Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei: Target China

If blackboard musings are any indication of what the SHAFT team finds interesting, then China must be their current whipping boy. It's not wholly undeserved, especially when absurd things like meat buns, cardboard, and toothpaste are involved. With the Mattel recall involving miniature magnets and lead paint, China is like the laughingstock of the export nations. Well, with markets way down on account of stupidity and greed (aren't they always?), someone needs to play the village idiot for comedic relief.




On a totally unrelated note, I am a stats whore. I have yet to reach that transcendental state where it matters not if anyone reads this. I figure, I might as well be talking to a blank wall, right? If the blank wall talks back, then you've arrived at Enlightenment. Or you're crazy.

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Bahaha?

So, Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei episode 4! Some authors find it easier to write (melo)drama than it is to write comedy, but similarly, I find it difficult to write about comedy. Perhaps I lack the necessary vocabulary to articulate a humourous situation.

Humour can elicit uproarious approval, a chuckle, a smirk, a facepalm, or nothing at all. I just can't tell you why. Even describing the gag is usually inadequate, as to port comedy from one medium to another usually involves nothing less than a complete reinvention of the wheel. The extent of my description may as well be approximated along the lines of,

It was funny. Go watch it and see what I mean.

And so it is with Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. It's fairly grim humour, but it works. So go watch it.

The rest of this post is a collection of a few points that I found interesting.


If you check out the WTF section of your favourite news site or sites, you may have come across a story about cardboard being mixed into meat buns in China. While a hoax, it came at a time when China's problems with quality control for agricultural exports gained mainstream attention in North America. It's probably going to be one of those simmering problems for years to come.


Surprisingly not random or flippant flavour text. Nothing like a healthy dose of pessimism to put overachievers in their place. Likely to find better application with something like the economy though. Economy expands too fast, raise interest rates. Economy goes into a recession, lower interest rates.


It's coming down to at least one Gurren-Lagann gag per episode, but this one was strangely appropriate to the scene.

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Have pause hot-keyed, will read chalkboard

Is this really a Baywatch reference? I've never watched Baywatch but the scene aligns well with my uninformed stereotypes.

There are probably a lot of references in Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei that I don't get or have missed in their entirety, but I accept it like I accept not comprehending most of the Lucky Star references. However, there was one that was sufficiently long and surreal to warrant curiosity. Trailhead provided by GNU which lead to the following:



I don't even know where the original sequence was from and what it's about, although answers will probably be forthcoming.

Hm, what else. Most times, maybe all the time, when Nozumu moves, the patterning on his kimono(?) does not. He's almost like a walking windowpane. Surreal.

Also,

Two pairs of feet don't have a legitimate reason to be here

There wasn't a dead body underneath Nozomu's bed when he went to lie down, so Gsus' hypothesis is convincing. I didn't even catch it the first time around. It was discreet, as dead bodies are wont to be, and the shot was short.

These short visual non-sequiturs is giving me ARG vibes, which is no great surprise as the ARG as a genre and something like Zetsubou Sensei both endeavour towards the surreal. Static background is subverted with hidden and changing content. In an ARG those tend to be puzzles that need to be solved, or require some action like answering a pay phone. The constantly changing chalkboard and signs don't serve such a greater purpose, but their presence does add to the atmosphere.

The potential drawback I see is that unlike an ARG, where searching for subversion is the whole point, repeatedly hitting pause in Zetsubou Sensei disrupts the flow in a very direct way (I mean, you've paused the video!), and more so when you're compelled, at that very moment, to go on a potentially fruitless search for what exactly is being referred to.

For now, props for effort. That much is evident. Hopefully it develops into an experience beyond watching for execution (I know nothing about the source manga), but watching for execution (Air, Kanon 2006) is not a bad thing at all.

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