FLCL Alternative (continued)

This has been an exercise in different perspectives. The first three episodes made me side very strongly with the "almost as good as the original" part of FLCL's audience. The second three episodes are now making me slide back toward the "pale imitation that misses the point" camp.

It doesn't make me join the second camp. I don't think Alternative misses the point of the original, so much as it just doesn't quite understand the tools that it used to make that point. The show still works. It's still doing its own cool, interesting thing that complements the original. Buuuut it's kind of crudely hammered together and doesn't quite fit in its own packaging. It has my approval, but not my enthusiasm.

So.

At its heart, "FLCL Alternative" is about the pain of letting go of one's childhood. Or rather, about the importance of not forgetting one's childhood even after accepting that it's gone and won't come back. In a sense, it examines a similar kind of nostalgia to what the original series embodies. Talking about the memories of transitional adolescence rather than trying to directly evoke the experience of transitional adolescence. Protagonist Kana's arc is actually more like the imprisoned demon-thing in the first FLCL than it is like Naota's; it's about her finding a way to accept that she needs to spread her wings and fly away.

The central metaphor that the show uses for this involves the giant laundry-iron structures that played a more minor role in the original.

These giant laundry-irons, built by alien invaders in cities around the world under the guise of factories, shopping malls, etc, are going to be used to flatten the earth's surface into a smooth, flat sphere. In both the original series and this one, it's explicitly described as a symbol for smoothing out the wrinkles in a brain and making it thoughtless, compliant, and inert. In "FLCL," this was just kind of yet another weird WTF detail dropped in alongside all the other weird WTF details. In "Alternative," it's given much more centrality, and turned into an allegory for the inevitable loss of the world Kana knew as a child as she becomes an adult.

And, in a way, that actually makes their presence in the first series make more sense. Naota was just entering his teens, so he becomes aware of the existence of these world-flattening alien irons but doesn't have to deal with them for a long time yet. Kana is finishing her teens, and so the irons are heating up.

There are smaller allegories within this scenario. For instance, one of Kana's close friends - the quiet Tomomi, nicknamed "Pets" - turns out to be the daughter of an extremely wealthy and extremely evil government official. Like many of Earth's elite, her family has secured passage on one of those rockets to the nascent Mars colony, as they had advance warning about the alien laundry-irons (turns out it wasn't just plain old environmental collapse they were planning to flee.

Well, it might be kinda sorta an allegory for that too, but it's mixed with a lot of other stuff lol). Pets always kept her social life and her family life scrupulously distanced, as she didn't want her friends to know anything that would make them see her differently, and she didn't want her abusive parents to interact with her friends. Now that they're dragging her away with them in advance of Earth's flattening, she becomes a metaphor for a few different things. Learning that Kana's happy childhood and teenaged world was never actually as bright and clean as she thought it was, for one thing. This point is emphasized by the reveal that Pets was Kana's oldest friend, since early elementary school, long before the other two joined their group. Her moving to Mars, outside of even phone contact range for most people on Earth, is treated as both an example of the irreversibility of childhood's loss, and as an analogy to death. Some people who Kana grew up with will not be following her into adulthood. That's just statistics.

Kana's need to accept the loss of her friend without defensively devaluing the positive memories she has of her is literalized in a couple of scenes. Most notably an Akira-knockoff sequence where Pets gets engulfed by one of the rampaging robot-monsters and Kana needs to free her.

I think it may actually be gesturing at Serial Experiments Lain just as much as Akira, looking at this screenshot again.​

In keeping with the symbolism, these rampaging biomech robots are revealed to be the larval form of the giant alien hands that are meant to wield the laundry-irons for Earth's flattening.

The giant map-pins from space that herald the spawning of these robots are path-markers, showing the irons their future courses to coordinate the flattening.

Another way in which this series lives up to its "Alternative" subtitle is in the revelation of a special ability of Kana's. Rather than just spawning anti-robot instruments from her forehead, she eventually manifests the ability to suck things INTO her forehead to get rid of them. An ability that she uses during the Akira/Lain-ish sequence to vanish the hand robot and free Pets from its grasp. Pets still leaves for Mars with her family a few days later. However, the hand-monster had been causing Pets to say hurtful things to Kana as it dragged her away, undermining the value of the friendship they shared and the memories they created and aligning Pets with her evil parents, and after Kana forehead-vores the robot Pets is able to exit her life leaving a positive, heartfelt, wistful wake. Literalizing the metaphor of Kana accepting the loss of that friendship, instead of demonizing the friendship itself and letting its loss take even more away from her.

The final resolution of the series has Kana using her forehead powers to create a pair of alternate earths. One of which gets flattened, and one of which is saved. The memories of her childhood world, preserved and treasured even though she no longer inhabits it.

Alternative Earths.​

It's an ending I want to like, but there are some serious problems with it. Some of which are also serious problems with the whole show leading up to it as well, others of which are self-contained.

First, the drama surrounding Pets' departure ends up being central to the ending. It sort of gets turned into THE metaphor for accepting childhood's end without devaluing childhood. Everything ends up revolving around it. However...we only find out about Pets and her family being bound for Mars in the fifth out of six episodes. True, we build up to it from the start with the mentions of commercial space launches, but the matter of Kana's relationship with this one particular friend is only tied to that very late in the game. And also...until that same episode 5, Pets barely does anything. She's the friend who gets the least exploration, and who shows the fewest signs of emotional intimacy with Kana. The whole backstory about her being Kana's best and oldest friend is only introduced retroactively, post episode 5. Until then, she almost might as well not exist for all the story does with her.

So...making the ending be all about saying goodbye to Pets feels really off. It caps off an arc that ran through the last two episodes, but it doesn't feel like an ending for FLCL Alternative as a whole. Doing more with Pets early on was an absolute necessity if they were going to hang so much emotional weight on her at the end, and they didn't.

Second, and getting back to a criticism I made in my first post; the show seems to think that its audience are morons, and the ending leans into that belief hard. To get Kana's forehead powers to activate and do the big planet-warping trick at the end, Kana has to stand up and basically explain in as many words what the show is a metaphor for and how she's learning and growing from her experiences. It is the act of saying these words that opens the portal to the alternate earth and sends the flattering-irons to it.

-___-

The original FLCL knew that it didn't need to do that. It was actually really good about not doing that. It had confidence in its own symbolic storytelling and in its audience's ability to interpret it. Naota resolved his struggle by engaging with the world of the story and letting his actions complete the metaphor. Kana solves hers by explaining the metaphor and then watching the world of the story transform in accordance with her words. And...it's just artless. And boring. And preachy. No matter how much I like the message of this ending, it came in a really shitty envelope.

Like I said, Alternative is guilty of this particular sin throughout. The ending is just the worst case of it.

...

Speaking of comparing endings...I have mixed feelings about this part, so I'm not sure if this is a complaint per se, but I'd be remiss not to talk about it.

The ending of FLCL said that growing up means accepting that you aren't special. That becoming an adult isn't defined by gaining power or racking up impressive achievements or trying to outshine someone else. I thought that was great. Like, seriously, that's a perfect antidote to the fucked up message that all too many coming-of-age stories - unknowingly or otherwise - convey.

The ending of Alternative has all of Kana's friends gather around her and anxiously urge her to use the unique powers that she's apparently developed to save them all. And she does it.

Consider also that in FLCL, Naota only had the forehead shit going on because Haruhara deliberately inflicted it on him, and he was explicitly said to just be the most recent of several humans that she's tried this with. In Alternative, Kana just...has the forehead powers, on her own, and nobody else has them.

The reason I have mixed rather than purely negative feelings about this comes down to the gender politics. Boys - in both Japan and in the west - are raised to expect a measure of power and influence. Media targeted at them often has the message that they're entitled to it. That's not at all how it is for girls, though. A show about a girl learning that she had power all along and just needed to become emotionally mature enough to use it reads very differently than one about a boy.

So, does Alternative's ending undermine everything good and subversive about FLCL's? Or is it just that Alternative's ending is a good one for girls, while FLCL's is a good one for boys?

I'm really not sure. I lean more toward the former (the fact that no other members of Kana's all-female friend group get empowered the way she does is a big part of what pushes me in that direction), but I'm not sure.

...

Lastly, the role that Haruhara plays in Alternative - including its ending - is one that I find highly questionable.

In the first few episodes, Haruhara is about as antagonistic toward Kana and her friends as she was toward Naota in the original. Maybe slightly less, but only slightly. She mocks Kana for being a teenager even while urging her to stave off adulthood. She steals multiple boyfriends and would-be-boyfriends from Kana and her friends. She's physically violent toward them. As I mentioned in the previous post, she's even sexually violent toward them at one point (the light tone is preserved because she fails so badly at performing sexual violence that she just ends up humiliating herself more than hurting them, but still).

But, repeatedly throughout the show, Haru's interventions are (not always, but often enough) shown to have ultimately been for the best. Stealing Kana's crush before she can confess to him helps Kana realize that if she was emotionally mature enough for romance, she wouldn't have had so much trouble confessing to him in the first place, and that - just like Haruhara told her earlier - she shouldn't try to push herself to date just because she thinks it's expected at her age. Haruhara helps her realize that her attempts to help her friend Hamma with her financial situation, without being asked to, is just hurting Hamma, and leads to her communicating more with Hamma and supporting her in ways that she's comfortable with. Etc. In at least many of these cases, it's made to seem like Haru was aiming for this outcome all along. At the end of the series, it's Haru who loads Kana and her friends onto her motorcycle and drives them up onto the clifftop overlooking the giant iron, where she talks Kana through the process of activating her forehead powers.

And like, I'm sorry, but you cannot have Haruko Haruhara play the role of the wise mentor while still having her act like Haruko Haruhara.

Haru wasn't there to teach Naota a lesson or help him grow in FLCL. She was the thing that he needed to learn how to grow passed. She wasn't self-aware about this (self-awareness of any kind would be antithetical to Haru's character lol). She was part of an object lesson from the creators of the show, but she wasn't any kind of guide or teacher herself. Her motives were all completely self-serving. The series ended with her dejectedly returning to outer space without having learned anything, and without realizing that she'd taught anyone else anything.

Alternative has her mostly act the same way she did in FLCL. In some ways, her childish and abusive behavior even escalates over its level in the original. But then we're supposed to accept that she was dispensing wisdom and intentionally guiding Kana to come into her own power all along, and...no. Just no.

There are plenty of other things to like and dislike throughout Alternative. The music - courtesy of the same band that gave us bangers like this one last time - is great. The animation isn't as experimental as FLCL's, but it's still great, and at the end there are a few moments of altered visuals that actually do come close to reaching those heights.

Haruhara being sucked into a wormhole at the end, for some reason.​

The monster fights are just about as good. The dialogue is great. Like, genuinely really funny and touching at various times, especially when it's just Kana and her friends shooting the shit and feeling very genuinely like teenaged girls. Or when Kana is reacting to the latest shocking absurdity of Haru's and echoes the audience own exact thoughts at exactly the right moments.

But there are also a few things that are soured by what I know of the copyright issues going on in the background of this series' production. Like, there's one monster fight scene that's really, really blatantly borrowing from Neon Genesis Evangelion, and...like I said, it's soured.


Overall, the first four episodes are much stronger than the final two. Which makes sense when you consider that for the most part, Alternative is structured as a slice of life show. When the big earth-flattening plot moves into the foreground and changes the entire flow and feel of the series, it kind of cramps its style. Makes it feel like it's trying to cram FLCL Original into FLCL Alternative in ways that don't fit.

Still, I wouldn't say that Alternative is a bad show. There's a lot of bad stuff in it, but not enough to ruin the whole. The original FLCL is a hard act to follow, and if I wasn't being forced to compare Alternative against its predecessor I'd probably be sounding more positive about it.

And hey, there's a lot it did that I genuinely appreciate. I wondered before if a female-centric version of FLCL would be any good, and the fact that Alternative made an earnest, heartfelt effort to find out (granted, Kana is also older than Naota so it's not a direct mirror, but still) is greatly appreciated. The flaws that it has, it mostly came by honestly, and its successes are likewise earned with the innovations it was willing to try out.

Reading up on it a bit more, Alternative is apparently the highest regarded of the attempted FLCL sequels. I haven't seen the others, but I have a feeling that I would agree.