And another thing re: Star Driver
Some people seem to have a hard time following the plot. And indeed the pacing is sort of frantic, particularly in the first episode. But essentially what the show does is lay out a bunch of tropes you already know. You don’t really need explicit context because you bring context enough to the show.
I mean, we get the hotblooded, justice-filled hero from out of town. He even mentions his now-absent mentor, in this case a grandfather. We know that guy. He’s the Hero at about monomyth stage four (going on five). We get the cheerful love interest, the stoic and reasonable friend — we know them, too. Then about halfway through episode one the show drops the evil organization on us, and we’re bombarded with bits and pieces of villainous scheming — but, really, our understanding is rooted in the fact that this is the evil organization, and, broadly speaking, they could only possibly want one thing, right? Hell, we even know that town with a secret that everyone but the protagonist knows. Of course we still can’t grasp the precise arcano-mechanics of the mecha, the island maidens, and so on, but that’s not the sort of thing we’d expect to see explained fully in the first two episodes anyway.
I guess one could make a case vs. Star Driver on the grounds that it expects too much of its viewers. Surely not everyone can just put everything together from prior knowledge — and, yeah, that seems to be a problem here, but I do think that the pacing works well enough that you can miss something (as I’m sure I have) and still have fun with it.
What do we call this kind of storytelling? The term I’ve been using is advanced, meaning simply that it’s a story that expects its consumers to consume with the skillset of seasoned consumers, people who do stories with some frequency and a certain degree of thoughtfulness. But that definition really rubs me the wrong way. I don’t want to sound so self-satisfying. We might call it a database narrative, but this kind of story appears often enough outside the database as defined as an anime/manga thing. So if you have a better idea, let me know.
(tl;dr it’s about giant robots fighting)
