Subject: Charlotte 12 summary Tue Sep 22, 2015 4:08 pm
Obligatory hospital MC so injured he is literally strapped to the bed Blondie so angry at MC for not fixing everything alone while having fallen into a trap, that he is attempting to punch a guy so injured he is literally strapped to the bed angst closures of side characters angst
Heroine is suddenly sitting in the scene Tomori: Sup Yu: Everything is shit, terrorists (actual term used) want to get us all and especially me, I don't know what to do, halp *cries* Tomori: I could comfort the extremely injured person, but f*** it, why don't you go out alone, find every single ability user on earth while being hunted, and take all their abilities to stop them from being hunted? Yu: Sure! Btw, I love you Tomori: I don't know about that, but if you do save everyone in the world, I'll date you or something Yu: Yay! Yu away~!
Subject: Re: Charlotte 12 summary Wed Sep 23, 2015 2:56 am
Don't think it would have worked in any context, anime or VN, unless it's about how the faceless MC can be treated as if he is barely there in VNs and the other characters are giving context to the reader directly.
We had this messaging where character was cynical and an average guy, but then he gets a revelation and becomes nice and cares about people more, which is good and a notion one should agree with. Problem is, the story itself inadvertently ends up disagreeing with it since after becoming nice you can separate people into two categories: stupid people and people who use him/take advantage of him (who are also pretty stupid in their decisions, but that's another discussion), biggest examples of the latter being his brother and now Tomori. He is barely treated as a human being since then by those people and their interactions boil down to "Hey, you have that use, so take this show of affection and do it", except from the times where we skip the show of affection, but of course never taking the time to show the slightest hint of concern about the obvious risks to him.
So really, what the story is telling us, is he was correct in the first place. He was right when he was exploiting things and try to manipulate people and not giving a f*** about anyone other than his imouto, because apparently people are a bunch of pricks anyways, and it's not like it's a new thing, even before people started using him the story was making a big deal out of it with the girl in his previous school, bunch of people bullying Tomori because reasons, Tomori's mother, the yandere middle schooler etc. It's self defeating.
And of course, the task of saving the world and tens of thousands of people, one by one, is going to be wrapped up in one episode, because, I get it, it's not that kind of story about going places and using superpowers, it's about the emotional bonds he formed after slowly becoming a new man. Specifically the ones he formed with... ... ... the guy who crashes into buildings aaaand... oh, oh, there's the ghost- wait, no, she's gone, just the guy who blasts through windows then.
Subject: Re: Charlotte 12 summary Wed Sep 23, 2015 3:19 am
Al-Bhed wrote:
the faceless MC can be treated as if he is barely there in VNs and the other characters are giving context to the reader directly.
Yes, this is how I feel Charlotte originally should've been handled, considering the rest of the cast.
Except they made Yuu relevant and gave him a personality, the latter of which didn't particularly matter, so I neither cared for the cast or the protagonist himself.
Maybe, and just maybe, Maeda was trying to write a non-generic MC with this(as we can see in episode 1), but he's definitely not used to it and the medium isn't long enough or could afford routes to do it.
I won't disagree that even as a VN, Charlotte probably still would've sucked. But the slower pacing and the ability to branch off into different routes would've served the writing a lot better. The story of Yusa and Misa that was condensed into literally an episode and then that one scene from the latest episode could've been stretched(and greatly detailed on) as an entire character route. Speedbro's entire existence could've been made relevant in some way. Tomori could've actually been written as a love interest and heroine, because she sure as hell didn't feel like that to me in the anime. I don't know how Maeda did it but the romance between Tomori and Yuu did not feel like romance at all.
It felt like Maeda shoved in scenes like the two arguing, or Yuu silently looking at Tomori with some cheesy monologue in his head in, or their friends shipping the two of them together, to try and make her feel like a heroine, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem that as an audience member, I cannot view Tomori as a love interest to Yuu, as a girl, and as a heroine. It felt like Saber from F/SN all over again, but worse. Maeda probably wrote her to be the type of girl who's eccentric and doesn't get along well with other people socially, and I don't think that's the angle he should've went with.
Back earlier when she followed Yuu around during his PTSD arc, that actually made her feel like a heroine. But then that development was erased when the time leap thing happened.
Guess I'm just mad because Nao really was cute, and I really hoped she could've been developed a lot more.
Subject: Re: Charlotte 12 summary Sun Sep 27, 2015 11:26 pm
Well, biggest complaints still carry over from the previous episode, and in the end that was all unresolved and the ending was forced through. Yeah, last episode could have been a season, but that would require maeda writing more characters and out of his setting, while he clearly spent himself on writing about 2.5 worth of characters for the entire show. It's just so forced and rushed and forced and rushed, you really can't feel anything about it because it's a slideshow about a character who might as well not have been the character we had in the previous 12 episodes.
And the crossbow guy scene... Yeah, he had a thousand ways to deal with it, including an ability to heal himself, but we have to force a resolution somehow, while somehow have his brother find him at that exact time. Might as well have timeskipped the entire scene and put him back in the hospital bed at the start of the episode implying he completed everything, resolution would have been exactly the same.
And fuck Nao. Not literally. She is right up there in my worst girls list. Manipulative bitch. Even went and tricked the brain damaged guy into thinking they are in a relationship, the worst.
Subject: Re: Charlotte 12 summary Tue Sep 29, 2015 5:07 am
Now I got the perfect image for Charlotte. It was like a train, going peacefully on its rails, until, bam! Suddenly, it hits a giant rock that's somehow in the middle of the track, no one knows how it got there, it just is. But after the crash it doesn't slow down. Front part obviously slows down, it's crashed on a rock, it's immobile, but the rest of the train just goes on and compresses into the rest, until it becomes really short and deformed, like the length of a car or something. Not train car, actual car. Blood and innards are spilling out of places everywhere, whole place is red, accordion train is on a red pool, fire is slowly burning, no explosions though, just burning the blood going "fussssh". And then nothing, just that, no loud noises, no screams, no crashes or explosions, it just uninterestingly burns for a couple of hours.
