Well, so I thought that I’d check out what Nagi no Asukara was up to lately, so I set down to watch this. And boy, it actually took a long while for me to actually start the thing. Today I finally managed to finish the latest three episodes because otherwise I’d never be able to move on, but it did make me ask a question: why am I still watching this?
It’s episode seven, so at this point we have a pretty good idea of the nature of this show. For the past few weeks I really started looking at anime in a different way, and I asked the above question for a lot of other series. Is it really worth it to watch so many series that contain such lazy writing that contains so many glaring flaws, just for a few things they do well? The key again is balance. Does Nagi no Asukara have that? I’m afraid not.
The thing with drama is: you take a few ingredients, juggle them together and let them culminate into a powerful climax, with some mid-climaxees inbetween. What Nagi no Asukara does is having way too many of these ingredients, overcomplicating the dish. Every episode it finds some contrived reason to create as much drama as possible, ranging from a love polygon that’s triggered way too easily to people behaving like arrogant pricks who can’t use their head for one second. A bit of this is fine and all, but this just kept on coming with the drama, there was hardly any variation to what went on. It’s all just teenaged drama.
Especially now that Hikaru has developed, things should have been more bearable, since he isn’t annoying anymore and he actually tries to take care of his loved ones, and he actually can shut up at once, but… meh. It’s all just so gloomy. Episode seven with those fishermen for example. That came out of nowhere, but these guys acted just as bigoted as he did a few episodes ago. These three episodes consistently bored me because they had nothing going on here. Only episode seven had something noteworthy when Hikaru and his sister actually left their home. That was something different, but getting less and less sure whether it’s worth it.
I think Mari Okada overshot herself with this series. In this series, and with Sakurasou too by the way, she focuses too much on one-sided drama that is in most cases really quite stupid. Compare that to three series of her that did work: Hana-Saku Iroha, True Tears and Ano Hana. Hana-Saku Iroha knew how to spice things up. It might have been a bit boring around this point, but at least it used this time to show what everyday life is for the cast, so it could use that for some very effective climaxes. The sm-episode came out of nowhere, but it took guts and stood out. True Tears also had lots of drama, but it was calculated: slow paced and it knew exactly what to do to remain interesting, again with great characterization. Ano Hana also had tons of drama at a fast pace, but it also delivered many twists that really got the best out of the characters. The cast was well balanced and every character was different, and the drama kept moving forward. It had strange twists, but these twists went together with the characters. It didn’t throw in stuff for the sake of throwing in stuff like what Nagi no Asukara is doing.
The animation in anime is consistently improving: people are really innovating there to create graphics that are really gorgeous, and you see this more and more. That’s good. Now transfer that mentality over to the writing departments. Force them to think logically about what they’re doing. We need more people like Gen Urobuchi, who are celebrated for their writing talents. There doesn’t seem to be any glamour to the writing business and to be honest, the whole scene seems quite a bit closed off. Because of this you have one group of writers who gets picked over and over to write and adapt these series, and there hardly seems any incentive to attract new talent or cultivate it. That really needs to change, because as I see it, it’s the biggest thing holding anime in general back right now.
Rating: 3/8 (Mediocre)