Writing for nothing, text for free

As every good comedian knows, one must “finish strong” to leave the best impression on the audience, even if the part before was at best mediocre. But what happens when you put on a great performance, dazzling the audience with wit and originality, but put a huge chunk of bad melodrama, about how you lost a dime needed to buy some plastic transformer and that’s the reason you didn’t get invited to the party of the fat kid next door and this somehow skewed your sexuality or something, at the end? Well, first you will be egged and whipped by your listeners, secondly you get endings like those of “Potemayo” and “Beating Angel Dokuro-Chan”.

I don’t know when studios started their abuse of forcing people to watch badly acted, trivial drivel at the end, but it has to stop.

Why do studios do this? Is it because the authors feel the need to somehow justify their comedy series, as if bad melodrama is somehow of a higher level? Why should it be? Good comedy is essential and great satire can form the human mind just as much as monologues about love, hate, the bigger jugs of the guy standing next to you, and so on and so forth. But instead of giving the people what they want, the authors insist on talking about trivial crap, put in orchestral music (because music with a lot of instruments automatically sounds better) and decide to have some sort of weird melodramatic circle-jerk. But most people watching comedy/satire series first of all don’t really care, and secondly, if they haven’t been just watching the show because of the pretty pictures, will see right through the bad efforts of tugging at their heartstrings.

Or is it because they feel they have to “wrap it up” somehow? I don’t know about you, but I prefer open ended scenarios generally more than these “Ok – We’re done now, go on, nothing more to see here, everyone is either dead or happily married”-endings. This wrapping-up reminds me of these “feel-good” movies, whose only objective is to make the viewers feel that they’ve successfully wasted 6 hours of their lives.

In any case, two great anime weren’t completely ruined, but definitely weren’t as orgasm-inducing as they could have been. And one thing is for sure: If I ever want to watch bad drama, I won’t watch anime, but tune in on a shopping channel to buy an axe to kill myself.