23 Jun 4705 - Nota Many

I guess that one's only funny if you're a latin buff.

I couldn't just let dot-hack go without putting in a critical word. There's a lot to watch out there, and a lot to read about, and every now and again a show comes along and brings you peace from a word-filled world of text boxes and strings, fields and forests, and supplants your already text-and-chat rich environment with seven solid hours of repetitive dialogue. There's a reason the tv rating system has a D option (and another reason why it is lame), and that is for shows like dot-hack.
Well, what's going on today? Tsukasa is talking to Bear, of course. They're waiting around to talk to someone else, be it BaconTomato, Lady Subaru, The Silver Knight, or any of the shows other names that don't get spoken enough for me to remember. Among the topics at hand are the running gags of:
Just what is going on with these glitches in the world and how have they manifested themselves recently?
What kind of person are you in real life?
What have the Crimson Knights been up to lately?
What has everyone else you know been up to lately?

And when those topics get exhausted, all the writers have to do is use some stock excuse to limit the amount of good information coming from one party to another, or have one of the characters ask another about someone else's information about one of those topics, or further than that: talk about talking about things, either on the interrogative side (could I have a word) or the declarative side (boy isn't it great that the world lets us talk to each other from different places?).

The unstoppable chattiness of the show gets in the way of the plot. It does not make it any better to have your characters run around for fifteen straight episodes talking about everything and resolving none of it. Otherwise, the show would have offered a compelling philosophical thought experiment on existential crisis, the nature of community, man's adaptability to bizarre environs, or the fundamental nature of awareness...but no! I had to get stuck along the way in dialogue hell, as if stymied by dial-up speed in the face of an excellent flash movie. Because of this, the show is near unwatchable. Given all the pacing of Dragon Ball Z, and none of the awesome fighting (that is, no payoff and none in sight), the show would earn less than one El Hazard, which on the scale of anime would put it in the company of Golden Boy and the original dub of Ghost Stories: totally unwatchable.

Except!

The show earns a single El Hazard, making it just watchable for the gravitas of one of the cast's supporting characters. No not Krim, although he's pretty ok himself. I'm talking about Silver Knight. Nevermind that the man can make his eyes glow red to underscore an intense epithet, or that his devotion to an in-game clan of socially constructed player-character police borders on fanaticism, or that his outfit looks exactly like all of his goons' except for the extra flourishes on his helmet. Any of these would make him great, but there's something about the total package that makes Silver Knight badass (this is in a show where there's no fighting, mind you, so badasses are hard to come by) that simply fails to find words. Even among the insidious verbosity of the show in toto.
A solid Silver Knight sentence should begin with the words "Lady Subaru, ..." and end with something incisive and relevant. He has essentially two tones, or moods: reverence in the face of Lady Subaru, high whatever of the Crimson Knights, and snide derogation in the face of absolutely anyone else.
Every time he addresses the Lady, he is clearly beholden to greatness and majesty.
Every time he addresses someone else (which is infrequent, mind you), he is righteous and obstreperous.

The man carries the show all the way to one El Hazard. I guess the writers decided there was enough action in the game and so they could leave it out of the anime. I feel a little cheated, but I'm used to getting doses of ultra-violence from my pg anime (Pokémon).

So if you see me sounding a gruff "Lady Subaru" before I say something, you'll know why.

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