Sayonara Lara

Sayonara Lara was a show that I remembered seeing the trailer for and thinking “woah, this show looks really cool!” I loved the colouring and really liked the animation that was shown. Full disclosure, I’m not an artist by any means so I won’t be able to offer much insight from my own mind other than “I think the show was very pretty!”

But of course shows/stories are much more than just the visuals and presentation! I watched this show with a friend who like me enjoys yuri, and of course it being quite the popular seasonal show we ended up watching it ongoing (which is rare, since I tend to prefer to watch things all at once).

It ended and as expected, the ending sparked a lot of opinions about the show. I’m a pretty moderate person in the sense that I think everyone is absolutely free to like or dislike a show because like I’ve mentioned before in previous posts, how media speaks to everyone is different! And this is all to say that the following is simply my opinion on the show as a whole, as well as my more general thoughts about how I feel about anime originals.

To be blunt and get it out of the way, I think the ending was disappointing. And this is not just because of the sort of ending it is in regards to Mari’s and Lara’s relationship, but rather more because I felt the ending was rushed and how they tried to get there wasn’t done properly with the time they had.

If I take a step back and purely think about what I thought the show ended up, I don’t mind the idea. The idea that Lara is constantly told “you GOTTA find true love Lara, everything depends on YOU finding true love” evolving into Lara going “you know what? fuck this” and doing her own thing, I actually like that idea!

Unfortunately, the execution of that idea to me is what lacked greatly. In general, I found the pacing of the show to be a little… strange.

I mentioned it to my friend when I finished but I felt that the show was both simultaneously too long, and too short. Too long because the show was so focused on showing Lara trying to find her true love, everyone telling her “you GOTTA find true love” (especially with Grace’s backstory near the end), that for just the ending episode to not be about that felt too abrupt for me to enjoy. Too short in the sense that IF this was really what the show was going for, I think there could’ve been more time to develop this. This was made very apparent because the last episode’s flash forward again, felt quite abrupt to me and I didn’t think they did a good job at that pivot.

In some ways, I felt that if the show was a 2 hour movie instead where they had to focus on that theme, I think it could’ve been done better. Or, if it was a 2 season show where they had the time to really develop it then it could’ve also been done better.

Because another issue I had with the show is that I felt Mari’s character didn’t get the attention and care I would’ve liked to have seen. Her character was kind of front loaded and then she basically became an observer for the rest of the show until the end that I would’ve preferred it if there was more to her and Lara. The show’s focus was on Lara obviously, but I definitely think their relationship could’ve been better paced throughout the show to really build up that dynamic. In some ways, and perhaps controversially, I think it could’ve been interesting to entirely build up Lara’s romance with Mari and still ultimately decide that this isn’t what she wanted for herself.

There were a lot of episodes focused on the backstories for other characters which again, I think is GOOD, but because of the limited episode count for the show, I almost felt like the screentime could’ve been spent in other ways. Hence again, my comment before about too long and too short.

I will also say I personally felt like this was a possibility from the start because with all the marketing and everything, I always wondered “did they really intend for this to be a yuri show?” in the sense that people wanted it to be that is. I think a lot of the fanart definitely added to people wanting it to be (and I enjoyed said fanart) at least. Maybe I’ve just been burned too many times in the past haha.

Now, if you somehow made it this far, this is actually a lead in to my ramble posting about how I feel about seasonal anime (and things in this vein, even including manga!) as a whole. Because this is not my first time being disappointed with an original anime’s ending, and I’m sure it won’t be the last! Now everything here is extraordinarily subjective, and just my opinion and I don’t actually have a knowledge as to how the industry works.

But I’ve always felt that having a cap of roughly 12-13 episodes for a season to be very… rough. Unless you’re a very big name (to my understanding) it’s pretty rare for an anime original show to deviate from this episode name, at most I think I’ve seen some be 10-11, and some be around the 15-16 mark I believe. My point being that anime shows tend to have a pretty fixed run time.

I think this can work fine when it comes to adaptions. Because you know how much source material there is, you can find a start point, an end point, then base your season around that. Hurrah!

However with an original story, I think having that fixed length is very limiting. Lara to me is a good example of that. In some ways you could argue that having this known limit lets you know how to pace your story better, but I don’t think that’s always true. I don’t have much knowledge specifically as to how anime production is like (my memories of Shirobako are quite old at this point), but I feel like with ongoing things, there are some things you can really only tell as you write the story itself. It’s not like publishing a book where you only present the finished product. It’s an ongoing thing! Maybe as the weeks go by you realize you need to touch up on things, or you need to fix XYZ, or ABC, and being constrained with this episode count in my opinion doesn’t help with the quality of a story.

There are many original shows I’ve seen where I feel like this plays out in a similar way. The first few episodes are very strong because they have a strong hook and introduction. But as the show goes on, the pacing starts to falter, whether it be too fast or too slow, and by the time we get to the end it’s ultimately disappointing to me.

Why does this happen? From what I can guess, it’s likely a production/money thing. It helps keep costs within expectations if you know exactly how long a show is going to go for. If it does insanely well, well you can think about extending it later. This is again, great for adaptions. Not so great for an original story where that doesn’t work the same way.

As someone who reads a lot of manga, I’ve also read a lot of manga that get axed or canceled or rushed to an ending. I’ve also seen the inverse where a manga gets dragged on too long.

It’s something that I’ve always felt is a limitation to this format. I’m not a proficient storywriter by any means. But when I write for fun or write for my own enjoyment, the control I have over how long it is lets me dictate the pace to be something (to me) that is good. However, I’ve also written under rulesets (? probably not the best way of framing it) with word counts (both limitations and minimums), and those are much harder. Because then I have to plan my story to be within this limitation, and I can feel that it limits what I want to say, or it forces me to say more than I want.

It really hurts when reading a manga that I enjoy and seeing it either get rushed to an ending or even sometimes drag on far longer than I think it should have. I believe Yu Yu Hakusho was an example of such, at least one where (as far as I’m aware) the author said that the manga continued due to its popularity.

It would be naive for me to say that I think every writer should have the exact amount of chapters or episodes they need to tell the story they want. Of course it’s what I’d like (presumably with editor critique so writers don’t get too crazy), but I understand that these things cost time and money. There’s a lot more I can say about how in some ways it must be hard to want to write a story, but be forced to tell it in a certain way to make sure it sells, but that’s a whole other post of its own.

Whenever a series I like reaches a conclusion that I felt like the author truly wanted to get to, sometimes it feels like a miracle lol. All the more better if I also liked it. Do I feel that in Sayonara Lara? It’s honestly hard to say. Like I mentioned before, while I could see the vision they wanted to achieve, it just didn’t feel like they executed it properly. Whether that was a fault of the seasonal anime format or not, I can’t say for certain, but it sure feels like it was a limiting factor to some degree.

Anyways this ramble has gone on long enough. This is also to say, please support your favourite series! I’ve read too many axed manga! You would be surprised to see how many of them usually have the latest chapter for free that you can skim and go to the end and like the chapter! It helps! Let authors tell the whole story they want to tell, and give them the ability to do it (though special shoutouts to the mangakas that get axed, then continue the story anyways through self publishing).