I love food. Much unlike my little sister I’ve never been a picky eater, and I’m kinda notorious as the sarlacc of my friend group — a bottomless pit that will eat anything left on a dining hall plate. But I’m an LA kid born and raised, and difficult seafood – crabs, lobsters, steamed clams – has always been a mystery to me. So when my girlfriend and I decided one night to go to Boiling Crab, I was a bit nervous. I figured I’d just get a fried fish meal and call it a day, but I was in a weird place and for whatever reason when the server looked at me I blurted out that I’d have the King Crab legs.
Couldn’t be that bad, right?
Narrator: It was that bad.
No matter how much we love and embrace new experiences, they are still unfamiliar and strange. Whenever you’re thrown into a completely new world, it’s nice to have a familiar foothold or two. You cannot understand the solace I felt when after hacking indiscriminately at crab joints (are they elbows? knees?), I reached the bottom of the bag to find sausages and corn – like small, cajun-flavored angels after the terrified frenzy that proceeded.
Anime and food – stop me if I’ve said this before – have a lot in common. We generally look down upon clichés and tropes, but they work. Like a spoonful of sugar (cajun sausages), they help the medicine (crab legs) go down. The reason I keep watching anime is to see something refreshing, but if every element is new and alien to the viewer, it becomes much harder to draw them in and build emotional connections. Of course, filling your show with familiar tropes and plot points will only result in a boring final product, but audiences have a pretty good nose for that. Too often though I see people bash any element that isn’t fresh and unique. It’s all about the balance – without a solid foundation of familiarity, your crab becomes inaccessible and stale.
(There’s a bunch of different ways to do this, as usual. You can make your world familiar and have some crazy, out-of-this-world shit going on, or you can set a more traditional story in a wacky futuristic world, or you can make all the characters irredeemable psychopaths. have fun with it.)
Stranger Things absolutely nails this balance. It lures you in with enough references direct and indirect to sell you on the world and characters before hitting you with some absolutely sublime thrills. In season 2, Max complains to Lucas that his story is derivative and lacks originality – a comment that could be aimed right back at the Netflix original. And yeah, the plot is nothing new – the entire lab escape scene is a glorious send up of the first Jurassic Park – but the characters are brilliantly written and acted and the show’s overall themes are a breath of fresh air.
P.S. Do you know how expensive King Crab Legs are? Because I do and honestly there are some things you’re better off not knowing
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