Quarantine Control #31: The Fate of One Million Lives, Baby

The last week has been more insane than few of us could possibly imagine, for reasons beyond the ever-climbing number of Covid-19 cases across the United States and fresh lockdowns being enacted in several territories around Europe. The US, after all, just had a presidential election, a good portion of which involved voters submitting ballots by mail that have to be counted slowly. It was already an insane and terrifying time to be an American (unless you’re a fascist or okay with it), but this entire week has been enough to send the nerves into overdrive. Politics sucks man, just like Covid. Distract yourself with some good entertainment in the meantime, unless you’re the type that just can’t stop thinking about and checking in on this stuff.

 

Angela Moseley

2020 has been one hell of a ride. Tuesday’s presidential election was no exception. As of this writing we still don’t have a decisive winner, making it almost feel like we’ve been transported to the year 2000. Oh, and we’re still in the middle of a pandemic with rising daily cases. Now more than ever we could use a good distraction in the form of anime series discussion.

Aggretsuko Season 3 (2020)
Source: Netflix
Episodes: 10

Fun fact: If I had actually gotten my contribution for Quarantine Control #30 out last week both Joseph and I would have discussed the third season of Aggretsuko. Fortunately, there’s no such thing as too much Aggretsuko discussion, so have some more.

When Aggretsuko was released on Netflix in 2018 I was struck by how a show about cute anthropomorphic animals could be so relatable. Our protagonist Retsuko is stuck at 9-5 job she hates, with a boss who has little respect for her, and her mother can be overbearing at the worst possible times, but thankfully she has a few co-workers she considers friends. Although she has a stable job, she’s still trying to figure out her life as she spends a season trying to escape from working by being a housewife, another season dating a rich tech billionaire only to discover he’s not what she wants from life, and a third season chasing her unexpected dreams. The catch is that this red panda is too nice for her own good. She often vents her rage during karaoke by singing death metal songs. What I love about Retsuko is her imperfection, her knack for getting into troublesome situations, and the way she often grows from her bad experiences.

Season three is a bit different because Retsuko finds herself working multiple jobs in order to eke out a living thanks to some terrible decisions. In this case, she spends all of her savings on micro-transactions in a PSVR game and is broke. Retsuko’s luck takes an even further turn for the worst when she gets into an accident with her rental car. She finds herself in debt to the leopard she backed into. He gives her a job so she can pay back the cost of fixing his van. That has her working as a manager for an underground idol group at night. At first she hates the job, but then embraces her role and manages to make the idols popular and profitable before becoming a performer in the group itself. She eventually makes plans to leave her office day job, but life hits her with cruel twist.

The latest season of Aggretsuko is the perfect story about a millennial who has to work several jobs to get by. (At some point, I’m sure many of us have been there.) One job is relatively stable, but unfulfilling. The other job pays far less, but is incredibly rewarding on a personal level. Just as it looks like it might be possible to make a living off the dream job, it all crumbles before her. She goes back to the stable, but ultimately unfulfilling job. This is a cynical, but surprisingly accurate outlook on life for many working adults. Dreams are crushed and the mundane is safe. Fortunately, Retsuko has some great friends and they are what keep this season from getting too dark.

If you’ve been keeping up with Aggretsuko, no doubt you’ve probably already seen season three. If you haven’t been watching this series I suggest checking it out. Each episode is only 15 minutes long and I promise this show’s soul-crushing relatability is actually a fun ride with fantastic characters and great character development.

Fate/Grand Order – Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia (2019)
Source: Crunchyroll
Episodes: 21

Once upon a time in 2017, I decided to watch Fate/Grand Order: First Order. It was a movie based on a mobile game of the same name that launched in 2015. Other than a heavy amount of technical babble that made little sense at the start of the movie, I found myself enjoying the concept, the characters, and the story. It wasn’t anywhere in the same league as 2011’s Fate/Zero or even as good as 2017’s Fate/Apocrypha. Even so, when the movie ended on a cliffhanger I wanted more.

Fast-forward to the fall anime season of 2019. When I saw more Grand Order was airing in the form of Fate/Grand Order – Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia, I was excited. I didn’t actually get to the show until earlier this year and didn’t finish it until the summer. It was clear that I missed a story or two between First Order and this show. I was able to mostly follow the current plot, but everything leading up to it was lost on me.

Humanity is on the brink of extinction and Chaldea is the only organization capable of reversing this disaster. Ritsuka Fujimaru is the organization’s last master and he has a demi-servant named Mash Kyrielight. The pair is sent back in time to ancient Mesopotamia to help protect the city of Uruk against an alliance of goddesses that want to snuff out all of humanity.

I’m going to admit at this point, I don’t know why Babylon in 2655 B.C. is humanity’s last stand or what happened to all of the other budding civilizations around the same period. I do know that this show features King Gilgamesh, a recurring character in several of the Fate series. In Fate/Zero and Fate/Stay Night he’s a servant who’s both powerful and evil. Here he’s the king of legend, and is cold, but not evil. It feels like the writers took this character and wrote a “what if he wasn’t evil?” plot. It largely works and his story along with the overall plot incorporates some elements from The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Of course, it wouldn’t be Fate without loose interpretations of historical or mythological characters from other periods showing up. Alongside Ritsuka and Mash, we have Ishtar (who looks like Rin Tohsaka from Fate/Stay Night for some reason), Merlin, King Leonidas, a gender-flipped Minamoto no Yoshitsune aka Ushiwakamaru, Benkei Musahibou, and Ana (who’s not quite human). On the side of the Three Goddess Alliance we have Gorgon, a gender-flipped Quetzalcoatl (who has pair of pterodactyls as familiars), Tiamat, and Enkidu (Gilgamesh’s former friend) who’s orchestrating most of the attacks on Uruk.

Honestly, I just watched Fate/Grand Order – Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia for the fights that are best summed up as spectacles. In the downtime between fights, I found myself barely caring about any of the characters just because I lacked so much information on why most of their characters were even working together. The only exception I will make is for Fou because he’s as awesome as he is cute. Oh, and Gigamesh as well because I actually did enjoy seeing him in a different light. However, I was baffled as to why majority of the goddesses in this show were so smitten with Ritsuka. Was this a show about saving the world or building a harem filled with powerful women? Yes, I know he was a master and the goddesses found him interesting, but I still can’t figure out what makes him special aside from surviving the attack on Chaldea in First Order. My enjoyment of Babylonia was dampened by my overall confusion.

I might seek out more shows between this one and First Order to fill in these missing story gaps. Giving other shows in the Grand/Order continuity the G/O label would have helped me avoid this confusion. It’s far too easy to jump from the original movie to this series, thinking it’s a direct sequel.

I can’t really recommend Fate/Grand Order – Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia, unless you’re really into Fate and perhaps the Grand/Order mobile games. The fight scenes are entertaining, but the confusing story is way too high of a price to pay for admission.

 

Geoffrey Barnes

Space Dandy (2014)
Source: Blu-ray
Episodes: 26 (across two seasons)

My first experience with Space Dandy involved watching the first three episodes on Toonami, and I’m going to be honest here: I didn’t like it. This was entirely the result of my expectations. After hearing that Shinichiro Watanabe was working on it and the resemblance to a space drama from the promotions, my feeling was that it would be a fusion of Cowboy Bebop and Outlaw Star, an action-driven series with comedic elements. Space Dandy, however, is all comedy with a little action sprinkled in. But watching the whole thing on Blu-ray while knowing what to expect made it clear that it’s a great series on its own, and didn’t need to be compared to those aforementioned space opera/bounty hunter franchises.

The titular Space Dandy is, well, a Dandy guy in space. He primarily travels around searching for bounties with small autotune-voiced (especially pronounced in the dub) R2D2-style robot QT and space cat Meow. Most of the bounties provide them just enough to get by for a short while, currency Dandy usually spends at his favorite eating establishment: BooBies, an outer space iteration of Hooters that hosts a wide variety of humanoid and alien races. The mere presence of this place and the hostesses that work within it is enough to show how gag-heavy and full of fanservice the overall series will be.

The combination of the setting and themes are what give it a different feel compared to many other anime series. There’s some continuity, but I enjoyed how they didn’t let that get in their way of several good gags, even though this doesn’t go to the same hyperactive extent Excel Saga went to. There’s an episode, for instance, focused around the cast becoming zombies and trying to perform their usual duties while being in a super-slow state. This can sometimes get in the way of character development, but the episode directors and writers clearly bet on the gags being so entertaining that this wouldn’t be necessary, and they were right.

A part of the series that I didn’t expect to love as much as I did was the soundtrack. Space Dandy takes cues from cheesy old-school sci-fi series that covered both anime and live-action. That’s partly seen in Dandy’s design, particularly his fly haircut, but also how the music wouldn’t sound out of place in a 70s series. It’s not a big surprise that the soundtrack is great given how this tends to be a given with Watanabe-directed shows, but I can’t remember the last time I needed a series’ soundtrack after watching it.

The series strikes a good balance between having a good deal of comedy with serious content sprinkled in all the way through, with the second half getting a bit more dramatic than the first. Regardless of which mood it’s going for, it never stops being enjoyable. Watching the entire thing made me glad this wasn’t simply a fusion of Cowboy Bebop and Outlaw Star, even though I’d still like to see that idea come to fruition.

The Mandalorian: Season 2 — Episode 1 (2020)
Source: Disney+
Episodes: 1 (so far)

The second season of The Mandalorian started on Disney+ last Friday, the entire season of which was thankfully filmed just before the pandemic shut the world down. Rumors abounded regarding what too-enthusiastic Star Wars fans could expect from the season, a couple of which panned out in this episode. This one focuses on Mando’s battle (accompanied by The Child, aka Baby Yoda) with a Krayt Dragon (previously introduced in Star Wars: A New Hope), for which he has several accomplices.

The Mandalorian was always billed as a space western, but this episode took that literally for a short part of it. The episode largely occurs on Tatooine, partly in a town that resembles a run-down one from an old western show. It’s in the saloon where Mando meets with Cobb Vanth (Timothy Olyphant), who himself is wearing Mandalorian armor that looks very familiar. Both of them help the Sand People fight the Krayt Dragon.

A minor complaint I had with episodes in the first season involved how short some of them were — shorter, in fact, than episodes from a normal TV series. But this one was about 50 minutes, and the producers knew how to fill that time with a good amount of story, suspense, and action.

Basically, I have no complaints about the start of this season, and I’m looking forward to how the rest of it will develop from here — especially with the gigantic tease at the end.

 

Joseph Daniels

Ever since the summer of 2017, I’ve found myself interested in the concept of being Narnia’d.  Despite my name for it, the idea of finding yourself transported to another world actually predates C. S. Lewis, since the Oz books do it too, and there might be books before even them.

In Japan, the term is known as “isekai”, which literally means “different world.”  It can be very tempting to want to disappear into a different world at this time, given how 2020 has been playing out, but it should be noted that many isekai protagonists end up stuck in this other world and close to 100% of these protagonists are expected to save the world they find themselves in.  It’s all a matter of being careful what you wish for.

One of the advantages to isekai anime is that we learn about the world at the same time the protagonist does.  There isn’t any “as you know” style exposition.  One of the disadvantages is that the protagonist is often at a disadvantage for he doesn’t always have the training to deal with situations in this other world.  It’s truly a fish out of water scenario.

A high proportion of these protagonists are also gamers, oddly enough.  I guess there’s something about being Narnia’d which gamers are able to understand and cope with?  From my own personal experience, that’s not always the case, but then I do think that most writers of isekai anime don’t experience it themselves.

The isekai genre is as varied as any other genre of anime.  This week, I’d like to spotlight:

I’m Standing on 1,000,000 Lives (2020)
Source: Crunchyroll
Episodes: Ongoing (5 so far)

In this anime, the method of being Narnia’d (I suppose I should call it being isekai’d, not being Narnia’d, but you tend to get used to using a term before you learn what the “real” term for something is) is that you’re transported into the game world by the mysterious game master whenever he wants you to go on a mission, then you’re transported back home to await the next mission if you succeed.  As of episode five, the group has yet to find themselves trapped, so it is assumed this is always going to be a two way street.  The main protagonist is a gamer who notices that this other world operates a lot like a game, although some of the rules would’ve been nice to know ahead of time, like in one episode where he finds himself losing experience for attacking a human, when these humans are bandits and are ready to commit violence against him and his party.  It’s a little unfair to be punished for breaking a rule that was not communicated to you ahead of time.

Which I guess makes this anime a little frustrating for the characters to experience, since the rules are there to screw the player and not the NPCs, who don’t have power levels they can increase or decrease and have nothing to lose by attacking and killing the protagonists.  It’s like playing Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and seeing the enemy breaking rules that you yourself are forced to follow.

Fortunately, death is cheap in this anime, and I am jealous.  I wish I could’ve had a cushion like that, being able to return to life after lying there for a few seconds as long as the rest of my party is alive.  Protagonist Yusuke often finds himself in over his head, so he’s often laying dead on the ground for a short while, trying to come up with a new strategy to win because just charging at the enemy isn’t helping.

It also doesn’t help that he’s constantly rolling really weird classes whenever he’s eligible to add another one to his character sheet.  Yeah, apparently in this world, you can take levels in various classes, but the ones you receive are entirely up to RNG.  Imagine if, upon booting up Final Fantasy, instead of determining the jobs of your four Warriors of Light, the game decided for you.  This is essentially the Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta in anime form.

I don’t trust the game master, and not because he has half a head and he doesn’t finish his senten.  I don’t trust him because you don’t just one day decide, just for fun, to transport people to another world and give them quests to comple.  Hopefully we find out his motivation soon, because there are only plans for twelve epi.

Writing sentences like those are not as easy to do as you’d think.

Anyway, the twelve episode season might suggest that there’s a second season coming, or else the main plot might not be finished before the end of the series unless it gets rushed in the final couple episodes.  The final mission is supposed to involve enemies being fought in the real world, and according to the way the game is set up, that mission will only occur after a full party of ten have been gathered.  This isn’t a spoiler, we find out about this early on.  We’re almost at the halfway point of the anime, but we’ve also only accumulated a party of four, and the current mission is taking several episodes to play out.

Also, it’s odd but as of episode five, I can’t help but feel like there’s something off about this anime.  Not about the situation the characters are in but the quality of the anime itself.  There’s still time to turn it around, but I’m beginning to feel like it might not be as good as I first thought.  For now, I’m recommending giving this show a try, and over the next few weeks, I’ll be exploring some other ways to get Narnia’d in anime and the consequences involved.

 

It’s very difficult to be optimistic about anything at the moment, but the best you can do is stay safe and stay informed until things get better. Well, if they get better. You never know these days.