I hate spoilers.
For things you actually care about, once revealed, you can never unhear or unread or unsee. It’s incredibly frustrating to be working your way through some material only to have someone blather important plot points to you or inadvertently reveal that a certain character dies later on. As such, I’ve always taken to seeing movies opening night or reading books the day they come out because otherwise, I don’t feel like I can freely browse the Internet until I do.
A little extreme, maybe, but it’s dangerous being a Harry Potter fan when there are trolls roaming the webz with “***** KILLS **********!” flashing in their forum signatures. I’ve never attended a midnight book release for Harry Potter for the same reason — drive-by spoilers. Some people have nothing better to do. I actually blocked a few friends temporarily on Facebook and AIM for the week leading up the Deathly Hallows‘ release because I had zero tolerance for the various nonsense and fake spoilers they were spouting. Spoilers are serious business! Who are you to deprive someone of an experience?
What?! He dies? Noooo!!
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I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Code Geass is an epicly popular franchise in hard economic times. Why shouldn’t they milk it for all its worth? It’s pretty much guaranteed that everyone’s going to watch whatever they put out anyway. It doesn’t matter whether they loved it or hated it; curiosity trumps everything. They’ll watch it. I know I’ll watch it. I don’t want more; I was very happy with the ending and really want to just leave it as it is, but I’ll watch it anyway.
The final illustration drama is already supposed to address more of what happens after the ending, actually, but the new announcement makes it seem like they have something more up their sleeves. So what’ll it be? Another season? A summary-type movie/OAV? Side-stories or spin-offs? Prequel? SEED Supernova-style crack shorts?
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Finally. A good month and a half after the series has ended, I’ve finished writing this review.
Despite the fact that I’ve said that the nature of reviews is to be opinionated, I have a pressing need to consider all sides of everything and to present as fair an assessment as possible. Naturally, being fair while simultaneously trying to convey your own personal feelings about a series is difficult. Code Geass has been one of those series that remind me why I’m a fan of anime in general, so of course I’m biased, but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand the fact that there are a lot of things wrong with it. How to get both points across without being more verbose than I already am? It’s a huge challenge, and I’m still not sure if I like how the review turned out. I did the best I could though, and I guess that’s all I can do for now. I may revisit the review sometime in the future like I did with my review of the first season.
I rewatched the first live action Death Note movie with my roommate last night. Hopefully the second movie and the L movie will soon follow, and I’ll be able to write all three reviews.
Okay. You know I’m all for product placement and hand-in-hand promotions. Code Geass has been especially apt at this, seeing as it was my example for that article too, but there is a point when the product associations just get… really weird. Sure, it’s a side thing and isn’t woven into the fabric of the show like the Pizza Hut nonsense was, but… c’mon. Can you really imagine the Ashford kids chillin’ on a rolling golf course? Okay, so actually, maybe it’s right up there with all the Mario Sports games… I’ve always thought those were kind of weird too, but Mario is a much more versatile property because it’s about plumbers saving a fantasy world. Code Geass, with all its quirk and crack, is still a show about terrorism (kind of). Besides, its main character is thoroughly established as someone not meant for physical activity.
So my first thought was this:
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Man. I’ve been trying to tap out this review for Code Geass R2 all weekend. I think maybe I’m trying too hard to word things nicely because despite everything it did indeed fail at, I still liked it. Liked it a lot even. Not sure. Maybe I should give it a bit more time before I try to write it. In the meantime, I did manage to revise both my original Code Geass review and my Gurren Lagann review so they don’t sound as retarded.
It’s been hard to get Geass out of my head. Today is the first Sunday in months where I won’t have any new episodes to watch! (I can’t watch the new season of 00 until I finish the first season, lol…) As such, I’m going to take this time to write about product placement and hilariously overt advertising in anime. My friend Andres recently wrote about it in the context of video games and lamented the fact that the American audience has been so keen on rejecting it. And I’m with him — why are people so against the idea of advertisement in their entertainment?
Most people seem to be against this whole idea of “selling out” and doing things “just for the money.” I can understand and will agree with that sentiment for things that take away from the value of the product, such as making unplanned sequels to popular series. Forcing a franchise usually only ends up hurting the property, but I’ve never found advertising to be intrusive or annoying? How distracting is it, really, to have a Coke on the table and Toyotas driving in the street? How distracting is it, really, to have a guy drive down the highway and pass a Samsung billboard. Do you really even notice?
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Okay, so I’ve just rewatched the last episode for the third time (don’t ask me how I’m making time for this when I have about twenty things due tomorrow), and I think I’m finally satisfied with exactly what I think about it. There are a lot of pretty interesting interpretations and theories floating around, so it’s a good discussion all around. It might be a while before I get around to my “official” spoiler-free review of the entirety of Code Geass R2, but for now, here’s what I think about the conclusion of this lovely series… (spoilers, obviously)
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Actually, I’m kind of surprised at all the fan rage that’s exploded since it was revealed that [adultswim] was changing their Saturday schedule (again) and moving Code Geass and Moribito to the 5am deathslot. After all, I don’t remember this kind of reaction when they did something similar to Gundam SEED and Yu Yu Hakusho some years ago. Maybe this is just the straw that broke the camel’s back; as many others have pointed out in aforementioned threads, anime on [as] and Cartoon Network in general has been going downhill for years. We’re all nostalgic for the pre-2003 era, but we’ve put up with [as] because it was still the best place for televised anime in the United States. We put up with the rampant schedule changes and snarky comments from the producers because [as] censored less, put in less commercials, kept our opening themes, and so on.
But do we really have to put up with this anymore?
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It’s rare that I notice fansub group drama (there’s apparently a lot of it), but for one reason or another, Code Geass R2 is the first series for which I’ve regularly watched multiple sub releases for (what a loser, right). As such, when gg declared, rather obnoxiously, you might say, that they were dropping the series, I noticed. Their flaming Internet ragequit led to some interesting discoveries and discussions though, and it came to my attention that apparently, R2 hasn’t exactly gone as planned.
The first season of Code Geass aired in a late-night slot in Japan. Thanks to its unexpected popularity though, R2 was upgraded to a prime-time slot. Drama ensues. You can read the details of it yourself, but it basically boils down to Taniguchi having to change, alter, or rewrite completely parts of the story because he had to deal with a new audience in a new timeslot. New elements were added in — /a/’s theory about Rolo has gained widespread acceptance in the few hours since it was formulated — and other elements were taken out, notably Kallen’s backstory and Suzaku’s funky connection with geass as seen in S1 episode 22.
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This morning, I woke to see that a Code Geass character popularity poll by BANDAI had closed and that the results reflected the collective efforts of /a/. The #3-5 slots would have probably been the real crowning victors of the poll, but due to the Zergling rush, #2 belonged to Rivalz, an incredibly minor and arguably irrelevant character, and #1 belonged to Clovis who (spoiler!?) is dead by episode three. It amused me greatly, but I’m usually amused by the poll-sabotaging antics of /a/. Earlier last month, a similar Japanese poll for Code Geass containing many more characters (since it spanned both seasons), was also “influenced” by /a/ — the poll came right on the heels of a five second scene in episode 13 of R2 that became an insta-meme by everyone who saw it (seriously, even if you’ve never seen Code Geass before, if you watched this one episode, you would know which moment it was or maybe not… the entire episode is full of crack and insta-memes). As such, the meme’s central character was rushed to the top. As far as I know, the results of this poll haven’t been released yet, but the /a/ rush might be why…
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So recently, I realized that 4 of 5 of my listed favorite anime series on MAL are either mecha series (Gurren Lagann, Gundam SEED, and Code Geass) or include mecha in some way (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex). The odd one out is Paranoia Agent, which is last on the list anyway because I kind of included it on a whim. I find this kind of strange because even though I do like my giant robots, I’ve never thought that they had much influence on my overall impression of a series. After all, I don’t think I go out of my way to watch that many mecha series, and I certainly have positive opinions of wide variety of other series. But nevertheless, it’s the mecha series that hold up as my favorites. Is it just a coincidental statistic that 80% of my “top favorites” are mecha? Or 60% if you want to disqualify GitS:SAC for only having Tachikomas that are mostly irrelevant anyway? Or is there really something about mecha series that makes them rise above the rest?
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