I can’t remem­ber why I dropped the show dur­ing its first air­ing, because it con­tains every­thing I love…

Simoun is an under­ap­pre­ci­ated title that has much to be praised for: a well-executed expo­si­tion that fully out­lines one of the most cre­ative fantasy-scifi set­tings in just two episodes; a diverse cast that makes leaps and bounds in char­ac­ter and rela­tion­ship devel­op­ment with skillfully-written melo­drama; a war story that is deep and engag­ing, pro­pelled by the themes of love (in its many forms), pos­si­bil­i­ties, and becom­ing an adult; not to men­tion one of the best anime sound­tracks of the decade with its awe-inspiring clas­si­cals. There’s also the mat­ter that it’s pow­ered, lit­er­ally, by the divine power of yuri~

But to me, Simoun’s bril­liance shines the most in how every­thing cas­caded from the cre­ativ­ity of its premise, its use of sharp con­trast between beauty and cat­a­stro­phe to drive ide­o­log­i­cal themes… Read the rest of this entry »

As a hob­by­ist world­forger, Lelangiric’s post and Eternal’s con­tin­u­a­tion on how the mechanics/setting of anime tends to fall short of expec­ta­tions actu­ally ticks me off a lit­tle bit. Not quite because of their view­points, but because mod­ern Japan­ese ani­ma­tion, and much of recent scifi/fantasy in gen­eral, are a rather poor gauge on mea­sur­ing the lit­er­ary val­ues of set­ting cre­ativ­ity. But then, that’s also par­tially our fault as the viewers…

Expo­si­tion start: acti­vate lec­ture mode! (and who remem­bers this old yet remark­able anime?)

By and most in today’s series, we don’t have ‘set­ting’. More pre­cisely, we have a very much watered down ver­sion of ‘set­ting’ which is far bet­ter enti­tled ‘premise’. The dif­fer­ence between these two? A set­ting attempts to round out the details behind all the pri­mary con­cepts and mechan­ics it intro­duce. It goes beyond just those two ini­tial lines of con­cep­tual expla­na­tions and seeks to reflect the cast’s under­stand­ing of their World to the audi­ence, with­out inhi­bi­tions or con­ve­nient cutouts. On the other hand, a premise is a set of con­cepts and mechan­ics sim­ply handed to the audi­ence with min­i­mum scrutiny, and the viewer is expected to accept it in order to make the story work. ‘Premises’ can be upgraded to ‘set­ting’ through sto­ry­telling, but with­out intri­cate detail­ing and/or in-depth analy­sis, it will always remain what is it: merely a premise, a set of ideas and foun­da­tions, not a World.

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