Musaigen no Phantom World – 08

Love is a canvas furnished by nature, and embroidered by imagination. Voltaire

I think this one will go down as one of my favorite episodes that KyoAni has ever made; and it’s the perfect spiritual successor to Kyoukai no Kanata 06. But it’s not for the obvious reason – the supposed fanservice.

“Hey, I don’t mind Fanservice…

Mayonnaise-ama!!!!!

I’ve been trying to work the salad dressing gag into one of these posts since the show began- I think I’ve found the right way just short of the character covered in sandwich spread. Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let’s cover the bookends.

First we got a brief introduction into storytelling. OK, I’m stretching that, we got a mention of combination and permutation, dropped by the students’ teacher at the episodes beginning; for once the cold open didn’t really punch the thematic clock like it usually does. A story is a collection of parts, a combination of plot, characterizations, action, reaction, exposition, theme, etc. If you put them down any which way, you stand the chance of getting a disjointed or nonsensical story. But a well thought out permutation makes all the difference.

Yada!!!!

I mention this because of the show’s other bookend, going into all of these crazy motions to solve the problem when the tools to do so was right there as the character’s disposal at the very beginning; either one – Kurumi’s heartfelt question, as she proved to be able to do last episode, or Haruhiro’s questionable summoning of alien octopus crazy star god, that he foreshadowed well in advance. So why did’t they use either method? Hell, why not used Ruru to talk to all phantoms to begin with? Well, they wouldn’t have a story if they did that! Ah, fanservice, it really is a random ain’t it? Well, so is human nature, as comedy is distance, can’t get more distant that drawings on a TV….

Actually, it wasn’t at all this time around. That was rather the point. They pretty much paced this one perfectly; from the get go they wrote it layers. There was the suspiciously alike-in-looks to the main girls in our cast Beach Troop. Everyone was waiting for them, they were buxom, they were sexy, they were powerful, and they were ultimately useless. When Mai tried to duplicate their methods, she got the exact same treatment they did; a big old lick from the fanboy/monkey.

There were other methods used  as well, but I would just like to focus on how perfect Koito’s crazy method was brought about. Most fanservice is built on how un-natural and forced some poses are, or how physics defying some of the situations get. Her’s was built on how foolish it is to ask a character to act out of character. And they did it with such self-referential purpose.

Which is pretty much what everyone was doing at one moment or the next; just happy to toss themselves in to solving the problem without thinking. Most of them never having a moment to even establish a character so far as the background players go. But for our main cast, Kurumi should have known better than to allow a stuffed toy into a bath. Paper, paint, water and steam is not a good combo Haru, and you just lost major points for the panto horse, dude. Reina, you shouldn’t have a single bit of shame in who you are, etc.

Speaking of Haru, the monkey out of him turnout was one for the books. While the rest of the macaque entourage loved Mai’s red butt treatment, Haru’s boyish cuteness is what ultimately sealed the deal for the big one-eyed, big forearmed boss. All of that pretty much underlines how absurd it all is, and how sometimes fans can get out of hand and out of mind when it comes to it; I bet KyoAni was channeling the reactions to Free! with that scene.

Extra Bits…..

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…so long as it’s appropriate to the story”

 – is perhaps one of the most half-arsed and misguided things to say about anime along with, “I’ll waste my time time watching three of these, even though I’ve already judged it from the first one, the first fifteen minutes in as something you don’t wanna watch”. Any storytelling element is mostly subjective, which is this case it’s prankish titillation, which I’d rather have than violence for the sake of it nearly every single time. So, judge on how the element is used, not just or only that it is used.

So long as humans use human sexuality to sell product then we will have fanservice – and here you thought them using our next of kin with the snow monkeys was random. This episode is as close as you can get to showing how appropriate the trope of fanservice can be…Kyoto Animation knows exactly what it’s doing, and does it well. They’ve been saying quite a bit about narrative tropes with this show, and it’s been appreciated on my part. Now after saying all this, are there brighter bulbs out there? Dimmer? Maybe, but for me, this one episode had enough illumination to be brilliant, lampshades and all…

…or just the bare bulb, whatever works…

Next Time…

We gonna get us a samurai and a new character it looks like…