Another

Do you like revenge p***? Do you like wanton bloody violence? Do you like terrible mysteries? Then you’ll love Another! I watched it recently so it’s nice and fresh in my mind, and I simply cannot wait to rant about its terribleness. Now, some amount of suspension of disbelief is required for any show. Realistically this school would have shut down a loooong time ago. You're telling me that there were people connected to class three being killed at random over the course of twenty years, and they let it go on? tHeY tRiEd SwItChInG tHe NaMe To ClAs C tHoUgH… give me a break! They’re going to just close down eventually and open a new school, or parents are gonna stop sending their kids there. bUt ThE cUrSe WaS a SeCrEt… No! There weren’t many many dozens of deaths all related to one class without word getting around! Also the fact that they were looking down on the people who left once the calamity started… people are losing their lives, a few weeks later you're all going to go batshit insane and start murdering people because you don’t want to die, you all should have left! But I digress, no murder means no mystery and no mystery means no anime in the first place, so one can choose to ignore it for the sake of enjoyment. First, the characters: Where are they? I see a few collections of limbs, shambling around and waiting to die a gory and violent death. I feel like I barely got to know most of them, because there was nothing to know. The main character is as one dimensional as it gets. He has a backstory and he was in a coma for one and a half years but he barely ever mentions it and it hardly affects his mindset. And the eyepatch girl’s whole characterization is her lack of it! She could’ve been a great character in my opinion. She’s of course very weird (it’s almost like she’s trying to creep you out…) but that isn’t entirely a bad thing. From a single flashback in the last episodes we know that she used to have emotions before her sister/cousin died, as she can be seen playing with her while she expositions her life story. But I absolutely hate when shows establish sympathy for someone after the fact. We’ve gone a whole show without seeing a speck of emotion from her, and now we’re expected to have a big rush of sympathy and understanding for why she’s been like this, and be heartwarmed when ten minutes later she starts feeling emotion again, it’s all too fast! Then there are the other people, and this is where a lot of my gripes come from. They all seem to be reasonable people, they don’t get a ton of characterization and no one else grows even a little bit, but at least they all make sense and have a general fear of death and desire to solve this mystery, until the last few episodes. I enjoyed the brown haired guy's performance– when he killed the blue haired kid and rushed to the others when he realised he’d messed up, but that’s about it. The Lord of the Flies gets to have a bunch of kids kill each other because its goal first and foremost was to send a message, although it didn’t make for the most believable story (but they were little kids I suppose). These are all high school kids. Fear of death is a powerful thing, but one girl saying that everyone should go kill someone because it’ll stop them from dying shouldn’t be enough for almost every single one of them to pick up a weapon and go on the hunt. It felt like I was watching the Salem witch trials in real time. One of the girls literally said that she would kill the eyepatch girl to test if she was the dead one and if she wasn’t forgotten then oh well (as they did with witches…). Some may find this a harrowing reminder of exactly how much our society has progressed and that anyone can be turned to madness with enough peer pressure, but to me it was just unrealistic and upsetting lunacy. There’s also the “old crone” who randomly wants to murder everyone, if she even counts as a character, Why? She’s shown for a brief moment as the woman who’s kindly let them all stay in the lodge, and then the next moment she has a knife and she’s trying to kill everyone, AND NO EXPLANATION IS EVER GIVEN FOR WHY! That’s plot-convenient unrealistic BS! There was a better way to scare me than ruining my immersion with a random psychopath for no reason when the focus was this scary curse that killed everyone. Unless… and I’m just realising now, she was a part of the curse? But since when could it alter people's minds? Was the whole thing at the end just happening because of the curse and making everyone want to kill everyone else? I suppose it did make the teacher kill himself… everyone’s lunacy would make a lot more sense if it was all caused by the curse, which leads me into my next topic: The Curse. Why did it happen in the first place? Is the first guy that was killed haunting the school for some reason? We never actually do see what’s pulling all the strings, which I loved at first because fear of the unknown is one of the most visceral and in my opinion one of the best kinds of fear, but being left with no definitive answer at all just made it unsatisfying. They did a kind of poor job explaining it at first, and eventually it did make sense, but sometimes it just seems too plot convenient. Like the time when the crazy murder girl got hung, assumedly by the curse because of how improbable it was, right when she was about to kill eyepatch girl. In fact, so many times the show sacrificed realistic characters for the sake of the plot, but the plot isn’t any good without characters! Eyepatch girl’s reasoning for not telling the MC about her cousin didn’t make sense, and the fact that she didn’t tell him his Mom was dead either, he was going to find out eventually, and once they learned how to stop the curse she should have said right away! They also revealed how the assistant teacher was actually his mom the whole time, because it would’ve been almost impossible to guess, and they never tell us that none of the other classes don’t have assistant homeroom teachers. Half the fun of a mystery comes from trying to solve it, but being told at the end that it was basically impossible for us to solve anyways makes it no fun. The ending was also terrible! Like, once they realise that they can’t stop the curse for good they should just shut everything down not let everyone continue to die. This reasoning is actually dragging on a lot though so I think I’ll cut it kind of short. I liked the opening and ALI Project, they did the Code Geass endings and I could tell it was them from the first second of the song. They have that weirdly distinctive synth instrument that I’ve only ever heard in their songs. I actually didn’t hate the beginning of the anime and most of the time I try not to let a show’s ending impact how much I enjoyed everything before, but even before it I was starting to see cracks and implausibilities, and the ending is especially important when the show is so short or when it’s a mystery show because that’s what it’s all been building up to, anyways… I give it a 4. (If I didn’t mention, I liked a lot of the beginning…)
[Problem is, the hardest part of mysteries, or most series in general, is ending them in a satisfying and clever way. It's a lot easier to make the clues in a mystery than it is to tie them together, so a lot more weight has to be given to the ending. It also eliminates lots of rewatch value knowing that most of it is leading to nothing. -added 9/18/24]