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Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Fate Last/Encore and Emiya-san no Gohan aren't great:

Fate has a lot of spinoffs.  Some, like Apocrypha, are at least decent.  Kaleid/Liner is magnificent.  Last/Encore and Emiya-san, however, just don't belong in the same category.

If a franchise is a single integral whole, where every portion of the franchise affects every other portion, it must be accepted as a whole, even the bad parts.  Even the foxy pirates arc in One Piece is part of the overall One Piece narrative, it can't be excised out.

This isn't true of stories that reset or spin off.  Last/Encore and Emiya-san have nothing to do with the plot of any actually good Fate storyline.  They're just fever dreams that happen to use the same character designs.

Shows like that should not automatically be considered great just because some other source work that actually is great has something loosely in common with them.  A standard like that is a sort of chain migration loophole through which unworthies continuously flood across the border of greatness.

Each spinoff must be viewed independently from the last, and judged on its own merit whether it deserves to be included in the overall corpus/canon of greatness.

This is true not only of Fate, but also of Pretty Cure, which isn't actually one series but 13 or so separate ones who just borrow some of the same themes.  While this hasn't been a problem up until now, because every Pretty Cure season was excellent in its own right, that's no longer the case ever since Kira Kira.

Kira Kira and Huggto Precure are not unwatchably bad shows.  There are some nice moments in each of them.  But they aren't great anime either.  It doesn't make sense to be adding the length of their seasons to the total length of the greatness of Pretty Cure.  Since they aren't actually contributing anything useful to the franchise, why does the franchise length number keep growing due to them?  This isn't an accurate reflection of Pretty Cure's greatness at all.

If you subtract Fate/Last Encore, Emiya-san no Gohan, Kira Kira Precure and Huggto Precure from the greatness canon of 'must-see anime' you get a total of 9005.  That's still above the 'it's over 9,000!' anime post I celebrated a year ago so no harm done.  It's also a much more accurate reflection of how much great anime there actually is available in this world.

I can't encourage people to go watch these four spinoffs to the actually good franchises because they aren't must see shows in the least.  There are boundless better things to watch than these four series.  They share the name of other great series, but not the quality.  These frauds need to be outed and purged.  Chameleon like exteriors aside, they have nothing in common with the great interiors found elsewhere.

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