Thermae Romae (Primae et Novae)

    Not too long ago, I logged into Netflix and found that the "we're promoting this today" product was a new anime, Thermae Romae Novae.  My reaction, of course, was "huh, really?  That's a weird choice to give a sequel to.  Didn't realize anyone even remembered that show..."

    Then I let the trailer play and I was like "wait, it's a remake?"

    Naturally, I added it to my watch list and just left myself a mental note to get to it later.

    So, I watched the first episode last night.  It's a weird mix of "clearly a lot of research went into this" and "why the *^%^& would they do that?!"  (Warning, this discussion will have some "spoilers" for the first episode, but...is this really the kind of show where there even is such a thing as a "spoiler"?  I mean, the premise is "the Roman who bathed through time," you know?  It's not about story so much as the humorous reactions of an ancient Roman bathmaker in modern day Japanese bathhouses.)

    I mean, right from the start, it's a little weird in the opening credits to have music based on Italian opera and visuals based on Greek vases.  (Sort of.  More the figures and the poses but less so the actual art style and not the coloration at all.  Hard to explain properly, esp. without having the visuals right in front of me.  (I've only seen it the once, after all!))

    Then we get the introductory sequence of "welcome to Ancient Rome" and the fly-over of the city, and I'm thinking that it looks pretty darn good.  The city looks about like it should, and the animation quality is good.

    And then we get a series of short scenes to further introduce the Roman people as a whole.

    Including a party-goer throwing up (either from too much wine or to make room for the next course, most likely) while his fellow-partiers call him back over...

    ...and the fellow partiers are lying on their stomachs on featureless couches.

    On.

    Their.

    Stomachs.

    I'll pause here a moment to let you fully take that in.

    The weird thing is, that's not the first time I've seen someone so completely misunderstand how reclining at the table worked.

    And the other was also Japanese pop culture, so I suspect there's some "classic" Japanese history text that made that mistake and generations of Japanese students have just absorbed it.  (Or maybe it comes from that movie about Cleopatra that Tezuka made?  I don't know much about that movie...)  Anyway, the other place was in a cute little manga called NG Life, by Mizuho Kusanagi, about a man from Pompeii who was reincarnated in modern-day Japan but still remembers his life as a Roman.  (It had a lot of other mistakes in it, esp. regarding the social role of gladiators, but it was still cute.)

    In both cases, it's hard for me to understand how no one with editorial oversight didn't look it up online and realize that the reclining position should look like this:

    I mean, that took me maybe five, ten minutes to get.  (Took me longer than necessary 'cause I was trying to get those Etruscan tomb frescoes showing all the young men at a symposium, only then it turned out the pictures weren't all that good at showing what I wanted...)  The pictures are, in order from top to bottom, an Etruscan sarcophagus, a panel from a Roman sarcophagus, a Greek vase (the reclining figure is on the lower tier), and a fresco from Pompeii.  (All the pictures above are from Wikimedia Commons, and you can click the pictures to go to the page with the full-size images and photographer credits.)  And that Etruscan sarcophagus is one of the most famous works of Etruscan sculpture of all time--one of the main things you think of when someone says "Etruscan art"--so there's not a lot of excuse for not knowing what it looks like.

    Moving on, after that absurdity left, then we had the bulk of the first episode following our protagonist, Lucius, as a child.  And there were still some little inaccuracies (I thought for a while that everyone was wearing these odd seashell necklaces until I realized they were supposed to be cloth pouches to hold their money, which is inaccurate in that you wouldn't wear that outside your clothes where the thieves can see it! (also inaccurate in that a child would not be carrying money with him unless he was specifically on an errand to buy something)) and the streets didn't have anywhere near enough people on them, but mostly it was looking good.  (There were still a lot of cultural awkwardnesses, of course.  I don't think bullies would have acted the same way in Ancient Rome that they did in mid-century Japan, you know?  I mean, I admit to ignorance about how the urban middle to lower class boys bullied each other in Rome, but...I don't think that was it.  And Lucius was on an errand to bring lunch to his grandfather, but I'm not so sure lunch was even a thing in antiquity.  I need to look that up; I had sudden panic as I was preparing my latest novel for release on itch.io as I realized that it was probably grotesquely inaccurate to have people eating a midday meal in the Late Bronze Age.  But I'm not sure when lunch, as we think of it, started happening.  I feel like for most of human history it was two meals a day:  one in the morning and one in the evening.  But I need to research that...)

    And we got through this prefatory material pretty smoothly, and then we get Lucius as a grown man, freshly returned from studying in Athens...so he can be a better bathmaker.  Of course, Athens was not exactly known for its baths.  That was a Roman thing.  It was known for its architecture, though, and Romans loved the cache they got from having studied in Greece (esp. for rhetoric or poetry), so that wasn't too big a deal...

    ...but then Lucius stops to pay his respects to his father and grandfather, represented by these little full-figure statuettes standing where the household gods should be.

    That is a huge "no."

    Yes, Romans did keep statues of their deceased family members--male ones, at least--but they tended to be busts, and they were pretty much only brought out for funerals.

    They were not the equivalent of the Buddhist altar you often see in homes in anime and manga (I won't speculate on how accurate that is to Japanese reality, because how would I know?), and they certainly weren't kept in place of the household gods.

    Very, very awkward.

    Then Lucius goes to the baths, where he runs into one of the bullies who was picking on him at the beginning of the episode.  The bully having grown out of being a bully and wanting to apologize for his earlier behavior felt a little forced in an era so far before psychological counselling, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen, so I'm okay with that.

    I'm much less okay with him using the "thumbs up" gesture in such a modern way.

    Specifically, after the bully-turned-butcher apologizes, Lucius asks if he'll give him a discount next time he visits his butcher's shop.  And the guy gives him a thumbs up.

    That.

    Is.

    So.

    Wrong.

    Firstly, at some point since the gladiatorial games went the way of the dinosaurs, people forgot what the signals meant.  Thumbs down actually meant "put your sword away," as in "let your opponent live."  So, the thumbs up was "kill the guy!"  Therefore, what in the heck would it even mean in this context?

    I can't even imagine.

    Either way, a gesture associated with the brutal fighting in the coliseums would be entirely inappropriate and unnatural in a friendly conversation inside a bath.

    So...yeah.

    Basic reaction to the first episode is "they got so much right that the things they got wrong really jump out at me, screaming and yelling and waving their arms."

    I still plan on watching the rest, of course, but I think it's going to be a "one episode a week" thing to build up my strength again.  (Thankfully, while I'm moderately knowledgeable about it, and used to be pretty good at the language, Ancient Rome doesn't mean the same thing to me that Ancient Greece does, so it's not as big a problem as it could be...)

    Anyway, today I decided to pop the DVD in the player and rewatch the first episode of the original anime (which was from 2012, so I guess this was sort of a 10th anniversary thing?) to see how it compared.

    And I very quickly understood why they wanted to do a new one.

    The first one wasn't really...well...animated.  It was more like sprites sliding around, and lip-flap animations when someone was talking.  I mean, they were much better lip flap animations that you get in most visual novels, but...the difference between that and the lavish animation in the Netflix anime is mind-blowing.  (The original also didn't spend as long setting the scene and just plain showing Rome, so it had less time to make mistakes.  Though the conclusion of the episode made some pretty massive mistakes, in that the Romans did know how to make glass bottles, and also had pottery wheels, so whether those clunky bottles were supposed to be badly made glass or badly made pottery, either way it was wrong.)

    To give you an idea of the difference, visually...

    Here's the promotional images for the two versions side by side.

    Huh...actually, that's not so informative.  You can't really understand what I'm talking about without seeing a clip of the original and then watching the trailer for the new one.  (The main thing you can see here is that in the original, Lucius is blond, which would actually have been pretty unusual for a Roman.)

    Honestly, I think the original was made super on-the-cheap as a promotional thing for the live-action movie, as the teaser poster for it was on the wall when Lucius arrived in Japan in the first episode.  I can't even imagine how this would work extended into a single, movie-length story.  And with everyone being Japanese, I would think it would kind of squash some of the fish-out-of-water when Lucius arrives in the present, since his original basic reaction of "these people look like no one I've ever seen before" would kind of not work if everyone involved is of the same ethnicity.

    That being said, I think a live-action take on this could be really cool (in small chunks only), if you did it right:  get together an appropriate cross-section of humanity for the Rome sequences (keeping in mind that Rome in the time of Hadrian would actually be pretty diverse, due to the spread of the Roman empire and slaves being brought in from all quarters of the empire and then freed, not to mention free people moving to Rome for better opportunities, plus just plain tourism) and have them all speaking in Latin, then the stuff in Japan is of course in Japanese and featuring only Japanese people.  If I were a teacher at a college, I would so try to get the Classics and the Drama departments together to do something like that.  Just to see it, you know?

    (The world should now be very grateful that I do not teach....but if anyone does make a video like what I just described and posts it to YouTube, please let me know, okay?  I want to see it...)