Anime (2017)

Oh, right, they don't know that Eren has the Coordinate quite yet... Ok, it does make a bit less sense than I thought.

My supposition was also that the Beast Titan was unaffiliated with the three infiltrators for various reasons, but I think we're at a point where any further discussion on this topic won't be useful until I have a chance to read more volumes.

Yes, but as I recall, it was implied that Reiner and Beast-man had some sort of duel to determine whose course of action they would take, implying that they weren't working together beforehand and that the Beast Titan is not Reiner's formal superior, since Reiner didn't automatically follow his game plan. I also presumed that someone who was behind the assault on the Walls would know enough about the people inside to be familiar with 3D maneuvering gear. However, I get the impression that a massive amount of exposition is due to come in the chapters right after where I left off, so this could be confirmed incorrect already for all I know.

Incidentally, way before that, my theory was that the Beast Titan was not a shifter at all, but some sort of "natural" intelligent Titan meant to propagate the species and provide direction. Of course, we now know that's completely wrong.

This appeared in my FB feed.  I was pleased.

I think that may be a meme, editing this particular video.  The first time I saw it, a friend posted a version with the Tokyo Ghoul intro on my wall.

Let's see if I can kajigger this into working...

I like Preacher, partly because it doesn't take itself too seriously. And it looks, from the teasers, like Season 2 will be doubling-down on that. I also like the cast, and think the cinematography is tremendous.

I'll write more when I've got the time, but I finished Shiki, and the upshot is that while I while I'm not thrilled with the visuals in more ways than one, every thing else is top-notch. It's serendipitous that I watched this right after Tokyo Ghoul, because it's basically everything I wanted Tokyo Ghoul to be.

Alright, on to Shiki. There are *spoilers!*

I'll start with what I didn't like: the art. As has has been mentioned before, the anime hair in this show is utterly absurd, and I have absolutely no clue why this was the art direction the creators chose. It does not match the dark and serious tone of the show at all and it is constantly distracting. Furthermore, I just don't care for the art direction in this show in general. A lot of the characters are kind of... weird and spindly looking, and everyone's pupil's are way too big, except for Masao's, which are just tiny pinpricks in a sea of white. There's something vaguely uncanny about it all. Overall, I just don't like the aesthetics of this show.

That's a bit of a harsh indictment, but luckily, it doesn't matter much because everything else about this show is excellent. What I like about it is that it doesn't pull any punches with its vampire mythology; a lot of other human-eating-monster shows give either the monsters or the humans an "out" that removes a lot of the ethical dilemmas or brutality inherent in the idea of human predation. Maybe the vampires are able to drink animal blood, so it's obvious that the killers are the "bad" ones who make deliberately evil choices. Maybe the zombies are just mindless shells that don't retain any human sapience, so they can be destroyed by the good guys without raising any moral qualms. Stuff like that. While I don't mean to imply that any shows which provide these comforts are necessarily lesser for it, there is a relative lack of fiction that actually uses the concept of vampirism to explore complex ethical dilemmas without softening it in any way. Shiki is one of those.

Shiki is about a lot of things, but if I had to narrow it down to one basic idea, I'd say it's about exploring the ways in which desperation or a drastic change in social order can change a person's moral outlook, and what this change (or lack thereof) says about their personal character. For example, Tohru was a stand-up guy who would never dream of harming anyone in his human life, but after he turns, he chooses to murder people for food even as he hates himself for it, because the only other option is death, and his principles ultimately do not override his desire for self-preservation. What he does is not morally defensible, but he does at least feel terrible about it, and doesn't enjoy his new life at all. Megumi, on the other hand, is different. She takes to murdering her fellow villagers without hesitation, specifically going after people she doesn't like, or killing Natsuno in the selfish desire that he'll rise up and be with her forever. One gets the impression that the only reason she wasn't already a killer is because she knew she could never get away with it before, or because no one in a position of immediate authority had ever given her license to do it, so it never occurred to her or seemed like a desirable option. Any semblance of moral behavior she had before the turn was ultimately just a sham, adopted mostly just because it was the easiest path.

Perhaps the most interesting case of moral collapse is Nao, who kills her whole family in the hopes that they'll rise up, but none of them do, leaving her distraught. She constantly beats herself up about it and claims that she deserves all the suffering she goes through because of what she's done, realizing that by any reasonable metric she doesn't deserve to continue living or receive mercy from the humans, yet she still fights for her life until the very end, knowing full well that she'll have to continue killing should she live. On the surface, she seemed like a good person before the turn and she seems like one of the more sympathetic vampires after, but it should be noted that almost all of her actions and dialogue for the entire show revolve around her own feelings and desires, and rarely anyone else's. Whenever she talks glowingly about her family, it's always about how lucky she was to find them, and how happy they make her. After she kills them, she seems more sad that she'll never see them again rather than being sad for their misfortune of being dead. It's subtle, but ultimately, she's extremely self-centered and is incapable of acting in a way that betters her loved ones rather than trying to make things better for herself. She may seem like a better person than Megumi, but that's debatable; Megumi did terrible things purely for her own satisfaction, often with the intention of inflicting harm, not caring if anyone else suffered because of it. Nao did terrible things for her own satisfaction knowing full well that those she loved most would be harmed by it, either through death or a cursed existence, and went forward with it anyway, subsequently having the gall to be a sad sack about it without actually doing anything to make sure that going forward, others didn't suffer as she and her family had. Is deliberate evil worse than evil committed through weakness? You be the judge. Personally, there's a part of me that feels bad for Megumi because she lacks moral fiber, while I don't feel much sympathy for Nao, since she had a sense of right and wrong and refused to use it.

Other than Natsuno, whose situation is not quite the same as the others, Ritsuko is just about the only vampire who chooses to die rather than kill a single human. She knows that no one else who has turned has resisted, she knows that the villagers will kill her if they find her and won't care that she didn't drink, but she doesn't care. Murder is wrong, and she refuses to do it. This drives Tohru mad, since it's basically an indictment of his own behavior. He's convinced himself that it's not possible to resist the will to kill and live, and so his own transgressions aren't his fault and he bears no responsibility. Ritsuko proves to him that this isn't true, and it makes him hate himself even more. He does at least let the other nurse leave with her life, ultimately sacrificing his own life in the process, so his moral side does eventually win out right before the end after a bit of prodding. This last bit of selfless action and reclaimed dignity makes him a much better person and more sympathetic figure than Nao, in my opinion.

While there are a couple who don't kill, most do. Some of them feel guilty and others don't, but in the end, almost all of the villagers choose to murder their friends, family, and neighbors on a regular basis in order to stay alive. And really, barring various acts of cruelty that go beyond necessity, there's only so much you can blame them for that; they'll die if they don't. Objectively, as a viewer, it's easy to say that they're wrong, and that wouldn't be incorrect, but simply judging them (as many viewers seem to do) rather than exploring the issue further isn't terribly interesting. Choosing to commit suicide rather than kill others would be an incredibly difficult decision, especially when an extensive social support network makes killing very easy, and it is not a decision that a lot of people would realistically take. Shiki explores exactly why this is, and subtly chides the viewer for presuming that their own unchallenged moral principles would hold in a similar situation. And it does this really well. There are a ton of characters, but for the most part, they all have a meaningful purpose and are juggled fairly well. The voice-acting is top-notch, at least in the dub, and while I don't like the aesthetic of the art direction, I'll give the visuals credit in that they depict the brutal violence and gore in a suitably horrifying fashion that is sure to make all but the most hardened viewers wince, which really drives home the themes.

I've mostly talked about the villagers-turned-vampires and and have glossed over the human villagers and the Kirishikis, but if I went into that now, this would be three times longer and I'd never get it done, so I'll end my analysis here for now. I will mention just a couple spots where the character work falters a bit. One is that after Natsuno turns, he appears again only sparingly, and it would have served the show well to feature him a bit more. His remaining scenes are good and there's plenty of closure for his arc, but it's a bit weird that his appearance is so rare. My understanding is that in the novel, he died rather than being resurrected and so didn't appear in the story afterwards, so that likely has something to do with it. My other complaint is that Seishirou also does not appear very often, and is not very fleshed out; in fact, he could be removed from the show entirely and it wouldn't be affected much. The idea of a human being in league with the Kirishikis has a lot of potential, but I never understood exactly what his place in the whole scheme was, and his presence is pretty much a total bust other than his brief conversation with Natsuno towards the end, which may have been his only substantial scene.

But overall, I liked this show quite a bit, and it will be one of the ones that I recommend to others going forward. And Megumi having her head ran over by a tractor will probably replay in my nightmares for quite some time.