Cruel Angel Theses

Or, black holes and revelations, which is my take on how Myself; Yourself is going to resolve itself. Trust Muse to know better. I read three dissenting opinions on M;Y today, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s an inevitable by-product of blurring the boundaries of the genres, which also means it absolves itself of any blame if that’s the case.

This season holds a record for most renai/visual novel/dating sim adaptations not behaving like a typical adaptation of its make should. There’s the excellent and emotive Clannad. The maligned yet deep ef. The vanilla and pristine kimikiss. M;Y differs in that the game will be released soon, making any comparisons to the source impossible. Unlike the other three, M;Y has an advantage for being devoid of any expectations whatsoever; unfortunately, this works for and against it.

Personally, as things stand right now I don’t see it attaining an outright good/bad consensus. Not like that’s a bad thing given how a lot of the best shows out there lack unanimous acclaim, or how lowest common denominators are usually the only means by which an anime attracts the most praise, but it’s not a good thing either. You could call it schizophrenic, indecisive, or bad planning. I prefer to use what might seem to be a misogynistic analogy.

“Girls who send mixed messages.” We’ve all heard of them, and while guys aren’t entirely innocent when it comes to leading on girls, in my defence I can only say that we might not even be aware of it, like all typical harem protagonists. But that’s besides the point. The archetype of the girl in mention here is the single, ideal girlfriend material that, at some point or another, crosses into the no man’s land territory between “friends” and lovers”, but when balks confronted with the idea.

How is this done? Through the aforementioned mixed messages, or, in simpler layman’s terms, unconscious flirting. The real-life equivalent of a tsundere. You aren’t expected at any one point to be sure whether or not she likes you because you know she might not think of you in that way. Her words and body language don’t match. She goes out of her way to be nice to you but has other guys in her life. That kind.

The analogy leads back to M;Y because of how it’s presented the story so far: in short, a terribly incoherent manner akin to that of Gantz (having read all 260 chapters yesterday, I have to concur that it lent new meaning to the terms “playing by ear” and “free improvisation”). What it’s trying to be isn’t as much what I said about post-harem as it is also trying to break out from existing conventions and offer something more than the standard repertoire.

revealing that Aoi is an cyborg at this point would be for the greater good considering that the alternative is expecting to believe she’s a real person, and not the sum of all fetishistic pandering combined

A close look at how the story’s been handled so far confirms this. For one, it’s attempting to do in 13 episodes what Clannad is doing in 24, with not much in the way of explaining how it’s going to do so properly. The cast (with the exception of Aoi) have their own problems and inner demons, all of obviously require resolution or closure to some extent.

However, instead of going into each person’s arc individually, what M;Y does is jump all over the place; when you factor in how it also bears similarities to kimikiss in that several storylines are taking place simultaneously, the confusion mounts. Is it trying to put a clever twist on harem by eschewing the usual arcs for something more disjointed and unclear? Does it even have arcs to begin with? Is there a point to Hinako at all?

What’s more, all harem anime can now be divided into BSD and ASD (Before School Days and After School Days). As M;Y is an ASD, it would be understandable to assume that the ending is likely to be wrought with conflict, gore, and non-stop drama, as episode 08 led us to believe; however, it’s greater than the sum of its parts, and what’s more likely to happen would be a resolution unlike anything seen before in harem.

It all depends on whether or not there’s a method to this madness that Takumi Nakazawa (as Moogy has reminded me over and over, who wrote the Infinity series of games like Never7, Ever17, and Remember11) has in store for us. Maybe he isn’t even trying to do anything with the story and then have it come together haphazardly like vehicles would in a car crash, or maybe he is, and there’s magic waiting to happen in the last two episodes.

I’m positive that show isn’t to blame right now, in any case. I mean, look at it this way — too much drama isn’t a good thing. Neither is all that rainbows and sunbeams, and for the time being I’m content with letting M;Y do what it wants. The last thing I’d accuse it of being is inconsistency, for ever since it began airing it’s been consistently inconsistent.