Endings And Beginnings

Time for a very quick update on TV shows I've finished. If I leave it any longer I'll have forgotten what I wanted to say about them. 

They're all animated shows. I seem to watch mostly animation these days. It's not so much a preference as it's all I can find that interests me. There's a dearth of live action shows in the styles or genres I like right now, at least on the services I subscribe to. I think I need to sub somewhere else and soon.

Let's begin with a couple I wrote about before, when I was still in the middle of watching them. How did that turn out?

My Daemon

I absolutely loved this. I would say it's one of the best anime I've seen but a) I haven't seen enough for that to carry the weight it needs to be a compliment and b) there seems to be some controversy over whether My Daemon is actually anime or not. 

That really is a pointless debate in my opinion but when I went to read up about the show, after I'd finished watching it, the only things anyone seemed to care about were whether or not it qualified as anime and whether it was a good Pokemon rip-off or just a rip-off. I read more arguments over that than I did any discussion of story, theme or execution. 

Some people didn't want to accept anything made outside Japan into the anime fold (The studio that made My Daemon is based in Thailand.) while some claimed the Japanese setting was enough to give it a pass. Others weren't having any truck with digital animation, insisting anime had to be hand-drawn. 

Semantic literalists repeatedly reminded everyone that "anime" is just the Japanese word for "animation" so any animated content is automatically anime anyway. Cultural gatekeepers weren't having any of that reductive claptrap. It got quite heated at times.

I never read anything about shows while I'm watching them, for fear of spoilers, but if I like a show I almost always go read reviews and opinion pieces about it as soon as I finish it, often literally moments after the closing credits roll on the final episode. I want to see if other people responded to it the way I did and also I'm hoping to postpone, just a little longer, that numbing moment when you realize it's done and you won't be hanging out with this particular set of imaginary friends any more.

In that respect, when it comes to My Daemon, I seem to be an outlier. No-one else seemed to be pining for more or needing support and affirmation for their loss. The minority who wanted to talk about the content and quality of the show at all seemed underwhelmed by most of it. There seemed to be a sense that it was mostly for kids, not especially well-animated and generally nothing much to get excited about.

I would like to disagree most strongly with all of that. In terms of tone and content I found it not just adult but positively grown up. Thematically it deals with grief, loss, abandonment and betrayal in some very bleak and uncompromising ways. I found much of it hard to handle, emotionally, and some of it actively hard to watch. 

Technically I don't suppose there's anything in there that wouldn't pass the regular checks for content suitable for sub-teens, although the parental advisory site I checked suggested using discretion in letting younger children see it. They recommended it be watched by"older children and teenagers due to the intense themes and animated violence",  to which I'd only add "...yeah, and the rest!"

The thirteen-part series is self-contained, to an extent, and has a satisfying conclusion, although it clearly anticipates a second season, which I regret to say it probably isn't going to get, not having been especially successful or well-reviewed. The first eight episodes are the most harrowing. 

If you can get through those, it does shift tone slightly, towards more traditional action-adventure. There's even a fight on top of a moving train. It was a change of pace that came as a huge relief to me after the claustrophobic, introspective, soul-searching intensity of the earlier narrative.

Even so, it never really lets up on the animal cruelty, some of which I found quite distressing. It was a strange co-incidence that I watched it almost at the same time as playing Palworld. I've never played a Pokemon game but if either of these "inspired by" takes is remotely accurate to that IP's ethos, it has to be a damning indictment of Pokemon itself.  

Together, the two of them have made me re-assess some of my own behavior while gaming. Too many of the things we blithely accept as "just how the game works" simply don't bear close examination.

Overall, I'm very glad I watched My Daemon and would strongly recommend it to anyone who thinks they have the stomach for it. Just be ready to have your assumptions uncomfortably challenged.

Hazbin Hotel

This one ended much sooner than I expected. It seemed like one of those shows that takes most of its time setting up the premise and introducing the characters before suddenly realizing there are only a couple of episodes left to deal with the plot.

That said, I thought it was great. It looked fantastic, made me laugh out loud several times, had me hissing the villains and cheering the heroes, and left me feeling satisfied and sated after the big ending. The songs were pretty good, too.

One thing I will say is that I do seem to have watched an awful lot of shows in the last two or three years with demons or devils as the protagonists. I'd like to write a whole post about it but I need to do a lot more research first. 

A lot of them are generically demonish but this one has actual, named devils and angels from the Judaeo-Christian tradition, something that always feels weird. OK, there's no actual Daughter of Satan in the Bible as far as I remember from my Religious Knowledge O-Level studies, and even if there was I'm pretty sure she wasn't called Charlie, but Hazbin Hotel has roles for Satan himself, not to mention Lilith and Adam. 

As seems to be the norm these days, the devils are the good guys and the angelic crew the villains, only in the case of Hazbin Hotel there's very little in the way of nuance when it comes to the angelic hordes. Satan is a charismatic fop with a suppressed paternal streak you do not want to awake. Adam is a genocidal, carpet-chewing sociopath and all the angels merely his unthinking storm troopers. They're idiosyncratic characterizations, to say the least.

The show was great fun from beginning to end and broke viewing records for Amazon, so I imagine we'll be getting more. I will definitely be watching.

Star Trek: Prodigy

Now this was a complete surprise. I am not much of a Star Trek fan although I am slowly coming to believe that, in the eternal cats vs dogs debate, I'm probably more attuned to the wavelength of the Federation than either the Empire or the Alliance.

Even so, I couldn't even name all of the official Trek shows. I watched the original series in the seventies (Not the sixties, when I don't recall even knowing it existed.) and the first season and a half or so of New Generation in the eighties, quitting out of boredom before, as people like to tell me, it got good. 

After that, I think the next Trek show I watched was Lower Decks, which I loved. That positive experience was why I thought I'd give this one a go and I'm very glad I did. It's not as sharp and clever as Lower Decks and it's much more tuned for a tween-teen audience but it's fast, funny, exciting and very coherently plotted. I enjoyed it a good deal.

As usual, the best thing about it was the characters, all of whom are nicely individuated, recognizable types without actually being stereotypical. The voice acting is solid, not spectacular, with no-one really standing out as particularly impressive or annoying. That makes perfect sense with such an ensemble cast and such a focus on camaraderie and teamwork.

I assume the show is canon, if only because one of the main characters is Capt. Janeway from Voyager, of whom I had heard, even though I never watched the show. She seems very dry. I'd be interested in watching an episode or two of Voyager now, just on the basis that she's probably pretty good in it.

The animation is not stellar (Ha!) but it does a job. The visuals are at their best when the team visit various planets. The interior of the ship really doesn't give the animators a lot to work with. 

The plot, while consistent and tightly-focused, doesn't make a whole lot of sense but that's nothing new. Most SciFi shows don't make sense if you think about them too hard. This one involves time-travel, which is always a big red flag to logic, anyway. It also features any number of call-backs to other Trek shows and series, which may delight or infuriate, depending on your tolerance for fan service.

The show has a fractured past. Originally commissioned by Paramount and shown on Nickelodeon in two, ten-episode half-seasons, it was then cancelled after a second season had already been approved and work on it had begun. Netflix picked up both the first and second season, the latter of which is supposed to air later this year. 

Once again, I will be watching.

Neon Genesis: Evangelion

I knew the name from the manga we sell at work but I never thought it looked particularly interesting. Then one day I was chatting to one of my managers, the one who games and watches anime, and she recommended it in the strongest terms so I thought, since it was right there on Netflix, I'd give it a go.

O. M. G! This is one of those "What did I just watch?" shows, pretty much from start to finish. It's an acknowledged classic (Did not know that.) from the nineties (Didn't know that either.) with an infamously weird and divisive ending. 

The show runs 26 episodes but they ran out of money for the animation towards the end so the last two are basically slide-shows. The show then became a cult as the director, Hideaki Anno, spent the next two decades trying to get the story told the way he wanted. 

There are a bunch of Evangelion movies, all dealing with the same plot as the show, most of them on Netflix, all of which I still need to watch. My manager, whose opinions are sound, tells me they're all better than the TV show, which means they must be damn good because the show is wonderful.

Visually, it's stunning, in large part because of the direction rather than the animation. Shot selection is incredible. It looks like an art-house movie from the eighties or nineties done in animation.

Characterization and voice acting in the American dub are good to very good. (I'm not even going to get into the Netflix vs ADV vs Japanese original arguments. I saw this version first  so it's always going to be the version to me.) I'm guessing the levels of hysteria in some scenes would be orders of magnitude more intense in the original so I'm happy to be missing that. I don't think I could cope with a full-strength, anime-style Asuka.

The world-building is off the charts but also very hard to credit. For a start, the timescale, fifteen years after a global catastrophe, doesn't seem to be anywhere near long enough to allow for the rebuilding that's taken place and the technology level is probably hundreds of years ahead of ours although everyone behaves like it's still the nineties.

None of that matters, of course. It's a full-on, sensual, intellectual and emotional assault that can feel quite overwhelming at times. Fortunately, there are also huge swathes of teen drama, adult soap opera and slapstick comedy to get you through the tough-to-follow parts. I never did figure out where the cyborg penguin fitted into it all.

Now I need to find time to watch the four, essential movies that supposedly make sense of the whole thing. That's going to be a trip, I bet!

And The Rest Will Have To Wait

I'm pretty sure I've watched other stuff through to the end as well but I can't off the top of my head remember what it was and anyway that's enough for one post. Next time I write about TV, I'll go through the several shows I started then dropped, something I find very interesting when other people do it. 

If only I can remember what those shows were, that is...

Devils And Daemons

Because I feel it would be unreasonable to post about Palworld every day, even though I definitely could do that, today I'm going to do something I don't normally do and write about a couple of TV shows I'm still in the middle of watching. If nothing else, it makes for an instructive jumping-off point for a meditation on the purpose of reviews and reviewing, a topic on which I have far more to say than anyone would want to hear.

In brief, it does seem wrong sometimes that I only get to write about shows after I finish watching them, and sometimes quite a while after, at that. I occasionally have to make it clear I've forgotten a good deal about a particular show and even when I don't offer that caveat, it's often the case that I've had to go back and re-watch a few scenes, just to refresh my memory so I can write about them.

Contrast that with being mid-watch, so to speak. Those are the times when not only are the details of the show fresh in my mind but when I'm suffused with enthusiasm and eager to spread the word. It's weird to hold back, isn't it? If it was a new game; would I wait until I'd finished to begin posting about it? 

Not likely. In exceptional circumstances, if a game was both self-contained and short, it's conceivable I might play, finish and write about it on the same day but almost always there would be a series of "First Impressions" and "Currently Playing" posts, detailing my ongoing experiences, thoughts and opinions in something approximating real time. For what we now, somewhat euphemistically, refer to as "Live Service" games, no real "Final Review" is ever even possible, although professional reviewers frequently need to pretend otherwise.

It does seem strange, then, that another similarly extended, ongoing experience, like watching a TV show, should have to wait until the final episode before I even mention it. That would never have happened in the days before streaming services and on-demand viewing. In the olden days, if a reviewer waited until the conclusion of a TV series before writing about it, it would already be too late. Anyone who hadn't watched it already would have no way of catching up and most people who'd seen it would already be watching something else and wouldn't care.

All of which is steering us dangerously close to the sandbanks of what a review is for, something I desperately want to avoid, so enough with the pre-amble and on to the shows. Just bear in mind I haven't seen the endings of either of these yet (In one case, no-one has.) so, to paraphrase the boilerplate at the end of advertisements for financial services, my opinions may be subject to change.

Hazbin Hotel (Amazon Prime)

This one has a complicated backstory -not the internal narrative but how it came to be made - none of which I knew until I read the Wikipedia entry in preparation for this post. To summarise, a Patreon-funded pilot episode was released on YouTube back in 2019 and four years later, about a couple of weeks back, the first episode of the series itself premiered on Amazon Prime.

I've linked to the pilot but I haven't even watched it yet myself. I only found out it existed about two minutes ago! As for how I came to watch the new show, Prime chose to featureit in one of those big, splash panels you see at the top of the page when you log in. I'd never heard of it but I liked the look of the art style and I'd just finished another show, meaning I had a gap in my schedule, so I thought I'd give it a try. 

My initial reaction? Blimey, Charlie! 

Hazbin Hotel is a full-on assault to both eyes and ears. The aesthetic that attracted me to it in the first place is rigorously, almost mercilessly employed. It's spiky, aggressive, loud and sophisticated all at once. It's also color-keyed to an extreme I've rarely experienced before. 

The action takes place in Hell, where everything is some shade of red. Everything. Characters are red. They dress in red. The buildings and the streets are red. It's all red. Okay, there are some yellows and oranges but they only make the reds more red! 

While you're seeing red, you're hearing blue. Hazbin Hotel has to be one of the sweariest shows I've ever watched. Certainly the sweariest since Deadloch and it doesn't even have the excuse of being Australian. I'm six shows in (Prime are doing that thing of releasing episodes on Fridays, a couple at a time.) and I think the firehose of four-letter words may have been turned down just a notch, although it's possible I'm just inured to it now. 

The older I get, the more I realise I love creative swearing. I used to find it abrasive and awkward but now I just relish it like good music. Hazbin Hotel has some extremely musical swearing and I'm not even being metaphorical because Hazbin Hotel is a musical.

Oh yes, did I not mention that? As if it wasn't enough to have super-sweary demons swaggering around a scarlet, cartoon Hell, they also keep breaking into song. Throw in a central plot about genocide, some sub-plots concerning pornography, coercion and consent and a whole raft of religious table-turning, top it off with plenty of explosive, cartoon violence and you have something pretty much guaranteed to annoy or offend almost anyone.

I love it and apparently a lot of other people do, too, because it holds the current record for the "largest global debut for a new animated series on Prime Video", at least according to Wikipedia. I haven't even mentioned one of the show's greatest strengths, the characters, all of whom are memorable and frequently endearing. 

In short, highly recommended, provided you don't shy at swearing, sex, religion or song and dance numbers. Or, I guess, suffer from red/green color-blindness, which I imagine would be kind of a problem...

My Daemon (Netflix)

Another new show about which I knew absolutely nothing before I began watching it. Unlike Hazbin Hotel, whose wiki presence is enormous, My Daemon rates only a basic, factual, uninflected entry on Wikipedia. It deserves so much more.

Whereas Hazbin Hotel sets out to shock but mostly succeeeds in being immensley enjoyable and entertaining, My Daemon comes in under the radar to deliver an emotional payload so harrowing I had to debate with myself quite seriously about whether I could go on watching after the first episode. Seriously, it's traumatizing.

The Cliff Notes version: a road movie with a quest narrative in which a child protagonist attempts to walk from one side of a futuristic, post-nuclear-disaster Japan to the other in search of a rumored daemon with the power to raise the dead. So far, so anime. 

The heartbreak is in the reason for his journey and the horror is in the razor-edge line the narrative walks between quotidian good and thoughtless evil. Without spoilers, there's not much I can offer in the way of detail. Just know that every character, even the bit-parts and walk-ons, comes freighted with a life all their own, motivations and attitudes and assumptions the narrative subtly offers and invites you to understand, accept or challenge.

Coming fresh to the show, I expected the titular daemon to be a supernatural, otherworldly entity. I didn't take the extra "a" to be significant but it absolutely is. These are the daemons of His Dark Materials, seen through a science fiction lens. Philip K Dick would have recognised them as his great-grandchildren.

Visually, My Daemon is stunning. The animation is fluid and subtle but the backgrounds are purely sublime. It's one of the most beautiful shows I've seen and of late I've watched a lot of action taking place in front of jaw-droppingly gorgeous backdrops. The standard is high but this exceeds it.

The writing matches the visuals and the voice acting doesn't let either down . The real problem with the show is its emotional impact, something that on multiple occasions I've found almost more than I could take. The repeated scenes of what can only be called animal cruelty, even if the daemons are, technically, something not-animal, are particularly horrific and the perpetual tension around whether Kento, a nine-year old orphan can keep his best friend, Anna, the ineffably loveable, loyal and - as Kento claims - incredibly cute daemon he raised from a tiny speck, at times verges on the unbearable.

Throw in the death of a parent, a terminal illness and a mysterious government organisation, devoid of all humanity, determined to have Anna, "dead or alive", and you have the potential for melodramatic sci-fi soap opera. Instead you get something rich, strange and fine.

I'm five episodes into the thirteen-episode limited series. I hope it has a happy ending. I hope I can make it through to see it.

Obviously, this one is highly recommended, too. If you think you can take the emotional strain, that is.