Yuuki Yuuna #10 — Same Ol’, Same Ol’

December 11th, 2014

  

The more things don’t change, the more they stay the exact goddamned same.

Impressions:

You know what I adore? Pointless flashbacks. Moving past that completely unneeded and pointless third of the episode… it was pretty much more of the exact same as the last couple episodes. The only thing that’s changed from the early obnoxious episodes is that the tune has changed from “Friendship is magic!” to “Woe is I.” It’s still padded out. They’re still covering no important ground. There’s still no actual antagonist to provide any kind of direction to all the “world is unfair” schlock, and they’re still not bothering to do anything but put on a front about everything supposedly important, be it “the world is in extra super mega danger now” to “our lives are the worstest ever.” Aaand since they steadfastly refuse to do anything to address the situation and about 98% of the woe is delivered as a talking head simply sitting there narrating how awful everything is, it’s impossible to feel even the slightest bit of empathy for them or their supposed plight.

“We have it so bad!”
“Well, what are you doing to change things?”
“I tried killing myself.”
“That helps how?”
“Can’t you see how bad I have it?”
“So… for attention. What else?”
“I tried killing myself again.”
“We’ll table the suicide option. What else?”
“I threw a temper tantrum!”

At the very absolute minimum, they need to understand that they had to sacrifice something because they were unprepared and they screwed up, and then move forward from there. If you want to pile on suffering and woe on top of them actually giving half a crap and trying to improve things, we would be in an entirely different situation (and show). Instead, they hit the first hardship and have spent a month now crying about how awful it is. So they’re doing the absolute bare minimum, and refuse to get up the very first time they hit any kind of hardship that lasted for more than 30 seconds. Go team.

Posted in Yuuki Yuuna | 13 Comments »

13 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • Andmeuths says:

    Here’s a thought: would you be willing to be a soldier in an endless war? Sure, pay is awesome, the job benefits many, and the Veteran disability compensation, quite literally god-tier. In exchange, every battle, you run the risk not of dying, but rather giving up one of your body functions, and if you screw up, anything from a few dozen to all of humanity dies.

    “At the very absolute minimum, they need to understand that they had to sacrifice something because they were unprepared and they screwed up, and then move forward from there. ”

    But they are basically child soldiers in an endless war. So if anything, perhaps Taisha Yuusha doctrine is just really really sucks? I mean, these are teenage girls at the most emotionally unstable time of their entire lives. I think only Yuuna, and perhaps Karin is incline to think in that military manner – the goal is to win while minimizing the number of Mankais used – if you are prepared, you don’t have to sacrifice anything. The trick of course, is that eventually, you do have to make sacrifices – if you are lucky, maybe you could go ten or twenty battles without sacrifices, so perhaps you might live out an entire human lifespan before being confined to a bed forever, if you do well. And then, it’s immortality as a cripple, but one worshiped as a god.

    Does that really sound like a sweet deal to you? That’s basically the deal offered to the Heroes in Yuuki Yuuna, only, the Taisha lack transparency, and after seeing Togo go apeshit this episode, I don’t blame them.

    • Aroduc says:

      Compared to the alternative of “you and everyone you know dies?” Yeah, it is a pretty sweet deal unless you’re a nihilist.

      It’s the same as practically every action show out there. Fight, or die. There’s no real choice or it’d have been a very short show. Let the chompers go kill you/the world tree if you don’t want to do it. Your tamagotchis demonstrably won’t do much of anything about that. The antagonist is quite literally “the world is unfair.” They’re just posturing about how much angst making that false choice brings because the great writer/god in the sky arbitrarily inflicts suffering as a transparent emotional ploy. Even someone getting an arm chewed off would at least supply a visceral shock, to say nothing of them all just simply being better whenever they feel like transforming, which is approximately half the time so they’re not even usually affected by it during the important scenes at all.

      • Andmeuths says:

        Then the Taisha are incompetent, and fail to manage some of the least rational people in the world: teenagers, and making them essentially child soldiers. The trick is to indoctrinate them into accepting it’s a sweet deal for a necessity when the time comes, not trying to hide the truth indefinitely, to instill pride in them as defenders of humanity.

        I actually think Togo is the real antagonist in the show – Yuuna will embrace that “unfairness” wholeheartedly, even going so far as killing Togo for her betrayal.

        I think the only way for the Heroes to be better is the Karin way – train hard between battles, rather than pissing the days away in inanity. Which implies that Fu is an incompetent moron whose leadership has been catastrophic.

        • Aroduc says:

          Yes, if they actually were trying to better themselves, things would be different.

          That, however, was something you shouldn’t be doing when you could go to karaoke with friends instead.

        • Andmeuths says:

          So, Karin should have been the leader from the start, and the Taisha have realized, far, far too late that Fu is incompetent?

        • Aroduc says:

          Let’s be fair. They’re all incompetent.

          I really want Japan to get over its “having power is a curse” fascination that it seems to have been stuck in for the last few years, particularly when it comes to light novels and characters with the darkness within, doubly so when it’s some teenager cursed with invulnerability and/or immortality and is already full of eternal suffering at 16 years old. This is handling it especially badly with the central conflict just being “We have to fight to save the world, but if we fight, we might get hurt!” But only when not transformed. Which is half the time. And all the ‘hurting’ is just told to us. It brings Symphogear G’s arm ripping to mind. Sure, they screwed that up by immediately resetting it, but at least it invoked a visceral cringe reaction as a natural outcome to fighting giant bitey things instead of the far more illogical and disconnected “The world has decreed you’re deaf in one ear. Now agonize over it!”

        • Longhaul says:

          Having your arm nom’d and regrown by a monster of the week is more cringe worthy than being tricked into inescapably having your bodily functions taken as sacrifice to perpetuate a fubar world?

        • Aroduc says:

          Organic vs narrated. Jarring vs drawn out. Visceral vs contemplative. Show vs tell.

    • Burnout says:

      The thing about Yuki Yuuna is that while the Taisha are necessary, the deal is a pretty raw one if you go into it without foreknowledge. You’re fucked either way: I’m not even sure if you can die, because suicide is out and I think the girls might just be immortal. Suicide-by-monster might be the only way out, and I’m uncertain if that would work.

      Wixoss is different, because the most straightforward solution is to *stop playing the game*. No-one’s forcing ’em to, in that one!

      I mean, if I was facing eternity as Stephen Hawkings without even the hope of the sweet release of death, that’s just not cricket at all.

  • Sanjuro says:

    I think it’s obvious Aroduc is saying that Karaoke is ruining anime.

  • atenbites says:

    At the very least I feel that this show has more Action Per Minute than UBW…

  • algorithm says:

    That’s what a Wixoss review would look like. For every single episode.