First Two Fall Anime 2014 Impressions

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There are two new anime airing this season that I’ve pinned down to watch, now that Free! and Sengoku Basara: Judge End are over, and both aired their first episodes yesterday on Crunchyroll, so in between my power marathon of the last season of Star Trek: Voyager, I sat down to watch them. I figured I’d make a post about my first impressions (spoiler alert).

The first is Cross Ange. Sunrise anime tend to be hit or miss for me, so I end up watching most of them before making up my mind. (I’m currently watching 2013’s Valvrave The Liberator and am not sure if I’m going to like that one either.) I’ll admit I’m a little surprised by the intensely negative reactions the Internet is having to the first episode, and I say this as a woman who has had a very close friend be sexually assaulted. The two biggest things people seem to have an issue with are Angelise’s callous speech to the woman when her daughter is being taken away and the “cavity search” scene in the last few minutes of the episode. The vast majority of reviewers on ANN and viewers on Crunchyroll took these scenes as being salacious, misogynistic, and in incredibly bad taste (especially the supposed fanservice of the latter). But I feel like they’re missing something important: both of these scenes are horrifying and are meant to make you feel uncomfortable – neither scene is shown to be “okay” in the slightest. And believe me, I completely understand if someone doesn’t want to watch something that makes them feel uncomfortable – a lot of us, me usually included, feel that way about our fiction. I also understand the viewpoint that the rape scene is bad from a narrative standpoint because it’s essentially rape used as a cheap plot device to gain our sympathy for the main character. To me, it came off more as a shocking and disturbing twist to the usual “fallen from grace” events that befall main characters in anime, and that the horror of the scene subverted any fanservice, but YMMV.

As to the issue people have taken with the fact that all Norma seem to be female and have thus concluded the show is sexist: even if it’s later shown that all Norma are indeed female, the show is not portraying it as being an issue with being a woman, the issue is with being a Norma – it’s not as though other female characters are shown to be treated worse by this society because they’re female. Basically, I didn’t see the events of this episode so much as being about fanservice or misogyny, but more as to it showing us how crappy this world is and how our protagonists are hopefully going to fight to make it better in the coming episodes.

Controversy aside, I like Ange and I want to see where she goes from here. I don’t think she’s a two-dimensional character – she’s clearly under a lot of pressure to appear perfect for her perfect society, as evidenced by her dismay that she’s unable to rescue her teammate and win the game at the beginning of the episode, and how she reacts to the little Norma girl. She wants to be a good leader, even if she is misguided about it, and she’s obviously going to have to reevaluate the beliefs she’s been raised with after what’s befallen her. Her brother is clearly going to be the bad guy, incestuous advances towards his younger sister aside, and there’s not much to say about him yet. Her parents, however, seem to be decent – at best her father is cowardly by trying to cover up his daughter’s “disability,” and her mother obviously loved her daughter very much, to the point where she was willing to die so Ange could escape. We’ll see what the rest of the main cast is like in the coming episodes.

So with Cross Ange, I really do understand where other people are coming from with this one, but I’m interested enough to keep watching.

Gugure! Kokkuri-san is the other series I started yesterday, and I can already tell it’s going to be my crack for the season. I normally shy away from things based on four panel manga because they usually never have the consistent plot that I like in my anime, but this one was just so amusing and charming that I found I couldn’t resist. I love the main characters – both are hilarious and yet rather tragic, especially Kohina, whom is claiming she’s a being with no emotions when she is clearly trying to cover her feelings of loneliness and sadness up. The scene where she calls the cops on Kokkuri won me over, and I can’t wait to see what other weird characters are going to get added to this mix that we got hints of in this first episode.

Agree? Disagree? I’d love to hear it in the comments, as well as any recommendations for other new series that just started airing. Both series are streaming legally on Crunchyroll.

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