The Kingdom of Biscotti

The strangest thing is happening to me recently.

I am watching a Rider show even I consider to be pretty bad, and I could stand Kamen Rider OOO (which has been said to be pretty bad, but I haven’t really watched the show in full).

Seriously, man, this is pretty weird. Why would I waste my time over an arguably bad show and have someone claim that I have no taste whatsoever when I could have actually used that time to watch even more episodes of Steins;Gate or, y’know, SLEEP.

For those of you in the peanut gallery, kindly take note of the following: I consider this to be a pretty bad Kamen Rider show. The Driver is clunky, having 40 doodads is clearly a marketing gimmick (as if the Gaia Memories and OOO Medals weren’t bad enough), the plot and setting are simply ridiculous and paper-thin, the characters are initially unlikable, the opening song is Absol-utely horrible (to be fair, OOO’s music was incredible and I highly doubt anything can beat Nobody’s Perfect), and get this. One of the scriptwriters (and thankfully, not the HEAD scriptwriter) was responsible for M.D. Geist. (#DANGER #DANGER #MOSTDANGEROUS)

That is a recipe for disaster. A show this bad can’t possibly draw in people going stark-raving insane over it, right?

No, that’s a recipe for POTENTIAL disaster. Also he has a rocket for an arm. A ROCKET FOR AN ARM.

And yet, there’s a #fourzeowns hashtag on Twitter. I’m giggling at the painfully obvious clues that point out who really deserves a kick in the nuts. I’m flipping out at the Deus Ex Machina it yanks out from time to time. I’m eagerly awaiting the next episode of My Little Spaceman Kamen Rider: Friendship is Magic with a big stupid grin on my face.

To put it simply, I am enjoying myself with wild abandon, despite the show having the hallmarks of failure.

So why am I eagerly await the next 30 minutes of seeing the misadventures of a friendship-obsessed, thick-headed juvenile delinquent when I could be watching a bunch of nubile young girls fight crime, evil and they totally-not-existent feelings for one another (better known as Heartcatch Precure)?

I do believe it’s got something to do with what I’ve been hearing so much about anime nowadays. What with the specter of moe, female characters being more and more idealized sexually, plot and story being eschewed for making money and the fact that making a 1-cour animated series is basically a textbook example of design-by-committee, I do believe we have forgotten one very important thing.

The answer is that FRIENDSHIP IS MEGUCAL

That happiness and enjoying oneself is still something primal. As much as we love to codify and index our enjoyment, it does seem that because of this, we’re forcing a show to fit our standards of “quality” rather than letting a show speak for itself. People like to talk about the 3-episode test and I can tell whether I’ll like a show by the OP alone, but we’re all forcing what is essentially a commercial product fit into our definition of enjoyment.

Or to put it simply, we’ve stopped enjoying anime. The irony of the current mood of the “scene” is that it’s largely self-inflicted, made even worse by the fact that people are perpetuating this emotion by not understanding that it is their disappointment they are projecting onto a wider audience.

Bad anime happens. It’s like that one day you forget to bring an umbrella and it rains. You can’t stop it from happening and whining about how bad the day is only makes your day worse.

So what are you gonna do about it?

Rave about Madoka Magica x Kamen Rider, DUH.

I’m gonna go play in the rain.

Tomorrow: Of robots, mecha fandom and cancer. It will be a fun poast.