AMV chronicles #82: Sunlight

Silk_SK released “Sunlight” in mid-2009, several years after I first got into AMVs but around the same time that I finally got involved in them, both in terms of editing and consistently participating in the community as a fan. I don’t remember watching this AMV when it was first released, but returning to it today and basking in its late-’00s charms, it’s hard not to get nostalgic for the time it was released and the general feelings that I associate with AMVs like it. Yes, this is another one of those AMVs where the personal associations I’ve attached to it are doing most of the heavy lifting. That’s not to say that the editing comes up short in any way, but that the technical acumen that was once its strongest suit hasn’t endured particularly well over time. Then again, so it goes for pretty much every AMV edited over eleven years ago. For better or worse, “Sunlight” is “2009: The AMV.” And I’m inclined to look at it strictly for the better for the rest of this entry.

My nostalgia for this AMV isn’t rooted in any old memories I have for it, as I don’t think I came across it until four or five years ago. Same goes for Eureka Seven, a series that I also missed out on when it was new and didn’t experience until it was almost a decade old. But in spite of its flaws or the somewhat common opinion that it never quite lived up to its potential, Eureka Seven remains a classic series full of deservedly iconic characters and scenes and a nearly unmatched sense of style, one that still oozes with cool in ways that most mainstream, tentpole anime series never come close to embodying. This video only hints at those vibes but crackles with an upbeat sense of optimism that’s infectious and refreshing, one that still triggers a secondhand nostalgic response when I watch it. I will now attempt to finish this entry without using the n-word any further.

Aside from relying heavily on crossfades to stitch most of the clips in this AMV together, a technique that lends this otherwise intensely-edited action AMV a softer edge than most editors would strive to apply, Silk_SK used a lot of masking in this video to help create a fluid sense of flow between various sequences. It’s noticeable (particularly by today’s standards) but succeeds in a more subtle fashion than most masked transition-heavy AMVs do. It doesn’t showcase the ostentatious shot-to-shot rotoscoping that was extremely in fashion when “Sunlight” was released in 2009 (and never really went away, to be honest), and thankfully it doesn’t produce the literally dizzying effect that I’ve often experienced when watching such videos. I’m struggling to come up with a concrete reason why the masking “works” here as opposed to the countless other instances where it actively distracts me from getting fully immersed in an AMV. Oddly enough, “Sunlight” was a VCA finalist for best no-effects video, in spite of the editor himself testifying that a single mask took a whole week of work to complete (as if cuts like this and this weren’t dead giveaways).

“Sunlight” grabbed a lot of nods in that year’s poll, including nominations for Most Artistic, Best Sentimental, Best Character Profile and Best Romantic. It was also nominated for Best Storytelling, likely more of an acknowledgement that Silk_SK faithfully edited the scenes to preserve their original meaning rather than ignoring their context altogether. “Sunlight” doesn’t convey a clear-cut narrative that will make a lot of sense to anyone who hasn’t seen E7, but I suppose that the video is appealing and effective enough to leave the viewer with the sense that characters have been established, that the nature and depth of relationships between them has been acknowledged (if not fully explored) and that a meaningful story about them has been told from beginning to end. And I suppose that’s one of the things that good editing can achieve: successfully persuading a viewer to feel or believe something in spite of what’s really on the screen. I don’t want to accuse this AMV of playing a dishonest game; the invisible art of editing bends time, space and logic itself, illusions you consent to every time you watch anything.

“Sunlight” is an upbeat song that smuggles in an unexpectedly serious message into its lyrics, one that listeners might not even notice even as they’re singing along. As a song about forgiving oneself for past mistakes, finding the strength to let go of shame or guilt and moving on, it’s actually an extremely appropriate soundtrack to explore Eureka’s inner conflict. Aside from the lyrics, the sound of it is startling to hear in 2020, the mere presence of rock guitar in a pop song like this, actually playing power chords, instantly takes me back in that same way that your parents recall stupid, irrelevant music from their youth with misty-eyed reverence and bloated delusions of its enduring appeal. It’s a feeling that cannot be put into words without prompting whatever well-deserved “Ok Boomer” zinger is most fitting someone my age. It is what it is, I guess!

Decades are inherently arbitrary collections of years that rarely frame cultural changes in any truly meaningful way… everyone “knows” this, but we still assign them great meanings and consider them to be discriminate, uniquely-flavored chunks of time that make understanding history as easy as eating a bag of crisps! Even with that in mind, I can’t resist the feeling that the end of the 00’s really did mark the end of a certain era for AMVs. Silk_SK edited “Sunlight” with the highest quality sources available at the time, but by the early 2010s, universal acceptance of 480p AMVs throughout the hobby had shifted to a begrudging tolerance at best. Broadcast standards in Japan and the west completed the transition from 4:3 to high-definition 16:9, and editors scrambled to keep up with viewer expectations that demanded bigger and better-looking video with every passing year. Introduced to AMV editors in the late 00’s, frame interpolation software like Twixtor became a widely-used plugin throughout the early 2010s, introducing visual effects that once seemed impossible to conceive of, let alone actually produce onscreen. Within a scant few years, these techniques would form the foundation of a visual aesthetic that defined an entire new generation of editors.

In addition, while it may be difficult to imagine today, the arrival of YouTube in early 2005 prompted a long-running and often contentious debate within the AMV community that played out for several years. Communities like animemusicvideos.org functioned as gatekeepers to the hobby, setting ethical and creative standards that newcomers were urged to adopt and accordingly rewarded for doing so. The instantly-gratifying and convenient end-around that YouTube suddenly provided to aspiring young editors fractured the long-established community in an instant, although by 2009 the disagreements had largely settled into a stasis. Despite the unchecked power it held to remove videos at will, it was largely regarded as a morally neutral platform (a playing field that favored editors who pandered to viewers with overused sources, sure, but even this was nothing new). The logic of its algorithms, inevitably promoting certain channels or videos over others, was not yet fully understood. By the early 2010s, social-media savvy users began to crack its formula, revealing a now-obvious truth: gaming the system for subscriptions and likes was a far more important tactic in running a successful channel than taking creative risks or following outdated sets of rules. The feedback loops created by these forces fostered a new mentality in AMV editing that had never seemed possible: the tedium of editing could easily be circumvented altogether by following crowdsourced presets. Sources were as important as ever, but only in so far as they signified meanings critical to the editor’s personal brand.

There would be little room for videos like “Sunlight” in this future.

The “golden age” of AMVs might have already been in the rear view by the time Silk_SK shared “Sunlight” with the world, but I feel like it has far more in common with videos from that era than it does with most anything from the 2010s, even in the earliest years of the decade. That’s not a hot take by any means but since you’ve made it this far, there you go, the thesis of the entire post! With the availability of Eureka Seven on blu ray, it’s an AMV that’s absolutely begging to be remastered. With all its meticulous masking and other subtle but numerous effects, it’s a video that will most certainly never receive the treatment. It’s forever stuck the past, a symbol of a transition period for AMVs and maybe even the Internet as a whole. Even its optimistic tone mirrored the hopeful mood of the end of the decade, a belief that we could put our darkest days behind us and seize the future we’d only dared to imagine for ourselves. It might have been naive, but it’s a mindset I’d much rather lose myself in than the current mood of the hobby.

Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest

Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest spits in the face of the endless untapped potential of animation, digging its heels deep into the most callous cynicism of our age as it grinds out one of the most breathtakingly vapid and ugly pieces of “media” that I have ever set my eyes on. It’s not an “anime” as much as a black hole from which astounding amounts of time and money were irretrievably drawn into; the untold stories the these resources could have made possible and the value they could have held to society or even to a single person are forever unknowable. It is so incompetent that it is almost above reproach; when it finally reveals its full hand, one realizes that it didn’t “fail” at telling a story or examining a single idea from more than a single angle. It just didn’t try. There is no discernible evidence of it even attempting to leave a single unique impression on viewers. Did its creators conclude that the material here was simply not worth the effort, that viewers would lap it up regardless of quality? As a matter of simple self-preservation on the part of overworked and underpaid staff, was there wisdom in this decision?

Arifureta is an egotistical power fantasy fueled by resentment, rage, a toxic expectation of unconditional servitude from the opposite sex and a laser-focused fixation on violence as a means of self expression. Arifureta‘s protagonist, Hajime Nagumo, is summoned into a distant world with his high school classmates and forced to battle monsters in labyrinthine dungeons–I won’t waste time dunking on this premise, it is not the problem here–in  the most rote entry in the Trapped In An RPG-style isekai story template that I’ve ever encountered. Hajime’s abilities are rather weak compared to his classmates. Moreover, he’s routinely ignored or taken for granted by most of his classmates on account of his withdrawn personality. From the very beginning, it’s presented as a given that their lack of appreciation towards Hajime is a Big Mistake that they will eventually regret, but we’re never given any glimpse into Hajime’s inner life to justify the notion that there’s anything to him that his peers are foolishly missing out on, nor any circumstances to explain why he’s such a gloomy person. If the original light novel presented the reader with any reason to empathize with him whatsoever, such details were left out of its anime adaptation altogether. In the midst of an intense battle, Hajime is betrayed by a classmate, cast into the depths of the dungeons and left for dead, a premise that immediately validates his status as a tragic victim for the ages. Through sheer determination and a fortunate discovery of power-up items that grant him immeasurable strength and god-like abilities, he begins his quest to escape the dungeon and ultimately become the greatest hero that this world has ever seen.

I don’t want to criticize Arifureta simply on the grounds of being just another isekai series, as I’ve certainly enjoyed more that a few anime that could be slotted into the same category. I actually… kind of loved this for a few episodes, for much the same reason that I loved Candidate For Goddess or Garzey’s Wing: describing these anime as “tone deaf” doesn’t quite do the experience of watching them justice. The over the top dub performances and inept direction provide an endlessly more entertaining experience than any anime that’s merely competent on a narrative or technical level but is clearly content to go through the motions. It’s incredibly rare to come across any work of media that’s the product of so many professionals–adults with decades of cumulative experience in the industry and presumably an honest passion for what they do–that genuinely feels like the product of a teenage narcissist who either ignored honest critiques of his work or was simply spared from the process by people who knew better than to waste their time. For the first four or five episodes, watching this lifeless, cliched trainwreck somehow fall deeper and deeper into the realms to pure edgelord fantasy is an experience that’s difficult to prepare for. It’s hilarious and a joy to watch… until the malevolence running through it all slowly reveals itself as the real thing.

Sourced from a successful series of light novels, Arifureta joylessly ticks the boxes of the most routine isekai cliches, running as hard as it can from the opening scenes to quickly confirm every criticism that people have ever made of the genre. There is no “worldbuilding,” just a collection of well-established concepts passed down from other anime series. The problem isn’t that the characters are one-dimensional but that it’s hard to find any evidence that the creative team even considered fleshing out a single one of them or any of their relationships beyond the most insultingly simple set of stock tropes. The animation sucks in ways that shouldn’t even be possible in 2019. Character design feels inspired by sketches from a middle school otaku’s algebra notebook. CGI animation and backgrounds are lapped by efforts as dated as Candidate For Goddess (2002) or even Blue Submarine No. 6 (1998). The main character is an irritating shithead, and both the story and the overall direction of each episode urges you to see the world through his eyes. He’s Lelouch on steroids, if Lelouch was also a school shooter. This is very naughty harem anime. It’s daring you to say it crossed the line!

Hajime is an inflamed delusion of a character, a celebration of pure masculine id, a brash edgelord incapable of reading any situation incorrectly, overestimating his abilities or ever being in the wrong at any moment during the thirteen episodes of this series. Is it possible that the creators of this series were presented with the idea of a character with “flaws,” misunderstood the entire concept and rushed to literally correct his every imperfection? Within minutes of the first episode, we see Hajime at his lowest, confused, vulnerable and alone. Once he’s granted a magical item that he did nothing to earn and spent no effort to discover, we’re off the races. Never again will Hajime express doubt or fear. Nothing he desires isn’t framed by the script and the direction to be rightfully his to begin with. He views his companions as dead weight and isn’t afraid to tell them so: at every possible turn, his self-centered judgements are wholly affirmed. Any man who questions his methods is either frozen in fear by his terrifying gaze or is given a beatdown that would put most humans on life support. Any female character who does the same is given a stern lecture until they see things his way or are reduced to tears (including his gentle high school teacher, a young woman whose protective instincts over her students would seem to set her up as the moral center of the story… Hajime destroys her with a passionate soliloquy that reaffirms him as the sole rational actor in a world filled with weaklings, cowards and traitors). Every interaction that any character has with Hajime is eventually escalated to its most intense extremes. His presence is exhausting. He is also far from the most irritating character in the show.

Women flock to Hajime. By and large, they are bafflingly stupid archetypes that he barely tolerates. Nevertheless, they amass around him and constitute the dumbest ensemble cast of characters I’ve ever seen in a television program. Hajime’s main squeeze, a lolicon vampire he rescues from the depths of the dungeon early in the series, is the only girl in his harem who isn’t constantly turned up to 10 every second she’s onscreen (her tolerable low key demeanor is her saving grace, in exchange she functions as a fanservice dispenser for viewers who have a thing for frequently-naked girls who look like they’re ten years old). She enables and supports every decision he makes with completely submissive devotion, but in that respect she is indistinguishable from the rest of her rivals for his affection. It’s never implied that Hajime desires most of these girls in any way whatsoever, but it’s a constant given that he deserves them all. The entitled incel subtext of Arifureta isn’t disguised as much as it is hidden in plain sight, bandied about so boldly that the series often feels poised to reveal itself as a satire on the juvenile attitudes about women it marinates in from the moment these characters are introduced. I’ll admit that it’s entirely possible that I’m just that unfamiliar with the tropes of harem anime and the depths to which they’ll routinely stoop to placate viewers’ basest desires. Are there actually lots of shows like this that I’ve simply missed out on?

There’s plenty of juicy details I’m leaving out here on purpose. At a certain point, compiling a laundry list of complaints actually becomes counterproductive. The more you complain about something, the more a certain kind of person will feel drawn to it. Did it feel like a given that reminding voters that Donald Trump was a racist, a misogynist, a tax cheat, a draft dodger, a serial adulterer, a serial rapist, an Islamophobe, a failed businessman, an aspiring dictator, an enabler and protector of the far right, an Internet troll, an adult with an incomplete and dishonest understanding of the Constitution, etc. would convince them to vote for someone else? Does rattling off reasons like this come across like wagging a finger in someone’s face? People are fed up with being told what’s good for them! I don’t honestly believe that this post will trigger someone to watch Arifureta just to spite some stranger with a blog who obviously believes he has better taste than they do. But crazier things have happened. As Trump’s election exposes flaws in Democracy ripe for future exploitation, a system that only works if citizens are educated and equally empowered to make informed decisions, Arifureta is a stark reminder that a creatively bankrupt property can still “succeed” in the marketplace of ideas. While thoughtful, artistic projects helmed by industry legends slowly die on the vine, this display of utter incompetence was just rewarded with a second season.

I understand that this series speaks to people. It has its defenders, half from the “so bad it’s good” school of thought, half from a place where Hajime’s Hot Topic-chunibyo style and persona is a breath of fresh air in a world of needlessly conflicted and pointlessly sensitive characters. If I was twelve years old, how would I not fall in love with this stupid show? How would this not fill me with the thrill of imminent forbidden pleasures?

For years, criticism of the wish fulfillment fantasy anime was aimed squarely at Sword Art Online, a tremendously mediocre, pandering and “problematic” anime that suffered under these criticisms… all the way to the bank! In hindsight, some of the backlash against it was a little overblown, but compared to Arifureta it reveals itself as a visually impressive series that went out of its way to sell viewers on its premise, and in the process, gave its world a shape and a grand scale you could feel in every episode. Characters weren’t “complex,” but they were easy on the eyes and had personalities that, true to their circumstances, felt like real people (some more than others, sure, just work with me here). There was a palpable sense of danger in every episode, a sense that death was right around each corner. Kirito was a nesting doll of a protagonist, an “ordinary” boy that the typical viewer could easily identify with (he’s a gamer just like you!), but whose “ordinary” qualities concealed layers upon layers of exceptional talent and impossible levels of casual coolness that would make James Dean look like Steve Urkel. Sure, it was a manipulative trick, but for all his crimes as a character, Kirito was never an asshole (not counting contrived and insincere moments like this) and was never an avatar to the idea that enduring enough unjust suffering gives you a free pass to be one whenever you wish. Kirito had his own harem of girls set up to compete for his affection, but at least he regarded them as actual friends and not lesser human beings. Arifureta borrows heavily from SAO every chance it can and fails to improve on a single aspect of it despite having seven years to observe and remedy its shortcomings. It single handedly redeems the legacy of SAO, actually making it seem nuanced and genuinely hip by revealing the hidden depths to which viewers never assumed the isekai genre could sink to.

Arifureta is a love letter to the darkest urges of the adolescent mind. It’s rude, in your face and desperate to have it both ways: eager to stomp on “politically correct” good taste via a viewer surrogate character that confirms the audience’s deepest conviction: that they and they alone are a truly special snowflake (any questions?). It’s a devastating rebuke of the idea that anime is an art form worth taking seriously. Its existence leaves us with a lone message of consolation. Your ideas may be unpolished or unoriginal, but as long as you put something of yourself into them, they can’t turn out worse than this.