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Feb 09 2010

Sora no Woto = Hetalia Army of an Inconsistent Era

Posted by Aorii in Anime, Impressions, tags: , ,

I can’t help but think that every time I watch an episode of Sora no Woto, not het­alia as in that Het­alia, but as in the use­less Ital­ian Army of WW2. It seems like a por­tion of the anibl­o­gos­phere is bent on heav­ing praises to the sub­tle hints of this post-apocalyptic world being dropped left and right, but I keep scratch­ing my head over the parts that just feels lack­ing or is out­right miss­ing about the whole series premise. I mean, the first episode was great on drop­ping both phys­i­cal and mytho­log­i­cal intrigue on the audi­ence, but it’s been plum­met­ing to the basics since then. If I had to give an one-liner of my thoughts on this series thus far, it be the following:

Sora no Woto aims to be a mil­i­tary slice-of-life with seri­ous themes; it comes out to be a lack­lus­ter moé series with a con­fused goal.

Each episode begins with an OP that sets the theme of redemp­tion, fol­lowed by mil­i­tary anti-war and treasure-life motifs scat­tered through­out the back­ground scenery: be it the inspi­ra­tion of music to an orphan; the lost joy of the destroyed music class­room; the soft, sooth­ing music played from a tank; or the con­trast of des­o­la­tion and nat­ural beauty in dusk over No Man’s Land. But each theme stay on screen for only a minute or two, while the rest of the time is spent by dump­ing in sev­eral loads of moé com­edy that wrecks havoc with its tone and mood pac­ing. I’m sorry, but these are some heavy con­cepts and sim­ply not meant to be por­trayed in such a light-hearted atti­tude. To exag­ger­ate things some, doing so would be like plac­ing Auschwitz in the mid­dle of an amuse­ment park. It’s why award win­ning movies like Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan or my favorite Assem­bly (Call) drops down to com­plete seri­ous­ness when under­tak­ing the bur­den of such sub­stan­tial themes; same goes to anime like Saikano and Zipang. Even The Third, with its post-apocalyptic adven­tur­ism, but­tons itself down when­ever it tack­les a war-related issue…

And Sora no Woto just— I’m not ask­ing this series to reflect beauty from the dark­est depth like in The Pianist, since it doesn’t take place dur­ing an actual war; but it could at least attempt to por­tray some real­ism and seri­ous­ness. Right now, the pre­sen­ta­tion style which sim­ply makes short, pass­ing ref­er­ences is almost insult­ing to the mil­i­tary genre (not that it’ll be a first in anime). As E_Minor of Moe Sucks puts it:

Oh yeah, war makes orphans out of kids, but mov­ing right along to more stu­pid Kanata

I under­st­sand those things are like 40kgs but… are you sure you’ve had basic training?

The Keion-bu Squad

Sora no Woto chooses to focus on a sin­gle armored-reserve gar­ri­son squad sta­tioned out in some strate­gi­cally insignif­i­cant posi­tion. It seems like the army sim­ply formed this squad out of use­less per­son­nel that they don’t know what to do with. Lead by Cap­tain Sawa-chan-sensei Feli­cia, the all-girls squad is so laid back that it’s vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to con­sider them ‘sol­diers’. As I watched episode five my mind pretty much screamed ‘did these girls even go through boot camp or any form of basic train­ing?’. I mean how can you take them seri­ously with this composition:

  • Cap­tain Feli­cia is so soft and easy­go­ing that there isn’t the slight­est sense of author­ity around her. How she can pos­si­bly keep her girls in order dur­ing the midst of any real com­bat is beyond me. Her Tsumugish per­son­al­ity would make a good mother; but supe­ri­ors, espe­cially in the mil­i­tary, are not mater­nal fig­ures — they’re pater­nal, with all respect, guid­ance, and tough love that should come with one. Under her soft­ness, it’s not sur­pris­ing that the squad became what it is.
  • Noël and her ded­i­ca­tion might make a decent mechanic in the REMF logis­ti­cal corps. But to dou­ble up as a squad dri­ver? I’m sorry but the mil­i­tary doesn’t wait for proper day­light hours before engag­ing in oper­a­tions, and any­one with low blood sugar should have got­ten used to it dur­ing boot camp’s dawn train­ing. It’s cute, but I wouldn’t trust her abil­ity to stay awake behind the barhan­dles of a tri­cy­cle, let alone an Armored Com­bat Vehicle.
  • Kureha has slightly too much of a panic prob­lem. This isn’t that sur­pris­ing for green cadets, but for a gun­ner it’s about the worst case pos­si­ble. Imag­ine her shak­ing hands in episode 2 con­trol­ling the deadly gun bar­rel of a Main Bat­tle Tank; for­get accu­racy, there’s an unac­cept­able chance of friendly fire here. Of course in this show, she’ll be sorry for killing her com­rades for two sec­onds, the world will right itself back again, and we’ll move on with tsuntsun deredere—
  • Kanata is the new recruit. She has that hard­work­ing demeanor, but the show fails to make use of any part of it. That sud­denly learn­ing to play well in episode 4 makes no sense. If good music only requires one’s musi­cal senses to move with the flow and ‘play itself’, then all the hard work by musi­cians every­where just went up in flames: so much for train­ing since 5 years old on that piano.
  • Rio, the watch­ful men­tor, is the only one who really seem to fit in with the entire mil­i­tary theme.
  • Takemikazuchi, the pri­mary weapon of this armored squad, is a quadruped tank with­out a chas­sis. Effec­tively, it’s a tur­ret stocked away in a garage, which is use­ful only as spare parts. Sadly, that’s prob­a­bly still more use­ful than its oper­a­tor squad.

So what exactly is mil­i­tary about Sora no Woto? It sure feels like the writer sim­ply decided ‘Hey I got a cool idea, let’s put the keion-bu in a mil­i­tary squad! Wouldn’t that be original?’

.

*Head­wall* The sym­bol­ism is nice and all, but aren’t you try­ing a lit­tle TOO hard to fit in this music theme?

The Sur­real Post-Apocalyptic World

The cul­ture is a mashup of mediter­ranean styles, includ­ing Greek, Ital­ian, French, and appar­ently Japan­ese; this I find inter­est­ing and rep­re­sen­ta­tional of a melt­ing pot world band­ing together to sur­vive a harsh apoc­a­lypse. But that brings it back to what I do have a prob­lem with: this incon­sis­tent post-apocalyptic premise.

Some­how, only spe­cific mil­i­tary tech­nolo­gies sur­vived; yet hun­dreds of years later, the insa­tiably curi­ous human race still haven’t even par­tially reverse-engineered that fusion-age tank to enhance their industrial-age infantry firearms. Yet some­how they under­stand enough of it to repair the thing… huh?

Some­how, despite the fact this shin­ing arti­fact of the old world is the one of the only ancient-technology items we can see in the entire world, Kanata seems to make no big deal from it. The squad’s reac­tion towards it makes it seem rather com­mon­place, despite how out-of-sync Takemikazuchi is with the rest of the tech base in the Sora no Woto world.

Some­how, although they all know about the lost World, no one con­tem­plates or even acknowl­edges the apoc­a­lypse. It’s not just a mat­ter of avoid­ing it in the dia­logue and drop­ping only hints. There isn’t even one of the expected moods: no sor­row or grief over the lost world, no pain or guilt over what could have been, no reflec­tion or impres­sion over the past mis­takes com­mit­ted by soci­ety. It isn’t just a mat­ter of avoid­ing the past or for­get­ting the his­tory — it’s as if noth­ing earth­shak­ing had actu­ally hap­pened, that the shift from the music class­rooms of old to the Time-Keeping Fortress of present were the per­fectly log­i­cal out­come in the grad­ual pas­sage of time. This is like Ger­many treat­ing the era of Nazism as a per­fectly nor­mal step in their history…

This is no set­ting. The char­ac­ters of Sora no Woto seems to inter­act only with the envi­ron­ment when it’s con­ve­nient, and even then they do it only on a super­fi­cial level before head­ing back to goof­ing off — talk about wasted potential.

Well-placed paint­ing… though no reflec­tions after see­ing some­thing like this is—

.

Please, give me my K-ON moé in the K-ON style we love and enjoy; don’t pre­tend this is the some deep-ended anime with moé injected into it.

I hope the show will even­tu­ally either get seri­ous, or drop all pre­tense of it.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 19:09 and is filed under Anime, Impressions. 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.

9 Responses to “Sora no Woto = Hetalia Army of an Inconsistent Era”
  1. omo says:
    February 9, 2010 at 19:52

    Sounds like a futile exer­cise of look­ing for some­thing where it may or may not exist. I do want to address a cou­ple tangents:

    » Some­how, although they all know about the lost World, no one con­tem­plates or even acknowl­edges the apocalypse.

    You know this because…?

    » There isn’t even one of the expected moods: no sor­row or grief over the lost world, no pain or guilt over what could have been, no reflec­tion or impres­sion over the past mis­takes com­mit­ted by society.

    There’s some irony about this; we do it today on a reg­u­lar, every­day basis. None of that is rel­e­vant to the story of the show really. Of course, the series is pre­sented with a relaxed nar­ra­tive and the point isn’t about what hap­pened then, but what is hap­pen­ing now. The bet­ter ques­tion is to ask: why drop the hints? Why does this show takes place in a post-apocalyptic world?

    » Some­how, only spe­cific mil­i­tary tech­nolo­gies sur­vived; yet hun­dreds of years later, the insa­tiably curi­ous human race still haven’t even par­tially reverse-engineered that fusion-age tank to enhance their industrial-age infantry firearms. Yet some­how they under­stand enough of it to repair the thing… huh?

    This is more likely the log­i­cal pro­gres­sion of tech­nol­ogy in a post-apocalyptic world where tech­nol­ogy has regressed, on aver­age. It’s very safe to say if mankind were to reboot itself, tech­nol­ogy will not advance the same way it did the sec­ond time around. There are just too many things that could or could not have hap­pened the sec­ond time. Espe­cially when we take into account of pre-existing future tech throw­ing off the way things would have “nat­u­rally” devel­oped. This is all not tak­ing into account of things like the severe pop­u­la­tion drop, the loss of nat­ural resources, and who knows what else.

    Your logic would make more sense for a loss of tech­nol­ogy of maybe 40 years, tops. Put it this way–to develop the lens used in episode 3, you need laser. Laser is some­thing you need rel­a­tively advance mate­r­ial sci­ence to make, just to iso­late the very first prim­i­tive cat­a­lyst. Then you need to develop the opti­cal physics to even know what laser is, that it exists, and why it’s a huge tech­no­log­i­cal break­through. Then you need to apply that physics to craft the lens, but only after real­iz­ing you can apply laser to do it. And all this is for some lens on some silly mechan­i­cal thing that we don’t even know how it works.

    Reply
    • Aorii says:
      February 10, 2010 at 08:22

      Because there hasn’t been any direct men­tions of what lead up to the cur­rent sit­u­a­tions. All it has been is like: oh there were once stu­dents here, oh this was once the war zone / fall­out region. I doubt any­one today can sud­denly find a wrecked, aban­doned town in the mid­dle of nowhere and just go: oh, it exists, whatever.

      His­tory is what defines the cur­rent. That’s why arche­o­log­i­cal tourism loca­tions always describe not only what some­thing is, but also a rough account that bridges the past and present. Because peo­ple will ask, peo­ple will won­der. I can’t point to real-life exam­ples of how peo­ple feel about an apoc­a­lypse since it didn’t hap­pen, but those of a nation whom col­lapsed dis­as­trously from its glo­ri­ous days always have this begrudg­ing atti­tude about the past when they are reminded of it. And hence I find their reac­tions illogical.

      The fact the tank is being main­tained (not to men­tion repaired) as an active-service vehi­cle also means they must be able to pro­duce at least some of the spare parts involved to keep it oper­a­tional for the fore­see­able future, includ­ing when light bat­tle dam­age becomes involved. The fact Noel is repair­ing the chas­sis means she has at least some idea of how those quadrupedal gyros work — we can’t even man­age that today. If some cadet can under­stand these, what about their top notch researchers? The prob­lem here isn’t just some kind of slightly unbal­anced tech­nol­ogy gap, as much as the ridicu­lous deriva­tion of it: two to three entire tech­no­log­i­cal eras of dif­fer­ence between mil­i­tary and civil­ian tech­nol­ogy as far as I can see, prob­a­bly around ~150 years. Usu­ally, when one tech era is achieved, the over­head before break­ing through to the next tech era is astro­nom­i­cally higher than to R&D the other inno­va­tions capa­ble within the cur­rent era, so a full era of gap­ping is already extremely unlikely. If the apoc­a­lypse hap­pened not long ago, this would make more sense as they haven’t had a chance a fill in gaps, but the other fac­tors don’t point this way. It’s par­tic­u­larly the case since there was a post-apocalyptic war, and research is always strained to the max­i­mum dur­ing wars, espe­cially reverse-engineering; some of that tech sur­plus is then always adapted for civil use after the war. Basi­cally, this means that the civil­ian sec­tor should also have some tech gaps that are maybe halfway as crazy as the mil­i­tary ones, but there’s no sign of such at all.

      Reply
      • omo says:
        February 12, 2010 at 10:03

        I have no issues with your argu­ment. I have issues with your assump­tions. In gen­eral:
        1. just because it hasn’t hap­pened 5 episodes in doesn’t mean it won’t, although it is cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence that it may not exist. Maybe you can try to build your case for each of them.
        2. some of your assump­tions are not log­i­cally con­sis­tent with other assump­tions you are mak­ing, and what has been revealed in the show. For exam­ple, you assume there are sci­en­tists in their world, that there are peo­ple who want to and can reverse engi­neer these high-tech black boxes, when we have not seen one. And yet it’s clear that they do not have a public/mass sys­tem of edu­ca­tion. It may very well be that there are no “sci­en­tists” in their world, as we know it.

        The story of Sora no Woto so far is an allur­ing scav­enger hunt that invites the audi­ence to deduce the one(?) cat­a­clysmic event that turned it into an apoc­a­lyp­tic world. They are the para­me­ters and assump­tions you are mak­ing. So when you just mouth them off, it doesn’t sit right with me.

        » The fact the tank is being main­tained (not to men­tion repaired) as an active-service vehi­cle also means they must be able to pro­duce at least some of the spare parts

        This is def­i­nitely not the case. In my mind I think of Iran and its F-14 fleet (and that isn’t even “lost tech”). Which is to say lost tech are often main­tained poorly, and bro­ken parts are taken from other dis­abled lost tech. Seems like the obvi­ous thing that hap­pened in the anime.

        Again, I think you really need to re-examine your con­cep­tion of tech­no­log­i­cal regres­sion. What you model is not a 100+ year loss of tech, and more like a 40–50 year loss of tech. Fur­ther­more it doesn’t assume loss of resources at all, when clearly the world has been altered dras­ti­cally. You do make a good point about civil­ian tech use, in that there ought to be more non-military ori­ented black boxes out there (but it may speak to the nature of the cat­a­clysmic event, on purpose).

        More impor­tantly, your assump­tion about the event that caused this gap seems arbi­trary. Maybe that’s a good place where you can lay out the case for the things you argued in the post proper.

        Reply
        • Aorii says:
          February 12, 2010 at 11:49

          Yeah, I’ll admit I may be attempt­ing to make more assump­tions than should be here. How­ever, one of the gen­eral rules of sto­ry­writ­ing is always to explain the premise con­cepts (as opposed to sto­ry­board­ing con­cepts) that a reader may not under­stand because it’s not the com­mon norm; one of the rules of world­forg­ing is very sim­i­lar: if it’s not the same as a com­monly accepted form of soci­ety that the audi­ence already knows, then it must be explained, and within a lim­ited time frame after the intro­duc­tion of the con­cepts. I have to build log­i­cal bridges some­how, and since Sora no Woto is still using human soci­ety, I just have to assume some of the givens in human sociology/psychology still applies. Sorry, but if a series tries to appeal from its ‘set­ting’, then I’m not going to give it any con­ve­nient black holes in think­ing. Of course, Sora no Woto may fix a lot of this before the series is done, hence­forth this post is merely my impres­sions of it.

          We seem to be a loss on the tech­nol­ogy regres­sion. My expe­ri­ence in tech­nol­ogy regres­sion in scifi is that they’re usu­ally rel­a­tively con­sis­tent when spanned over long eras, and sharp con­strasts like Sora no Woto indi­cates oth­er­wise; but obvi­ously that’s not the case with your expe­ri­ence in it, so I’ll just leave it at that.

        • omo says:
          February 12, 2010 at 20:05

          Look­ing back, a few cases of tech­ni­cal regres­sion that comes to mind tend to be in the form of, say, Scrapped Princess or Lord of Sands of Time, they tend to fol­low this for­mat in that black box tech is mainly shown to be mil­i­tary in appli­ca­tion. To me that’s the genre trope in play. But who knows, maybe they didn’t want to fol­low Japan­ese light novel con­ven­tions :)
          omo´s last blog ..Chas­ing Moon­runes My ComLuv Profile

  2. Scamp says:
    February 10, 2010 at 15:07

    Just want to throw one thing out there: NO MONEY

    The human race at the moment is capa­ble of some pretty crazy things if we were able to get the fund­ing for it. Episode 6 proves that econ­omy is in a pretty shitty place at the moment so where on earth are they going to find money to research new weaponry? Besides, if they had these good weapons, would they really give it to a bunch of girls off by the edge on no mans land who are never going to be attacked?
    Scamp´s last blog ..The two-year death and his­tory repeat­ing itself in the aniblog­sphere My ComLuv Profile

    Reply
    • Aorii says:
      February 10, 2010 at 15:44

      Of course they’d have no money after the recent war. Apart from Amer­ica after WW2 how many nations actu­ally emerge from War in a good eco­nomic state? I sure remem­ber Europe and Asia being trashed by every major war. Of course, if no money in the world is the source of all prob­lems they wouldn’t have raised the money to wage war in the first place. War costs more than every research project combined…

      Reply
  3. Sora no Woto, Dead Languages and Traumatic Mysteries « 2-D Teleidoscope says:
    February 12, 2010 at 03:39

    […] 12, 2010 · Leave a Com­ment Major Arcana’s recent entry about the lack of real­ism of Sora no Woto inspired me to write my own thoughts.  Con­sider this a reply, or at least a […]

    Reply
  4. Patching the Holes in Sora no Woto | zanaikin | Major Arcana says:
    March 2, 2010 at 14:05

    […] might remem­ber the prob­lems I had with Sora no Woto, about how it’s not tak­ing itself seri­ously enough given the heavy themes pre­sented by the […]

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