'He wears pink and likes to pull on his chain!' by Kara
Monday, May 19, 2008 at 6:45 AM

Hoookay. So I was watching AMV Hell 4 (apparently the last one) the other night. Despite all the Naruto-ness in AMV Hell 3, I liked it in sort of a weird sick way. There was a lot of it, but there was a lot of other stuff, too.

For those who don't know, AMV Hell is sort of a Robot Chicken-style mish-mash of short, (sometimes) funny AMV clips -- anywhere from 5 seconds to a minute or so. Azumanga Daioh tends to be massively overrepresented, but it also seems to be AMV Hell's 'pet show,' so I can let it slide. This year, you could see what shows were popular. There was a notable decline in Naruto clips, a smattering of Lucky Star and Haruhi ones (a lot fewer than you might think), and a fair bit of One Piece. And then ... let me put it this way ... you couldn't go five minutes without at least one Death Note vid.

I swear, I was just a hair away from posting a comment asking them to please correct the title, as it is clearly: 'Death Note feat. AMV Hell 4.' The pot is boiling, kiddies, and Longrant is looooooooong.

I can't stand Naruto. We know that. Mostly I can't stand the fans, but I really dislike the show. I hold nothing against people who actually legitimately like the show without being crazed and metal-headband-obsessed. I can't understand (and shush, I've had people explain it to me), so I chalk it up to a basic difference in taste. Hell, I like The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which became painfully overhyped, and we all remember how resentful I was (and still am) of that.

But Death Note is a whole new phenomenon. Even Naruto didn't monopolise cosplay, AMVs, and generally fannish glee as much as this piece of self-satisfied 2D excrement has. Every 17-year-old girl I've ever seen of late glorifies this show like they're getting free sex and ice cream every time they watch it. Just listening to them makes me resent it more than just about anyone or anything in the world.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! Hold up! Hoooold up! Close up your e-mail. Because I know what you're going to say. 'How can you say you don't like it if you won't watch it??? That's not fair! You might like it if you watch it!!!'

Well, guess what? I have watched it. I haven't watched it all, but I have watched approximately four times what I give any show to grab me, and I've watched the 'important scenes' from later in the series. Why? Because there was a point when I actually did have that sort of time to kill, and also because I knew I'd never be able to get away with ranting about it if I hadn't watched a fair bit. I've gotten people saying I didn't watch long enough, that it just starts getting good right after where I left off. But look. If a show is just getting good a third of a way through its run, what the hell makes you think it has any redeeming qualities??? Legend of Galactic Heroes (which I just finished recently) took less time to get into, and it's almost entirely talking heads. And if I didn't give up through 110 bloody episodes of that -- and enjoyed it -- you really don't have much of a case when you tell me that that I have to wait at least 11 episodes to give a shit about a show.

So rather than just spouting about how the fans annoy me, allow me to give you a point-by-point as to why I despise this show with every fibre of my being that isn't already being used to loathe Chris Chibnall:

1. The writing is repetitive, clumsy, and derivative. When you first look at this show, it looks for all the world like it's trying to be clever. But then when Light spends the entire second half of an episode walking along behind someone debating how to get a girl's name so he can write her in the Note -- and incidentally, he is weighing a grand total of two options here -- my brain starts to atrophy.

I've gotten two 'justifications' on this. One is that 'some people really are that dumb and have to have things explained to them that simplistically.' That's not a justification, it's yet another excuse from one of the show's many, many apologists. And if it is, in fact, a legitimate argument (which it's not), then I have even less reason to like it because I don't like shows made for stupid people.

The other is that the manga is better, and let me state for the record that I will not argue the quality of the manga or the live because I've not experienced them. However, if 'the manga is better,' that's more of an argument to read the manga than it is to give the anime another chance, and anyone who'd like to convince me to read the manga is more than welcome to buy me the first volume.

2. The directing is just plain crap. It's slow, it works too hard to be dramatic in all the wrong places (POTATO CHIP), and it will make rather stupid use of that 'camera shake'/out-of-focus effect that I really can't stand in modern anime.

3. Angst angst angst. This might actually be one of the reasons it is so popular. I don't understand the attachment girls have to angsty boys nowadays. Maybe it's this sort of fanficcish belief that they could be the one to make him happy (think Spock and the human woman who could melt his Vulcan heart). But I have little to no desire to watch people be miserable.

4. The characters are flat. Light is focused on 'cleansing the world of evil' and covering his own arse, L likes sugar and numbers and standing on chairs. I was given no reason to care about any of the characters, because I got the feeling they would never change -- and if I don't like them now and they never change, I'm not gonna care about them later.

5. Megalomaniacal god-complex prettyboy is overdone. Kamen Rider Kabuto beat you to it, and he had to actually work to kill people.

6. The music is fucking annoying. The fact that Maximum the Hormone (the people who did the Air Master ED) made me want to rip their heads off is a bad, bad sign, and they're not the only ones.

7. Did I mention I just don't care? Again, this show offered me absolutely nothing. I could tell from Day One that Light would bring himself down, so who cares? I have no desire to watch his downward spiral into madness.

Oh, and incidentally, I do know how it ends. And in point of fact, I am going to spoil it just because I don't want other people to feel the need to watch it. Light kills L, Light's father dies, Mello dies, and Ryuk uses the Note on Light. There.

Hey, you know where to send the e-mail.

If you have been, good night.