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This Week in Anime - What the Hell is Happening in Sarazanmai?

It was my first Ikuhara show, but if they're all like this (which I'm told they are) I see I wasn't missing much. I can appreciate thematically ambitious stories with plenty of symbolism, one of my favorite works of fiction ever (Umineko) is exactly that, but this isn't how you do it.

You know patience is a virtue right or do you prefer typical high school BS or stupid Isekoi crap?

it doesn't seem to be being obscurantist (not to pick on ThatGuyWhoLikesThings, but this show just doesn't seem that complicated).

the Princess of the Crystal

I watched the first 15 minutes of episode 1 and dropped it without remorse. Unfunny jokes, lame and gross shock value, no emotion whatsoever in spite of the incredibly flashy visuals and direction. And yet the show demands I be invested enough to try and decipher the nonsense it throws at me from minute one without actually giving me a reason to. It was my first Ikuhara show, but if they're all like this (which I'm told they are) I see I wasn't missing much. I can appreciate thematically ambitious stories with plenty of symbolism, one of my favorite works of fiction ever (Umineko) is exactly that, but this isn't how you do it.

Mawaru Penguindrum is generally considered Ikuhara's best work, maybe because it's fairly different from the others and not as convoluted. That might be worth checking out if you didn't like Sarazanmai. So far I don't like Sarazanmai anywhere near as much as Penguindrum.

Is it really? I mean, it's my favorite Ikuhara work (it also happens to be the first of his shows I saw), but I feel like most Ikuhara fans (and anime fans in general) think Utena is the best. I co-run an Ikuhara panel at Anime Detour every year, and the first year we ran our panel, most of the audience members actively hated Mawaru Penguindrum. It was awkward, because us panelists were sitting up front as the Takakura siblings (penguins and all) and we just had to sort of let the audience members vent at us for a good portion of the hour.

King Pickle the Wise wrote:

Mawaru Penguindrum is generally considered Ikuhara's best work, maybe because it's fairly different from the others and not as convoluted. That might be worth checking out if you didn't like Sarazanmai. So far I don't like Sarazanmai anywhere near as much as Penguindrum.

Is it really? I mean, it's my favorite Ikuhara work (it also happens to be the first of his shows I saw), but I feel like most Ikuhara fans (and anime fans in general) think Utena is the best. I co-run an Ikuhara panel at Anime Detour every year, and the first year we ran our panel, most of the audience members actively hated Mawaru Penguindrum. It was awkward, because us panelists were sitting up front as the Takakura siblings (penguins and all) and we just had to sort of let the audience members vent at us for a good portion of the hour.

I agree, though, that Penguindrum has a very different feel from his other works. It definitely does the least with gender and sexuality (two of Ikuhara's favorite topics), and is the only one that borrows heavily from another story (Night on the Galactic Railroad).

Utena is liminal because it was Ikuhara adapting a work rather than creating it whole cloth. He did write the movie, but that's generally regarded as "infamous."

Overall, that seems to be a throughline of critical reception to his work, that he's best when reined in by another writer and completely bonkers when trusted with plot, and has a bit the same suspicions as Evangelion when it comes to symbolic-seeming stuff.

So far I feel like this is the most self-indulgent Ikuhara work. They're all pretty similar to this but I also feel like Sarazanmai is really lacking in substance beyond the typical symbolism expected. I hope the plot starts to pick up soon.

I know there's a prequel manga where they raise Sara as their adopted daughter, so she's definitely wrapped up in the otters' scheme somehow. But yeah, there are many open questions whose answers I'm sure will be appropriately tragic.