Shelf Life

Field of Wings

We Without Wings is obviously based on a game. The first five minutes are about a boy attending a high school with super-cute uniforms where all the girls want his sweet ass. Post opening credits, the show flips back and forth through different fuzzy TV channels, introducing an ensemble cast. We never get back to that high school until episode four, so at first I wrongly assumed the opening was a parody.

I liked the non-high school characters in this show. Shusuke is an obnoxious freeter who starts working at a maid café. Meanwhile, he's assigned to write a review of a book by one of his coworkers, Eriko. Meanwhile again, another, more down-beat freeter named Hayato takes on the odd job of finding high school girl Naru's lost bicycle (or did she actually hire him to go on pseudo-dates?).

Shusuke and Hayato are lousy dudes, and they inhabit a city with a seedy street life. I am interested in Japan's underbelly, like in Durarara!!, but in We Without Wings (I'm going to abbreviate Ore-tachi ni Tsubasa wa Nai as ONTWN from here on out), the cool stuff is counterbalanced by irksome game-like scenarios. For example, there's a gang fight in episode three, but you have to suffer through crap like the eternally annoying Naru needlessly stripping at a manga café first.

This is a show with surprising multiple personalities; episode four contains a long (and humorous) sequence set in a fantasy world complete with orcs. As we learn, some of the male protagonists are knights in a crazy alternate dimension where everyone is named after birds. Eventually all of these crazy arcs come together, but it's a spoiler to say how.

Our high school hero, Takashi, is occasionally sucked out of school to save his kingdom. That may literally be the case, but I prefer another reading of this show; perhaps Takashi is addicted to online RPGs and skips school to go on raids. Maybe Shusuke works in an ordinary restaurant and only imagines the waitresses as hot young things. Hopefully Naru is a figment of Hayato's imagination.

Regular readers of this column familiar with ONTWN will naturally assume that I found Alice, the goth-loli kid, offensive. Alice is a foreign girl with an elementary school backpack who continually draws attention to her age, saying things like, “the guys in this country are generally pedophiles.” Indeed, I'm glad Alice said that, because I'm exactly the kind of foreigner who has started to raise an eyebrow about characters like Alice. I suspect Alice is a tongue-in-cheek attempt by the creators of ONTWN to address my concerns. I find Alice easier to take than most underage girls included as stock characters in a cast of female stereotypes (she lacks subtext).

Overall, I found the unapologetically blatant nature of ONTWN refreshing. I hate it when pornography is too softcore; ONTWN has panty removal before the first commercial break. Ketchup and mayonnaise squirt suggestively from episode one. Episode nine features an actual sex scene (albeit censored heavily).

In the end, this show is flushable on three fronts: it's incredibly low budget, it's tasteless (shooting female characters from the neck down for a whole scene…), and I could never re-watch this or sanely recommend it to anyone. Episode three is one of the cheapest things I've seen in a long time, with as few mouth movements as possible and Xeroxed-looking black and white city shots thrown in that look more budget-friendly than artsy. The editing attempts to cover up weak writing, but the first half of the show winds up a jumbled mess. As secrets get revealed, the show becomes more coherent, and even endearing… well, it might be endearing if it weren't for Naru's wretched whining.

ONTWN is a glorious failure on so many fronts. Once in a while, there's brilliant comedy (episode seven at about 5:45), or an interesting concept, or a character I actually like, but it's all caught up in an uneven web of crap. I can't even imagine what it must be like to play the ONTWN game.[TOP]