Bobduh

Not particularly - if anything, my feelings towards it have slightly improved in a couple of ways. First, I'd always figured FSN had already demonstrated how to do a traditional "battle royale" with this setup, but apparently that's not FSN at all, so in retrospect it's nice to see Zero demonstrate how you can actually make use of an ensemble cast in this very busy context (even if Zero had its own stumbling blocks along the way, like the tedious first half). Zero would likely have been better if it had actually killed off a couple characters slightly sooner to allow for more evenly developed arcs from the others, but it was working within a pretty strict set of limitations.

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Which is the other thing that now impresses me a bit more about Zero - that it came across as a fairly coherent story while also slotting a bunch of characters into place for their roles in a later story. This doesn't actually make Zero "better" in the abstract, but I can appreciate that it was probably pretty tough to work within those limitations, and the fact that Zero doesn't come off as "setup for a different story entirely" is to its credit. In fact, plenty of elements of Zero seem to ring very strongly of Urobuchi's style - not just in the "can't save everyone" stuff that was already baked into the story, but, for example, in the way the various family expectations put upon characters like Kirei, Kariya, Tokiomi, and Waver contrast and reflect Urobuchi's consistent questions.

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And yep, the first half of Zero is kinda like most of UBW, though UBW's first-half fights are way more engaging than Zero's first half fights. It's more that the first half of Zero is like the second half of UBW - I actually enjoyed the first half of UBW a whole lot.

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I guess it depends on what you mean by "other otaku hobbies?" Because I think the key thing here is that the obsessive attachment isn't reflective of any particular property, it's reflective of the nature of "fandom" itself. Everybody /likes/ certain media, and is emotionally attached to it. I think the idea of "fandom" inherently implies something more than that - it implies both a sense of identity and a sense of community, that you partially define yourself by this thing (not necessarily in a negative way, but in a "this is a part of my life" way), and that you exist within some kind of group that shares that passion.

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The thesis of "The Soul of Anime" by Ian Condry is that anime has a "special something" in this regard, that anime is maintained as an industry not because of commercial viability, but because from the creator to consumer side, everyone invests in it and shares a kind of communal "ownership" in it. Anime is pretty much inseparable from the derivative works and "anime culture" that define both its fandom and commercial infrastructure - buildable robots, collectible figures, saleable doujinshi, etcetera. The idea of "collaborative culture" (media that isn't just handed from creator to consumer, but is created by everyone together) is key with anime, and becoming even more relevant as we see the advent of shows like Mekakucity Actors, built backwards from fan culture into the commercial industry.

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This isn't a stigma, this is a commercial reality - but I don't think it makes anime inherently different from other mediums. I think it's just reflective of the fact that anime (or at least, the portions of the anime market we generally talk about as adult western fans) has been for so long immediately responsive to waves of specific fan desires. It's a small industry, built for enthusiasts by enthusiasts, and so there are fewer natural layers of separation. But this same stuff is happening in western media, and the internet is making the creator/consumer line even less relevant, as fans become successful creators and creators become far more accessible. Fans acting like they "own" characters can result in a lot of unfortunate stuff, but in the context of modern media, "ownership" is becoming a very strange thing.

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Sorry, that got a little off-track. If you're interested in this stuff, though, I talk about it more in my Madoka Rebellion essay:

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http://wrongeverytime.com/2014/07/14/the-rising-tide-madoka-rebellion-and-communal-culture/

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