Erasing Control

Erasing Control

I see a lot of people praising Erased for having mystery and drama and some other shit. From where I’m standing the show is crap for the same reason I knew it would be crap ever since I read the synopsis. Time resets. I have mentioned many times how they are cheap plot devices for a lazy way out of problems. But in this case it is double as lame because on top of being a lazy plot device, the main character also has absolutely no control over it.

He doesn’t choose when he will go back in time, or at which moment. Some unseen force decides it for him and all he is doing is reacting to it. This makes everything in the show forced on top of being pointless. No matter what drama the characters shove down our throats it won’t mean anything because at any moment god will feel like sending the protagonist back in time when none of that happened or matter.

And you might think that at least this way he is preventing bad things from happening but the truth is it doesn’t matter. Just think of what it means to go back all the way to your childhood. Every good thing you did up until that moment, is negated. None of that happened. By probabilities alone, by the time you reach the time someone needed help, too many things will be different so they won’t need to be saved, or they will be in a completely different location, being endangered by a completely different thing. So now you need to save them all over again, until god decides to send you back to when you are a baby thus again undoing everything.

This is why this show is bullshit. You expect me to care if he ever solves the mystery behind the killer of his mother? Even if he does capture the killer, some kid could be falling from a tree nearby or something, so will just go back in time and he will need to do everything all over again.

And you know the worst part? There aren’t even any rules concerning this time reset. Absolutely no consistency when it comes to knowing how much time you have before the crime takes place. It’s all random, chaotic, and eventually meaningless. And that is why anyone who thinks this show is good is a fucking idiot. It’s a failure by its premise alone, as I said it would be. Fuck time resets.

The Concept of Control in a Show

A rough way to divide anime fans, is into the A types who are the thinkers, and the B types who are the sentimentalists. It comes down to logic versus emotion and on first glance it seems like they have nothing in common. Well, I say there is a specific thing that binds them together, and that is the concept of control. The A types like to have an explanation for everything, measured, quantified, and categorized. B types on the other hand revel in the concept of chaos.

If you strip it down to basics, emotions come out when we lack self-restrain. We are unable to remain calm towards something we experience, and we react by laughing, crying, being angry and so on. Genres such as romances, comedies, and dramas are built upon this notion and aim to make the audience react emotionally by having situations where the characters have complete loss of control. Being an inability to express feeling for another person, slapstick humor, or an incurable disease.

Genres such as science fiction and historical documentaries on the other hand are all about making sense of whatever is going on in them. This is why they are closer to social studies and in overall do a much better job at world building or theme exploration. For the same reason, their characters tend to be far less emotional, and usually dry or hard to relate with.

This does not mean that a show can be either one or the other; in fact, many titles are both. It’s just that most of them focus on one or the other. Slice of life type of shows, are particularly easy to combine both aspects, because characters and settings are simple in concept, and the stakes in any conflict are usually very low.

It is action and adventure type of shows that have the hardest time to pull it off properly. The more complex characters and settings become, the harder it is to maintain a balance between a world that has consistency, a cast that is interesting, while still keeping the fighting scenes exciting. With the focus constantly switching from one aspect to another, it is pretty easy to make a society seem illogical, or the characters to feel dry.

A myopic way most viewers and readers use to overcome this issue, is by simply focusing on each aspect individually. Since it is hard to keep track of everything (and thus lose control of it) instead of looking at a show as a whole, they break it to parts and look at each one of them as an isolated thing. That is, the characters only, or the themes only, or the animation only. If they like or dislike a single aspect, this usually expands to include their opinion for the whole show. And this is why there are series with such polarizing opinions amongst the audience. Some like a few certain things, some dislike a few certain others.

Speaking as an almost pure blooded A type, I find it hard to like shows that are all about making you laugh or cry, since I am supposed to lose my composure for that to happen. Which is something I don’t like doing, especially when the stakes are too low. It impossible to care if a guy doesn’t win in a football match, if he can simply play another match next week, with nothing lost.

This does not mean I am an emotionless control freak who wants everything to be dull and logical, since I love anything that is GAR. I am just annoyed instead of entertained when a show tries to be serious and silly at the same time. If such scenes are far apart from each other, then yes, I can accept having fun and analyzing characters and concepts in the same show. But exchanging places in an instant is just plain ridiculous and damages both aspects.

What I mean by that, is how there can be control over tonal shifts, even if a show tries to be very emotional. You can have funny and sad moments too, as long as they are not right next to each other, or interrupting one another as supposed comic relief or some lame plot twist. Something which sadly can’t happen often today, because most anime are limited to 12 episodes, and run through the source material like crazy (an indirect excuse of why retro are better at this).