Two weeks (and three episodes) in, I’m still not quite sure what to make of Boogiepop wa Warawanai.  Part of that is more or less by design, as this series is pretty reticent in offering up what it’s really on about.  I don’t think that’s so much the staff assuming viewers will have familiarity with the LNs and earlier anime (though that may be a part of it) but simply the stylistic nature of the series.  This is what a lot of sci-fi anime were like 20 years ago for the most part – minimalist, opaque and quite detached.

If one followed the discussion about Boogiepop after last week’s premiere, a lot of it focused on pre-post-morteming why it wasn’t going to work with modern audiences (a topic I briefly speculated on in my First Impressions post), but pretty much universally assuming it wasn’t going to work in the first place.  There’s great irony in this – modern sci-fi anime is dominated by adaptations of modern light novels and games, most of which bombard the viewer with exposition by explanation from the opening bell and tell you explicitly what characters are thinking most of the time.  Not only was Boogiepop a light novel, it was one of the first and most influential – but a style of light novel that is now almost extinct.

As for myself, I suspect the me of 10 or 15 years ago would have had an easier time immersing myself in this series than I do now.  But even then I tended to like best the sci-fi anime that were a little warmer (or hotter) in tone.  Still, on an intellectual level Boogiepop wa Warawanai is certainly an interesting proposition, and the clinical depiction of events elicits different emotional reactions that I’d almost forgotten could be part of the anime-viewing experience.  I’m with the consensus in thinking Boogiepop isn’t going to go over very well with today’s viewers (I think it could actually do better in the West than in Japan) but I do enjoy the trip down memory lane watching it takes me on.

The focus of this week’s story is kyuudou boy Tanaka Shirou (Ichikawa Aoi) and the class president, Niitoki Kei (Shimoji Shino).  They’re an interesting pair, actually, though Shirou’s heart already belongs to the murdered Kinoshita-san (who he’s searching for this week).  Niitoki and Shirou are somewhat more relatable as characters than the cast last week, at least for me – maybe we’re allowed to get closer to them on purpose.  Tanaka-kun is the boy Boogiepop bonds with this week (I don’t know if that’s going to be a regular pattern or not), and he ends up helping Boogiepop in taking out Manticore and Saotome (who shows a bit of gallantry in sacrificing himself for Manticore, though it’s in vain).

One observation I had after the dual premiere was that this premise seemed like an allegory for man’s inhumanity to man, and indeed if Nagi’s words are to be believed that may already be playing out.  Apparently (or at least allegedly) Echoes is an Angel, sent to Earth to decide whether mankind is good or evil and whether it should be destroyed.  Shirou and Niitoki’s plucky courage seems to have rubbed Echoes the right way, but he can’t have thought much of what he saw from Saotome – gee, could humanity possibly be both good and evil?   Echoes sacrifices himself too, for Nagi – after Saotome has poisoned him and slit her throat, Echoes “converts his body to information and returns to the source“, stopping along the way to give Nagi enough life force to survive her fatal injury.

I don’t know if that bit about Echoes is true, or if so what that would make Boogiepop – which is fine, and I don’t know what it not being true would make Boogiepop either.  Again, at this stage of the game it’s all murky by design – welcome to 2000 – and even the timeline in these first three episodes is all over the map.  I remain more than interested enough to tag along, not invested enough to commit – we’ll see if that changes as the hidden facets of this stone start to reveal themselves.