Weiss Kreuz as a series is more than a little chronologically confused. This is a show that only makes sense if it's set in a year with twice the regulation number of days. We're talking snow in April, Omi having the canonical birthday of Febrary 29, 1981 even though 1981 was not a leap year, and oh God Ken Hidaka's back story. Don't try and make sense of it all, for that way madness lies.

On the other hand, it is at least possible to get the decade right. Sure, Schuldig appears to be campaigning hard to bring back the Eighties, but we always knew Schuldig was a bit weird and he may just be yearning for the glory days of the Stasi, and Kase seems to be under the delusion that it's the Seventies but then he's always been even weirder. The fans, on the other hand, think it's 2010.

BUT. IT IS THE NINETIES.

The nineties, I suppose, still just looks contemporary. (As someone who was a teenager in the 1990s, I should probably be thankful for this.) Nineties fashion, relying as it does heavily on the jeans and tee-shirts I spent my own teens in, doesn't look anywhere near as dated as it could do since nobody's wearing puffball skirts or ridiculous bouffants, and consumer technology's prevalant enough to be noticeable. There were games consoles that weren't made by Atari with graphics that actually managed to look vaguely like the things they were trying to represent. There was an Internet, even if most of it did seem to consist of lunatics ranting on Geocities and Tripod about not very much (and you wouldn't even get that much if you were on AOL) and you most likely had to access it all via dial-up networking. It's not like Weiss Kreuz is set in the terrifying pre-technological wilderness that was the Eighties, after all.

But it is still the late nineties. The spring and summer of 1998, if one wishes to be scrupulous. And there's obvious evidence for this and I'm not just talking things like official birthdates or the occasional date on the occasional piece of background color. The essential ninetiesishness of the setting the characters are moving in is everywhere the alert viewer might choose to look, and several places they probably wouldn't.

And, of course, I have screenshots to prove it. Everything's better with screenshots.


This is not a contemporary setting we're talking about here. It is not 2010. It's twelve years previous and it shows. It's showing, I like to believe, pretty damn obviously in just about all these screenshots in one way or another; it's just as bad elsewhere, if not a little worse. Either it's 2010 and Weiss are the most self-consciously retro assassin team ever or it's 1998 and they're actually pretty well-equipped. What's more likely?

( But what does it all mean, laila? )

There's more to it than this, of course. There's Youji infiltrating an office with a DVD-R rather than a pen drive - and the attendant five-minute wait for the data to transfer. There's Wunder X, peddling CDs of addictive music, and the victims plugged into Discmen rather than iPods - or any other kind of mp3 player, for that matter. There's Weiss's reliance on radios when communicating in the field and the size of the headsets they use. There's the fact that a minute fraction of the cast have cellphones - incredibly clunky-looking cellphones at that - and even the ones that do don't always seem to remember they're there. There's Persia's car phone. There's Tetsuya's Playstation 1. There's the fact that two computers and a laptop in a house with only four people in it was quite a lot of computer to have casually hanging around the place in 1998. And then there's Sister Ruth trying to find Farfarello via her Angelfire page.

So could we please declare a moratorium on giving Weiss - or the Mary Sues who love them, for that matter - things like iPods or Nintendo DSes? It is the nineties, and there were no such things in 1998.