Other Wednesday Shows (10/10/18): That siscon anime, RErideD

First up is a show with a long, awkward title: Ore ga Suki nano wa Imouto dakedo Imouto ja Nai. Apparently, this translates to “The One I Love is My Little Sister But She’s Not a Little Sister.” So… is she a little sister or not? I almost expect the story to cop out and reveal that the two main characters are not blood-related, but nothing remotely suggests this in the first episode. Anyways, this terribly generic “romantic comedy” stars Yu and Suzuka, two siblings. Yu thinks Suzuka hates her big brother because of some incident in the past, and it doesn’t help that she’s always criticizing and lecturing him. But what he doesn’t know is that she actually loves him! Oh ho ho, what a delightful twist! What an unforeseen irony!

Obviously, Suzuka can’t proclaim her love for her brother to the world, because, y’know, that’s incest. Incest is wrong, and if you think otherwise, you’ve strayed too far from God’s benevolent light. But what if you could change society’s attitude towards the taboo subject? What if you could produce such a seminal piece of literature that would forever change how we as a civilization views incest! I mean, other than the crippling birth defects, what’s the harm? As a result, the girl has become an aspiring novelist. She hopes that when her light novel about a love between sibling becomes popular, then incest will become accepted, embraced, and dare I say celebrated!

Well, there’s a catch: Suzuka is so gosh darn perfect and she has a strict and overprotective father, blah blah blah. As a result, even though she wants people to accept her love for her brother one day, she can’t be caught writing her novels. That’s hilarious. Incest is okay, but god forbid anyone catches me with a part-time job. Anyways, Suzuka thus wants her brother to be her stand-in. Go to all the award ceremonies, meet with the editor and illustrator, coordinate the publishing of the light novel, so on and so forth. This is doubly pathetic for the guy, because he also wants to be a novelist. Unfortunately, he apparently sucks at it. Not once has he ever succeeded in impressing anybody with his tripe. Meanwhile, his sister takes one damn shot and rises all the way to the top.

But what does that say about light novels? What does it say when some generic piece of siscon bullshit is instantly lauded and celebrated? I dunno, there’s potential for meta commentary here, but I don’t think the show is self-aware enough for that. For instance, Yu’s latest submission gets shot down because it’s littered with cliches and has unappealing female characters. What do we proceed to get? An anime full of cliches and unappealing female characters. I-is the story poking fun of itself? Is it actually self-aware enough to do that? Unfortunately, I just can’t bring myself to give the author the benefit of the doubt. After all, the rest of the story seems to be playing the incest thing straight and trashy.

RErideD – Tokigoe no Derrida

Over the weekend, I forced myself to watch the five episodes that had already aired. Now that I’ve watched the sixth episode, I’m finally all caught up. On paper, the show sounds pretty solid. The execution, however, leaves me wanting. Here’s a brief snippet from the show’s Wikipedia entry:

Derrida is an engineer and the son of Jaques Yvain, the inventor of the DZ AI technology that has brough forth a new civilization in the near future. Him and his colleague Nathan discovered a flaw in the AI program his father created and reported to his boss, Andrei, who refused the recall. However it is revealed that Andrei wants to take advantage of the flaw and sets out to kill Derrida and his allies.

For some reason, Derrida keeps seeing visions of a young girl who looks a whole lot like his best friend’s daughter Mage. The girl in his visions doesn’t call herself Mage, though. Rather, she’s Ange, and she’s been guiding our hero since everything went pear-shaped. She’s the one who tells him to put himself into a cold sleep for the next ten years. She also often appears to him whenever he experiences the “time ride” phenomenon, a weird ability that allows our hero to briefly send his consciousness back in time in order to try and change the past. That’s a bit odd, isn’t it? Why go to sleep for ten years just to wake up and send your consciousness back ten years? You could argue that Derrida essentially had to go into hiding, but hell, he’s still being hunted now. Maybe Ange just knew that he had to go to sleep for ten years so that he would meet Videaux, a badass dude from the future who has the means to protect him. Maybe. But that sounds like a stretch.

Honestly, my biggest problem with the show (other than the weak animation) is that the characters are just really forgettable. Derrida doesn’t have much of a personality nor does he inspire much confidence. He doesn’t really start taking charge of his situation until the latest episode where we see him experiment with “time ride” extensively. On the flip side of the coin, Hans seemed like the main villain at the start of the series, but he’s since morphed into a pathetic sort of comic relief. So who are the truth bad guys? Oh, just some evil governments. But because we’re dealing with such a shadowy organization, they don’t have any characterization either. You also got Donna, the assassin who has been hired to go after Derrida. Right now, she’s literally just cool, badass lady who murders for money. I’m glad that the show attempts to have some action, but because the animation is so poor, you can’t really enjoy it. And the consequence of having so many action scenes it that you have less character development scenes. This show’s cast is just weak and uninspiring.

I also don’t know why the majority of the female characters are either children or people whom Derrida used to know as children. Mage, of course, is his best friend’s daughter. Yuri is Mage’s best friend, so she’s about the same age as Mage. They were both like… what? 7 or 8 at the start of the series? Since he’s been asleep for the past ten years, they’re now adults, I guess. But where are we going with this? How am I supposed to feel about Derrida’s partner-in-crime being a girl who is young enough to be his daughter? What do we have Mayuka, yet another daughter, precociously talking about how Yuri and Derrida should get married? Again, where are we going with this?

Anyways, I’ll keep my eye on the show for now, but it’s difficult to sit through an entire episode without feeling the urge to “change the channel,” so to speak.

Conception Ep. 1