Kizumonogatari
Watched the Kizumonogatari trilogy. This concludes my Monogatari marathon, as there are no more released episodes left.
I thought the films were okay, but I’m still quite dissapointed. The audio was great, I wonder why normal anime never invests into quality sound. The fights were cool. Probably best 3d I have ever seen in anime. People used to hate anime 3d because it looked atrocious, and I did too, but I knew even back then that some day it would get good enough, which made it worthwhile for the studios to incrementally develop their technique.
About the bad parts of Kizu, well mostly it’s that again I imagined something much more interesting. In the anime series it really feels like Koyomi and Shinobu have a deep connection that is something other than love, and I imagined it must have been that they survived together something impossible. But it turns out their real story between them only occurs in the last part of trilogy over cliched “I wish to die” plot and is solved alone by Araragi’s strength and side characters’ convenient info dumps.
Actually one of the things I most hate in the series is Gaen Izuko because all she does is put the story in its rails. It’s as if the author is making a parody of a character who knows everything, but yeah, playing it completely straight removes the parody and makes it exactly the thing supposedly being parodied. I think instead of having a character explain the convoluted rules that put the story where the author wants it to go, that role should be given to natural forces and implied that the characters just mostly know what will happen with their unique actions because they are connected to the magic.
For example, I think it could have been better if Araragi figured on his own that he could drain Kiss-shot and reverse the roles to become her master. You could have the usual climax about him refusing to kill her and opting for that third option. Although surely just arbitrarily changing that one thing would make the story worse because I’m ignoring all the little things the author probably thought of while choosing that way of ending, like giving closure to the side characters and putting emphasis on Araragi’s torment at the moment where he still didn’t know of the option he ultimately took. What I’m saying is that if the logic of “natural forces” and “characters’ intuition” was used at a larger scale when creating the story then there would be less need for the railroading and it would be better, or at least more to my liking. And that’s just one example of why ultimately I’m unsatisfied with the writing in this series. I imagined something different and better as I always do. Now that I’ve seen all of it, the magic is gone.
