What's going on? Who's that guy?
Mood:  chatty
Topic: asian culture
I've noticed, after having watched a lot of anime and playing a decent amount of console RPGs, that the Japanese have a tendency to start stories in the middle. If I remember Battle Royale correctly, this trend extends to literature as well.

Basically the viewer/player/reader (user from now on) is thrown right into the story and is left to figure out who the characters are, what their relationships are, and the nature of the environment in which they exist as the story goes along. A lot of it is passed on through dialogue with a decent amount of flash-back sequences as appropriate.

Like anything else in life this has both its advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that the user is thrown right into the action. If the anime has fighting or some other active element to it, usually the anime begins with a fight going on. The user doesn't know who the protagonist or antagonist are (unless they searched online, read reviews, etc) and why the fight is even taking place. The user just has to sit back and hope that it will all be explained in due time. Of course some anime do a better job of explaining what's going on than others. Sometimes I have to go online to get some background info based on the intense analyzing of die-hard fans. But, at least I don't start off with a boring intro scene. "Hello, I'm so and so and this is my task and these are my friends...etc"

Of course, the bad part is that it's a little hard to get engaged in the fight if you don't know who to root for. Generally, I tend to appreciate anime much more on a second viewing because I appreciate the consquences of the opening scenes. Another negative aspect is that anime episodes are ~20 minutes long; sometimes the it takes three or four episodes before the user can figure out what's going on. It seems sometimes that the writers are pretending that they just have a segmented movie and so it's ok if you don't know what's going on until an hour into the show. This is why, as I beleive I've said on this blog before, the user should always watch all four to five episodes on disc one before deciding whether or not to continue. It's usually impossible to know after episode one what's going on, nevermind if one wants to continue watching.

Video games tend to be even worse in this respect. Because of the battles and walking around towns and worlds that the user isn't familiar with, it can be on the order of 5-10 hours into the game before the user has the slightest clue of what's going on. In the meanwhile they are getting the story snippets at a time. This is why I'm holding off on playing my FF games until I graduate. Because with the small amounts of story revealed at a time, each time I played I will have forgotten a large portion of the story, including clues that may have been dropped about what my next task should be.

When I thought about it a little more, it's not that American movies, tv shows and books don't do similar things. But it tends to be on a much shorter time scale or they "cheat". For example, look at the show "Friends". All of the characters had pre-existing relationships with each other, but since everyone didn't know everyone else, they spend the first couple of episodes introducing each other. By the end of the first one, and certainly by the end of the second one, you've got it all down. There are some nuances left or else there wouldn't be much to the show, but pretty much it's ok.

However, the biggest difference is that anime and RPGs tend to have ~10^40 subplots in addition to the overarching plot of the game or show. So the user has to learn the main theme as well as what's going on with each character and their past. This can get VERY complicated sometimes. Basically, this is the biggest reason why it takes so long to understand what's going on with the characters. Some anime, like Cowboy Bebop (which I've seen most, but not all of the episodes) introduce so little about the character's backgrounds that it isn't until almost the end of the series before you understand their motivations and why they are together. Personally, I tend to like these because of the complexity and maturity of the story. However, it CAN be done badly. One example is the movie "Armitage III". I really like this movie, but it has so many deep subplots to it, that I've watched it around 3-4 times and I'm still not sure exactly what's going on in all of the movie. Each time I watch it I gain further understanding. But even that wasn't too bad of a job. I've heard of other anime, which I can't remember the titles to, where the stories are so complex that even after multiple seasons, viewers don't know what's going on.

But the big question for me is, "where did this come from?" Obviously it's not from American influence. Were the ancient Japanese myths and stories pre-anime/video game like this too? Does this characterize Japaense story-telling in general? Or is it a relatively new pheneomenon ocurring post-WW2? I'd love to take a class to find out. Perhaps one day I will...if you happen to know....drop me a line via comments. They will be posted next time I sign in and approve them.