The Problem with Plot Summaries: An Indelicate Balance.
There will be spoilers.
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Before each season begins, most seasonal watchers check out summaries of the shows that’ll be airing. After all, if the summary says something like “this is the story of a boy who loves raising chickens” and it’s tagged as a drama or slice-of-life, if you aren’t interested in chicken-raising, there’s a pretty good chance you can give this show a miss. And, with 40 or so new shows each season, most of us can’t afford to give each one a try on the off-chance that that chicken-raising show turns out to be oddly amazing. (Yakitate!! Japan suffers from this. It’s difficult to read the summary “anime about baking bread” and feel excited, even if it is a fantastic show.)
There are other considerations, of course. If it’s a sequel, you can easily decide whether to watch it or not based on whether you saw the previous season and happened to like it. If you answered no to either question, you can feel pretty safe in your decision not to watch the show’s continuation. (I thought Rewrite would be an exception to this, but it really wasn’t.) Or perhaps you, like me, find the art style vitally important. I can usually cross off five or six anime a season due to this without any worries. After all, if it’s really amazing, someone on /r/anime will post a gif to convince people to watch it. It’s kind of inevitable.
Or perhaps you’re interested in the studio that produced the show. Maybe you’ll watch anything by KyoAni but give A-1 shows a miss. You might care a lot about how hyped up a show is and decide to either watch or ignore a show that everyone’s talking about simply because you like or dislike hype. I won’t judge. Hype is well-capable of ruining an otherwise good series after all, but it can also bring a series to your attention that you otherwise would never have noticed.
Whatever you use to narrow down the search initially though, you’ll probably find yourself looking over the anime summaries on whatever site you prefer. I personally use Anichart, but there are plenty of others available. /r/anime usually has a post at some point with an image detailing all the upcoming shows as well.
For some shows it’s easy. Anime News Network’s summary of Hinako Note is entirely unproblematic:
Hinako is poor at speaking and lives in a rural part of Japan. She wants to improve her speech to be able to talk to people freely, so in high school, she transfers schools to Tokyo and plans to join a theater club. When she arrives, it turns out her boarding house is a secondhand bookstore, and a girl who eats books lives there.
You get a basic idea of what the show’s about without finding out any potential spoilers. Everything in this summary is revealed in the first half of the first episode.
Other shows might be a little too simplistic in their description. Anichart’s summary of Little Witch Academia is simply:
TV series of Little Witch Academia.
Really? I never would have guessed.
But beyond these types of summaries lies a third type, which ranges from alright to utterly rage-inducing, and a summary’s place on that scale is somewhat subjective. This is where things become problematic, and where the spoilers start.
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This is your last chance to stop reading if you don’t want spoilers. Skip to the next emboldened title and try your luck there. Please assume the same for all following headings, because I won’t be repeating this warning.
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Who Here Has Watched School-Live!?
Great. Now how many people went into that show expecting just your everyday regular cute girls doing cute things (CGDCT)? If a summary sells that shows as that, then that summary has failed. Because School-Live! isn’t just a show for people who like CGDCT, and indeed, people who want that may well dislike this show. On the other hand, there’s an entire group of people who may like this show based on its other genre who would never know to watch it based on that description.
Because gosh darn it, School Live is a zombie apocalypse anime.
Even so, people defend the right to sell School-Live! as just CGDCT because the zombie apocalypse aspect is a plot twist, and plot twists don’t work if you know about them going in. But it’s not like you can say “this is a show about cute girls doing cute things but with a twist,” because that’s almost as spoilery as just plain admitting the zombies.
Honestly, with School-Live!, the “twist” is revealed so early on I don’t really count it, but I’ve seen enough upset fans to know that opinion isn’t universal.
What About Those Recent Magical Girl Shows?
You know what I’m talking about: Puella Magi Madoka Magica (Madoka Magica), Yuki Yuna is a Hero (YuYuYu), and Magical Girl Raising Project (MGRP). They’re all shows that take the love conquers all and justice leads to happiness ideal and deny it. Madoka Magica kicked off the trend, and YuYuYu rode on its coattails, playing off both the usual magical girl expectations and the expectations Madoka Magica created. (This was, I think, the best of these shows to be watching as it aired, since the viewers were so prepped for everything to go straight to hell.) MGRP is, I think, more inspired by the novel Battle Royale than Madoka Magica, but it too creates a world where being a magical girl is not all sunshine and happiness. It’s suffering.
Trying to sell someone on any one of these shows without mentioning the twist though is difficult unless that person’s an avid magical girl fan. And if they are, again, there’s a decent change they’ll end up not enjoying these shows unless they also happen to be a fan of the despair genre.
How About Steins;Gate?
Tell me. How would you describe Steins;Gate?
The typical scenario is something like “it’s a time travel show about a chuunibyo guy who… well, watch it.” Because what more can you say without spoiling Mayuri’s series of deaths? But a good number of people struggle to watch this show, hanging on until her first death at the end of episode 12 only because everyone says the show’s great. Everyone says, “Well, if you’re not liking it, just give it 12 episodes.” Then suddenly, episode 12 ends, and they understand. This isn’t a time travel anime. This is a suffering anime. And I don’t know what it is, but it seems like most of us are suckers for suffering.
But isn’t that kind of terrible? Who wants to watch the entire first half of a two-cour show just to find out that they’re the exception — that they don’t suddenly find themselves loving it, as everyone assured them they would?
More and more as I write this, I’m beginning to think that “suffering” really should be a tag. It’d help with most of these problems.
And Yet Weirdly No One Cares About the Re: Zero Spoilers
Despite posts being deleted over revealing trivial matters as discussed in the above shows, apparently no one cares at all about spoiling Subaru’s constant deaths. Even though School-Live!’s spoilers are just as integral to the plot as Subaru’s Return from Death, people who reveal the former are condemned, while it’s more or less a given that the latter will be revealed.
Why?
What did Re: Zero do so differently that no one cares about so-called spoilers for it? Don’t get me wrong. I think calling the School-Live! spoiler a spoiler is stupid in the first place, and I likewise don’t see any issue in revealing Subaru’s circumstances. But they’re both the same level of spoiler, so if you’re going to get upset about one, you should absolutely get upset about the other. But that isn’t the case.
But, whatever the reason, this does make summarizing Re: Zero a heck of a lot easier. You can go ahead and say that it’s a show about a guy transported to another world in which, every time he dies, he revives at some set point.
SukaSuka, or, the Anichart Spoilers Don’t Get Better Than This
Random Lord of the Rings (LotR) spoiler, in case you’re one of the very very few people who doesn’t know how that ends.
Five hundred years have passed since the humans went extinct at the hands of the fearsome and mysterious ‘Beasts’. The surviving races now make their homes up on floating islands in the sky, out of reach of all but the most mobile of Beasts.
Only a small group of young girls, the Leprechauns, can wield the ancient weapons needed to fend off invasions from these creatures. Into the girls’ unstable and fleeting lives, where a call to certain death could come at any moment, enters an unlikely character: a young man who lost everything in his final battle five hundred years ago, the last living human awakened from a long, icy slumber.
Unable to fight any longer, Willem becomes the father that the girls never had, caring for and nurturing them even as he struggles to come to terms with his new life, in which he feels the pain of helplessly waiting for his loved ones to return home from battle that his ‘Daughter’ once felt for him so long ago. Together, Willem and the girls gradually come to understand what family means and what is truly worth protecting.
How many spoilers can you fit into a description? I can only assume that, if they were responsible for summarizing LotR, they’d say something like “A hobbit throws a ring into a volcano.”
Not that I blame them. If I had to try to describe SukaSuka without spoilers, the best I could manage would be something like, “It goes from a not very happy place to despair to even more despair. But it’s still kind of low-key.” Not exactly a useful summary.
That said, despite numerous spoilers, I don’t think Anichart’s summary was actually badly done. It doesn’t reveal the most important pieces of information. The only issue I have with it is that, again, it really needs a “suffering” tag.
Meanwhile, with Rokudenashi…
On the other hand, Anichart’s description for Rokudenashi Majutsu Koushi to Akashic Records actually manages to maintain the difficult balance between revealing too much and too little perfectly.
In the “action fantasy” story, Glenn is a part-time teacher at a magic school who is inclined to write “self-study” on the blackboard and then take a nap. One of his students, Sistina, gets angry and challenges him to a duel and he is easily defeated. However, when a terrible incident threatens the school, Glenn shows intense dedication to protecting his students.
That is how it’s done. “Intense dedication.” Do we know anything extra? No. Not really. We know that Glenn-sensei can be provoked into giving a shit, but that’s it. This summary doesn’t reveal that “oh, by the way, Glenn Radars was an assassin code-named The Fool from ages 15 to 18.” It doesn’t say, “by the way, he’s totally capable of beating the shit out of the bad guys.” It also doesn’t say, “This is a show about a lazy teacher and his students.” (While, like many summaries, technically correct, this totally fails to provide any reason to watch the show for those who want more than a random lazy teacher.) This summary belies his utterly useless persona given in episode one. Maybe you don’t know that he can actually be pretty badass, but you know that the carefree shitty attitude he displays in episode one won’t continue.
In the end, I don’t know how to fix the problem of summarizing anime (or any other story really). Depending on the show, it may be easy or impossible to give a summary that both avoids spoiling anything and gives an accurate summation viewers can use to judge the show. And no matter what you do, there’s going to be someone who’s unhappy. But at the very least, I hope you can somewhat empathize with the people writing summaries. I know finding out twists or spoilers (even if they’re revealed in the first episode) in the middle of the summary can be frustrating, but try to consider whether you could do any better at maintaining this balance.
