Every once in a while, I’ll plop down on the couch with my dad and binge watch a few seasons of a show. We’ve been doing this every so often for years. It started with Buffy the Vampire Slayer when I was a young kid, and I still hold crazy nostalgia for that show (my step mom could never handle the admittedly mild spookiness). We usually watch live action sci-fi shows, as that’s something we both tend to like. While I’ve really enjoyed shows like Westworld and Ascension (seriously, go watch Ascension, it’s fantastic), there’s always been something missing from them: animation.
I LOVE animation, and greatly prefer it over live action. Unfortunately, my dad doesn’t like it much. Still, I recently convinced him to sit down with me at watch Netflix’s B: The Beginning. We watched through it, and both liked it. The animation was fantastic, it had a lot of impressive background detail to add realism, the characters were fun, and the story… well, it was okay. It was kind of a hot mess, but whatever, it was pretty to look at, and those clown people looked cool.
After the show finished, I still wanted to watch something with him, but I also wanted to get some work done on my webcomic (honeybloom.smackjeeves.com by the way, thaaaaaanks c;). Since my dad gave B: The Beginning the vaunted compliment of “that didn’t suck,” I wanted to keep the anime train a-rolling. I can see why someone wouldn’t really like anime, so I thought, what shows don’t feel very anime-ish? What shows avoid a lot of the tropes that make people dislike the genre? On top of that, what has animation low-key enough that I can pay attention to it while working on my comic? There was only one answer: Death Note.
I read Death Note back in middle school or so, and watched part of the anime while I was in college, so I remember most of it pretty well. I never got through it, though… I stopped where most of the people who don’t finish it do. Still, it’s a really good show with a gripping story and awesome-looking death gods, so I thought maybe my dad would like it. Turns out I was right! He even stopped making snide comments about it part-way into the second episode. I asked him which he liked better, B or Death Note, and he instantly said Death Note. I had to agree.
That got me thinking about WHY Death Note is better than B. It isn’t the animation. While Death Note’s manga art is genuinely impressive, the anime’s animation really… isn’t. It’s competent, and it looks nice, but it has a lower frame rate and less motion than B. I also just like B’s character design more, including both the style and the visual flare of the characters (and how dang cute the female lead is). It’s not the voice acting. Both have unusually good voices for an English dub, and from what I remember, avoid the more stereotypical voice affectations. On top of that, B has cool magic, rad fights, and futuristic car-tanks. Shouldn’t that be more exciting?
No. It wasn’t. And I think the reason why is a genuinely good writing lesson. It’s certainly made me think about how I approach my own writing. B: The Beginning’s biggest flaw is how downright mysterious it has to make everything. Death Note is first and foremost a mystery, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Right from the beginning, you know what’s going on in Death Note. A dissatisfied teen finds a diary that kills people, tests it on some criminals, and meets a produce-loving clown god. He starts seeing himself as Jesus: Murder Edition, and ends up in a cat-and-mouse death game with unconventional heartthrob L. He gets an obsessed waifu with ghost eyes, dramatically eats potato chips, yadda yadda. While the story being told from both sides of the rivalry helps to keep things clear, there are times when certain things are left in the dark (IE the identity of the second Kira, along with a majority of the second part of the first arc). Still, even when the audience isn’t aware of the causes of events, it isn’t ever confusing.
What about B? Well… some girl is almost raped and killed by hillbillies but is rescued Red Hood style when the ugly creeps are massacred. A detective group says it’s the work of someone called Killer B, which sounds like an old Batman supervillain, and they chase after him. One of the hillbillies steals a car-tank and a pretty-boy with wings and an arm that’s a sword fights a clown on top of a train. It turns out the clown was part of some sort of secret jester agency. There’s a dirty genius and someone he loved was killed which made him quit being a genius, but he came out of retirement for… the story, I guess. Then the clowns help some weird teens fill a building with poison gas that isn’t really poison gas but everyone got to be all dramatic so hey, that was fun. Wing boy fights a clown who skateboards down the side of a building while spouting poetry and they go to fight in some water, but dirty genius knows they’ll fight there and there are candles for some reason. Very significant candles.
B’s problem is that whenever it solves one mystery, it has to introduce at least three more. Why does bird boy have a weird eye? Why did the clown he fought explode? Why is there an organization of evil clown people? Why do they have jaunty face tattoos? Why do they hate bird boy? Why does his arm turn into a sword? What are dirty genius and the mysterious doctor talking about when they talk about “back then”? That’s just a small sampling of the roughly ten billion questions you’ll have while watching B. Almost all of them are eventually answered (I’m still not sure why the clown people have tattoos, other than the fact that it looks cool), but it takes forever. The answers are pretty much piled onto the end of the show, and even then, there’s a lot of stuff that still doesn’t make sense.
The two shows also have a lot of difference in motivation and stakes. In Death Note, the characters’ motivations are very clear. Light wants to play God and make a better world by killing people, L wants to stop him because he thinks that’s wrong. These motivations are very clear and consistent, and help you understand a character’s emotions and decisions. In B things are a bit different. Bird boy, one of the main characters (that isn’t his real name, but it’s honestly just fun coming up with alternate, slightly silly names for somewhat unmemorable characters), doesn’t even know what his own motivation is, and when he remembers… it’s confusing. To me, it also wasn’t very impactful, and I didn’t understand his attachment to it. Dirty genius remembers his motivation, but it’s kept a secret from the audience. I understand part of it, but it’s still a bit convoluted, especially with how it relates to the events that play out. The cute girl, who’s the third main character, doesn’t seem to have much of a motivation. She’s just a good person, I guess.
This relates to the stakes. While I was watching Death Note, I found myself enthralled by the drama unfolding on the screen, even though I’d read the manga and watched the show. It made me think back to the moments of equivalent tension in B, which would likely be the fights. You’d think something so inherently dramatic would be more impactful, and would draw the audience in more than the psychoanalysis of a game of tennis, but that wasn’t the case at all. The most invested I felt during one of B’s fights was when bird boy was fighting the skateboarding poetry clown, and that’s just because I find her cool. She was also skateboarding down the side of a building, which is hilaaaaaarious
There are only so many ways a fight can play out. With how often people in anime beat the crap out of each other, it’s become predictable, even between a magic bird boy and a murder clown. It’s really just about who’s stronger. While Death Note’s cat-and-mouse style mind games have the same principle of competition, it has the potential to be more varied than a physical fight, and with more subtle, long-lasting results that often end up feeding into later mind games. It also feels more grounded, which I think can help an audience member relate, making them more invested not just in the outcome, but the intricacies as well.
The takeaway of all of this is that being enigmatic doesn’t always make you more interesting, and having more action doesn’t always make you more intense. This isn’t to say that B: The Beginning is a bad show. It’s a good show with some interesting elements and great animation. It might not be fair to compare it to Death Note, which is already insanely beloved (the first half, at least), but I thought that there was an interesting lesson to be learned from this comparison. So remember, kids: if you’re going to have your pretty bird boy fight a murder clown on top of a train, make sure the audience knows why.