[Triple_R]

Originally Posted by DasDingus

Triple_R covered most of what I wanted to say about the development (or lack thereof) in the characters of oreimo. I would, however, like to elaborate on the distinction I draw between character development and plot development and how it works with respect to ep10 of oreimo.

I feel like episode 10 had a lot of what I would call plot development.

I definitely see where you're coming from here. If you define "character development" very strictly, it means what you wrote here...

In my mind, character development occurs when 1 character acts in one way, and then acts differently later in response to some kind of trigger in the plot.

That's what I tend to think of when I think of "character development" as well. It would probably be best to say that Ayase saw her character fleshed out a lot in this episode. Whether we chalk that up to plot development, or character development, at least the anime is taking the time to make Ayase a pretty intriguing and (in some ways surprisingly) complex character. That is something that I think Ore no Imouto deserves credit for.

To elaborate further on that, one thing that I think Ore no Imouto has going for it is that its primary supporting cast characters (Ayase, Kuroneko, Manami, and Saori) are all excellent. This is a very strong supporting cast for the two leads; it gives the two leads some good characters to play off of, and have as foils. Part of me just can't help but feel that perhaps even more could be done with these superb characters in being good contributors to Kyousuke and Kirino developing as characters too.

Oreimo in general has been severely lacking in this department. The only real character development in this episode was the fact that Ayase now is willing to try to be friends with Kirino despite her anime/eroge obsessions. However, this is minimal development as Ayase still insists that she hates those things and beyond that it only involves a minor side-character rather than one of the main characters.

Well, it's a little bit more nuanced than that. Ayase has decided that she will make a honest attempt to engage in the parts of Kirino's hobby that don't conflict with Ayase's personal moral values. In other words, animes without much ecchi content, all-ages versions of visual novels/eroges perhaps, etc...

Personally, I think that's an admirably fair and reasonable approach on Ayase's part. It's a lot more thoughtful approach than her initial response several episodes ago of just painting everything of the otaku world with the same "It's indecent" brush.

We have not seen a lot of cases of events that change how the viewer feels about a character by changing how the character acts.

This isn't to say that what I describe as plot development is necessarily bad. I just find that if a character-driven show relies entirely on plot developments to define its characters rather than having those characters grow and change in their own right then the show feels quite hollow.

Totally agree. Great points here.

Originally Posted by Vexx

I don't want deliver a eulogy.... but a persistent theme in execution of anime seems to be "set up great premise, interesting characters, and then.... trip, stumble, do nothing, reset, fall, veer into left field, leave a pile of great arc starts on the ground". Doesn't matter what genre really - its like a character flaw of production teams.

Great points here too.

In fairness, part of it is probably the inherent difficulty in adapting a light novel with a lot of internal dialogue (i.e. a character speaking a lot in a narrator voice) that has not been concluded yet. Some of this content is just hard to translate over into a visual/audio medium like anime.

Still, some of the choices the production team has made for this anime are head-scratchers for me. There is a great premise and interesting characters here, but also some trips and stumbles to be sure. Oh well, I hope that this anime has a good ending with Episode 12 anyway. Next episode looks somewhat promising.