Matt-Man vs Anime?

Hail and well met

Well I just spent several days catching up on some anime that I had started watching years ago and ended up missing for one reason or another. It is by far the truth that I could have gone the rest of my life without ever seeing them at all. Now don't get me wrong, they were well done and visually pleasing, with some great story telling as well. No the problem is that so far they have all done the same thing, bait and switch.

What do I mean by that? Well it is simple, they start promising to be a straight forward giant robot battle opera and lead you on with what seems to be straight forward story telling. Each episode building to the climactic final battle where all is revealed. The switch is when they totally drop the final battle/enemy angle and jump into some heavy psychobabble and introspection. Then to top it all of they have the audacity to drop a "deus ex machina" twist in the last few episodes that robs the viewer of a real ending but instead we get to see the writers idea of what God is and how we all were created or some such contrivance.

Why do they have to do this? What is the deal? I just wanted a intriguing story, with deep characters that interact and develop, while fighting horrors in giant robots/cyborgs/alien machines. I wanted to be entertained, enthralled and allowed to lose myself for a few hours...ok days. Is it that hard to come up with a story that doesn't end with some version of a god like entity showing up roaring around for twenty minutes while we are told how it is the creator of everything and how it is going to recreate the world? Or how it is going to jump back in time and change everything...yeah there is another pet peeve.

Time travel is something that I have spent a great deal of time reading about, thinking about and playing with in games. All of it seems to boil down to one simple point, every event is shaped by thousands of others leading up to it. So the two theories I have are these...

One- By changing the proper event the situation in the present is changed drastically. This totally changes the landscape of the present from the previous reality. People will be mostly the same but the events that you will remember them doing or being involved with will have been erased for the most part, in fact some of them may even be dead and others that did die will be alive. There is little to no way to know the full extent of the changes made to the present by changing even the simplest thing in the past.

Tw0- Some events are brought about by long term chains of events made by people that the time traveler is not aware of. Thus they may go back to change something but not knowing the real cause cannot alter the right events. This means that all they will most likely do is alter the players but not the event. They may even alter the outcome of the event but only along the lines of possible results of that event happening. In the end the thing that was trying to be changed only changes slightly with the end result being mostly the same.

Either way it would take a AWESOME story to encompass time traveling on even the smallest level. This is why I shudder when suddenly the term "time travel" shows up late in any series or show. Most of the time it is well founded as it totally screws up the plot and destroys any credibility it may have built up with me.

I could go on for a long time on that one. Suffice it to say that I have had it with anime for a long time. I mean really a long time. It would take a incredibly great anime that delivered what it promised from the beginning to the end with no damn twists! Maybe it is out their but for now I am not looking for it.

So this post was a little off the beaten path but I just had to vent.

Well off to work on going to sleep and then finishing my campaign.

May the Force be with you

Excelsior!!!