Japan’s Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger saw its finale this recent weekend and, though I would very much like to, I cannot say that I am totally satisfied by it.

That is not to say that I’m disappointed by it.  To describe how I felt at the end of that episode (despite not yet returning to the episode with those subtitles that are so integral to my comprehension of the narrative) as disappointed would be a gross misnomer.  I was left feeling very pleased by what I had just watched.  The last four episodes had achieved a perfect balance that is rarely reached by the final act of any real kind of story.  (Considering that Gokaiger is a genre piece) we were exposed to a very carefully constructed balance of resolutions (of plot elements in episodes 48, 49, and 51; or character arcs in episode 50; of the core concepts and conceits of the show in episodes 49, 50, and 51) and action (the best mecha sequence in all forms of media in episode 50; the most satisfying fight sequences in episodes 49 and 51 (satisfying for different reasons).

I realise that a lot of what I just said makes very little sense to anyone who hasn’t seen the show (and I’m kind of assuming that anyone who has committed themselves to read this far at least owns the interest in eventually watching the full series) but I ask you to bear with me.  Because, what I’m trying to say is that Gokaiger was perfect insofar as the constraints placed upon the show, in production and distribution, would allow it to be.

These constraints were potentially damning to the show and I think it’s a testament to the people behind this show that these constraints actually didn’t break that show.

(i) a review of gokaiger in its finality

Gokaiger was really good.  From the first episode it was really clear that the show just had its shit together. The writers made their goals really clear really quickly:

1. Introduce a team of loveable and sympathetic rogues.  Call them pirates.
   • Systematically dissolve ambiguity with regards to each team member’s back story in lead up to their becoming a part of Captain Marvellous’s crew.
   • Show character evolution from “selfish and self-serving” to “truly heroic” while never necessarily destabilising the façade established by the initially delivered character traits.
2. Generate an intricate space opera that will inevitably (and with due reason and cause) resolve itself into a battle for the safety of the Earth.
3. Pay tribute to the previous thirty-four teams/years/shows using classic themes of piracy mashed with contemporary ideas of digital piracy as a vessel for this tribute.
4. Sell a metric butt-load of toys.

They pretty much ticked all of these boxes.  It was clear that the show did exactly what it set out to do, exactly what it wanted to do, and it did it really well.  Every episode was an insight into the varied madness of the genre, a small advertisement for nothing less than three disparate sentai per episode, playing with its themes (piracy) and its conceit (that super sentai is amazing, let’s look at how much super sentai there is, OH MY GOD THERE IS SO MUCH SUPER SENTAI THIS IS AMAZING) superbly while still delivering interesting characters on both sides of the fence.

The major storytelling flaws were few, but distinct.  The evil space emperor was flat and desperately underwritten;  the call-backs to old sentai were (occasionally) vague and demanded the assumption that the audience was a PhD in tokusatsu;  there wasn’t enough ZyuRanger.

That third one doesn’t really count.  But it’s an appropriate segue.

(ii) gokaiger could never please the totality of its audience

Now, that’s not to suggest that Gokaiger is something like L O S T, the show which successful polarised its viewership on no less than four occasions.  It doesn’t really do anything wrong by anybody.  It’s just that the show did more right by parts of its audience.

I haven’t done the study, but certain subsections of the Gokaiger perceived audience have different favourites.  Every individual has different tastes, but I feel like there are trends.  The international audience, for example, (read: the english speaking audience who, strictly speaking, don’t count in any way, shape, or form) who are at roughly at my age would have a particular fondness for ZyuRanger – while I’m led to believe that the Japanese audience of the same age would be more partial to the surrounding sentai either side of that (Jetman and DaiRanger).  More contemporary audiences would be closer to Shinkenger and then our older audiences probably like Gorenger.  I really don’t know about that one, actually.  But anyway.

My point is that by virtue of the show’s nature (that it must attempt to appropriately address thirty-four different teams, 199 heroes) things can only fall through the cracks.  Things get more attention – because the producers have more of that particular team’s costumes, because the writers are closer to particular shows, because some shows are newer, or older, or better; because getting into contact with sentai alumni (old actors/characters from previous series) was more difficult for some series than for others (there’s a really interesting (ha! “interesting”) story out on the internet about the actor portraying TimeRed in TimeRanger sort of disowning his debut role.  Similar drama (and more detailed drama, I daresay) can be found on the YouTube re Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers and David Yost).

The problem: that the show can’t keep everyone happy.  It can’t give equal attention to each series.

The solution: Gokaiger appeared to give attention to shows based on the direction their narrative was taking, availability of alumni cast notwithstanding.  They even had what can only be described as a nod to the American fans deleted for time restraints, demonstrating that they had an awareness of the variety of audience expectations, and an intention to meet them, but only insofar as their other constraints would allow.

(ii) gokaiger could never possibly have enough time

Early on, it became really clear that Gokaiger had a lot of ambition.  It had a lot that it wanted to do.  It wanted to celebrate thirty-five years of television in a way that was meaningful, but it wanted to tell its own story too — and it wanted to tell its story well.

But it only had fifty-one episodes to do that with, and each episode had only half an hour (less) to tell a story. (1)

The result from all this is that we get some pretty annoying things:

• ZyuRanger never got a tribute episode.
• We didn’t see the Gingaman or MegaRanger grand powers until episodes far later in the series (relative to the episode that the Gokaiger receive these powers).
• The last episode didn’t have a mecha battle (which was actually the best thing).
• We only saw some grand powers once (2) or not at all (3).
• Some of the fight scenes are rushed and hard to read (the last battle for the series, for example, shifts through no fewer than thirty-four gokaichanges.  While awesome, quick cutting left much to be desired.)

The problem: Gokaiger had a limited amount of time and episodes to explore its conceit (to celebrate thirty-four previous series), its theme (pirates), and its narrative.

The solution: one extra episode.  There was never going to be a real solution to this.  This was one of the hard and concrete constraints that was always going to be looming over the series.  We should, really, be thankful that it didn’t hurt the show as much as it could have.  In the grand schemes of things, this was annoying.  That’s as bad as it got.

(iii) gokaiger was always going to end the way that it ended

Sentai is pretty predictable.  As a viewer, you know that bad guy will be dead by episode 49 or 50.  Sure, sometimes we get surprised and the show withholds the big bad from us until halfway through the series — but we weren’t surprised by Gokaiger.  The big bad was the emperor of the Zangyack’s Empire’s son.  We sort of all knew that this guy would die and be replaced by his daddy, and then that his daddy would be killed and the earth saved.

Similarly, we all knew that the Gokaiger would get all thirty-five of the grand powers and, eventually, the greatest treasure in the universe.  What we didn’t know is how.

It takes a special talent to make that journey that obvious entertaining.  I’ve seen sentai at [what I currently consider] its most boring.  Gokaiger never really had the threat of becoming boring, but it had the threat of losing coherency; of collapsing into a blur of 199 costumes smacking pointless baddies for no real reason. That was the biggest threat to the show.

Problem: That Gokaiger very easily could have become a mindless mash of colours without coherent narrative or promise of closure.

Solution: paramount to everything else in the show — more important than the conceit, the themes, the celebration and tributes, more important than the plot — were the characters.  They were more than just their two-dimensional-implied-by-the-colour-of-their-costume-and/or-their-gender-archetypes.  They were great people.

And maybe Saban could learn something from that before they desecrate this excellent piece of work, as they did Shinkenger.

(4)

—-
(1) Sure, there were also three films.  But their first film (Gokaiger Goseiger Super Sentai 199 Hero Great Battle) is totally demonstrative of exactly what I’m talking about.  It had something like two hours to do everything it wanted to do and it still didn’t quite get there.  It still wanted another half hour.  Of course, in saying that, I feel the need to point out that it probably had the clearest deconstruction of the different sentai and different gokaichanges outside of a wikipedia entry.

(2) Gingaman, MegaRanger, KakuRanger, Dynaman, Changeman, Maskman, Liveman, Jetman, DaiRanger, GoGo-V, Boukenger, CarRanger

(3) MOSTLY EVERYTHING ELSE, excluding GoRanger, ZyuRanger, TimeRanger, AbaRanger, Hurricaneger, DekaRanger, MagiRanger, GekiRanger, Goseiger, Shinkenger, GaoRanger, Go-Onger, Gokaiger.  This actually has a lot to do with the toys being sold, more than time.  If we’re being honest.

(4) I was going to go through and add click-through links to all the referenced and additional sentai material.  But, I decided I couldn’t be bothered.

I don’t really know how I managed to miss it.  I was marathoning the whole of season two a few months ago and I somehow just, skipped this one episode.  I realised – not that I’m anything even close to fully aware as to how I realised – about two-and-a-half episodes later that I’d skipped this particular episode and went into a mad panic featured around the idea that I’d missed some pivotal and vital piece of plot that I simply couldn’t live without, destroying my experience of the show proper as a whole and ruining everyone’s chance at happiness.

So, naturally, instead of stopping (or finishing) the episode I was, at the time, currently watching and just going back to that episode I’d missed, I went to wikipedia to read the plot synopsis.  I think, I think I did this to see if the plot synopsis felt at all familiar to me, as a strange kind of way of confirming to me that I either had or had not watched this particular episode.  It made sense at the time.  It was easier than putting the episode on, I had doubt that my doubt that I’d missed the episode was genuine.  [Yep].

The synopsis of this episode read such that one character (Blaine), having transferred to McKinley High to be closer to his boyfriend (Kurt), develops something of an innocent and flirtatious crush on another character (Rachel).  By “innocent and flirtatious” I mean, they get raging drunk and get their mack on in front of Kurt.  Blaine, then, starts to question his sexuality and blah blah blah long story short: Kurt denies the existence of bisexuality.

So I didn’t watch this episode.

I already actively dislike the Kurt character.  I think he’s bad people.  He uses his homosexuality as an excuse to be obnoxious, rude, and attention seeking.  I don’t like that.  I don’t like him.  He barks self-righteous and moralistic bullshit about the acceptance of every person, despite their particular differences or idiosyncrasies, or opinions or orientations, etc. or etc., but I’ve always felt that he’s only been one way about this.

To clarify: I’ve always felt that he wants everyone to accept him for everything that he is, but he is unwilling to accept everyone else for everything that they are.

I felt this he when he basically tried to turn the very straight (and clearly very uncomfortable with Kurt’s advances) Finn to the gay side.  I felt this he first met Rachel.  And I felt this when I was reading this synopsis.

glee is normally pretty good with this stuff.  It is, after all, the very base of the show’s thematic integrity.  But I don’t like the idea of this.  The homosexual boy questions his sexuality and becomes bi-curious - but resolves the issue within an hour of television, re-affirming his homosexuality and blaming it all on the alcohol.  (1)

I don’t like this because a show that has been very in your face about how delicate one must be towards homosexuality, about how hard it was for Santana to come out of the closet as a lesbian, and about how hard it is for some individuals to actually cope with their latent or suppressed sexuality, has basically turned around and said that bisexuality is just a phase.  That, ultimately, you make a decision either way and you never look back.

I don’t like that.

“But, Adam,” I hear you say, “that blonde girl, that cheerleader — what’s her name??  Oh!  Brittany  Isn’t she bisexual.”

Yes.  She is.  But she also lacks the mental capacity to distinguish the difference between bisexual and bilingual.  She also thinks that Santa Claus is real.

She is characterised as a child, intellectually suffering from a particular kind of arrested development – so really her bisexuality is symptomatic of that child-like approach to the world.  Unicorns are real, Santa Claus is real, I’m not dumb I’ve just never grown up because my brain doesn’t know how.  The character is intellectually stunted.  She’s caught between phases and she never properly graduates from one to the next.  She’s in a same-sex relationship, but she’s bisexual because she lacks the maturity to progress beyond that phase in her sexual development.

One might accuse me of reading rather heavily into this, but I’d argue back that one must read things this closely.  I mean, and I mean only, because of that one episode (the one I’ve not seen) one is sort of required to read into the subtext like this.  Blaine isn’t accepted for his bisexuality – he just passes through it.  And that begets the acceptance of that type of sexuality, that it can only be relegated as a phase, as though there is no distinction between bisexual and bi-curious.

Blaine was only bisexual insofar as he was bi-curious for an hour of television before settling back on homosexuality.  The same applies to Santana (who was only bi-curious inasmuch as she was suppressing her lesbianism because of familial and peer pressure (not to mention societal and internal/psychological) from all sides) who was very into men, until she accepted that she was actually not into men.  (2)

I suppose I should be just happy that no one in the bisexual spectrum is characterised as a sexual deviant, but I’m really not.  I’m actually rather disappointed with the show (read above: thematic integrity of the program) for not really living up to its own premise.  I’m angry that the show chose to characterise bisexuality as simple confused indecisiveness and as, what’s worse, strictly speaking unreal.

As far as episodic conceits that have greater ramifications for the rest of the series as a whole go, that’s a pretty massive faux pas,  you guys.

—-

(1) I haven’t seen the episode, of course, but the episode is called “Blame it on the Alcohol”.  Either I missed the irony or that subtext is palpable.

(2) Notice that none of the straight characters question their sexuality.  Every single character to exhibit any kind of bisexual tendencies had that behaviour set by a precursor of homosexual tendencies.  The heteros are clearly much more securely comfortable in their sexuality.  Especially when they’re teenagers, right?

—-

totally thematically appropriate to something as silly as valentines day, right?

Meet the following criteria and I will buy your Wii-U:

• Make your machine output a high definition image.  We will except nothing less than 1080p.
• Re-release The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker in full HD.
• Include no fewer than three dungeons that were not present in the original Gamecube game.
• Include a number of islands greater than ten that could not be found in the great sea in the original Gamecube game.
• Employ voice actors.
• Never make another Zelda game again.

Lots of  Love,
Adam Tzinis

I’ve just now finished reading Thomas More’s Utopia and, well, now I’m writing this.  I had intended to write this since basically the moment I picked up the text.  A few pages in and I felt like there was just something about this text that had to be said.  Originally I thought it was something about SOPA and internet piracy.  But then I feel the popularity of that issues diminished and my ability to rationalise the correlation with it.

And I feel that that happened because it was the wrong connection.  I feel like the correlation to draw between this text from the 1500s and this life in the 2000s runs deeper into the fundamentals (of More’s conceit, of the world’s problems) than a reflection of a poorly conceived policy that I thought I saw in More’s reasoning behind slavery and thievery.

More’s Utopia, as we understand the word, as he defined the island, is a classless, money-less, tolerant, communist bubble that he invented and implanted into European geography and society.

Look.  I’m no economist.  My interest in politics is fleeting.  I envision difficulties maintaining my toy collection in a world where there is no money.  But.

But I wonder how we’re in a world where, five hundred years ago, a man wrote a book that basically said “money is the cause of all your problems, get rid of it and you’ll find these problems solved” yet we were still surprised when the global financial crisis hit.

I’m not arguing that this book has all the answers.  It is five hundred years out of date, after all.  But I find it interesting that, that long ago, there were people in powerful intellectual positions who were able to consciously outline and rationalise solutions to money as a problem.

Also I love that the book pointed out that Jesus Christ was a communist.

I think the term derives itself from a misconception that a novel being called a novel is the same as a novel being called a book — when that’s not true.  Novel describes the form, book describes the physicality of the novel — book, essentially, describes something that is bound.  It’s packaging.  Novel is content.

Lord of the Rings with pages of illustrations; I would consider that a graphic novel.

I would, in the past, resolve to call these things comicbooks.  Because they are books – the prefix comic is just a way of distinguishing them from other kinds of books.  But I don’t like that any more.  Comicbooks is derived from comic strips and those are silly little funny things.

Lumping something like Watchmen in the same category as Garfield I think is something of a problem.  I understand why we invented the term graphic novel — it was to create that significant difference between Stan Lee’s weekly Saturday Spider-Man strip in the newspaper and Kraven’s Last Hunt.

But I don’t like it.  A graphic novel shares nothing in common with a novel on the level that being a novel would demand.  What they share in common is beyond form.  In form, they’re entirely in contrast.  What they share is something literary.

So here I propose that we begin calling them graphic literature.

Congratulations, those several people with whom I had that conversation.

I feel like The Wiggles have been on something of a high lately.  This Rewriggled tribute album has been good for generating publicity with the adult audiences who don’t have children.  I’m not entirely sure why The Wiggles would be interested in that audience, and beyond nostalgia I’m not sure if that audience would have any kind of long-term interest in The Wiggles — but I guess if the publicity generated by the album pushes units then I guess it must be a good thing.  Not that I’m entirely sure that The Wiggles get much money from the tribute album.  I don’t really know how royalties and covers work.  But, look, my point is that there has been conversation about The Wiggles and any conversation is a good thing.

Even with what happened recently with Greg Page.  Coming back the way he did, booting out the new guy so he take back his yellow skivvy, it can be construed as a bit of a dick move.  But, with adults, even bad publicity is good publicity.  On some levels, bad publicity is better publicity.  Couple that tasty, tasty, controversy with that nostalgia I mentioned before and, well, things are pretty good for The Wiggles when it comes to adult audiences.

I remember when Greg left.  I was pretty upset.  Not in a visible, genuine kind of way.  That would be silly.  I was upset in the kind of way that I could empathise with how I would have felt when I was a kid and if this had happened then.  If Greg left the band when I was three and was replaced by some other guy, I’d be pretty upset.  I think I’d have felt betrayed, if anything.

I think that was a pretty common thing with people my age — and considering that people my age are now among the people with very young children, I think it’s pretty clever bringing Greg back.  It generates conversation among adults and that conversation encourages those adults to introduce their young children to the music.  It’s their way of reminding us that they exist, I think.  Not that I’m entirely sure any of us ever needed it.  Maybe the competition from Hi-5 is much higher than it ever was from the Hooley Dooleys.

The mass media is giving Greg a little bit of a hard time, playing Sam as the victim who was cut out of the band unjustly.  I thought this was unfair on Greg.  The way I see it, Greg leaving was like Paul McCartney leaving The Beatles and being replaced by just some guy — but then coming back.  Only, I think it might actually be a bigger deal than that because to a four-year old The Wiggles are way bigger than The Beatles.

But then I remembered the audience that The Wiggles cater for: zero-to-five year olds.  And five is being generous.

I’ve always figured The Wiggles, as songwriters, have a pretty easy job.  They write a handful of songs in the early nineties, then a handful more for the rest of their career and then they’re pretty much set.  It’s less about their music (and their variety in that music) than it is about their performance repeated over and over again to an audience that will literally never get bored of them.

They just to need to perform for the children, to keep them happy.  They won’t exactly get stale anytime soon — or, more to the point, they’re designed to get stale.  They don’t actually need a high retention rate, or any kind of retention rate, because they’ve got an audience for as long as humans are making new babies.

When the children lose interest, there’s already a whole heap of new children — probably more new children than lost children, I daresay.

But the thing is: the audience is made up of small children.  And if I’m right in saying Greg left five years ago, or if I’m wrong and he left only four or three years ago — it doesn’t really matter.  The point is that most of the audience won’t even know who Greg Page is.

So if I’m thinking that a smaller, younger, version of myself would be pretty unhappy at Greg leaving then it’s only fair that I imagine all of the children that age currently would be pretty unhappy at Greg coming back.

If The Wiggles’ job is to keep children happy, then I feel like they’re not doing a very good job right now.

You know, if The Hangover :

• was funny.
• was well-written.
• had any likeable characters.
• had any likeable actors.

OOOOOOH, CONTENTIOUS.

I can’t help but respect a film that has its sympathetic lead protagonist call a sixteen year old girl a little cunt.  Good stuff, cinema, good stuff.  I enjoyed watching this and had many of the lols, though I am very much aware that this would have pretty easy to write — I reference the narrative, not so much the individual jokes.  The plotting was very structured.  It wasn’t exactly 500 Days of Summer, is what I’m saying.  It was that whole romantic comedy thing, typical standard fare, ticking all of the boxes.  Except it was actually funny.  Which was pleasant.  Refreshing, even.  The romance was even sort of there.  Kind of.

That mostly depends on how you define romance.

Is baking a cake shaped like a carrot and writing “I’m Sorry” on it in icing romantic?  I guess it could be.  Sounds sort of novel.  I’d call it cute, or sweet (HA!), but I dunno if I’d go so far to call it romantic.

BUT WHAT IS ROMANCE?  WHAT IS IT ACTUALLY?

We’ll never know.

Romance is dead – it was acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney, homogenized, and sold off piece by piece.

Lisa Simpson.

Bridesmaids was compared with The Hangover quite a lot when it was initially released to cinemas, generally referred to as “The Hangover for girls!” or something to that effect.  If I were this film, I’d find that offensive.  It’s like comparing a good person to Hitler and saying they’re “the Hitler of spaghetti.”

You know.

Because they killed six million strands of spaghetti.

This is not my first time writing an open letter to you and your many peopled staff.  The last time I wrote you, I was angry.  I was angry that you felt the need to interrupt my reading with obnoxious advertising.  But I’m over that.  I’m not angry with you any more, DC.  I don’t have anything to be angry at you about. You’ve done me nothing wrong, not really.

No, DC, I’m not angry at all.

But I am, I think, very disappointed.

I feel that this is the disappointment that only a student should feel when their teacher misuses “your”, or that only a child should feel when they learn that their parents aren’t actually infallible Godly idols made of money and candy.  I feel that this is disappointment typically reserved for the discovery of Unicorns as unreal.  It’s deep, heart-breaking, irrevocable disappointment.

Look, DC, it’s not you.  It’s not your fault that you think Liefeld is a talented comicbook creator.  It’s not your fault that you rebooted without actually rebooting but still while rebooting.  It’s not your fault that you think your audience can only be aroused by Catwoman when it’s a shallow pretence for Winnick to write uncomfortable torture porn and it’s not your fault that you haven’t written an interesting Superman story since All Star Superman and that, as a result of the aforementioned, you treat Grant Morrison as a God while offering him none of the creative freedoms to behave like one.

It’s not your fault.  It’s my fault.

It’s my fault for giving you money.  See, I thought that my giving you money was for my benefit.  In that financial exchange, I was getting something out of it — something I assumed that was either worth my money or worth more than my money.  But that wasn’t what was happening at all.

Whenever I gave you money, I was sending you a letter – much unlike this one, though, because it was not written.  It was not active.  It was passive and it was in that passivity that I was telling you, clearly announcing to you, that I was enjoying your work.  That I was enjoying your work and that you were doing something right, DC.

I was sending you a lie.  Because I was not enjoying your work and you were doing nothing right, DC.

I can’t do that anymore.

So I will be giving you no more of my money.

With regret,
Adam Tzinis

If copyright holders were at all serious about stopping piracy, they’d update their distribution models to conform to the modern practices of the consumer.  I mean, piracy is a thing for a reason; not least of all that consumers (see: people) don’t feel as comfortable paying for content as they (we) once did.  You can’t sell content based on the content any more.  We won’t buy it.  These financial transactions need to be incentivised.

What benefit does buying a DVD with a film on it have over illegally downloading the same film in 1080p for none of the money with no real penalty?  (Sure, you could penalise people, but then people get cleverer.  This is the internet; it’s not as simple to entrap users as it is to put a No Standing sign on a pole  – plus we’re not exactly restricted by any discernible laws of physics).

No benefit, really.  And that’s part of the problem.  You can put more and more content onto those discs, but at the end of the day you’ll find that we’ll find that content online somewhere anyway.

My solution is simple, really.  Provide your content to your audience for free.  Charge them for the cinematic experience, charge them for the DVD packaging (which, now, you’ll need to make interesting and enticing), and charge them for the auxiliary merchandise.  People won’t steal and people don’t see this as theft.  Because it’s like reading a book in a library or looking at a painting on a wall in a museum.  Make your money around your content, not through your content.

But, like I said, that’s hardly the point.  These bills have nothing to do with piracy.  They’ve got, instead, everything to do with censorship.

I’d invite Americans to Australia to continue their YouTubes and Facebooks after the US Government shuts them down, but, well, our Government will probably do the same pretty soon.