This Ugly Yet Beautiful World

This Ugly Yet Beautiful World:  C++

For all my defense of it, this is the best image I can find.

I really do try to avoid Nerd Rage.  It's an embarrassing phenomenon that happens when those of us obsess over things find someone else who obsess over them out of phase with our own obsession.  I say this in my defense in case anyone finds out that I was behind the rather heavy-handed edits to a couple of Tropes pages discussing This Ugly Yet Beautiful World, which I'm rewatching now.

Some backgrounds.  After I first watched Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, I decided that Studio Gainax could do no wrong and that I should watch everything they've ever produced.  This led me to watch some really good series that I would have otherwise missed and some series that are really just about breasts that I would have otherwise missed.  This Ugly Yet Beautiful World is somewhere in between these two.  It's a series with a shameless amount of casual nudity, but dismissing it as a series about nothing but fan service is completely missing the point.  It's also a story about emotion, hope, struggling against fate and pain of love.

If that sounds a bit like Neon Genesis Evangelion, it should.  Now, I fucking loved Evangelion, and while I will not say that any series that is like it is equally good, but I do think that Eva and series that are actually deeply emotional are incredibly difficult to appreciate if you're unwilling to open yourself to a serious series.  I'll go ahead and add that a series that has an awful lot of fan service is less likely to be taken seriously.  However, I don't think any of these truly justify being completely dismissive of a series that actually has well-written emotional complexity.  Which is what the TVTropes page was before I took my pen to it.

Now, I don't think that This Ugly Yet Beautiful World (jeez that's getting to be a mouthful) is an absolutely stellar series.  I rate it right on the line between C+ and B.  I guess I'll be satisfied with calling it a C++ (ha ha, and now my blog will show up on a lot of the wrong searches).  I guess I just can't stand to see something not given it's fair shake in a place like TVTropes, which, humorous though it may be, is a place people go for information, not to hear things degraded like a high school classroom.

And that's enough defensive rambling from me.  My recommendation:  It's a worthwhile bittersweet romance with a slight sci-fi bent fueled by pseudo-paleontology and downright made up biology.  If you can't stand gratuitous (if justified) nudity it's probably not for you, but even if the idea of a Magical Girlfriend show doesn't appeal to you, give it a chance, it explores the trope and its ramifications rather than simply being an occurrence of it.  It's only 12 episodes, not much of a time commitment, and it's a complete story with an ending and everything, but it's a story that knows what it's really about.

"I'm thankful, for things that are ordinary and obvious."
        -Hikari