Re: Maidragon

The Haruhi series is actually detective fiction. 

For example, the author practically lampshades this with the latest novel, exposing the core of the series and bringing it to the forefront. For another example, The Disappearance blew me away the first time I read it exactly because of the detective work Kyon did. He was lost in the different world so he did his best to figure out who was the culprit. And in that process, and in that realization in the end, Kyon was forced to reconsider the entirety of his assumptions. About the world, about his friends, about himself. It was how the book got to that paradigm shift that blew me away. Kyon's realignment in the end were what we would have expected from him: he was a well enough realized character that we the readers could tell that from stimulus A he would get to decision B. But that stimulus - the decisions of Yuki, the decisions of the rest of the SOS Dan, the reality of the world - and the way Kyon interacted with that stimulus was the emotional core of the book for me.

That was slightly different in the film. KyoAni chose to expand on and somewhat shift the focus towards Kyon's reconsideration itself.

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And the film was an utmost success.

So were the Key adaptations.

So was Fumoffu.

So was K-On.

And all of that partially because of what the creative staff in KyoAni fancied and the parts of their souls that they left in these works.

I assume that's how the KyoAni aesthetics was born. I assume.

The test run was Hyouka, also a huge success.

I complained, I complained a lot. But the general public took the bait, hook, line, and sinker. 

And thus everything afterwards was subservient to that aesthetics.

 

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The public reaction to Kobayashi S1... and then how many people were outraged at S2... demonstrates this really well. Cool Kyoushinsha is not just some bland author. He has a really strong and well defined aesthetics. And that aesthetics was mostly supplanted by the KyoAni aesthetics in the anime adaptation. And that clashed with the core engagement of the series: every Cool Kyoshinsha's work's core engagement in the end is that it's a Cool Kyoshinsha's work. Thus forcing it to be a KyoAni work rather than a Cool Kyoshinsha work will leave you feeling that something is slightly off, that some piece is not quite fitting in its place.

And, really, the same was true for every other series subservient to that aesthetics, and especially to the ones that followed the business model that KyoAni developed. They were all great stylistically, but at every turn something did not quite fit.

You know, I liked Chuu2... but then the aesthetics demanded an end that I did not feel logical. So when I felt that I've seen every new show before... I gradually just disengaged from KyoAni. Even though I found the style appealing.

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See, this is not about style per se. It's exactly about aesthetics. Shaft created/polished a style but their series are aesthetically very varied. The way the characters are idealized is entirely different between *monogatari and Sangatsu, for example. 

And the style in Kobayashi S1 and S2 is exactly the same. Nothing has really changed on that front. The fire and the absolute tragedy did not limit KyoAni's ability to produce a polished style and to fill it with creativity and attention to detail even on a yotta.

But the aesthetics in Kobayashi S2 is unmistakably Cool Kyo's, not KyoAni's. 

This really is all kinds of sad.

tl;dr: I just finished Kobayashi S2.  It's a 10/10 anime.