Disaster Report: GATE
Whenever I’m asked to talk about bad anime that I’ve seen, I usually don’t have much to talk about. That seems to be kind of unusual, at least from my perspective. Most of my peers in this fandom grew up in the bad old days of the 1990s when the vast majority of anime available were crappy OVAs, and there are plenty of others that will watch something bad yet popular so they can keep up with the latest social media discourse. As for me, I’m heading into my seventh year as an anime fan and I’m still playing catch-up with older classics and a seemingly endless backlog of notable shows from more recent years. Making time for bad shows didn’t seem like a good use of my time.
Naturally, I had to set some ground rules for myself. I couldn’t just pick a show solely because someone said “this anime is bad and it sucks.” There had to be an interesting angle, something for me to explore beyond its ineptitude. I wanted to focus on the notorious flops, the production disasters, the big hits with deeply devided fandoms, and those shows with content too insidious or too extreme even for most trash-tier waifu lovers. I wanted to focus just on the examples that could be found through legal streaming as I had no desire to hunt down some obscure OVA or massively out of print series on the regular for the sake of novelty. It had to be complete, so anything that might qualify that has an ongoing or upcoming season would have to head to back of the queue.
So with a concept in mind and rules laid out, just where would I start? My answer turned out to be not too far away. Specifically, it came from Jonathan, a long-time online acquaintance I've known since our days on a small anime forum. He’s got a tolerance for bad anime that few can match, so when he goes on the record as hating something you KNOW it’s truly, unforgivably awful. So when I remembered how he ranted about a middling pile of light-novel-fueled fantasy garbage known as GATE a few years back, I knew that it was the perfect choice to kick this feature off.
The premise sounds innocuous enough. It’s not all that far removed from the scores of self-insert otaku fantasies that rose up in the wake of Sword Art Online. It’s about Youji Itami,a thirty-something otaku divorcee who serves in the Japanese Self-Defense Force mostly to feed his doujinshi habit. He just happens to be in Ginza when a magical gate appears in the middle of the street, spewing forth a vicious army of various fantasy creatures that slaughter hundreds of civilians. Youji uses his military training to save the day, earning himself a promotion and the opportunity to lead his own squad into the newly named “Special Region.” Together, he and his team gain a team of cute waifu-ready girls, win over the people, and fend off the machinations of forces from both their own world and those within the Empire. So why is GATE taken to task more often than its many, many peers? Well, those other shows aren’t literal propaganda.
I’m not exaggerating in the least about this. At one point, Itami declares "We're the Defense Force. The people love us," and the show tries its hardest to sell its audience on this idea. It paints anyone who would dare to oppose the JSDF's efforts as villains of the highest order. This isn't just limited to their opponents within the Empire, most of which are violent, cackling madmen. It portrays the leaders of the USA, China, and Russia as schemers looking to take control of the Special Region as a way to gain resources or control their populations. There's even a subplot where the American president tries to blackmail the Japanese Prime Minister into letting him essentially kidnap a number of Special Region citizens. That alone is pretty galling, but GATE is no kinder to the Japanese characters who criticize the SDF than it is to the foreign bodies.
Those in-story politicians who would oppose or criticize their efforts are shown to be selfish, biased, or obsessed with maintaining a good public image instead of helping others. Not even the media is spared from criticism, as near the end a skulking photojournalist is shown to be manufacturing a story about the JSDF's waste and laziness to fit his views. Meanwhile, everyone from the defense minister down to the lowliest rookie is portrayed as good, just, and noble. They never question their orders, never doubt their actions for a moment, and every act of deception or violence by Itami or those under his influence are justified in-story. It doesn't matter that the Japanese also want to exploit the resources of the Special Region for their own goals or that the SDF are shown mowing down soldiers by the thousands. When it comes to the JSDF in GATE, you will either love them or you will despair.
That pro-SDF attitude didn't come about by accident. The original writer, Tanaka Yanai, is himself a JSDF veteran who publicly holds a lot of extreme right-wing views about the role of the JSDF and about kicking foreigners out of his country. Amazingly, as controversial as these views are on the show, what we see has actually been toned down over time. GATE was overhauled at least twice: when it shifted from a web novel to a physical light novel, and then again when that was adapted into an anime and manga.
Still, those messages resonated greatly with the right-wing elements of Japanese sites such as 2chan, and those people remain the series' biggest fans. It also seems that the real world JSDF has no problem with what messages GATE has to offer. If anything, they've given it their stamp of approval. They helped sponsor the show, gave the production access to reference materials about their uniforms, weaponry, and procedures, and even used the characters as part of a recent recruitment campaign. In recent years, the JSDF has been employing all sorts of cute, otaku-friendly strategies to help bolster their ranks, and in GATE it seems they found the perfect long-form commercial for otakus.
That pro-military angle only highlight the fact that this is a story about colonization. It's about a modern country forcing another, less technologically advanced nation into submission through trade, political persuasion and pressure, and military technology that the natives cannot even comprehend. As much as the show tries to paint the actions of the JSDF and the Japanese government in this show as purely noble, curious, and humanitarian, they're behaving just as possessively and strategically as the countries they try to demonize, much less the countless real-world historical examples that you're all comparing this show to in your heads right now.
It trades especially hard on the notion of coca-colonization. Time and again, characters from the Empire will stop in their tracks to declare the superiority of Japanese goods and culture over their own. Their food is superior! Their baths are superior! Their traditional wares are superior! Their earthquake preparedness is superior! Their government is superior! Most importantly, their military, weaponry and its members are superior in every fashion possible! This is not a subtle show, much less a politically correct one. Instead, it's a hoo-rah political power fantasy tarted up with some otaku fantasy dressings.
Just like most power fantasies, GATE is a series that glorifies violence. That's not all too surprising considering that this is a story centered around a real-world military force, but it's hard to miss that on a very literal level violence is always the answer in GATE. Be it a battle with enemy armies, a menacing animal, or even just a panicking horse threatening to trample a person, the answer is always 'shoot it until it's dead.' In the first few episodes, Itami's squad end up killing sixty thousand people over the course of a few days and all of the soldiers treat this as if it were nothing.
Somehow the violence feels worse because of the stark difference in technology between the two forces. It's not even that the other side is technologically outclassed, it's that they can't even begin to comprehend such technology! It doesn't feel fair when one side uses bows, polearms, and tortua-style defense and the other uses assault rifles, mortars, and fighter jets. Yes, there are ambassadors and negotiators at work trying to get the peace process going, but those are mostly secondary to the actual, literal battles. Maybe it just didn't sit well with me because this series doesn't just glorify violence, but also revenge.
GATE also believes that revenge is a perfectly healthy way of coping with trauma. This is made most literal in the second season with the show's token elf girl, Tuka. She is the sole survivor of a dragon attack, and her response to her father's death is full-on denial. Over the course of the series, she convinces herself that her father is simply away and spends her days searching for him around the village that springs up around the military base. She wanders to the point of exhaustion, but despite the protests of others Itami refuses to take responsibility for her.
Eventually it gets to the point where Tuka deludes herself into believing that Itami is her father. He plays along with this for a while because he doesn't want to traumatize her with the truth, but eventually everyone agrees that the only solution is to go off to the next country over and kill the dragon in revenge. Anyone who knows a thing or two about psychology know that this is not how treating this sort of trauma works, but here it works like a charm. In the middle of their battle, for no real apparently reason, Tuka has her moment of realization and immediately is returned to normal. Other instances on the show aren't quite as obvious as this, but the moral is always the same: violence is good, revenge is for the best, and neither will never leave any negative lasting effects.
Then there's the matter of its protagonist, Youji Itami. He might be the biggest goddamn Gary Stu I've seen in an anime since Sword Art Online's Kirito. You wouldn't think that would be a problem at the start. As a thirty-something divorcee with a full-time job, he's already got a good decade in age and a lot more responsibility than most protagonists in these sorts of shows could dream of. Sure, he's still an otaku, but he's shown as one who has managed to find a nice balance between his work and his hobbies. Only one of his squadmates regards his otakudom as anything other than normal, and her disdain is played as a joke. It's a shame then that the show forgets Itami's older otaku angle before the end of the first season so that instead he can become just another big damn hero.
As the story progresses, we're told a lot of things about him. Itami is apparently some sort of idiot savant, managing to flunk out of officer school but successfully complete ranger and special ops training. For someone who says that they will always prioritize their hobby over their job, he's awfully good at behaving like a model soldier and manipulating people so he can rescue even more people single-handedly. On the rare occasion that Itami's actions go against orders, the story just hand-waves away any consequences.
It certainly helps that he seems to be the most well-connected man in the JSDF. All but one of his squadmates like him, he's pals with a bunch of superior officers, and even the head of intelligence and minister of defense know him on a first-name basis. Even his ex-wife can't hate him, since she only married him out of convenience and divorced him because she cared too much to see him sent off to battle. That's not even taking into consideration the growing harem of fantasy-world girls hovering in orbit around him.
There's just one problem: you can't build a proper character arc around a character that never faces a proper challenge. Itami's time in the Special Region never changes him as a person. His otakudom never gets in the way of his work or gives him any sort of new perspective. He doesn't seem all that interested in the world of the Special Region and doesn't seem to take anything away from his time there. Imagine what Itami could have been like if he didn't always know what to do in any situation. Imagine if he had to grow into his leadership role because he was an under-socialized otaku. Imagine if he had to learn and adapt to this new environment from both his fellow soldiers and from the friends and associates he makes along the way in the Special Region. He might have actually become a true character instead of some self-insert fantasy.
The sad thing is that there already is a hero in GATE that has a proper character arc: the ludicrously named Princess Pinya Co Lada. At the start of the series, she's eager to prove herself and her legion of lady knights as true warriors against these interlopers. At the same time, she shows annoyance about how her father dismisses her efforts and uncertainty about her abilities as a leader. Once she realizes the kind of firepower she's up against, she commits wholeheartedly to becoming the negotiator in the name of peace.
Her beliefs and resolve are tested when her elder brother leads a coup in the second season, but in the end forces from both worlds come together to save her and her struggle is rewarded with the role of regent to the Empire. The show doesn't always take her seriously, as there's a lame running gag about her turning into a fujoshi after spending time in Japan. Still, she actually changes as a person over the course of the series. She has faults and problems that she must overcome. She helps wins the day just as much through intelligence, compassion, and steadfastness as she does through violence. In my mind, she's the true hero of the series, not the Tenchi Misaki-wannabe in fatigues.
Sadly, she's the exception to the rule here, as many of the other female cast members are literally treated as prizes for various other men in or associated with the JSDF. I'm not joking! By the end of the series many of Itami's associates are all but handed random supporting characters to be their girlfriends. Itami's efforts net him three, arguably four women to choose from, although in true harem tradition he never gets too particular about any particular girl. Even more ancillary characters like the ambassador Sugawara get their reward as well, although in his case it's accepting a 12 year old noblewoman as his future wife to save her from enemy forces, painted with all the romance of a Harlequin novel.
Even if you're the kind of person who prioritizes spectacle over depth when it comes to anime, you're still not going to get much out of GATE . Compared to its peers this is a cheap, half-assed sort of production. I was shocked to see A-1 Productions attached to this series. These days they're known for lavish fare like the Sword Art Online franchise, but even lesser works of theirs like Vividred Operation manage to look a little more flashy than the norm.
Meanwhile, I strongly suspect that this series was thrown to A-1's equivalent of the B-squad, right down to the choice of director and series composer. The former has a background mostly in directing one-off episodes and storyboarding. The only other time he's directed a series was the first Love Live series, and let's be honest: no one was watching that show for the direction. The latter has served as series composer for a lot of middle-of-the-road fare, save for the exception of Monster. Even then, they clearly didn't add much to it, as that series is notorious for how closely it hewed to the original manga. That's a trick that works fine when you're adapting Urasawa, but not so much when adapting some amateur's light novel.
The animation is seriously lacking over both seasons. Most of the time it is merely competent, but there are times where blatant effort- and money-saving shortcuts are taken such as pans over stills. Things only get worse when the show tries to incorporate CGI into the mix. Normally A-1 shows are better than average at incorporating CGI and more traditional animation, but here the models are stiff, jerky, and badly composited. It's most notable in the crowd scenes, where the characters are obvious cut and pasted from a small pool of designs and move in a manner befitting an early PS2-era video game.
The visual direction is quite flat most of the time with the exception of one bizarre quirk. Instead of doing the traditional technique of shot/reverse shot during extended dialogues, the show instead employs a lot of split screens so that both, sometimes multiple parties will be facing any number of directions instead of one another. Two, three, or even more images may be on-screen at any given time and it adds absolutely nothing to these scenes. Some might argue that such techniques are a way of applying modern media techniques to enliven drier material and to ensure that no part of the frame goes ignored by the viewer. Personally, I found them bizarre and distracting. They throw the viewer's sense of where people are in a scene for a loop and a more confident director wouldn't have to fill the screen with split-screen montages to keep the audience's attention.
The visual design isn't any better. The world of GATE is composed mostly of a lot of half-assed fantasy tropes thrown together with little regard for consistency or cleverness. This extends to the character designs as well, where the most stand-out quality about them is how bizarrely different men and women look in this series. Men are plain, tall and square-jawed, with those not in fatigues or business suits look more like rejects from a Fire Emblem game. Meanwhile, the women all look like cutesy, doe-eyed knockoffs of the ladies of Sword Art Online. The difference between them is so stark that at time they seem to be two different species, regardless of whether they are human or not. This is also not helped by the fact that faces (especially the eyes) tend to go off-model on a fairly regular basis.
Beyond the story criticisms noted above, GATE is both poorly written and poorly adapted. Both seasons end on rather inconclusive and underwhelming notes, as if the writers simply shrugged their shoulders and said "read the light novels". There are a number of plot threads left dangling, ones that were clearly meant to be elaborated in later books and/or seasons. The main plotline - that of the potential war between Japan and the Empire - is frequently put on hold for episodes at a time while Itami and company wander off to some town or take an extended trip to Tokyo. These interludes aren't meant to flesh out the world of GATE but instead to give each girl in Itami's harem a bit of extra screen time.
That wouldn't be so terrible if any of them were the least bit interesting. Tuka is little more than a blank slate with elf ears. Lelei the mage is your standard stoic girl whose only distinguishing feature is how quickly she takes to Japanese culture and language. Rory Mercury is both a bloodthirsty death god priestess in goth-loli gear and a demigoddess loli who lives to make Itami feel uncomfortable. After them, things get vague. The rest of Itami's squad are distinguished mostly by their gender and a single quirk; beyond them lie a sea of mostly anonymous soldiers, officers, half-animal people, and politicians.
The reason the characters are so bad is that like so many light novel adaptations, GATE never learned how to show instead of tell. Most of what we know about Itami doesn't come from his words or actions, but from others explaining it to the rest of the cast (and thus the audience). There are seemingly endless scenes of dull political negotiations that would only be of interest to someone already invested in military minutia and would be more easily skimmed in literary form. These are flaws which clearly come straight from the source material, and no one seems to be interested in fixing them.
Even the sound leaves something wanting. The cast is full of mostly seasoned seiyuu, but they are directed in a very unremarkable, stereotypical manner. The score is nothing of note, and the opening and ending themes are generic J-pop fluff. They exist more as promotional vehicles for the voice actors for Tuka, Lelei and Rory than they do as proper songs. They also suffer from the same lack of animation and style as the rest of the animation, so they are all easily skipable. When you take all of these faults all together, it adds up to a production that's simply too lackluster to make up for what the story already lacked.
What's strange is that while I found GATE to be utterly despicable on an intellectual level, I didn't find it as tedious to watch as many other bad shows I've seen. That's not to say that it wasn't boring; as I took notes for this article, I could keep finding ways to distract myself with other websites or tasks instead of returning to the show. It's as if my own brain was trying to find ways to keep me from watching the rest of the show, knowing full well that I literally could be doing anything else.
In the end, I'm mostly just baffled as to why this particular series has an American fandom. American anime fans can't really participate in the political power fantasy because it's so heavily and specifically targeted to the Japanese audience. It can't be divorced from its nationalistic power fantasies and enjoyed as an animated spectacle because it simply has no spectacle to offer on any technical front. Compared to the likes of KonoSuba, Re:Zero, or even Sword Art Online, it's positively paltry. I'm no fan of any of those shows, but all of them have much more to offer narratively and visually than GATE. So why would any sensible American otaku settle for less?
Recently, though, I’ve been rethinking this point of view. It’s not like I’m a stranger to enjoying so-bad-its-good media. I grew up on Mystery Science Theater 3000. I hung around sites like The Agony Booth and Jabootu’s Bad Movie Dimension in their glory days, sites where notorious flops and weird cult films were broken down in epic, long-form essays. I’ve always been a fan of Nathan Rabin’s ongoing series My Year (now My World) of Flops on The AV Club, where he writes about movies and other pieces of media that failed, faltered, or simply were unable to be appreciated in their own time. So why couldn’t the same be done with anime? Why couldn’t someone do critical essays on the epic failures, the shows everyone love to hate, and the shows that were simply too weird and taboo even for anime fans? Thus, Disaster Report was born.
So with a concept in mind and rules laid out, just where would I start? My answer turned out to be not too far away. Specifically, it came from Jonathan, a long-time online acquaintance I've known since our days on a small anime forum. He’s got a tolerance for bad anime that few can match, so when he goes on the record as hating something you KNOW it’s truly, unforgivably awful. So when I remembered how he ranted about a middling pile of light-novel-fueled fantasy garbage known as GATE a few years back, I knew that it was the perfect choice to kick this feature off.
I’m not exaggerating in the least about this. At one point, Itami declares "We're the Defense Force. The people love us," and the show tries its hardest to sell its audience on this idea. It paints anyone who would dare to oppose the JSDF's efforts as villains of the highest order. This isn't just limited to their opponents within the Empire, most of which are violent, cackling madmen. It portrays the leaders of the USA, China, and Russia as schemers looking to take control of the Special Region as a way to gain resources or control their populations. There's even a subplot where the American president tries to blackmail the Japanese Prime Minister into letting him essentially kidnap a number of Special Region citizens. That alone is pretty galling, but GATE is no kinder to the Japanese characters who criticize the SDF than it is to the foreign bodies.
Those in-story politicians who would oppose or criticize their efforts are shown to be selfish, biased, or obsessed with maintaining a good public image instead of helping others. Not even the media is spared from criticism, as near the end a skulking photojournalist is shown to be manufacturing a story about the JSDF's waste and laziness to fit his views. Meanwhile, everyone from the defense minister down to the lowliest rookie is portrayed as good, just, and noble. They never question their orders, never doubt their actions for a moment, and every act of deception or violence by Itami or those under his influence are justified in-story. It doesn't matter that the Japanese also want to exploit the resources of the Special Region for their own goals or that the SDF are shown mowing down soldiers by the thousands. When it comes to the JSDF in GATE, you will either love them or you will despair.
That pro-SDF attitude didn't come about by accident. The original writer, Tanaka Yanai, is himself a JSDF veteran who publicly holds a lot of extreme right-wing views about the role of the JSDF and about kicking foreigners out of his country. Amazingly, as controversial as these views are on the show, what we see has actually been toned down over time. GATE was overhauled at least twice: when it shifted from a web novel to a physical light novel, and then again when that was adapted into an anime and manga.
Still, those messages resonated greatly with the right-wing elements of Japanese sites such as 2chan, and those people remain the series' biggest fans. It also seems that the real world JSDF has no problem with what messages GATE has to offer. If anything, they've given it their stamp of approval. They helped sponsor the show, gave the production access to reference materials about their uniforms, weaponry, and procedures, and even used the characters as part of a recent recruitment campaign. In recent years, the JSDF has been employing all sorts of cute, otaku-friendly strategies to help bolster their ranks, and in GATE it seems they found the perfect long-form commercial for otakus.
That pro-military angle only highlight the fact that this is a story about colonization. It's about a modern country forcing another, less technologically advanced nation into submission through trade, political persuasion and pressure, and military technology that the natives cannot even comprehend. As much as the show tries to paint the actions of the JSDF and the Japanese government in this show as purely noble, curious, and humanitarian, they're behaving just as possessively and strategically as the countries they try to demonize, much less the countless real-world historical examples that you're all comparing this show to in your heads right now.
It trades especially hard on the notion of coca-colonization. Time and again, characters from the Empire will stop in their tracks to declare the superiority of Japanese goods and culture over their own. Their food is superior! Their baths are superior! Their traditional wares are superior! Their earthquake preparedness is superior! Their government is superior! Most importantly, their military, weaponry and its members are superior in every fashion possible! This is not a subtle show, much less a politically correct one. Instead, it's a hoo-rah political power fantasy tarted up with some otaku fantasy dressings.
Just like most power fantasies, GATE is a series that glorifies violence. That's not all too surprising considering that this is a story centered around a real-world military force, but it's hard to miss that on a very literal level violence is always the answer in GATE. Be it a battle with enemy armies, a menacing animal, or even just a panicking horse threatening to trample a person, the answer is always 'shoot it until it's dead.' In the first few episodes, Itami's squad end up killing sixty thousand people over the course of a few days and all of the soldiers treat this as if it were nothing.
Somehow the violence feels worse because of the stark difference in technology between the two forces. It's not even that the other side is technologically outclassed, it's that they can't even begin to comprehend such technology! It doesn't feel fair when one side uses bows, polearms, and tortua-style defense and the other uses assault rifles, mortars, and fighter jets. Yes, there are ambassadors and negotiators at work trying to get the peace process going, but those are mostly secondary to the actual, literal battles. Maybe it just didn't sit well with me because this series doesn't just glorify violence, but also revenge.
GATE also believes that revenge is a perfectly healthy way of coping with trauma. This is made most literal in the second season with the show's token elf girl, Tuka. She is the sole survivor of a dragon attack, and her response to her father's death is full-on denial. Over the course of the series, she convinces herself that her father is simply away and spends her days searching for him around the village that springs up around the military base. She wanders to the point of exhaustion, but despite the protests of others Itami refuses to take responsibility for her.
Eventually it gets to the point where Tuka deludes herself into believing that Itami is her father. He plays along with this for a while because he doesn't want to traumatize her with the truth, but eventually everyone agrees that the only solution is to go off to the next country over and kill the dragon in revenge. Anyone who knows a thing or two about psychology know that this is not how treating this sort of trauma works, but here it works like a charm. In the middle of their battle, for no real apparently reason, Tuka has her moment of realization and immediately is returned to normal. Other instances on the show aren't quite as obvious as this, but the moral is always the same: violence is good, revenge is for the best, and neither will never leave any negative lasting effects.
Then there's the matter of its protagonist, Youji Itami. He might be the biggest goddamn Gary Stu I've seen in an anime since Sword Art Online's Kirito. You wouldn't think that would be a problem at the start. As a thirty-something divorcee with a full-time job, he's already got a good decade in age and a lot more responsibility than most protagonists in these sorts of shows could dream of. Sure, he's still an otaku, but he's shown as one who has managed to find a nice balance between his work and his hobbies. Only one of his squadmates regards his otakudom as anything other than normal, and her disdain is played as a joke. It's a shame then that the show forgets Itami's older otaku angle before the end of the first season so that instead he can become just another big damn hero.
As the story progresses, we're told a lot of things about him. Itami is apparently some sort of idiot savant, managing to flunk out of officer school but successfully complete ranger and special ops training. For someone who says that they will always prioritize their hobby over their job, he's awfully good at behaving like a model soldier and manipulating people so he can rescue even more people single-handedly. On the rare occasion that Itami's actions go against orders, the story just hand-waves away any consequences.
It certainly helps that he seems to be the most well-connected man in the JSDF. All but one of his squadmates like him, he's pals with a bunch of superior officers, and even the head of intelligence and minister of defense know him on a first-name basis. Even his ex-wife can't hate him, since she only married him out of convenience and divorced him because she cared too much to see him sent off to battle. That's not even taking into consideration the growing harem of fantasy-world girls hovering in orbit around him.
There's just one problem: you can't build a proper character arc around a character that never faces a proper challenge. Itami's time in the Special Region never changes him as a person. His otakudom never gets in the way of his work or gives him any sort of new perspective. He doesn't seem all that interested in the world of the Special Region and doesn't seem to take anything away from his time there. Imagine what Itami could have been like if he didn't always know what to do in any situation. Imagine if he had to grow into his leadership role because he was an under-socialized otaku. Imagine if he had to learn and adapt to this new environment from both his fellow soldiers and from the friends and associates he makes along the way in the Special Region. He might have actually become a true character instead of some self-insert fantasy.
The sad thing is that there already is a hero in GATE that has a proper character arc: the ludicrously named Princess Pinya Co Lada. At the start of the series, she's eager to prove herself and her legion of lady knights as true warriors against these interlopers. At the same time, she shows annoyance about how her father dismisses her efforts and uncertainty about her abilities as a leader. Once she realizes the kind of firepower she's up against, she commits wholeheartedly to becoming the negotiator in the name of peace.
Her beliefs and resolve are tested when her elder brother leads a coup in the second season, but in the end forces from both worlds come together to save her and her struggle is rewarded with the role of regent to the Empire. The show doesn't always take her seriously, as there's a lame running gag about her turning into a fujoshi after spending time in Japan. Still, she actually changes as a person over the course of the series. She has faults and problems that she must overcome. She helps wins the day just as much through intelligence, compassion, and steadfastness as she does through violence. In my mind, she's the true hero of the series, not the Tenchi Misaki-wannabe in fatigues.
Sadly, she's the exception to the rule here, as many of the other female cast members are literally treated as prizes for various other men in or associated with the JSDF. I'm not joking! By the end of the series many of Itami's associates are all but handed random supporting characters to be their girlfriends. Itami's efforts net him three, arguably four women to choose from, although in true harem tradition he never gets too particular about any particular girl. Even more ancillary characters like the ambassador Sugawara get their reward as well, although in his case it's accepting a 12 year old noblewoman as his future wife to save her from enemy forces, painted with all the romance of a Harlequin novel.
Even if you're the kind of person who prioritizes spectacle over depth when it comes to anime, you're still not going to get much out of GATE . Compared to its peers this is a cheap, half-assed sort of production. I was shocked to see A-1 Productions attached to this series. These days they're known for lavish fare like the Sword Art Online franchise, but even lesser works of theirs like Vividred Operation manage to look a little more flashy than the norm.
Meanwhile, I strongly suspect that this series was thrown to A-1's equivalent of the B-squad, right down to the choice of director and series composer. The former has a background mostly in directing one-off episodes and storyboarding. The only other time he's directed a series was the first Love Live series, and let's be honest: no one was watching that show for the direction. The latter has served as series composer for a lot of middle-of-the-road fare, save for the exception of Monster. Even then, they clearly didn't add much to it, as that series is notorious for how closely it hewed to the original manga. That's a trick that works fine when you're adapting Urasawa, but not so much when adapting some amateur's light novel.
The animation is seriously lacking over both seasons. Most of the time it is merely competent, but there are times where blatant effort- and money-saving shortcuts are taken such as pans over stills. Things only get worse when the show tries to incorporate CGI into the mix. Normally A-1 shows are better than average at incorporating CGI and more traditional animation, but here the models are stiff, jerky, and badly composited. It's most notable in the crowd scenes, where the characters are obvious cut and pasted from a small pool of designs and move in a manner befitting an early PS2-era video game.
The visual direction is quite flat most of the time with the exception of one bizarre quirk. Instead of doing the traditional technique of shot/reverse shot during extended dialogues, the show instead employs a lot of split screens so that both, sometimes multiple parties will be facing any number of directions instead of one another. Two, three, or even more images may be on-screen at any given time and it adds absolutely nothing to these scenes. Some might argue that such techniques are a way of applying modern media techniques to enliven drier material and to ensure that no part of the frame goes ignored by the viewer. Personally, I found them bizarre and distracting. They throw the viewer's sense of where people are in a scene for a loop and a more confident director wouldn't have to fill the screen with split-screen montages to keep the audience's attention.
The visual design isn't any better. The world of GATE is composed mostly of a lot of half-assed fantasy tropes thrown together with little regard for consistency or cleverness. This extends to the character designs as well, where the most stand-out quality about them is how bizarrely different men and women look in this series. Men are plain, tall and square-jawed, with those not in fatigues or business suits look more like rejects from a Fire Emblem game. Meanwhile, the women all look like cutesy, doe-eyed knockoffs of the ladies of Sword Art Online. The difference between them is so stark that at time they seem to be two different species, regardless of whether they are human or not. This is also not helped by the fact that faces (especially the eyes) tend to go off-model on a fairly regular basis.
Beyond the story criticisms noted above, GATE is both poorly written and poorly adapted. Both seasons end on rather inconclusive and underwhelming notes, as if the writers simply shrugged their shoulders and said "read the light novels". There are a number of plot threads left dangling, ones that were clearly meant to be elaborated in later books and/or seasons. The main plotline - that of the potential war between Japan and the Empire - is frequently put on hold for episodes at a time while Itami and company wander off to some town or take an extended trip to Tokyo. These interludes aren't meant to flesh out the world of GATE but instead to give each girl in Itami's harem a bit of extra screen time.
That wouldn't be so terrible if any of them were the least bit interesting. Tuka is little more than a blank slate with elf ears. Lelei the mage is your standard stoic girl whose only distinguishing feature is how quickly she takes to Japanese culture and language. Rory Mercury is both a bloodthirsty death god priestess in goth-loli gear and a demigoddess loli who lives to make Itami feel uncomfortable. After them, things get vague. The rest of Itami's squad are distinguished mostly by their gender and a single quirk; beyond them lie a sea of mostly anonymous soldiers, officers, half-animal people, and politicians.
The reason the characters are so bad is that like so many light novel adaptations, GATE never learned how to show instead of tell. Most of what we know about Itami doesn't come from his words or actions, but from others explaining it to the rest of the cast (and thus the audience). There are seemingly endless scenes of dull political negotiations that would only be of interest to someone already invested in military minutia and would be more easily skimmed in literary form. These are flaws which clearly come straight from the source material, and no one seems to be interested in fixing them.
Even the sound leaves something wanting. The cast is full of mostly seasoned seiyuu, but they are directed in a very unremarkable, stereotypical manner. The score is nothing of note, and the opening and ending themes are generic J-pop fluff. They exist more as promotional vehicles for the voice actors for Tuka, Lelei and Rory than they do as proper songs. They also suffer from the same lack of animation and style as the rest of the animation, so they are all easily skipable. When you take all of these faults all together, it adds up to a production that's simply too lackluster to make up for what the story already lacked.
What's strange is that while I found GATE to be utterly despicable on an intellectual level, I didn't find it as tedious to watch as many other bad shows I've seen. That's not to say that it wasn't boring; as I took notes for this article, I could keep finding ways to distract myself with other websites or tasks instead of returning to the show. It's as if my own brain was trying to find ways to keep me from watching the rest of the show, knowing full well that I literally could be doing anything else.
In the end, I'm mostly just baffled as to why this particular series has an American fandom. American anime fans can't really participate in the political power fantasy because it's so heavily and specifically targeted to the Japanese audience. It can't be divorced from its nationalistic power fantasies and enjoyed as an animated spectacle because it simply has no spectacle to offer on any technical front. Compared to the likes of KonoSuba, Re:Zero, or even Sword Art Online, it's positively paltry. I'm no fan of any of those shows, but all of them have much more to offer narratively and visually than GATE. So why would any sensible American otaku settle for less?
Comments
Post a Comment