Quarantine Control #49: The Case of Fry la Kill

Today marks one year since the pandemic began in earnest within many countries around the world, most prominently the United States. It’s when the public fully realized this whole thing wouldn’t blow over in an instant, that lockdown measures would need to be taken to stop the spread of infections. We have seriously been trapped in this hell for a whole year, spending an excess amount of time within homes, wearing masks, and avoiding people as much as possible to dodge the risk of not getting violently ill or potentially dying — though that wasn’t a choice for anyone “essential.” It’s good now that we may be slowly emerging from this, but that won’t bring back the mass death that occurred along the way.

Turns out, it’s still best to stay at home, where there’s plenty of entertainment to consume. We largely are.

 

Geoffrey Barnes

Kill la Kill (2013)
Format: HBO Max
Episodes 24 + 1 OVA episode (that I had to pirate because it wasn’t on streaming services, thanks)

You can typically tell what an anime series will be like by simply observing promotional artwork, and that mostly applies to Kill la Kill. The main art doesn’t try to hide that it’s an action series focusing on two main rivals, Ryuko Matoi and Satsuki Kiryuin, who constantly go at it with sizable blades. But it does hide how often the series jumps into comedy. Others aren’t much better, which either show Ryuko in a battle pose or both characters fighting in their battle outfits. This is not what the entire series is like, but it’s also not entirely misleading.

Not that I was too fooled at how much this series veers into comedy. I’m familiar enough with this Studio Trigger team’s previous works from before they departed Studio Gainax, specifically Diebuster! and especially Gurren Lagaan, both of which have similar art styles. It’s also been reviewed on this blog before. I knew most of what to expect, and this series ends up delivering on the entertainment front. But parts of it nonetheless surprised me in good and bad ways.

The story primarily follows Ryuko, who attends Honnouji Academy on a quest to find who murdered her father. There was no way she couldn’t suspect that Satsuki had something to do with it, and knew information about it. She is, after all, president of the academy and the head of its powerful Elite Four group (not that one), a woman who won’t let anything stand in the way of her ambition. She doesn’t deny a part in her father’s death, which kicks off an intense and violent rivalry between them. This intensifies when they both find “kamui” uniforms that let them fight even more fiercely against themselves and others who stand in their way — especially Ryuko, given that she takes on the entire school. The series is full of constantly exciting over-9000-ish battles.

They frequently get into crazy and hilarious antics, assisted by those around them. Ryuko’s closest friend, Mako Mankanshoku, hits it off with Ryuko early on after literally begging to be her friend. She’s a frequent source of the series’ comedy by primarily being support for Ryuko, though her role slightly increases in importance over time. Her family is even more off the wall than she is. The same goes for the group that assists Ryuko, literally named Nudist Beach, and the Elite Four rivals. The serious and comedic aspects segue well, so I didn’t find this a problem.

Not that the storytelling is flawless. Too much time early on is spent on seeing Ryuko and, to a lesser extent, Satsuki in action, and not enough on advancing the story. The series’ plotline doesn’t start progressing at a solid pace until midway through, and shortly after that point when the biggest twists start appearing. There’s nothing suggesting all the comedy got in the way of this, but it’s much better when it actually gets going.

The series kept my attention during the questionably paced parts by being entertaining nonetheless, and a real stunner to look at. Stories scattered around suggest that Trigger was hard up for cash during the series’ run on Japanese television, but that doesn’t show. The animation is impressive and rarely looks off model despite that. Part of this, I’m sure, is due to the home video (and, by extension, streaming) version having touch ups to clean up any unpolished work. But the other part of that is how this is from a team that knew how to work within their limited budget, to the point that one character relies on limited animation cells. The soundtrack is also one of the best I’ve heard among the anime I’ve watched in recent memory, some tracks with solid vocals in both languages.

The most misleading part of the key promotional posters involved the fanservice. I expected some thanks to being familiar with the team’s previous works, but I very much underestimated how overbearing it would be. It most prominently comes through the battle outfits Ryuko and Satsuki wear, which cover little of their unmentionables — and absolutely wouldn’t if Anime Physics weren’t a thing. It’s especially damning in Ryuko’s case considering she’s underage. All the fanservice from the female characters is somewhat counterbalanced with some of the male variety, especially from Nudist Beach, but it’s nowhere near as prominent in their cases. There are points where it distracts from the overall action, but this, like the pacing, improves later in the series. It helps that I’d simply adjusted to it by that time too.

Even with too much fanservice, I had a great time watching Kill la Kill, good enough for me to see why Studio Trigger has earned its reputation as one of the most popular anime production studios around — including outside Japan. It’s a lot of fun, and makes me feel like I should get around to watching Promare sooner rather than later.

 

Joseph Daniels

One of my recommendations for this week may be a bit tougher to find a legal copy of, since it’s not available on any of the main streaming sites.  At least, here in Canada it isn’t.  It is available, but for a very brief period and in a potentially small area.  If you live in the Canadian province of British Columbia and need to self-quarantine…

Magic Numbers: Hannah Fry’s Mysterious World of Maths (2018)
Source: Knowledge.ca, but you might have to pirate it if you aren’t in British Columbia, Canada, and you also might have to pirate it even if you do live here, but are reading this column a month after it’s published; it may still be legally available in England somewhere
Episodes: 3

In this three part series, the world’s best-looking mathematician explores whether mathematics was a human discovery or a human invention.  It may seem like a no brainer that it was a discovery, considering how neatly most of it works, but Hannah Fry explores how certain concepts had to be introduced to shore up weaknesses in the rules of mathematics that we discovered.  These concepts include:

-zero, which is the absence of a number and is useful for properly counting a quantity of things and recording this quantity.

-negative numbers, which are somehow less than zero but which still exist, if only in the abstract since aside from pulling off magic tricks for bison kings, you can’t actually have a plate full of negative apples

-imaginary numbers; it’s long been understood that you can’t take the square root of a negative number, because there isn’t a way to multiply a number by itself and receive a negative result… until it became absolutely necessary to do that or else our bridges couldn’t be built, so the “imaginary number” was created in order to facilitate such feats of engineering

In the end, I choose to believe that mathematics is purely a discovered concept and the only reason these weaknesses existed is because we suck at explaining the universe.  Anything we observe and try to explain that ends up flawed is because the observer is flawed and not the mathematics.  This is the reason we thought we understood square roots completely until we came up against concepts that required us to gain new understanding of them.  Some of what we understand today is likely to be contradicted by future discoveries and the best way forward is to learn from it and augment our understanding of these concepts with our new knowledge.

If you don’t want to pirate this series, don’t despair.  I have a recommendation for you that you will be able to enjoy, hopefully no matter where you are.  I know it works here in Canada, so I’m hoping it works in other countries, too.

The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry (2016)
Source: BBC
Episodes: 97, plus two bonus ASMR episodes to be listened to after season 15’s “The ASMRnswer”

Did you know that traffic jams follow mathematical patterns and can be explained by rational science?  You probably didn’t.  You likely don’t even care, when you’re stuck in one, that there’s mathematics behind how they behave, but that’s the kind of question that mathematicians Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry explore in this series, which has just finished its 17th season.  It’s a British show and this is the podcast form, so don’t be surprised that there are several “seasons” per year.

I think the best thing about this podcast, although I suspect it’s completely accidental, is that if you listen to it on the BBC website, the bar that measures how long you’ve listened to it only moves when observed.  If you click away to a different tab, it stops measuring how long you’ve listened to an episode, so along with the fun lectures on mathematics, I can essentially make the time bar thingy (I’m sure it has a name but I can’t think of it right now) quantum-locked.  I listen to all but the last twenty or so seconds of the podcast this way and then when I click back into the tab, the time indicator zooms across the screen rather than travelling slowly.

Yes, I’ve found my new favourite toy and my new favourite podcast (or at the very least, something fun to listen to while waiting for my weekly episode of No One Can Know About This: A Podcast Where We Play Every Final Fantasy).  The best thing is, the mathematics isn’t too complex, so I believe anyone can listen to this podcast and get some enjoyment out of it.  It’s especially great for waiting out traffic jams with.

 

Governments around the US are lifting restrictions, perhaps too soon. It’s true that cases are lower and people are getting vaccinated (around a quarter of adults in the country have received at least one shot), but we’re far from free of this virus yet. You might — might — think that surely people won’t make the same mistake and drop their guards again, but no one does ignorance better than Americans. If only everyone could be like Australia and New Zealand.