#and the plot was so overcomplicated and poorly executed

[ghostzzy]

after spending the day rereading my first novel for the first time since i wrote it, i have a message for 16-year-old izzy:

you did great.

[roxannepolice]

Everyone seems to have an opinion on the latest leaks where Palpatine possesses Kylo and Rey has to kill him. What are your thoughts?

Oddly enough, I'm not much bothered by the concept of Rey having to kill Ben, probably because I've always felt the SKB duel ended in a to be continued way and said Rey needs to commit a major f*ck up she'll be shown to regret. I know that many reylos hate the concept and discuss it from characters' perspectives but idk, I guess I'm too dead inside to not see them as non-existent characters serving as my katharsis tools.

But I do have oh so many qualms with this leak/theory in many other ways! For one, if executed poorly, this will look like a pointless plot overcomplication for the sake of pure angst and symbols. I know that a lot of people compare the concept to Red Vision, which was also a bit of overcomplication for angst's sake but done very right, but the problem is, Red Vision was one of multiple character subplots in one of four (at least) action subplots in Infinity War - not the supposed climax of two main characters' arcs. Additionally, the RV scene is what it is because a whole hour, in fact the reason why the whole battle in Wakanda even takes place, is to keep Vision alive - and then he doesn't come back.

Secondly, ugh, ffs, don't even get me started on Palps can't possess Rey because her lumens are just 2 much 4 him. This is bs.

And lastly, and I think no-one pointed it out yet I'm sure this would be the main criticism in retrospect - the supposed Matt Smith/Dark Side Acolyte character. Let me get this straight: a (supposedly played by a popular and rather young actor) character we'll have no time to grow to hate gets possessed by Palpatine and then gets killed by our righteous heroine and redeemed bad boy - but, y'know, Star Wars is about saving all lives, that's why Rey wouldn't kill Ben - only for Palps to pop out of him and horcrux into Ben. This is an Armitagesque counterintentional underdog villain fan darling material. His only purpose is to be Ben's plot armour for most of the movie. I guarantee that people would be asking why didn't Rey bring him back rather than Ben. And guess what, they'll have a point since maybe 1/9th of the trilogy spent in free mind could never be enough to produce an expendable level hate sufficient to override this moral hypocrisy posing as moral paragon.

So yeah, I'm sceptical towards the leak but for completely different reasons than most reylos. If anything, I think it should be The Exorcist type situation where Ben wilfully lets Palps possess him rather than DSA - a sacrifice of compassion, not universal necessity - then really can't kill himself and only then asks Rey to do this.

[deltaengineering]

Winter Anime 2019 Part 4: That’s all, folks.

Over already? This is a pretty thin season with not a lot of shows, so it’s not that surprising that there’s not many good ones either. Still, a weak showing. Oh well, let’s get it over with. There were a few decent ones in the last batch.

Circlet Princess

What: Dimwitted schoolgirl is good at some vaguely defined virtual fighting sport, changes school based on it, finds out relevant club has been abolished. Forecast says: 5 member plot incoming.

❌ I think it’s already clear this show isn’t very ambitious, and not very well written either. A game adaptation at its laziest.

❌❌ Man, this girl is STUPID. What the hell.

❌ The rest of the cast are less stupid (which isn’t hard), but that just means they’re so forgettable they might as well not exist.

❌❌ It looks cheap, and by that I mean really really cheap. The character design is ISO standard anime and it’s mostly on model, but that’s as good as it gets. The animation just sucks. That’s a death sentence for an action/sports show with terrible characters.

Bermuda Triangle - Colorful Pastrale

What: Japanese Spongebob, as in cute mermaids. Doing things optional.

❌ To make this quick, this is almost exactly Pastel Memories, only every problem is just a little less extreme. It has fewer characters, it’s looking slightly better, there’s a tiny bit more going on, the setting is mildly more interesting. That still means it is:

❌❌ 1. A boring mess in which a handful of samey girls do nothing of much interest in a location that should be unique, but isn’t.

❌❌ 2. Conspicuously cheap. It even has the same sightline problems.

❌❌ 3. Featuring a character model sheet that is “off” even under the best circumstances. This time due to the very offputting decision to give everyone blobby triangular irises.

❌❌ Unlike Pastel Memories (which was an ad for a mobile game) this is an anime original, so it really has no excuse being this lame.

♎ I find it amusing that Pastel Palettes are providing the OP for an anime, and it’s not the one currently airing that they’re actually characters in.

Endro~!

What: Kiraralike comedy thing in a generic JRPG setting.

♎ Namori character designs, so it’s like Spyce in that it just seems like the Yuru Yuri cast cosplaying a genre. But hey, Namori character designs do look good.

❌ I’m not as done with generic JRPG settings as with generic isekai settings, but it’s still a real problem since the former is now a subset of the latter. Mildly making fun of it does not improve things much either.

✅ The tone is cutesy and pleasant. I find this much preferable to something like Mahoujin Guru Guru, which is pretty much the same thing but with abrasive, high-intensity slapstick instead.

✅ It’s backing that up with generally high-quality, agreeable pastel looks.

❌ Not being annoying is a start, but beyond that this seems very middle of the road and predictable. I don’t get much out of the genre “parody” and simply being cute is still not an unique selling point in anime.

Grimms Notes The Animation

What: Did someone say JRPG? This is a mobile one, vaguely based on fairy tales as the title implies.

✅ This universe runs on the idea that every NPC’s fate is controlled by a preset story they’re aware of. You could make a good story about that if you took it seriously. It even does that somewhat, but only to the degree that you’d expect from a throwaway sidequest in a moderately well-written JRPG.

�� And the reason for that is that it has to make room for being a JRPG, of course. Read: It’s irritatingly mechanics- and combat-focused. Stuff like the characters changing form when in fights just seems overly complicated and adds nothing.

❌ Said combat looks competent, but not good enough to make up for detracting from what could have been an interesting setting. Merc Storia did this aspect far better (by usually not doing it at all).

❌ So it ends up being better than expected, but then that only amounts to a disappointment.

Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai / Kaguya-sama: Love Is War

What: Kaguya and Miyuki are in the student council of a prestigious school and HATE HATE HATE each other. Specifically, they hate the part where the other one won’t just finally admit their love.

✅ The joke here is that it’s operating on full intensity at all times, over the most simple matters. It’s pretty much Kaiji, only about dating - complete with hammy narrator. This is another one of those shows where I can’t say with certainty that it’s solid, but I had a blast during the first episode.

✅ Regarding Quintuplets, I made it clear that I love me some sparks in my romantic comedies. It doesn’t get much more explosive than this.

✅ The characters are comparable to Quints too: Smart scheming upstart vs. rich scheming ojou, with a simpleminded girl in the middle that ends up winning more often than not simply by not overdoing it.

✅ The visuals are just as over the top as the proceedings depicted. Occasionally a filter massacre, but mostly cool.

♎ The long-term viability of this show depend entirely on whether they can consistently come up with scenarios that work, which isn’t a given. Also, this is so intense it might become tiresome - I already felt some fatigue towards the end of the first episode. We’ll see, I guess.

Kakegurui ××

What: Some weirdos think they can crash the party at Hyakkaou with an intent to scare the daylights out of Yumeko and Midari, of all people. Let’s just say they were not as prepared as they thought.

✅ As you might have guessed by me watching the sequel, I liked Kakegurui. It has its problems, but if you’re down for some crazypants madness, this show delivers.

✅ This is one of the better episodes of it too, because it gets right into it and the game they play is dead simple. Kakegurui was never about smart moves or strong characters, so not having anything detract from our girls deriving the entirely wrong sort of pleasure from danger is a plus.

♎ Sadly, the OP is a step down (though still great) and the ED is simply an inferior, overcomplicated version of the magnificent original one. They seem to know this too, because they play the OP cut of Deal with the Devil in its entirety for a montage. The rest of the production is on par with the original though, so it’s fiiiine. Oh well.

❌ It got Netflix’d again and the subs situation is dire. Since this is one I actually like, I might have to wait for the official release.

Kouya no Kotobuki Hikoutai / The Magnificent Kotobuki

What: Piston-engined fighter plane pornography.

✅ This delivers where Girly Air Force failed: Close to zero exposition, the majority of the episode is just planes dogfighting with barely any talking either. And that part is executed really well. I think the plane startup sequence alone is as long as the total of Girly’s airtime.

✅ Guess what, it’s Tsutomu Mizushima, previously known for unbridled panzer (und girls) pornography, and boy can you tell. However, this cuts out a lot of GuP’s bullshit: A plane doesn’t have the cast of K-ON in it, it’s not over-the-top zany, and whatever this universe is, it can’t be as insipid as GuP’s. The classy milwank exists you guys, we found it.

✅✅ The music really helps here, sky pirates vs zeppelins just wouldn’t work without some classic swashbuckling orchestra background. Fat sound mixing on the dakka too. It’s great.

♎ Can’t really say much about the narrative because we kinda skipped that in this episode aside from the obvious, but Mizushima’s Shirobako collaborator Michiko Yokote is writing it, and that’s a good sign.

❌ Now we’re getting to the elephant in the room though: There’s no way the planes wouldn’t be CG in 2019, but the characters are CG too, and their animation is mediocre. Also, they did the KADO thing where they 2D-animated the side characters that aren’t important enough to model. This has the funny side effect that you can tell who’s going to die real soon by them looking better. It’s far from great, but probably a worthy tradeoff if the mechanical side is this extensive and also delivers.

✅ This is definitely not for everyone, since you have to have more than a casual appreciation for those magnificent girls in their flying machines. I do, though.

revisions

What: A chunk of Shibuya gets teleported to the dystopian future, local doomsday prepper gets handed a large robot because he’s special.

❌ A Goro Taniguchi joint being a poorly conceived scifi mess? Say it ain’t so! I especially dig the tryhard English jargon (mecha: “String Puppet”, monsters faction: “Revisions”, particular monster, I think?: “Civilian”, tacticool operetah: “Balancer”).

❌ Works very hard to characterize the main character, to the detriment of everyone else. A for effort, but you made an unlikeable asshole though.

❌ This is another full CG show, with the quality of the animation being curiously variable. Sometimes it’s well above average and sometimes it’s painful. There doesn’t seem to be much method to it.

✅ Tries to establish stakes by being mondo edgy and graphically murderizing some poor bystanders. It’s adorable.

❌ If you’re really jonesing for some mecha, you can watch all of this on Netflix right now. It’s not like you have any alte- wait, Egao no Daika has mecha too. Well there you go then. That’s a better show.

[imforeman]

My Thoughts on The Doctor Falls

 Overall, a mess of a script, lacking any focus and failing to deliver on a single one of its story threads.

1. Messed with the cyber origins in an uncomfortably complicated way. Just messy and weird. They just didnt touch on what was going on with them in the 2nd episode. what involvement if any did the master have in their creation, if any? why did they end up looking like John Lumic’s cyber men? what was going on with them downstairs while they were upstairs? how come they are being created on the spaceship and not while on mondas? how does this origin fit in with the Tenth Planet story?

2. Made the master both:

a. a sexist disgusting piece of shit (possibly to excuse and justify his own misogyny to himself?)(this is a habit- see BBC Sherlock, specifically the abominable bride) i mean ik the masters always treated women poorly but i always interpreted that as a disregard for the human race, not women specifically. in classic who he was never any crueler to women than he was to men. and in new who i always took his dismissal of Chantho as a girl and an insect to be speciest not sexist. and even if u do say that simm!master has always been sexist, in davies’ era, his treatment of women was always treated as a dark and negative character trait. It wasn’t just an excuse for some "funny” one liners about hating women like it is here. (i have written extensively abt the master+sexism elsewhere on my blog.)

b. a frankly much too weak willed version who is head over heels with the Doctor (Moffat has a habit of doing this too with his female characters. See: Adler and River Song- purely there to make the protagonist seen cool and important with no respect for their own characters)

c. and they also gave them completely unnecessary sexual tension that really took away from their characters.

3. Bills ending was sweet IN A WAY but coulda bn much better executed. Shoulda bn more to it and they coulda explained what it was and had some build up rather than leaving it so sudden and ambiguous. she should never have bn a cyber man in the first place if they didn't wanna kill her off. Because it's literally just Clara- killed off then resurrected to travel the universe without the Doctor. Only this time it was with the added badness of reversing conversion WHICH CANNOT BE DONE. CYBER BRIG AND CYBER DANNY AND CYBER BILL ARE ABOMINATIONS TO THE CANON. she never shoulda bn a cyberman in the first place it was so unnecessary to the plot and to her leaving not to mention the disturbing undertones of the conversion of the first LGBT+ companion.

4. Gave Nardole a bit of a disappointing exit too tbh. I loved him.

5. And began the interference in what is a perfect era of Doctor Who that does not deserve to be touched, particularly without hartnell around to play the part.  How dare Moffat project his misogynistic self absorbed writing onto the wonderful fairy tale magic of what was a perfect era of Doctor Who

My biggest ish with Moffat who is that its not self contained. He hasnt contained his foul stench solely to the two doctors hes written for. its spread to the farthest reaches of the whoniverse from davros opening his eyes to the cybermens origin overcomplicating itself to destroying the masters character (and then killing him?!?!) and now taking hartnell straight out of his last story, even when we dont have hartnell to portray him. He is out of control. he has no right to mess with the cannon in the way that he does. he has messed with dw lore more than any other writer on the show ever. and thats a fact. he cant just be dismissed at the end of his era because he has done sm damage, not just to the eras of two of the best actors ever to play the dr with terrible sexist scripts but to the doctor who mythos as a whole. to appreciate the chibnall scripts that shall follow i would need to recognise moffat who as cannon. and for the most part that is not smthn i am willing to do.