Spice and Wolf holds an odd place in my listing of Shows I Have Seen And Enjoyed. On the one hand, it has a lot of elements that would otherwise raise it to a Highly Recommended slot, shared by luminaries such as Princess Tutu. Horo is attractive, perhaps even cute, although in a more refined and less sugary way than that descriptor would suggest. The art is clean, and while I can see several occasions of slightly off-model animation, these are never jarring enough to bring me out of the story (unlike Seven Arcs's sins with the Lyrical Nanoha series and Asura Cryin). There are plenty of little touches which give me a little thrill of satisfaction every time they happen, like the way Horo's headwear twitches when she moves her ears.

On the other hand, after I finished watching the last episode, I had absolutely no desire to rewatch the show ever again. And I don't know why.

It took me a long while to craft together this blog post, since I didn't know where to start. (To be clear, however, it hasn't actually been that long; I don't have as much time as I did to watch anime, so Spice and Wolf had been my "I should watch this because of the anime blog" series.) I should be loving Spice and Wolf, but I don't. It doesn't have a lot of aspects I would actively dislike, such as crushing angst and long self-pitying soliloquoys, but I finished the show with an odd sense of discontent. It was as though despite the high production values, I found the show wanting, somehow.

I still don't know precisely why I feel that way, but I do have several ideas which don't seem obviously wrong. Chief of these is the assertion that Spice and Wolf did not meet my expectations.

Now, when people use that phrase, often they mean that it was not good enough, or it fell short somehow. In this case, however, the show may or may not have surpassed my ideas of quality, but it went wide off the mark nevertheless. I had a certain idea of what the show would be, or at least what I wanted to take from that show, but this idea was defeated.

This may be because Spice and Wolf is not, relatively speaking, a new show. Everyone I spoke to about it mentioned surprise at the heavy emphasis on economic theory, to the point of almost being educational. And so I went in expecting a lighter, fluffier, and certainly shorter anime version of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle with a cute wolfgirl. Obviously it would not be as grand in depth and scope, but the applied examples of currency speculations were a great deal more interesting when placed in the context of a society in the midst of a scientific revolution, despite the political upheavals at the time muddying the waters. (I realize that things have not changed much since then.)

What I got was a show which certainly tried to introduce a few concepts, but got sidetracked often by personal drama that seemed, to me, to be shoehorned in for the sake of some action.

It's weird: I could accept Horo's nature of being a wolf spirit taking human form as "normal", or at least normal enough not to interfere in the economic theory. Her superior (and supernatural) senses can provide more information than Lawrence would otherwise have access to, but that is fine, since a free market would theoretically work best with total knowledge of information. (This never happens in practice, which is one reason why economic theories never work as well when applied to real life. Ask ten economists, get fifteen answers…)

But when she takes an active hand in influencing the story by turning into her Big Bad Wolf form, or when her supernatural nature and background affects the plot significantly (the last couple of episodes, for example), it takes me out of economic theory and dumps me into a fantasy adventure. I would actually enjoy fantasy adventures in another context, but the transition here is a little abrupt.

It also felt a little odd that certain concepts, mostly to do with characterizations (how shepherds are used to fending off wolves, for instance), are repeated several times, presumably in order to hammer it into our heads, while others (mostly the financial stuff) are explained once and left at that.

I suspect that this is because the plot is not supposed to be about Lawrence and Horo's adventures in market theory, but more about the action and drama bits. It's certainly more interesting to the average viewer: a giant rampaging spirit wolf attracts more attention than haggling for clothes.

I also suspect that in the original source (light novels, if I'm not mistaken), the intellectual and emotional aspects are more closely integrated. Never having read them, I can't tell for certain.

All in all, Spice and Wolf deserves a rewatch, this time without any pre-conceived expectations. Honestly, I would not say that I have the time to do so, especially with so many other obligations that is Real Life. Perhaps I can put it off for a while, until my initial opinions of it have subsided into dim memory.

But to leave it at my current viewpoint would be unfair to the show, and any recommendations for anime I might make in the future.

A bit later than the curve would suggest, but I've started on Spice and Wolf. Note that I said started, as in "watched about five minutes of the first episode before I had to go". I have heard tell that this anime concerns itself with being informative and educational rather than entertainment, which I admit would probably not have lured me in if there hadn't been the much-fanarted Horo. I learn better when a cute anime girl is involved; I am a simple man.

Most of my knowledge about the history of currency is from Neal Stephenson's unwieldy Baroque Cycle. For those who have never read it before (and believe me, if you've read it you'd know, considering its possible usage as a 1d6 bludgeoning weapon), it deals with the political and cultural upheavals of the late 17th and early 18th century, with an immense focus, as only Stephenson can do and still get published under Fiction, on modern finance and banking. I am hoping, with the sort of desperate optimism a college student the day before his finals may possess while looking for Cliff's Notes in the bookstore, that Spice and Wolf may provide a less depressing context for the history lesson.

(And while I like Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, Making Money isn't really all that informative. Entertaining, but not informative.)

The idea of economics is pretty fascinating, although I should mention that I'd rather not do all the heavy lifting of actually studying the subject. The basic principles, from the concept of barter, is simple: I have A Thing which you want. You may have Another Thing which I want. We then trade our Things as far as we see the transaction to be viable. Except that the Real World doesn't work that neatly, and so lots of complications arise, and lots more complications arise from the attempted solutions to these complications, a state of affairs familiar to experienced gamers.

Along the way someone came up with the idea of representing, say, a given amount of apples or spices or cow with a shaped bulk sample of precious metals, and then someone else thought of keeping the general shape but reducing the amount of precious metal in that sample, and then we have things Written Down which promised to Pay The Bearer One Dollar I Say One Dollar Upon Presentation Of This Note. The piece of paper alone is worth about as much as a regular piece of paper plus some ink, but the information recorded on that paper, and the reputation of the person or organization encoding that information, made it worth as much as a given amount of precious metals, or a given amount of cow, if it comes to that. The jump to that information without the paper seems trivial in comparison.

Along the way, the world became more and more connected, and lines of communications became more and more secure, and very intelligent people thought up of ways to use this to their advantage, or their nation's advantage, or their culture's advantage. Or politics, which is never very far behind. (I include religious beliefs of that time inside politics, since that's what it boiled down to anyway.) Thus, given that it is fairly safe to assume that a message sent to someone will reach that person, these intelligent people are able to shuffle around money that they have, or don't have, or will possibly have in the future provided various things come to pass, or other people's money which they are keeping in yet other people's pockets, and still settle accounts, through some sort of financial voodoo.

We have come from trading Things, to what is essentially Magic. And the essential part of magic is in knowing just that bit more than everyone else.