your absurd trope. Here it is. Now let's get on with the story we want to tell." (The scene in I think the third episode with one character in the shower struck me as an example of this, as does the entire handling of the key political figures still being high-school students.)
no subject
Date: 2015-05-06 03:07 pm (UTC)Yes, exactly.
smart people actually behave like smart people (including making the particular kind of stupid mistakes smart people do, which is something very few stories get right)
Yes, I forgot to say, that stuck out for me too, that mistakes are very natural too -- mistakes from someone strategic but lacking real world experience, or intelligent but failing to account for people who don't automatically follow a well-laid-out plan, etc...
it puts a lot of effort into tortuously setting it up to kind of sort of rationally hang together,
Yeah, good point. I hadn't noticed that _absence_ of something annoying. Some bits did stick out as odd (or kind of awful like the automatic sexualisation), but were passed over briefly with "don't think so hard about this" which I think usually works better than trying to force everything into a logical framework, which inevitably leads to getting overloaded with too many extraneous constraints.