So, the second of the anime series on my New Year’s Resolution list that I’m done with is one I’m dropping – Texhnolyze. I did give it a reasonable try – getting about a cour through the series before I had enough, and because I had the show on my resolution list, I do feel it’s important to talk about why this series failed for me when two other Chiaki Konaka projects – Serial Experiments Lain and The Big O – were fine.
First off, it’s not exclusively the tone – the series is certainly very dark and bleak, but I’ve watched dark and bleak shows, books, and movies before – I watched Evangelion through End of Eva. I watched Angel’s Egg. I watched Ideon. I’ve previously read the whole Elric saga. Yes, I didn’t end up coming to those while also coping with the loss of a pet, but as I sat and thought about why this show wasn’t working for me, I found that the proximity of Patacon’s passing wasn’t the problem here.
A key part of the problem here is that, for a series, Texhnolyze doesn’t do a great job of creating someplace that feels like an interesting environment, nor does it have interesting character interplay. Indeed, in the first half of the series, the main characters with any dialog or even an interesting interpersonal dynamic are gangster Keigo Onishi and mysterious drifter-turned-sociopathic killer Kazuho Yoshii. Indeed, our ostensible actual protagonist Ichise has barely any lines, and is otherwise an effectively passive figure.
Now, bleak works with limited dialog can be engaging – much of Angel’s Egg is effectively dialog-free. However, Angel’s Egg is also a movie, and one with a runtime shorter than 90 minutes, and one where the broad strokes of the plot are simple and uncomplicated, with the philosophical themes and religious imagery doing the actual heavy lifting of the film.
By contrast, the first half of Texhnolyze puts a lot of focus on political machinations in the city where the series is set. When Yoshii enters the city, we spend a fair chunk of time in his eyes going through the city and learning the power structures, before he shows his true colors and starts stirring the pot, and then later revealing that he’s not Sanjuro, he’s the Joker. This is accompanied by a narrative of Onishi dealing with those existing tensions until he’s forced to react after Yoshii starts just yanking Jenga pieces. This should be interesting. This should be compelling. However, we don’t get a lot of personality in these characters through this.
As an example, I learned Onishi is married and has a wife during the scene where Yoshii broke into their apartment, held Onishi’s wife hostage while taunting Onishi over the phone, before Yoshii finally killed Onishi’s wife by kicking her into a window and then gunning down some of Onishi’s men. These characters should have some scenes together to set up a relationship between the two so this has emotional weight beyond Onishi reacting after the fact. Onishi’s wife literally could have been replaced with a sexy lamp and there’d be very little impact to the plot. Writing this now, I’m finding myself wishing, repeatedly, that Gen Urobuchi had been writing this instead of Konaka – not because of Konaka having gone Full Conspiracy Wingnut in the years since this came out, but because Urobuchi is a writer who loves to write dialog – especially dialog where characters spell out their worldviews to each other, even if in the larger strokes it appears clunky and unnatural. With Urobuchi, at least there I’d have a sense of everyone’s dynamics and their worldviews.
Speaking of which, I have no sense of what people just do in this world. We’ve got an anti-Tekhnolyzation (cybernetic augmentation) group, the Salvation Union. There’s the Mafia-esque Organo. There’s the street gang-esque Raccan. And we see a couple of people maintaining the big obelisk that dominates the city and… that’s it. No idea what people do when they’re not holding cult rallies, holding prize fights, begging, or drinking. We see some vendor stalls in the street and that’s about it. Unlike Lain, which presented its world as if it was an undercurrent of our world – a demimonde – this is something else entirely. Even with the bits of Habane Renmei I’ve seen, I see characters doing stuff during the day.
This world, by comparison, kinda sucks – and not in the “this is a bad place to live sense” (though they are aiming for that) but in the “this world is badly written in a way that cannot be kept intact by vibes”. The world of Angel’s Egg is dependent on its vibes, but that’s also a 75-minute-long movie. The Junkyard of Battle Angel Alita is dependent on vibes, but it’s also a world that does a good job of creating a sense of what people do from day to day. I have no clue what people’s lives are like in the city of Texhnolyze. When Onishi wants to stop a bloody spectacle from playing out on the streets – he is one of the only two characters who have expressed an interest in keeping that spectacle from happening. Everyone else shown in the story is absolutely okay with that.
In short, I wanted to like Texhnolyze, but it wasn’t willing to muster the strong character relationships of some of Konaka’s other work, nor a well-executed mystery to keep the audience engrossed in the story, and even though the philosophical themes aren’t intended to be viewed as an afterthought, they’re presented like they are. Give this a miss and pick up Lain or The Big O instead. (And also go listen to some Juno Reactor).
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