Some More Words About Aquarion EVOL 23

So I slept, and at some point I realized that as far as I was concerned, episode 23 didn’t really change EVOL at all, because I don’t actually care about the reincarnation drama at any deep level at all.

I mean, I still think it’s a masterful troll, if only because other people really, really care about the reincarnation drama, and a few of them are getting mad as hell. (Maybe EVOL was always about the reactions to me.) Now, I think it’s funny, and kind of interesting from the lore perspective, but I don’t care about it to the extent that I think things about it are super dramatic. So EVOL 23, the episode itself, didn’t really affect me, and I actually thought it was pretty empty.

This is probably also one of the reasons I can’t be arsed about Mikono. She has no real goals of her own and her entire arc is wrapped up in Apollon and Silvie bullshit, so I’m only going to get invested to the extent that it causes present drama. And the present drama it has caused has all been awful.

The really funny thing about all this is that both Aquarion series have had a message about “what’s important isn’t what you inherit, but what you are.” Getting all worked up about who Apollo and Amata are or aren’t is missing the point – they’re Apollo and Amata.

Anyway, this wasn’t supposed to have this many words about that.

When I started working on Aquarion, hand in hand with an overwhelming sense of confusion was an almost immediate love for the secondary characters. They had their archetypes, but I think they filled them with gusto and vivacity. They weren’t realistic or complex, really, but they were colorful. They interacted with each other at home, in class, and in battle, and they all had their own styles and ways of holding themselves that I was getting comfortable with, as much as I could. Back then I felt their individual voices, as I feel I should as their acting scriptwriter.

In some stretch of time between episode 15 and 18, whatever grip I had on their individual pseudo-personalities was lost. At one point I think I decided that lazy writing of love stories had wiped them out. That’s part of what happened, I suppose, but I’m getting the sense that with the plot trying to shift itself into a great epic and a big love story, it just doesn’t have time to let characters drive their own interactions with each other and be quirky or fun, not when it has things to say. When’s the last time Andy encouraged the main character in his boisterous, passionate way? Do you even remember Mikono struggling to speak up or Zessica hiding her stress behind a cheery smile? These characters barely even interact with each other now, only really interacting with the Plot and the Legend. They never get a chance.

I may not be able to write Aquarion‘s dialogue to my own standard of quality, and I could blame that on time constraints, fansubbing constraints, or my own lack of skill. But at some point, I lost the sense that I could even try, because I’d lost all the characters that were fun to write. It’s been bothering me.

I think about this shit way too much.