The Hell with Planned Posts

Several weeks ago I finished watching Now and Then, Here and There and I've really wanted to talk about it with someone, and I guess that someone is my blog. Good enough.

What? Long overdue posts on Silent Hill and Ghost in the Shell? Several more Steam games? What is this nonsense you are going on about?
Anyway, NTHT is a deconstruction of the whole 'kid travels to another world' plot. Shu the protagonist meets a strange girl Lala Ru one day after school, only for soldiers to appear from nowhere and try to kidnap Lala Ru. Things get messy and then everyone returns to where the soldiers and Lala Ru came from: millions of years into the future.

The world is a desolate wasteland, the Sun has gone supernova, and Shu finds himself in Hellywood, the stronghold of an army run by a mad king. Always an optimist, Shu vows to protect Lala Ru and escape from Hellywood.

One of this series' strengths is that it makes good use of the rule 'show not tell.' For every detail that is explained directly, several are left implied. What's even better, is that for the earlier episodes, even the morality of various people and groups is left unspoken. Sure Shu does act baffled and accuse people of being crazy, but he's the fish out of water; he's from a functional society and they are on a post-apocalyptic deathworld.
I personally found this style refreshing as I've come to expect present day morals forced into settings where things should be different. Unfortunately in the later episodes of NTHT the character of Sister is brought in, who is an out of place voice of reason. And then the audience is told that violence leads to violence, children shouldn't be soldiers, you shouldn't abort a child because you were raped, no one should be sacrificed for the greater good, and so forth. Gee I didn't notice when we left the endless desert and returned to present day Earth.

Something else that bothered me were the main characters Shu and Lala Ru. Ordinarily I tend to either dislike or just ignore the central characters as the outliers often are more interesting and not constricted by plot. In NTHT's case, I actually have slightly more solid reasons than usual.
Shu is a deconstruction of the 'knight in shining armour' archetype, which means that he still has all the traits of said type; the entire series kicks off with him risking his life for a girl he just met and doesn't know until halfway in the series. His limitless optimism and ability to take a tremendous amount of physical abuse strains my suspension of disbelief. How can you empathise with a character who shrugs off torture and whose argument against someone's attempt at suicide is that he promises things will get better (they don't (repeated)).
Where Shu is unbelievable, for me Lala Ru is outright unlikeable. She has the ability to summon and control water, a powerful ability in a desert with a supernova overhead. Using this power weakens her each time though, so we the viewer are left to ponder how much of sacrifice must this young girl make, if any.
Later however, Lal Ru mentions that she is much older than she looks (decades, centuries, millennia I can't remember how long), and this destroys an possible empathy with the character. Why should we feel bad about a character shortening their life when they have already outlived a normal human? And when she does occasionally use this ability, Lala Ru doesn't seem to be too efficient with it.
Further more she doesn't seem to actually take much initiative in helping herself. Years of experience and supernatural powers should make it rather easy to escape captivity but apparently she'd rather just leave it to Shu.

Those issues aside Now and Then, Here and There is an excellent series (to the point that I actually feel bad about partially spoiling some of the events). At about a dozen episodes it doesn't get slowed by filler and side stories. If you can tolerate the bleak tone then it is well worth watching.