I put the challenge out to you Anime Vice maniacs to give me some topics and you did not disappoint . How could I have expect anything less? I’m going to start with that early bird AjayRaz who responded the fastest.
AjayRaz: What's the worst anime that you have ever seen and in what creative way would you dispose everything related to it?
I’ll qualify this by saying my viewing sample probably isn’t adequately wide enough to name a “worst” choice that’s really that awful in the scheme of things. I've never sought anything out without recommendations, so I haven’t plumbed the depths, so to speak. I’m also not a hater and I don’t like to dwell. I’d rather move on to something I do like than gripe about something I don't. That being said, the first anime that pops into mind as being notably bad is RECORD OF LODOSS WAR. It was the first long form series I tried to watch after VISION OF ESCAFLOWNE (this was back in the days of VHS) and I gave up after only a few episodes.
The big descriptor I got for the show before watching it was that its world strictly adhered to rules of DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, which sounded cool at first until I realized what that really meant. That is, it combined the worst tropes of bad fantasy and bad science fiction. To explain that, I find a lot of “hard science fiction” frustrating because it often feels like a slightly-dramatized physics or math problem, and this felt similarly… confined, except the rules that confined it were actually meaningless. The bad fantasy elements lay in the settings, concepts and characters being cobbled from D&D, which, in turn was cobbled from Tolkien - - a homage to a homage, without consideration to the real source. More the point, the thing was just boring, It played like a lot of online fanfiction, having the double whammy of sluggish pacing and stilted cliches while still being bound by the confines of whatever it was drawing from. It didn't feel free or alive.
But I’m not a hater, like I said. I don’t wish any ill will on LODOSS WAR, its fans or anything related to it. If I were to think some creative way to rag on it, I’d devise some D&D-style stat system to tally my problems with it. Like I'd put together a scorecard saying it had -5 pacing and -10 originality, and so on.
Anyway, watch out for the next column where I'll flip this coin and discuss the best anime I've ever seen.
Tom Pinchuk’s the writer of HYBRID BASTARDS! & UNIMAGINABLE. Order them on Amazon here & here.
