Forum - View topicAudience expectations "successfully subverted?"
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nobahn
 Subscriber Posts: 5160 |
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WARNING! SPOILER ALERT!
This post discusses a scene in episode #13 of Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid. You have been warned. In this review
I respectfully submit that when Sousuke Sagara gets cut on the cheek and begins bleeding onto the ground, that that is a good example of subverting the audience's expectations because:
Last edited by nobahn on Sat Nov 27, 2010 8:07 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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poilk92
 Posts: 433 Location: Long Beach California |
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I really like your interpretation. I remember the scene you are talking about and deeply enjoyed the visual but I did not read into as much as you. That being said I think you are on to something and after all the best part of art is that its open to interpretation and in the end is defined by how the viewer perceives it. So I completely agree with you, if the creators didn't intend that scene as a visual metaphor they definitely should have!
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nobahn
Subscriber Posts: 5160 |
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WARNING!!! SPOILER ALERT!!!
This posting details a scene from episode #11 of Maria Watches Over Us Printemps You have been warned. DISCLAIMER: I am assuming (Yeah, yeah; I know: When one ASSUMES one makes an ASS out of yoU and ME. So sue me.) that this hasn't been brought up before in a different thread. I was watching M.W.O.U.P. when I took notice of something that I hadn't noticed before; and, having noticed it, I'm at a loss as to understand just how it is that I missed it before. So I'm taking the (potentially big) liberty of posting this here. There's a scene toward the end of the episode where Yumi is running in the rain while crying. As she runs past the statue of Mary, there -- for a second or so -- the P.O.V. is of the the rain streaming down the statue's face. Ergo, the statue of Mary is crying along with Yumi; thus, the crying trope is subverted. |
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Ian K
 Posts: 250 |
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King, based on your descriptions I'm not sure I'd consider either of those 'subversions of audience expectations' so much as imaginative ways to use the tropes differently. The tropes are being used the same ways, they're just being depicted a little bit differently. I haven't seen maria Watches Over Us and don't remember the particular scene from The Second Raid, though, so I could be wrong.
The Second Raid had a much greater subversion of my expectations: It made me think it was going to be a masterpiece, one of the truly excellently told stories in anime, and then it settled for a cop-out reset ending. 
In all seriousness, the trope subversion that has always stood out to me is from the first episode of Elfen Lied. Between scenes of Lucy, a telekinetic and very angry young women, breaking out of the high-security facility where she is being held, we are introduced to Kusaragi, a dizty secretary who maybe has a crush on her boss. As I saw her struggling to avoid dropping the cup of coffee she was bringing her boss, I naturally assumed that she would be a recurring comic relief character, and in any other anime she would have been. However, later in that same episode spoiler[Kusaragi is killed in an incredibly gruesome manner when she literally stumbles into the rampaging Lucy]. Elfen Lied doesn't seem to get much respect these days, maybe for good reason - I haven't seen past episode 4 yet. Still, I've respected it since for that one scene where my expectations were completely subverted and I was truly shocked by what I was seeing. |
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swienke
 Posts: 245 |
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Yay, an excuse to talk about anime in an intellectual and artistic way! I happen to love subversive series: they're generally more intellectually engaging and tend to stick with me for far longer than series that play the tropes straight. I haven't watched FMP! (other than the first 2 episodes, which kind of bored me), so I can't comment on how well it subverts audience expectations, but I have a few other examples to throw out there.
I'm in the midst of rewatching Durarara, and I'm really reminded of just how much trope tweaking permeates the series. My favorite example concerns a certain character, spoiler[Mikado, who is initially introduced as the typical kind and naive high school kid.] Now, considering that one of the main themes of the series is the dissonance between the personas people portray publicly (say that five times fast) and their actual personalities, it was fairly obvious that spoiler[ Mikado was going to end up being more than he appeared, which is itself something of an subversion of the straight-man trope that he originally embodied. His interest in the Dollars and slight fascination with the strangeness of the city in the first few episodes implied that he would eventually become intimately involved in the Ikebukuro underworld, but all of the evidence seemed to point to it being the standard "normal hero gets dragged into crazy adventure but learns to adjust and becomes a central figure, blah, blah, blah" trope that's so common in shonen and action series.] And then episode 10 came out. The end reveal of the episode is that spoiler[ Mikado isn't going to get involved in the insanity: he's already one of the driving forces behind it. The kid who was so interested in the Dollars, and who it was assumed was eventually going to join them, is revealed to have been their leader all along. The only reason he was fishing for information about them was because he wanted to know how other people perceived them.] All I can say is that it was a brilliant piece of misdirection that left me slack-jawed for hours afterwards. Another personal favorite is the very first episode of Ga-Rei: Zero. Some people consider it nothing more than blatant trolling, but I loved it. The episode starts off with spoiler[ a bunch of mildly interesting and rather badass exorcists running around Tokyo trying to defeat a rather large monster and its ghoulish servants. After failing in their first attempt (only after establishing that they're way more badass than the special forces guys brought in to deal with the monster at first), they finally manage to defeat the thing by luring it into a cooling tower and flooding the place with holy water. The monster's defeated, the heroes regroup to celebrate and joke around...............and then they all get killed in an incredibly gory and disturbing manner by a high school girl.] I think I spit up my tea after that and just stared blankly at the screen for a few minutes. The subversion is even more shocking if you've read the manga: spoiler[ the anime was supposed to be a prequel series that dealt with an entirely different unit of exorcists and that really didn't overlap with the manga at all. However, the girl at the end is clearly recognizable as Yomi, the manga's first major villain and the protagonist's former best friend, making it rather obvious that the two series really are deeply connected. Later episodes revealed the series to be the story of Yomi's descent into evil and managed to make one of the manga's most hated characters into one of it's most heart-wrenchingly tragic and sympathetic ones. ] I'm getting a bit lazy now, so no more paragraphs for me, but I might talk about Katanagatari and Madoka Magica later on, both of which have made it their mission in life to subvert as many tropes as possible, thereby making them some of the most fascinating series I've come across. |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11652 |
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It looks like people are interpreting "subverting expectations" in various ways. If this is the "What a twist!" thread, then I'd have to say episode 3 of Level E is a shining example. I won't bother to detail it - if you haven't seen it, I won't spoil; if you have, you know what I mean. Even episode 4 played with your head a little, though not to the same extent.
I don't know if Mind Game should be in this category or not. After the first few minutes you don't know what to expect, so without expectations, it's hard to subvert them
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