As the End Nears: ef–What Are We Supposed To Be Feeling? (Part 2)

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In which Mike wonders, after seeing much of its second season, whether the sacred cow he liked best last year was really all that. (This article is the spiritual successor to a similarly titled article last year about School Days’ midpoint.)

A couple of months ago, Coburn of Claiming Ground wrote a fascinating article about “Reaction Porn.” While it was in the context of True Tears, another show that I liked on the whole but found flawed in important ways, a lot of his insights seem to apply to the ef saga too. Coburn noted that

Our main man wants to be close to his dream girl. To do it right and be allowed to see the side she hides, which will let him be there for her when she wavers. What we the audience are granted is a privileged position in which we can potentially know each waver of the heart in everyone on screen. We don’t know it all at the start, but the show builds up details to create (mostly) realistically detailed characters who are totally exposed to us.

The plot of the show is carried by the incremental exposure of the personalities of the cast to the audience and to one another. Complications consist of the odd piece of misdirection before more genuine revelations of character. The ultimate form of which would be a character crying (my emphasis).

In other words, in True Tears, the trajectory of the story is made through character revelations: moments where something previous secret is made known and thus emotions come out. In True Tears, it mostly comes more gradually than it does in ef, but the concept is the same. Coburn goes on to say that the audience is fully aware that such moments are coming, which lends them a rather artificial feeling–somewhat like porn’s revealing of sex and naked flesh. But the revealing is the point; it’s where all the energy comes to a head (ahem).

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I thought of this when I watched the pivotal episodes of ef-a tale of melodies–namely, episodes 6 and 7, where both Yuuko and Kuze fall into extreme states as they reveal the darkness of their real selves to their lovers. The techniques are identical to a similar episode in a tale of memories with Miyako: a highly psychologized, fractured mix of image and text descended directly from similar moments in Anno’s Evangelion. That moment, which I chose as the great moment of anime in 2007, was shocking in its force and, as it had not been done in a major anime in a while, fresh in the raw emotions it provoked. It worked, too, near the show’s end in the climactic telephone call with its timer. Back then, I justified the rather soap operatic plotting and characterization of a tale of memories by these kind of directorial moments. The execution made the show, not so much the story.

I don’t take that back; season 1’s execution and coherence are still excellent. However, I am not so sure whether such moments compensate that much for its weaknesses. In fact, I began to wonder whether the emotional sledgehammers that such moments became were simply a raw, unsubtle play at what one might (following Coburn) call “sympathy porn.”

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For one, it’s become a kind of crutch for the storytellers through overuse. Oh, it was 95% effective the first time this season, in episode 6. The horrific abuse that we learn Yuuko endured is terrible enough to naturally arouse sympathy. The repetition of synonyms, the fractured frame, and, most of the all, the guilt being piled on Himura the whole time–the gale force emotions work in a very raw, crude way. I remember concluding the episode with much of the same daze and distress that I felt the first time I watched Miyako’s meltdown in season 1. Then we see Kuze get the same treatment in the following episode, and it was at that point that I began to realize something: this is really artificial now. Contrived, even. I felt that Kuze, as a character, had not earned that moment the way Yuuko had, because his suffering seemed to be of a quieter, more restrained sort. Yuuko had suffered physical as well as emotional violence; he was coming to grips with his terminal illness. The correspondingly violent artistic method works for Yuuko in a way it didn’t work for Kuze.

I began to think further, though. Did we really know Yuuko all that well as a character, either? She was a near-angelic, ghost like figure appearing in random places in season 1; now we see her as a person longing so badly for an older brother that she is willing to be abused for it. Her “brother” is a rather one-dimensional, sneering villain too, which doesn’t help. Other than hints of being “bullied” (a sure sign of abuse, I determined early on), the show actually doesn’t spell out much about who she is prior to the huge reveal in episode 6. In a way, her big revelation in the church is the start of her real character development, which then proceeds very meaningfully in episode 8–a fine episode that for me cemented what I felt was wrong with the overuse of the “Anno” technique (for lack of a better term).

I even began to also wonder about Miyako from last season. I figured then that she must be hiding something, though coming fresh to the ef franchise, I couldn’t have guessed the magnitude of her neediness. But it was a sudden drop into the abyss of her mind there, too. I’ve no doubt that the suddenness is deliberate, so to accentuate the impact of the moment; I’m just not sure this is always a good way to show character. Especially repeatedly.

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Does this basically boil down to “it just doesn’t work the fourth time around”? In a way, yes; but the fact that this is the fourth major time that such a technique was used says something about what ef is trying to do to its audience. Its method for empathy and sympathy for the girl characters (mainly) is to emotionally pummel the viewer into submission. It’s like the show is shouting at the audience: “FEEL THIS! CRY HERE!” Does the show really have any other tricks up its sleeve other than this? And isn’t it really just a form of crude emotional manipulation that betrays a deficiency in the character writing?

Well–the very following episodes do provide an interesting contrast. In episode 8, in a rare moment, the show is directed to feel “normal” for anime–which, in the ef universe, is abnormal. Much of what makes ef unique is its dreaminess, where the town is shot through a hazy gauze-like filter, the colors change like fall leaves, and the people talk in monologues about high-flown, abstract subjects. Most of the time, you never see random bystanders or any other people other than the characters themselves. These fall away in the story of Himura and Yuuko desperately running away to avoid her “brother.” We see random people on the streets for the first time. The filtered “artiness” decreases significantly. The symbols remain–the burned watch in particular–but the story, for the first time, is told naturalistically. And when the inevitable end comes, with Yuuko sadly returning to her abusive “brother,” I felt a genuine ache of the heart that I didn’t feel after the flash ‘n’ text slashing moments of the earlier episodes. For once, they began to feel like real people or characters rather than abstracted mouthpieces for feelings and thoughts. And I didn’t feel forced to feel sorry for her, either, not nearly as much.

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It may be that this simply proves that there can be too much of a good thing. Nothing has really been executed worse compared to the previous season. The metaphors about artistic creation are still there; so are the shot selections and the level of the writing. But something has been “disillusioned” in me about the whole affair. I’m not sure that I would put the moment in a top 12 moments list again, let alone make it THE best moment (BTW, I am participating in this year’s 12 moments project–are you?), and while I still like what ef is doing, it is joined this season by many other enjoyable shows that Fall 2007 did not have. We have well-written dramas like Mouryou no Hako and Kurozuka and surprisingly form-breaking comedies like Toradora! and Kannagi. It’s got competition now for my watching this season.

Maybe I’m tired and looking for something different now; maybe I’m just fickle. But I know that this time around, I didn’t quite feel what I think I was supposed to be feeling in ef.

As the End Nears is a series of articles about the near-end of the season. Coming up next: Clannad and the Substitute Family.

Author: gendomike

Michael lives in the Los Angeles area, and has been into anime since he saw Neon Genesis Evangelion in 1999. Some of his favorite shows include Full Metal Alchemist, Honey and Clover, and Welcome to the NHK!. Since 2003 he has gone to at least one anime convention every year. A public radio junkie, which naturally led to podcasting, he now holds a seminary degree and is looking to become Dr. Rev. Otaku Bible Man any day now. Michael can be reached at mike.huang@animediet.net. You can also find his Twitter account at @gendomike.

7 thoughts on “As the End Nears: ef–What Are We Supposed To Be Feeling? (Part 2)

  1. I agree.  Indeed, when I saw the “Miyako-breakdown-technique” being applied to Yuuko, I’m afraid I was already thinking “this has been done”, though the rhythm of Yuuko’s litany was a nice elaboration.  When it happened again with Kuze, I was a little disappointed.

    Last season, they were applying new techniques inventively (by the way, I think you’ll find Anno’s use of text in Evangelion, in turn, derives from similar techniques used by Jean-Luc Godard in several of his films from Anno’s formative years).  This season, I feel like they’re just recycling the things that worked before, and maybe being a bit ham-fisted at it.

    For the nicely colorful and evocative phrase “reaction porn”, I’ve just used “manipulative” or “manipulation”.  And, yes, I feel like I’m being manipulated by the overwrought emotional situations of ef – a tale of melodies.

  2. the fat lady has not yet sing! what is with all this gun jumping??

    season 1 was not an even experience, just like season 2. perhaps most of us was preoccupied with learning how to understand season 1 when it was going up and down, but so quick to judge! man.

  3. @dm: well, a little bell did go off in my head when I watched episode 6, but I figured–hey, they’re entitled to do it again once, right? It’s the second season and it’s one of the show’s hallmarks. And, as you point out, it was done in an alliterative way which added to its appeal. Seeing it in episode 7 triggered something of a reverse cascade for me, though.

    @omo: I don’t think I’m being unfair here–I didn’t really pass judgment on the entire show so much as its use of this one particular technique. And four times total use in both seasons does constitute a pattern, and shows something that seeing it only a couple of times in season 1 didn’t. There will be time later to assess the series as a whole (I’m increasingly seeing both seasons as really a single work). And it doesn’t take away from the uniqueness and effectiveness of the rest of the series, which is still rare in today’s anime.

  4. Omo does have a bit of a point — I wrote the above after watching episode eight.  Now that I’ve watched nine and ten, I’m happier with the series than I was after episode eight.  I’m even willing to defend the monochrome in episode ten as a frame for the sudden burst of color when Mizuki hears the music.  I do think watching nine and ten together is probably helpful.

    And, yes, the episode six wall-of-text was okay, only going into over-use in episode seven.

  5. I’ll agree that this technique didn’t work as well with Kuze, though I think the situation of the scene is also a major factor in the reason why.

    For example, in Kuze’s scene, I don’t think it worked as well because, at least personally, I don’t find Kuze a very sympathetic character in the first place.  In his scene, the sympathetic character is Mizuki – the one being piled on, not the one doing the piling.  Kuze, on the other hand, is just being, frankly, an ass.  And really, how long do you really want to hear an ass being an ass?  Not all that long.

    Meanwhile, in Yuuko’s scene, sher story makes her an incredibly sympathetic figure, and just how shocking her story ends up being and all the emotional trauma that she just lays out in front of Himura makes that scene all that more impactful. 

    Yes, it’s very similar to how they revealed Miyako in the first series, but then again, we see reuse of plot devices all the time in various shows, and the reason we do is because, well, they work.  And I think this is the same way.  If they execute it effectively, it will work the 1st time, and the 2nd time, and the 10th time.  It just didn’t work with Kuze because he wasn’t the right character to do it with to begin with.  His scene probably would have worked just as well if he started screaming at Mizuki and was throwing everything and their brother at her until she left or something.  In a sense, I think that would have displayed his crazed nature more than smothering Mizuki with “why?s”

  6. I was pleasantly surprised by episode 11 — while I thought Mizuki’s voice acting was perhaps a bit too “genki”, I thought her reply to Kuze’s questions had a great deal of charm, and made what seemed like a weakness in the series a bit more tolerable.

    I haven’t seen episode twelve yet, but I’m now looking forward to it with more eagerness than before.

  7. Y’all were right: this turned out to be a show that overcame the problems I saw in this article. It really felt like everything had come full circle and most of the major relationships were resolved in a way that felt redemptive.

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