Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita: Mankind is still in decline.

[Tengukami]

Pretty crazy first day on the job.

I know some people think airing the episodes out of chronological order is contrived, but I kinda like it. I didn't read the light novels, so it's fun to piece together the chronological story in my mind, and the arcs stand alone well.

[Drake]

I liked the part where you had to read the journal fast enough to keep up with the pages turning like it was somebody reading off dialogue in a game.

I wonder if they'll continue this after one season. There's a lot more material to follow, but they could just as well just end it wherever due to how they're tossing out episodes. I'd like to say I doubt they'll leave earlier plot points untouched so I'm hoping for an episode with animate-hair-kun, but who knows?

[Seventh Holy Scripture]

Well, that lived up to my expectations and more.
Though I was not expecting the gloom to be

Spoiler:

the protagonist's own fault, at least in part.

As someone else said on IRC, "I'm not really sure who to be sympathetic for in this episode."
Mainly because I don't know

Spoiler:

whether I can believe what Watashi was saying about Curly's motives - she strikes me as the less sincere person among them. Anime isn't usually clever enough to have the protagonist lie to the viewers' faces

, but this is Romeo, not anime.

If you consider that Watashi and Y somehow ended up being friends, or something close to it - her school years must have been quite something.
Looking forward to the conclusion.

[Tengukami]

By the final 30 seconds, I came up with idea that

Spoiler:

Watashi is going to end up so traumatized by Curly's clingy scariness that it will become the catalyst for a friendship with Y

. That "tea party" is also, I'm guessing, not at all what it appears to be, given this episode's title.

[triangles]

Watashi's outfit changes in the middle of a scene during episode 10.
[attach=1]
Did I completely miss some sort of plot point (I am bad at these things so it's possible) or was it just an animation oops?

[yuyukos]

Probably an animation oops or a difference in detail level due to focus distance.

I'm enjoying Watashi's background episodes more than the earlier/'present' ones.

[Tengukami]

That's a pretty big oops. It was probably deliberate, either to "mean" something, or they swapped in some previously-rendered scene as a time saver. Her outfit is the same before and after those few seconds, though.

[yuyukos]

It's over :ohdear:
I curious as to what parts from the novels didn't make it to the animation.

[Seventh Holy Scripture]

And here we are at the finale.

While the first half of the episode was excellent, the Jintai anime couldn't resist one last serenade to its love of wacky pacing - the events of the episode after that felt abrupt and almost disconnected from the earlier parts of the arc.

Spoiler:

After Watashi and Y had seen what the other members of the Wild Rose Society were up to, why would they have ever become cordial with them again? The answer is simple, really- time heals all wounds, and it was due to compressing years into minutes that the anime failed to make it believable.

I've resisted the urge previously, but I feel like reading a little more into this episode, since it resonated with me personally.

Spoiler:

The moral of the shocking reveal as it was stated by Y seemed to be that "people who seem too normal always have a hidden side to them." I'd like to think that Watashi, based on her ability to reconcile with the Wild Rose Society later, thought that through more carefully and realized this hidden side comes of bottling one's own feelings up and letting them brew for years, without finding any way to express them.

If you consider all of the 'weird ones that were left unchecked' - the keeper of the insult diary and the delinquents likely stemmed from those girls being too 'nice' to voice their irritation in public, forcing them to do it in private. The hair collector... uh, that's harder to rationalize, but I suppose she was a repressed lesbian. And considering what Curly's gone through - being completely rejected as even a friend by the object of her desire, as well as bullied herself - it isn't too surprising that she went yandere.

Y has her own hidden side, of course, and even Watashi does - despite Y's claim to the contrary. Her facade is her antisocial nature, and she secretly wants to have friends, as we learned last episode. She may not have any bizarre hobbies, but she's being no less untrue to herself and it is no easier on her than it is on Y or Curly.

And those are just my thoughts on the first half of the episode. I'll spare you from further rumination upon the second half - in part because I'm not sure I fully understood it, and suspect it may have lost a lot in adaptation. It did manage to be a somewhat satisfying conclusion, somehow.

Overall, I was quite pleasantly surprised by the quality of the Jinrui anime. It was by no means perfect, but I feel like most of its problems stemmed from fundamental weaknesses of the medium or other factors outside of the staff's control (such as budget - they didn't have much, but I'm really glad they didn't skimp on the voice acting.) Essentially, it would be unreasonable to have expected it to be any better. If we want the full experience, we'll just have to man up, learn Japanese and read the novels. :V

[Tengukami]

By the final 30 seconds, I came up with idea that

Spoiler:

Watashi is going to end up so traumatized by Curly's clingy scariness that it will become the catalyst for a friendship with Y

. That "tea party" is also, I'm guessing, not at all what it appears to be, given this episode's title.

I suppose that was to be expected, though, wasn't it?

For me, this is so far my AOTY. Lots of series have used social commentary and satire to get their points across. What makes Jinrui so special is it does this with the kind of cheerful, sunshine-and-rainbows cruelty you usually don't find outside of a Brothers Grimm story. As you'd expect from a society falling apart, the tragic and the absurd are greeted as inevitabilities that you just deal with. Humanity's attempts at making things better, despite their decline, almost always results in making things worse, too. Watashi is no exception - she accepts the absurdity around her at face value, but maintains a distance, despite her loneliness. She can be selfish, cruel and snooty, but somehow manages to resolve conflicts almost by accident (sometimes entirely by accident) and has no qualms with covering up her blunders along the way while receiving praise for a job well done. I like that about her.

A lot of people complained about the episodes being aired out of chronological order, but personally, I thought it worked very well. It's not a story that needs to be told chronologically, for the most part, and it's not like the timeline was too difficult to puzzle together.

Yeah, I do think the entire point of the first half of the episode was about repression and how those feelings manifest themselves. Although I do think there was an additional point made with Curly,

Spoiler:

when Y points out that leaving Curly as she is would only make her worse - implying that the "weird ones" can only be healed through giving them the kindness and attention that they crave. This, I thought, was a nice counterpoint to repression - people wouldn't have to bottle up their feelings if they knew they were accepted for who they are

.

Man I'm going to miss this series.

[Seventh Holy Scripture]

A lot of people complained about the episodes being aired out of chronological order, but personally, I thought it worked very well. It's not a story that needs to be told chronologically, for the most part, and it's not like the timeline was too difficult to puzzle together.

From what I've seen, the complaints (at least the recent ones) are not specifically over the series being out of order but are questioning the order that was chosen. Some folks seem to have the opinion that "The Fairies' Time Management" was the emotional climax of the show and thought it should have been at the end. I personally found this arc more poignant, but either one could have worked as an ending - though it wouldn't have solved the fundamental awkwardness of Assistant not showing up at all for a significant chunk of episodes. To be fully appreciated, both arcs require that you know and love the main characters already... and that's why chronological order would not have worked*.

Even if you were to accept that this final arc was an extended flashback and arranged the episodes according to their order within the novels, that would place it as the penultimate chapter, with the grand climax of the anime being... the manga chapter in episodes 3-4. Yeah.

* "The Fairies' Time Management" actually was the first time Assistant showed up in the novels, I believe, but I still think the anime made a smart decision placing it later in the series after we'd been getting to know him for several episodes.

[DX7.EP]

Started watching this with the uni anime club with 5 other shows over the past week.

...oh dear god this is glorious. :getdown:

[Moogy]

I was looking at the site to try to see when the last time someone had posted was and I found this thread. As a special bonus present I will post on sm.org for the first time in probably years!

I am a huge fan of Romeo and own all of the volumes of the Jintai novels (some of them multiple times) so I'll just stick my head in here and offer some commentary from the perspective of someone who read the novels long before the anime even aired.

* "The Fairies' Time Management" actually was the first time Assistant showed up in the novels, I believe, but I still think the anime made a smart decision placing it later in the series after we'd been getting to know him for several episodes.

Yes, he doesn't show up until v2c2 of the novels. I personally think it's a bit off-putting to see a mute character with no real explanation at the start of the anime like that, but to each his own, I suppose.

It's over :ohdear:
I curious as to what parts from the novels didn't make it to the animation.

Quite a bit. Of 11 chapters published at the time of the anime airing, 7 made it into the show. A week or so after the anime began airing, volume 7 was released, bringing us to 13 chapters total. In other words around half the series at this point. It should also be noted that the plot starts being introduced in the latter half of volume 7, so... hope for a second season, I guess? There's enough material left to do one once the series is finished assuming they do the out of order chapter thing again.

The only part of the anime cut significantly was the story with Voyager and Pioneer; in the novels, this takes up an entire volume all by itself, so it really should have gotten 3 or 4 episodes instead of the 2 it received. Every other chapter adapted was only half of a book.

Speaking as a die-hard fan of the books, I honestly was not really pleased with the anime. Nakahara's voice acting is wonderful and the comedic parts are portrayed pretty much as well as they're going to be, but I feel they really dropped the ball with v3c1 (episodes 5/6) and v5c1 (11/12), neither of which came close to having the emotional impact they do in the novels. Volume 3 is mostly a problem of trying to pack it all into 40 minutes or so; if they had taken more time with it and fleshed out the setting more I think it would have worked much better. Volume 5, on the other hand, can never be adapted to any medium that isn't text-driven. Romeo's beautiful writing expresses things on a deep, personal level that no anime will ever be able to. Really, the entirety of the anime really takes on quite a different atmosphere as a whole and I think the absence of Romeo's text is more or less at blame for this.

That said, nearly all of the (wonderful) dialogue is retained from the novels and the underlying ideas that went into Jintai are far more intelligent than any of the other tripe being pumped out in the anime industry nowadays, so I can understand why it found so much popularity despite my personal (fanboy) complaints about it. Even if it's an inferior experience to the novels, I'm pleased to see Romeo's brilliance being brought to a wider audience. It's just a shame that none of his writing has been translated properly, so I can't in good faith recommend any of it to someone who enjoyed Jintai but only speaks English. Them's the breaks, I suppose.

...Also, though it's not terribly important due to the nature of the series in general,  the anime has quite lacking production values, something especially apparent in the last two episodes. I doubt the AURA movie will really end up much better, so I guess it's good that there's not much action in that either.

Anyway, Jintai is a really amazing series of books written by a genius so I'm glad to see it getting some recognition. I didn't like the anime as much in comparison, but the fact that I plan on buying all of the blu-rays should tell you that I don't exactly hate it either.

By the way, if anyone was curious, the chronological order of the episodes is: 10 7 8 5 6 1 2 9 11 12 3 4

And if you liked Jintai, you should check out the AURA movie (based on another LN by Romeo) when it comes out. Here's the subbed PV, along with a brief summary by yours truly.