Well I won’t argue that Charlotte will please the casual viewer, to me it’s clear that’s hard & I’ve definitely heard many complaints from those, including some quite silly stuff that I’d rather not mention.
However in the end it’s up to the viewer to pay attention, and if you do watch Charlotte closely enough, you’ll see the subtleties because the information is most definitely in there if you watch out for it, it’s not invisible or so small that it requires 10 re watches. You just need to watch each episode once with enough focus, and you’ll get a good part of what you need in order to understand the main of it.
But then again, that makes the show sort of inaccessible to a certain audience, which can be considered a flaw in its own right, that I can agree with. But in another perspective, you can also say that paying attention is the viewer’s job, and that it’s their fault if they don’t get the subtleties. I’m more on the latter here, you simply can’t go into a work like this and think of watching it casually.
The problem is, even doing that, even with all the extra information, doesn’t fix the show’s problems.
I’m not saying it does, I admit that in my first post - but if you look at the vast majority of the criticism targeted at Charlotte, most of it is unfair & stems from this lack of understanding. I’ve only met very few people who didn’t like Charlotte and could actually make a decent case for their opinion.
It’d be nice if you can bring up those problems. I know you mentioned thing like bad BGM cuts, which can be viewed a lot more objectively, so it’d be worth discussing those, I think
To quote my end-of-season wrapup post:
Charlotte is an original anime helmed by Jun Maeda, the writer of many Key works.
Charlotte is a Heroes-inspired tale of a world where super powers exist. Yuu Otosaka has the ability to take over the body of anyone within his vision for 5 seconds. Using this power, he cheats his way to a fancy school, and becomes a popular figure at the school. One day he is brought to the principal’s office under suspicion of his test scores, and there he meets another superhuman, Nao Tomori. Nao, having recorded Yuu’s body controlling antics, tells him that he must transfer to a different school… A school for superhumans. Yuu gets dragged into the student council, and for the first 4 episodes, nothing really happens… It’s pretty boring really.
The story starts off by introducing our main cast! Yuu, our protagonist, who, after half an episode, suddenly loses every defining personality trait and becomes more of a background character. Nao, the girl who actually pushes for a story. Yusa, a generic idol, and Joujirou, a serious looking joker who fanboys all over Yusa.
Don’t worry about remembering the last two though. They get forgotten about quickly.
Oh, and Yuu has a little sister. She shows up sometimes.
The cast is really lacking in character development, and most of them never actually do anything… So that isn’t this show’s strong point. It doesn’t help that half-way through the show, our main cast is abandoned, and faced with a new cast, we are told “these are your friends!”
Ah, but this is Jun Maeda, one of the great musical talents of the VN world! The music of this show must be great, right? Yeah… No. There’s maybe two scenes where the choice of music is good. Aside from that, it is a total mess. The musical merchandise that spawned from this show in the form of How Low Hello and Zhiend are pretty good, but you won’t get that in the show. The OP takes a while to get used to, but it’s pretty nice, both visually and musically. The ED… happens sometimes.
Uuuh, the animation is not bad. You’d expect better from P.A. Works, but you can’t get it all right. There are a few pretty scenes throughout the show, but it’s not consistent in that regard.
As for the story, well, you’re not gonna get much of one. There’s a bit in the final 3-ish episodes, and a bit for a couple earlier episodes, but the rest isn’t all that story-focused. There are a few episodes that are enjoyable standalone, but as a series, it never really amounts to anything. By the time episodes become not-bad, it’s too late. Nothing has happened before to make the audience give a damn about what’s happening.
In the 11th episode, an episode that, while cheesy, was pretty good for about half of the episode. I could see myself enjoying it… But I didn’t. All I could think was “I’m never going to like this show, am I?”
I spent the 12th episode thinking one thing. “Why is nothing happening yet?”
The 13th episode was worst. “This is all I wanted.” Finally, for maybe 18 minutes, they created a story that was more worthy of a series than the past 12 episodes were… But it’s too late.
Huh, looking back on it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show get 2/3 of the way to completion without having any semblance of direction or coherency before.
I find it hard to believe that anyone working on this show had prior experience with anime. They’d have at least recognized some of the basic fundamentals that the show managed to screw up. Were they even trying?
Every element the show introduces is quickly dropped for something else. There are more flip-flops in Charlotte than on an English beach in the Summer. Instead of deciding on what it wants to be, it just kinda jumps between everything, leaving nothing to connect the jumps together. This leaves the series feeling slow, while the individual episodes feel rushed. One minute the show is giving us an in-depth look at an idol’s music video, the next it’s giving us an unexplained flashback sequence. Sad scene? Don’t worry! We have silly little Yusa to ruin the mood! In one episode Yuu is a smug selfish jerk. An episode later he is a kid who does whatever he is told, and has less distinct personality traits than a protagonist of a poorly written 90’s dating sim. What we do see of him is never consistent with what we already know.
This strange lack of coherency shows in everything. It’s all so sudden and yet so slow. Episodes will suddenly end at inopportune times. Scenes will be randomly thrown in at painfully jarring times. BGM tracks will start to play for no reason, at the wrong time, and then will just suddenly end. Nothing is worse than hearing tense music at a time of calm. Oh, and you can bet that the animation is never timed to fit the music, or vice-versa. Who does that, right? Hah!
How does a studio that has done any work before make such basic mistakes? Rokka no Yuusha had less, and made up for it’s technical flaws well enough. Why doesn’t Charlotte?
So… What is the strong point of this show? What does it want to focus on?
Honestly, I’m not sure. I don’t know what Charlotte was trying to do. It never really had any focus, and it never really had any depth. I can’t describe the overall story much. I can’t describe the characters. I can’t describe the music. There’s nothing there. A show needs a direction before it can do anything, and Charlotte never had that… So I don’t think I’d recommend it any time soon.
4/10
Not the most in-depth, but I have 20 better shows to write about. If you want examples of this stuff, episode 6 is a hotpot.
Oh, and if you look back on the discussion posts, I was actually trying to defend this rubbish for weeks. I had hope it’d get better, but I suppose I should have taken the smart mindset and realized it’d be a waste of time.
Lately, I’ve been avoiding talking about my opinion on Charlotte as a whole, concentrating on discussions of the content instead. So let me get this over with right away:
Like several others here, I consider Charlotte to be my least favorite Key work of all, but still a pretty good anime. It’s good compared to a lot of anime out there, but it’s just not Key-tier. I kept my hopes up, expecting another masterpiece for a long time, finally giving up after episode 11.
Do I think Charlotte has faults? Yes, lots of them. Do I think that makes it a bad anime? No. Do I feel like I have to discuss my disappointment? No. Do I regret complaining about the gloomy mood in certain discussions? No. Did I like Charlotte as a whole? Yes.
So now that I got that out of the way, let’s get to the good stuff.
I’d like to adress the issue of expectations that has been discussed before. Most, if not all of us, have expected a lot from Charlotte - because Jun Maeda. We have been told it’s going to be “a typical Key story”, so we perceived it as such and judged it accordingly. For example, we expected fleshed out characters that we would love so much, we’d cry rivers whenever something sad happens to them. So we got worried when many characters still weren’t fleshed out after many episodes. But it turned out that Charlotte was in fact not “a typical Key story”. It was Maeda trying out something new. Charlotte was, in many ways, different from what we had expected it to be. And we’ve never been told what it’s actually about. Even late into the show, we still didn’t know for sure where the story was headed and what the main conflict was. There was confusion and question marks all over. We have not been spoonfed the answers. Only now, after the series has ended, do I believe to understand it: (episode 13 link) It was all about Yuu.
I will draw some comparisons here. (Little Busters & Charlotte spoilers ahead)
Like LB, Charlotte spent most of its time preparing the main character for something that would await him in the future.
As @Velunari pointed out in the episode 13 topic,
(heavy LB & Charlotte spoilers) But unlike Riki in LB, Yuu has not been deliberately trained by other characters so that he could deal with certain circumstances. Nobody planned for Yuu to go save the world all by himself. Over the course of the first 12 episodes, he has grown as a person and became someone who’s both willing to take on this huge task and capable of seeing it through.
No wonder we didn’t understand where Charlotte was headed for the most part. Yuu didn’t expect it, either. None of the characters did. So there was nobody around to give us hints. Admittedly, I do think we should’ve gotten some hints here and there, just to lessen the confusion and prevent thoughts like “Oh no, there’s not many episodes remaining and the main plot still hasn’t been introduced!”. Some people even took the panic so far as to perceive some episodes as time-wasting fillers. Fortunately, now we can confidently say that those episodes had a solid purpose.
See… If that’s what Maeda was going for, then I think he’s losing it.
If that was the point of Charlotte, then it was bad at it’s core… Even without the basic flaws that she show has, spending 12 episodes doing nothing for one rushed 20 minute episode is an awful idea.
If it was all about Yuu, they should have made Yuu a character, instead of a name with a visual.
That’s a questioning I’ve had for a long time, but… Angel Beats has six visual novels, including five to come, so I don’t think we can really judge it as a “work” yet. We’ll only be able to do that in I don’t know how many years. Thus, I guess people are judging the anime - but how is the anime better than Charlotte? We’re not just looking at the ideas here, but at a work of animation - and I don’t see how anyone can convincingly argue that AB, as an anime, was even on par with Charlotte. If Charlotte has holes, then AB has galaxies missing - it’s a hugely ambitious work they’re trying to pass as an anime, but the shortcomings were many & all clear as day. Maybe the idea is even better and the ending more memorable, but looking at the 13-episode run of both, AB is less interesting and engaging throughout, except for a few specific moments. Meaning it achieves less - it doesn’t matter all the potential it shows or how much we love the ideas, the result remains that it barely exploited its possibilites. As an anime, it’s inferior to me - although as a whole work I can imagine it to be better, but as I say it’s impossible to judge that now.
Not that I want to change your or anyone’s opinion, it’s just that many seem to share this thought, and I just don’t see the basis for it. Not as of now.
The only truly Key-tier anime out there is Clannad. Most others batter the source material, especially Little Busters. If we’re talking Key anime, Charlotte is superior to most.
(This is all pretty jumbled, maybe not even worth reading, just me attempting to explain how I came about my opinion as compared to Days. But really my main point is from the TL;DR down, so you wont miss anything by just skipping there.)
I dont think thats a very considerate way to put it, because the truth stands: there are people who enjoyed Angel Beats! more than Charlotte, and even whether or not they considered each and every technical aspect of what would make it “better,” they’re still gonna call it that: better. I happen to be one of those people, so let me respond to your arguments.
You answered yourself why AB would have so many more “holes”: its trying to cover a much larger story and encompass many more characters. Now I dont think its even possible to “measure” the amount of “holes” Charlotte had proportional to its story and characters, so I wont attempt to use that argument. But to me, what you say about “holes” is true conversely in terms of chaos/direction. In Angel Beats, the presented goal is always clear, and the story becomes about they method to reach that goal, and the revelation of a “truer” goal. Charlotte however, seems to have none of this. There isnt a goal in sight until episode 12, so what appears to be the “point” of the series only gets one episode. And the method to get to the goal that we dont know about appears ever changing and unrelated. Ep. 1 is separate from 2-5, are separate from 6-7, are separate from 8-12, are separate from 13. Even if this is all for the development of Yuu, if jumps around so much that instead of feeling like development to me it feels like a mess.
Now this “interesting and engaging throughout” part… /sigh. I guess theres nothing really to argue here. This is 1000% subjective. I guess I would just say, dont use this to back up your statement that Angel Beats is objectively not on par with Charlotte, because that really is just your opinion, and the way that Charlotte used its ideas and settings, I feel the opposite of you.
As for achieving less vs more, and exploiting possibilities. I could definitely say the same about Charlotte in terms of the latter. This can simply be backed up by how it turned out almost nothing like I expected. The few of the major questions I supposed and was interested in at the beginning which it actually answered were done so insufficiently in my eyes, and many of them weren’t answered at all. But Charlotte chose a different path, and imo it was a less interesting one.
Uhhg, that was a ton of words just to boil down to this one point…
TL;DR: “De gustibus non est disputandum!” – “There is no disputing taste!”
Basically, its an opinion, man. You cant argue that one thing is hands down better than another based on what it achieved and how much it was interesting or enjoyable or whether or not its story/characters were more complete because those are subjective things. All those words I just rambled off up there are just my disjointed thought process of why I like Angel Beats more, but really, I dont even need that, because all I need for my opinion to “be right” (read: exist) is to experience them both. Thats all the basis I need.
First of all, thank you for trying to be civilized where I’m pretty sure many want to rip my head off for this Unpopular Opinion™.
Now as I said I have no intention of changing anyone’s opinion, if they feel AB is better then I’m fine with it, this is merely a questioning. However I don’t think you should back them for calling it “better” if at the end of it, you say:
If it’s taste, then don’t use the adjective “better”, because that one is entirely objective. This might sound like nitpicking, but that makes the way you come off entirely different. If you base your argument on the notion that all of this is subjective, then don’t use just the words “better” or “worse” without giving more context precising that this is none other than your feeling.
Of course part of it is a personal feeling, and that argument does come off as entirely subjective… but there’s more to it than just that.
That I can’t see - our expectations hardly matter at all here. Ultimately what we have to look is how it turned out based on the writer’s vision of his own story (which we can only understand via analysis after the show has ended), and the criteria of “achievement” then becomes quite clear and objective. Here I say AB exploited far too little of its setting, and that’s entirely objective, because it did show what a huge setting it had. From here on out, it’s up to the show to exploit it, and the fact that it didn’t is no more than an observation. Also, you say AB’s goal is clear… of course? I mean the ending was predictable. I’m unsure whether than makes the show’s end goal “clearer” though. And, just like Charlotte, the show did undergo some changes throughout its run.
That’s one of the arguments I’d place in the “it has to do with the viewer more than the show” category. Although then we might be going back to an earlier debate on whether the subtlety was too much in the show, so I won’t really go into that. I might be willing to accept this as subjective, but seeing as the people who output this argument were ranting more than arguing…
I’ll have to disagree here. Angel Beats! was very objectively less complete, it tried to cover too many things but failed to cover the vast majority of them. Charlotte also failed to cover quite a few things, but as a result of its smaller scale, there were less things it failed to cover. It’s almost mathematical at this point - a smaller scale resulted in a more comprehensive coverage of it. Beyond that problem, it also had plot holes, but then again Charlotte also had them, although AB’s are bigger in that at least one of them is very fundamentally bothersome.
So yeah part of it is subjective, but that’s not just it - I wouldn’t come out & openly wonder why people would say AB is better than Charlotte if there wasn’t more to it than personal feelings.
Not that I don’t respect the reverse opinion or don’t believe one can’t make a good case for it, it’s more of a questioning than anything really. I don’t actually want to argue on which is better, rather I’m wondering how so many came to that conclusion, and as you explained why & now I’ve also explained why I’m on the opposite side, I don’t want to start a whole discussion on which is better & why. Your answer gave me what I was looking for.
EDIT: just wanted to add that I don’t hate Angel Beats or anything, I like it a whole lot. Just thought my words might give the wrong impression.
First of all, according to my current definition, the Charlotte anime is a key work, the Angel Beats anime is a key work, Little Busters and Clannad visual novels are key works. Their anime adaptions are not key works - they’re adaptions of such.
The reason I like the Angel Beats anime way more than Charlotte is pretty simple: Angel Beats completely blew me away. It gave me tons of feels. I didn’t even know a work of fiction was capable of eliciting so many emotions of that intensity. It was what got me into Key in the first place. Angel Beats is just really powerful. It’s incomplete, with a big chunk missing right in the middle, but the parts parts of it that we did see were doing their job wonderfully. Also, I consider AB’s setting to be the ultimate emotional setting, something Key arrived at after working on many masterpieces. A place where children’s souls arrive at after a short life of struggle and an unfair death. With just that, there’s an immense potential in the story, and even the incomplete AB anime made good use of it. Even with all its faults, the AB anime is still up there, right next to the other Key works.
Charlotte didn’t have that kind of impact to me. It didn’t leave all that much of a lasting impression compared to any other Key story. It didn’t leave behind as many fond memories. Even in terms of music: Angel Beats has “Ichiban no Takaramono”, Little Busters has “Haruka Kanata”. Memories and feels start flowing into me as soon as I hear those. No part of the Charlotte OST will be that kind of “trigger” for me. The most memorable piece would be the opening.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not blaming Charlotte for not being dramatic or emotional. It never tried to go all-out on drama. The thing is, it just didn’t leave any other comparable kind of impact, either.
So for these and several other reasons, I will always like the AB anime way more than I did that of Charlotte. It’s not an answer I arrived at after sitting down and counting the number and gravity of mistakes that the respective anime have made or anything like that. Those aren’t all that important to me.
Are we doing AB vs Charlotte now? Because frankly it’s too hard to judge which is “better” or “worse” without a set criteria, even subjectively.
Perhaps, on some levels, they could be objectively argued; I personally think that Charlotte’s entire plot was way more polished than Angel Beats’, and that’s an objective observation. But is plot really all it takes to make a series better?
There’s a reason why I have my own rating scheme, and in that scheme, AB beats Charlotte overall; but it doesn’t trump it in every aspect. Perhaps some aspects are more important to you than others, and that’s where the subjectivity comes in.
So, yeah, if you wanna argue about AB vs Charlotte, at least be specific about what aspect you are arguing on.
I disagree. You are a mad man!
Charlotte had plot?
I’d merit Angel Beats for actually having content. Sure, it eventually threw it into an abyss of “we fixed it all off-screen” but at least it had some worth. Charlotte just did random stuff each episode until the last episode, and then it was like… Oh… We only have an episode left to be something.
Angel Beats had a goal. It had a cast that, while underdeveloped, actually had some personality and chemistry. It had a fairly decent romance. It had an interesting world. It made good use of it’s initial concept. It had a good use of BGM.
I don’t like AB, but it actually did some stuff right. It’s main downfall was it’s reliance on comedy and it’s rushed final episodes.
As far as I can tell, Charlotte didn’t do anything right until it was too late.
Despite the overwhelming Western negative backlash on Charlotte after the last episode, volume 1 BD sales are top of the rankings in Japan.
Didn’t see that coming if I’m honest.
Then again everything this season seems to have sold poorly.
Haven’t DVD/blu-ray sales been getting lower and lower? It might just be in the west due to Netflix and stuff though.
Okay guys! With the series having come to a close and the final podcast around the corner, I’d like to begin calling for submissions for the Charlotte Anime Bookclub Anthology!
Much like the AIR Bookclub Anthology, we’re asking for forum members to submit voice recordings sharing their final thoughts on Charlotte. For prompts, you can try answering the questions “What does Charlotte mean to you?” or “What did you gain from watching Charlotte?”. The only real requirement I ask is that the recording be positive. Criticisms of the series are entirely valid in our discussions, but the Anthology isn’t really the place for negativity. We’re looking to end the Bookclub on a good note, so please only volunteer your thoughts if you believe you have something nice to say about the series. Try to aim for 3 minutes, and make sure your audio quality is as good as possible before sending it my way!
I’m not sure on a deadline for this yet. It may be as late as next weekend, but if we can get this done by the end of the week, I’d be elated. So, if you’re interested in contributing, please don’t delay!
What. You gave Angel Beats! a 6 on characters but every other Key work excluding Rewrite and LB, a lower score ? Angel Beats didn’t even flesh out their characters. Other than Takajo, Charlotte fleshed out their characters better than Angel Beats!
Here is my contribution: https://www.dropbox.com/s/bsi8eb7ca0p5hjg/Charlotte%20Bookclub%20Anthology%20Thoughts.mp3?dl=0
I hope it’s not too controversial. 
Is there a possibility that an interview with Jun Maeda will arise, addressing the overall negativity of response toward the anime?
