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6/25/2025, 3:22:30 PM
>>528762470
It's complicated.
At the end of the day, the story has to offer you SOMETHING. There has to be some reason for reading it beyond "it's a story and it exists". Crazy plot twists are one type of thing the story might offer you, but it's not the only possible thing.
A story might instead offer, say, deep and interesting character writing. Did HL do that? No not really. Instead it repeated the same joke about Kurara's curry dozens of times and the same joke about Kyoshika fucking her sword dozens of times. We're not exactly dealing with high literature here.
So yeah, in the absence of deep characters and interesting worldbuilding or anything like that, it does fall to the "crazy plot twists" to keep readers entertained. And when those plot twists turn out to be subpar rehashes of twists from other sci-fi stories and the author's past work, people will rightfully complain.
Plot twists are often called a hallmark of "kitsch" (pop art, "low" art) by philosophers and literary theorists because they have precisely the effect that you describe. They're like a drug, you need the next twist to get crazier, and crazier and crazier, to stay entertained, but each twist is ultimately a hollow experience that provides only one moment of satisfaction before its burned out; it has no deeper meaning or relationship to anything outside itself.
One thing the story COULD have offered is a reflection on the real-world political and philosophical questions (particularly related to the ethics of war and colonialism, and the nature of racial identity as it relates to the whole Futuran clone thing) that its story raised, but the types of people who write anime stories usually aren't smart enough to think at that level, and their consumers would get upset if the story actually asked them to think critically anyway.
It's complicated.
At the end of the day, the story has to offer you SOMETHING. There has to be some reason for reading it beyond "it's a story and it exists". Crazy plot twists are one type of thing the story might offer you, but it's not the only possible thing.
A story might instead offer, say, deep and interesting character writing. Did HL do that? No not really. Instead it repeated the same joke about Kurara's curry dozens of times and the same joke about Kyoshika fucking her sword dozens of times. We're not exactly dealing with high literature here.
So yeah, in the absence of deep characters and interesting worldbuilding or anything like that, it does fall to the "crazy plot twists" to keep readers entertained. And when those plot twists turn out to be subpar rehashes of twists from other sci-fi stories and the author's past work, people will rightfully complain.
Plot twists are often called a hallmark of "kitsch" (pop art, "low" art) by philosophers and literary theorists because they have precisely the effect that you describe. They're like a drug, you need the next twist to get crazier, and crazier and crazier, to stay entertained, but each twist is ultimately a hollow experience that provides only one moment of satisfaction before its burned out; it has no deeper meaning or relationship to anything outside itself.
One thing the story COULD have offered is a reflection on the real-world political and philosophical questions (particularly related to the ethics of war and colonialism, and the nature of racial identity as it relates to the whole Futuran clone thing) that its story raised, but the types of people who write anime stories usually aren't smart enough to think at that level, and their consumers would get upset if the story actually asked them to think critically anyway.
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