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.

How does one tell if it is a ‘set­ting’ rather than a ‘premise’? Look upon this uni­verse in which the char­ac­ters reside in, and ask one­self if there are any major con­cepts that the char­ac­ters con­ve­niently brush aside and ignore as if it were an accepted norm. See if there are any top­ics hid­den behind that brief expla­na­tion akin to “there’s a sleep­ing Snor­lax on the road and you can’t get pass it”.

True, all those super­nat­ural ele­ments and pseudo-magic doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily have to make sense. After all, the expla­na­tion for magic is pretty much — magic. But there are things that do stay the same, be it soci­ol­ogy or strat­egy or the human curios­ity for knowl­edge and explo­ration. Peo­ple don’t just accept the exis­tence of a strange ele­ment with­out alter­ing their think­ing pat­terns or inves­ti­gat­ing it. This, is where the dif­fer­ences between set­ting and premise broad­ens: char­ac­ters ques­tion the mechan­ics within a ‘set­ting’ like how New­ton stares at his apple tree.

This is also one of the fore­most rea­sons for sto­ries placed in cre­ative set­tings: char­ac­ter devel­op­ment, as the cast retains their human (or pseudo-human) nature within the for­eign World, try­ing to fig­ure out why their grav­ity works the way it does and how to respond to a soci­ety prop­erly ‘weighed down’ by grav­ity. Obvi­ously, you lose most of this poten­tial within a ‘premise’, as peo­ple sim­ply don’t change if they never think about the World that envelops them.

I don’t think I need to dis­cuss the issue of con­sis­tency. If we start vio­lat­ing physics, something’s wrong. If a set­ting vio­lates its own rules, something’s wrong. Sim­ple as that. The excep­tion is when the cast real­izes said law being vio­lated and starts a shit­storm — then it’s fine. The excep­tion to the excep­tion is when too many laws are being vio­lated… excep­tion to excep­tion to excep­tion — this is like freak­ing chemistry.

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Exam­ples, Exam­ples: the Good, the Bad

A few crit­i­cal points of fail­ure in pop­u­lar mod­ern scifi/fantasy animes:

• Shaku­gan no Shana: What’s up with that Crim­son Realm any­ways? Why is the cast still attend­ing school instead of actively solv­ing prob­lems, by planeswalk­ing or destroy­ing gate­ways to stop con­flicts preemptively?
• Index/Railgun: For a series with remark­able sim­i­lar­i­ties to X-men, all the social impli­ca­tions of hav­ing super-humans are just… miss­ing. Seri­ously, the Accel­er­a­tor rep­re­sents mil­i­tary power to threaten 1st world nations.
• Evan­ge­lion: The mil­i­tary never prop­erly explored that con­ve­nient AT-Field which made them use­less. The World never seri­ously con­sid­ered or inves­ti­gated the ori­gin and impli­ca­tions of those angels.
• Any­thing Sun­rise: Too obvi­ous here. How many times did Code Geass make every­one go WTF!? How the fuck does that work? or Why hasn’t any­one noticed this? Same can be said for most of their other series.

I’m actu­ally hav­ing trou­ble think­ing of recent series that man­aged an excep­tional job in con­struct­ing the ‘set­ting’. It may sim­ply be that I watched the wrong series but…

Recent sci­ence fic­tion anime never seem to stand up to the scrutiny of a tra­di­tional scifi fan. New con­cepts are given lit­tle explana­tory expo­sure (what’s up space aids cur­ing), and new races are always cursed by sim­plis­tic psy­chol­ogy. Of course Ranka eas­ily sub­verts all the Zen­tradi in Macross Fron­tier, there’s like zero indi­vid­u­al­ism between them unless they’re at least a notable character.

Recent fan­tasy shows? It feels like the char­ac­ters are always stuck in the mid­dle of their own lit­tle micro­cosm, seg­re­gated from the rest of the world by either space-time defy­ing bound­ing boxes (Nanoha, Shana) or some invis­i­ble veil of secrecy. Either that or the entire set­ting is generic as hell (Zero no Tsukaima).

Those who know the header pic­ture prob­a­bly knows which series I’d present as hav­ing a remark­ably well-established set­ting: The Twelve King­doms intro­duced an entire new world and sep­a­rate social struc­ture, which the story strug­gled to explain to the viewer. They never quite man­aged it, as after all, their Man­date of Heaven is quite lit­er­ally magic. But that didn’t stop its cast from tack­ling the mechan­ics from every philo­soph­i­cal per­spec­tive, attempt­ing to answer the ‘why’ and prob­ing for pos­si­ble mechan­i­cal loop­holes to exploit. Crest/Banner of the Stars is another series which deserves pride in its set­ting, explained in detail and explored in width, from the tac­ti­cal impli­ca­tions of pla­nar space com­bat to the social views on the Abh Empire’s genetic manip­u­la­tion and unique psy­chol­ogy. (Although, since I don’t enjoy lin­guis­tics, that ‘Klin­gon’ lan­guage of theirs annoys me).

Out of the notable recent series, Full­metal Alchemist deserves quite the praise on its ‘set­ting’. Yes, their alchemy is pseudo-science that doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny, but at the moment it’s also not hold­ing up so well to the cast. That’s the notable part: Edward and co are actu­ally react­ing like real human beings to the mechan­ics of this strange World they live in. They seek pur­sue the quest for knowl­edge, to find out why their World works the way it does. Well, look at how much it changed them along the way, and how many story oppor­tu­ni­ties it opened.

Good set­tings tend to be a lit­tle on the aging side as far as anime goes, and not always the most pop­u­lar around…

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Why is poor set­ting par­tially our fault?

Because many of us don’t appre­ci­ate good set­tings enough. Because we can be appeased by less. Because by and most, the atten­tion span of today’s view­ers suck.

Set­ting takes time to develop. To use ‘set­ting’ to mold char­ac­ter devel­op­ment and sto­ry­board pro­gres­sion you have to explain the details of the mechan­ics, be it through a long expo­si­tion or peri­odic breaks from the main story to tackle the infor­ma­tion. Unfor­tu­nately, pac­ing the expo­si­tion to a scifi/fantasy set­ting is quite tricky. Give out too much infor­ma­tion and the viewer is bored, give out not enough and they’re con­fused. Script writ­ers aren’t per­fect, and peo­ple will mess up (by vary­ing degrees) in one direc­tion or the other. There’s a trend going around and I doubt it took long for pro­duc­ers to notice: less detail­ing is often for­given, for oth­er­wise Sun­rise would have gone bank­rupt by now. On the other hand, more detail­ing is often responded by peo­ple drop­ping out as mod­ern­ized atten­tion spans expire. Well, I know which risk I’ll be tak­ing if I wanted to make money from seri­al­ized pro­duc­tions, espe­cially when those extra min­utes the expla­na­tions will take is cost­ing pre­cious air-time.

Ever since I dropped out from Gun­dam 00 because its ‘pol­i­tics’ and ‘tac­tics’ were killing my brain cells, I’ve began adapt­ing a less seri­ous atti­tude towards most anime: don’t over-analyze how it works, just accept that it works. True, it’s done well in let­ting me enjoy a lot more anime than I would oth­er­wise. But at the same time, this is the kind of atti­tude that pushes stu­dios to lean more towards ‘premise’ and move fur­ther away from ‘setting’.

So what am I com­plain­ing about? That you can’t have both halves of the pie here. Deux Ex will always find their way into high-paced excit­ing sto­ry­lines. If you want your mechan­ics to make sense and applied to full poten­tial, then you’re going to have to risk a few infodumps.

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Setting-Driven

This is more of a post-note, but I think there are some who prob­a­bly aren’t so aware of the fact: there are setting-driven fans. Actu­ally, a lot of science-fiction and fan­tasy fans love ‘set­ting’ as much as they enjoy sto­ry­lines or char­ac­ters. Not exactly the most com­mon bunch, but they exist, and they’re the type who can actu­ally enjoy shows like Nanoha Strik­ers because it opened the door­way to a whole new world of cre­ative think­ing. So yeah, some of those in-universe jar­gon and crazy con­cepts are also des­ig­nated for this audience.

Hence why there are soft sci­ence fic­tion and hard sci­ence fic­tion: the soft with only com­monly used prin­ci­ples that are easy to under­stand, and the hard­core which can only be under­stood and enjoyed by a technophile (I have no clue what those books are talk­ing about sometimes).

At the same time, world­forg­ers also take a par­tic­u­lar pride for their set­ting design. It’s like how daddy Maes Hughes is proud of his daugh­ter, really, and he just can’t hold back from show­ing it off. So excuse the authors if some of those info­dumps went into some­thing slightly irrel­e­vant: they are just show­ing off and hav­ing fun. Of course, at some point it steps over the line to being unprofessional…

(Author’s ram­bling: I dis­cov­ered I needed a sep­a­rate cat­e­gory for this kind of seri­ous post­ing, and hence begins the Crossvi­sion cat­e­gory)

Pos­si­bly Related Posts

• Mar­cana Tarot Project
• Patch­ing the Holes in Sora no Woto
• Sora no Woto = Het­alia Army of an Incon­sis­tent Era

This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 23:54 and is filed under Anime, Crossvision. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.