The best shows, in my humble and totally correct opinion, are the ones that are incredibly confusing. I might have made a detour to talk about Neo-Men-Assist San-Fran Comic-Con, but that one is a classic. Maybe it wears its heart on its sleeve and straight-up tells you its themes, plus it has a really cliched happy ending, but people still love it. I guess it’s a childhood thing.
Oh, nostalgia…making you see things totally WRONG. I try not to be blinded by it. Such are my feelings towards an anime I used to watch when I was a child, ‘Meth Boat’. Pretty dark themes about a high school boy who finds a boat from the real of angels that can bring people back to life, but it also gives them a crippling addiction to crystal meth. It also had a serious message about the importance of plate alloy boats and their efficacy in the fishing trade, and you know what? It wasn’t obvious about it. There was no episode that grabbed you by the hand and gently led you to the spelled-out message, and as a viewer, I appreciate that kind of storytelling.
Maybe there would be a single episode entirely based around Kite trying to bring someone back to life with the Medical Boat while also trying to keep himself from being discovered by the police (pretty hard when the thing you use is a boat). Anyway, he gets interested in aluminium plate boats and thinks that if they’re all the rage, people won’t suspect him as much. But if someone gets brought back to life while he’s getting the plate alloy conversion, then everyone will find out his identity, and they’ll all want their dead relatives brought back to life despite the crippling addictions that would ensue.
See, that’s a great theme: the theme of trying to keep the Melbourne stainless steel welding people from discovering that the boat that they’re working on is actually magical. Also, methamphetamines. Drugs always make something a bit more serious, provided the series takes them seriously of course…
-Dylan-kun