While Jessa and I have been watching Scrapped Princess lately, I have been watching Boogiepop Phantom by myself.  This is an older anime that I watched right around the time that I saw Neon Genesis: Evangelion and Trigun, and really shaped my expectations around the kinds of things one gets from this form of entertainment.  Watching it again now, over ten years later, my perception of it has changed somewhat, but I still really enjoyed it.

The main thing that I like about Boogiepop Phantom is the serialization of strange goings on that is presented somewhat without explanation.  It is then the responsibility of the viewer to catch on to the explanations when they do appear and synthesize to understand the bigger picture.  While I can think of a number of shows that have done this, Boogiepop Phantom is the only one that comes to mind where this is weaved together with a series of first-person vignettes (Lost sort of did this with the flashbacks, but less with things that were occurring on the island).

These vignettes start off with a fairly level playing field in terms of knowledge, but at some point the story really escalates with some of the core people involved as the focus, at which point some explanations come a lot faster than the questions.  Critically, though, this is still done as point-of-view, and we still don’t see the point-of-view of those directly involved (Boogiepop, the detective, and Manticore).  This allows the show to answer some questions, but not all of them, and gives it a lasting quality that makes it worth watching again.

Overall, watching it was a fun trip down memory lane, and sated my want for a mystery-horror show for a few weeks.  Next on my list in this genre is Stranger Things, so we’ll see if it lives up to the hype.