[Triple_R]

Originally Posted by Solace

I know you're pretty fond of this anime, but I'll note that in the past you've criticized other titles for these issues despite those problems not being nearly as prevalent as they are here.

Well, a few things that I should say here:

1. In action-packed sci-fi shows I tend to not be very picky over "defying the rules of physics", and a fair bit of the criticism I've seen wrote about Guilty Crown is of this sort. For me, this is a much smaller issue than, say, horrifically botched characterization. So there's certain types of "ass pulls" that bother me more than other types. For example, "Void convenience" is something I'm much more willing to roll with than a character doing a sudden 180 in their personality without much justification given for it.

2. Characterization-wise, I honestly never had a big problem with Shu or most of the main cast. Well, I do concede that some of the characters left much to be desired in the first half, but most of these issues have been resolved in the 2nd half, imo. While I can understand some viewers thinking "that's not good enough", it worked reasonably well for me in this show.

3. Guilty Crown is a show that's been actively hated on, particularly on a lot of the anime blogs I frequent, and much moreso than any anime show that I've been more critical of than this one. So I think that GC's flaws are already getting loads of attention, so why should I spend a lot of time just repeating other people? If anything, I think that Guilty Crown's real standout strengths have been drowned out in the criticisms of some viewers, and I just think that's a crying shame. The reason why is...

4. Anime is a visual medium, and also one in which audio is important. While how well an anime is written is important, it's not the only thing that's important. If an anime looks and sounds better than 95% or more of all the other anime out there (and that's honestly how I feel about Guilty Crown), then I think that's something that deserves a lot of credit. And this isn't something I'm being generous just with Guilty Crown over. I also showed Hanasaku Iroha a lot of slack for much the same reason. If an anime truly looks and/or sounds great to me then that makes it a lot easier for me to forgive somewhat sloppy writing. Maybe that's wrong of me, but that is honestly the effect that extremely good-looking/good-sounding anime tends to have on me. Some (if not all) of the shows that I was more critical of than I was of Guilty Crown were ones that didn't have GC-caliber visuals/audio, so they didn't earn that slack from me the same way GC did.

All things considered, Guilty Crown isn't terrible. It has great production values and interesting concepts. However what Guilty Crown lacks is strong and consistent direction. It flounders at several key character progression points. It tries to combine too many elements into one story.

I can respect this viewpoint. If I'm reading you right, I think that you see Guilty Crown much the same way that I saw Angel Beats!

In other words, as a show that was so incredibly ambitious in throwing together a veritable potpourri of popular anime elements that it just wasn't able to execute them all well in the time allotted, leaving some sense of dissatisfaction.

But I personally have less of an issue with a two cour show trying to pull this off than I do with an one cour show attempting it. I think GC had enough time to achieve its ambitious aims, so I wouldn't want it to be less ambitious. I think that the overall balance probably could have been better (maybe one less episode of high-school hijinks and one more episode of carefully handling the post-Hare/pre-Gai's return stretch).

You have the mech genre stuff. You have the school setting. The "Japan is a warzone" setting. The sci-fi elements with the virus and clones.

More often than not, I liked these.

The generic evil organization that can't control mad scientists and generals yet somehow manages to "almost" win anyway.

By "mad scientists", I assume you mean Keido and Segai? Because if so, I felt that both of them did a good job of hiding their "mad" sides from their superiors.

The idol singer. The "cool guy who isn't the hero but should be". The cat-girl ears, the EVA plug suits. The Rei clone. The "average hero who isn't actually average, but spends most of the story being worthless".

I admit that some of these tropes are overplayed, but I nonetheless liked the spin that GC put on them.

Inori may have been a Rei clone personality-wise, but her appearance was so drastically different from most Rei-types that it caused her to feel a bit different to me. Her being an idol singer is another way in which she was different from most Rei-types, so if nothing else, this anime made an unusual combination of commonly used anime tropes.

I get that the Shu character type is tiresome to you, and it usually is for me too. I usually don't like the "starts a bit wimpy/whiny, very gradually improves, and then becomes genuinely cool, effective, and/or badass just in time for the final arc or two". But for whatever reason, Shu didn't bother me as much as most other examples of his character type do.

Perhaps it's because I felt that Guilty Crown was mostly about sheer spectacle in the first half, with characterization being more important in the 2nd half.

This story would have worked better, imo, if it had toned down the scale and gotten rid of the mech stuff.

I have to bluntly disagree with you here. The grand scale of the GC narrative made it much more interesting, engaging, and simply fun to me. I love epic action-drama, and GC provided that in flying colors, imo. I would not want to change anything about it in this regard.

And the mechs helped to give us some nice action scenes. Honestly, I really don't see why the mechs would be an issue at all. I mean, we're not even talking anything all that fancy here. It's not like perfectly humanoid Gundams walking around. The mechs of GC are more basic than that, and hence easier to square within a setting that's not in the far distant future.

The virus angle works well, and I think the story is done a disservice by all of the stuff that clutters up the plot: the empire, the rebels, the ridiculous people turn into/sheath weapons stuff, etc.

But all of this supposed "clutter" is what enables the great action-drama of this show. If you took all that away, what would you use for action scenes? I wouldn't want Guilty Crown to be some sort of straightforward sci-fi horror, the end.

So I guess I just completely disagree with you here. Truthfully, I've never been a big fan of sci-fi/horror (or horror in general, really). I much prefer a good, epic action-drama like Guilty Crown.

Of course, it would be a very different story, I suppose...

Yes, it would have been. One that I almost certainly would have found a lot less fun, and a lot less interesting.