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March 29, 2005

Traditionally, They Kill Japanese Storytellers Just As They're About to Write the End

I have a happy weakness for sci-fi television, and the best science fiction television series these days are all Japanese anime shows. (Thank heavens for Netflix.) Japanese anime series tell some pretty fine stories... with just one problem. They don't have endings.

I exaggerate. A few of my favorites, like The Vision of Escaflowne and Angelic Layer and Full Metal Alchemist, have pretty darn dramatic and well-thought-out endings. But I just came to the end of Martian Successor Nadesico, and there was no end there.

Nadesico tells the story of a battleship in a war between Earth and Jupiter, where the main character has mysterious ties to an ancient Martian culture, and also can't make up his mind which of his crewmates he's in love with. (There's a subgenre of anime called "harem" shows, featuring one clueless male and a bunch of women who may or may not be romantically interested... but I digress.) You might expect Nadesico would end with, say, the end of the Earth-Jupiter war, or the secret of the Martian culture, or the hero maturing enough that his love life would actually make sense to an outside observer...

Nah.

He kisses one of the girls. I have no idea why, except they were childhood friends. The war goes on. The Martians remain unexplained. And that's... it.

In fairness, Nadesico is a comedy. But lately I've run into a whole bunch of series where you watch the end and you really feel the writers made up the ending at the second-to-last episode, or had a big ending idea that exceeded their talents and came out as twenty minutes of viewer confusion. (Rahxephon... Berserk...)

Frankly, it all reminds me too much of what I don't like about Neal Stephenson. But I watch them anyway, for the same reason I watch Stephenson: the ending may be a train wreck, but the middle is often a heck of a good ride.

Anime as the supreme guilty pleasure -- that's for another post.

Posted by danielstarr at March 29, 2005 02:01 PM

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