So much for the werewolves.
Remember how I’d said last week that werewolves were what all dem cool kids were about these days? Guess not in Horizon! Of course, thinking on it, there aren’t a hell of a lot of werewolves in recent anime, are there? I think there was one in Dance of the Vamped Loli, but when I think on it, vampires remain a lot more common. For example, contrast dem Twilight books with dat Vampire Knight anime/manga – in the former, a vampire and a werewolf vie for one girl! The latter? Two vampires, one of whom is a purebred and is her brother/uncle/something, the other of whom is some dirty low-class vampire and is her adoptive brother! Nihon has no need for the cross-species competition!
…
Oh, yeah. Horizon.
This week, jpmeyer of 見ないで! ひとり言 takes the reins for the Horizon on Tits II Project. He takes a more critical approach (in the true sense of the word) than our previous posters largely have, looking at why it is that Horizon fails as an anime. He talks about how apparently one needs to have read the 50,000 word introduction to the Horizonverse in order to have any idea of what is going on, which made me think of one of those things I hold for anime: an anime should be able to stand on its own two feet. Put more clearly, an anime can have a manga, it can have light novels, it can have radio dramas, it can have whatever extraneous content it so desires, but it must be able to stand on its own and make sense. Requiring that an audience invests in additional items in order to understand the anime itself is a total bullshit move.
For some more fun, make sure you check out the comment section on jp’s post. 50,000 words of angry fans explaining why writing it off means that you are an idiot and lazy. Horizon is deep, man. It just requires a lot of effort, y’know?
Leaping topics, you may’ve noticed I have yet to do my Arcana Famiglia post this week… all three of you following that. I’ve been stupidly busy this week, and haven’t had the time to sit down to watch it. I’ll either get it done sometime to-morrow, or I’ll just roll it in with next week’s episode. Sorry folks.
GAR GAR Stegosaurus 
an anime should be able to stand on its own two feet….Requiring that an audience invests in additional items in order to understand the anime itself is a total bullshit move.
Quite right.
Surprisingly, this is true of Horizon, though I guess you have to pay attention. Fortunately, those who pay attention are rewarded. Though if the rewards will include the series “being deep” remains to be seen.
Fortunately, those who pay attention are rewarded.
I will publish my Horizon review someday, which reaches quite the opposite conclusion. Essentially, even if jpmeyer and others haven’t seen every episode of Horizon, they makes astute, valid criticisms of it that can’t simply be disregarded.
I pay attention, and I am rewarded. Thus, if you reach the opposite conclusion, your reasoning is faulty. Perhaps you are missing something?
Granted, the series makes it easy to miss things: in addition to prompting pre-judgment through its choice of character designs, it jams so much into each episode, and is simultaneously subtle in one place, while broadly, goofily explicit in others. One episode’s seemingly random occurrences are explained by events several episodes before or after, or are allusions to history or popular culture. This is not to all tastes, but for me it makes the series more interesting and more rewarding.
Is it “deep”? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a chuunibyou barrage of superficial puzzles. Nonetheless, I’m finding second and third viewings of Horizon episodes to be fresher and more interesting than first viewings of episodes of many other series.
Someone give that wolf a hand! In fact make it two…poor wolf T___T