#khara is getting her own post because shes just cool like that

[strawberry-seal77]

What’s Endling even about? *Hands you a ticket that says ‘Insert Rant (/pos) here*

OHOHO A RANT TICKET YOU SAY WELL

Fair warning, this is a 3 book series, so uh itll be long I'll split the books into different posts maybe

Also there's death. Like a good amount of it

Endling (as it starts) is about a Dairne named Byx!

Dairnes are like dogs, but are bipedal, have thumbs, and have glissaries (bits for gliding).

They're one of the 9 leading species, which are those that can both perform theurgy (magic) and speak common tongue.

Byx, like any other of her species, can tell truth from lies, in the same way you can hear when a note is off in a scale. If someone does not believe what they're saying, a dairne can tell.

And this makes Dairnes dangerous.

(rant continues below hehe)

The books start in a place called Neddara, bordering Dreyland as well as a large ocean

And the Murando, the ruler in an England sort of way, is trying to exterminate Dairnes. Lying is no good when a dog can call you out, yeah?

(this is introduced really well, by showing how Dairnes have changed from their traditional life of nesting in trees and living diurnally, so nocturnal and constantly moving in hiding.)

so anyways Byx is the runt of her litter, the weakest, always distracted. And she wanders off into a nearby forest. She's never seen the ocean before, just a quickkk peak!

She hears a classic dairne call, but catches a falseness in it. Continuing on, she sees the super cool view of the ocean! And also a band of hunters! Whoops!

So anyways theres just a WOBBYK in a TINY BOAT which is gonna SMASH INTO THE ROCKS OH NO

Byx, on one side hunters, on the other a hungry ocean, takes a leap of faith and grabs the wobbyk, using the force of her dive to just BARELY make it to another landing place. Sadly, the hunters saw.

(side note, wobbyks are these guys)

gonna move quicker soon I swear

ANYWAYS

Turns out the Wobbyk is named Tobble! Also the hunter's pathfinder sees them through a bush and does a little thing called not snitching.

They run back to Byx's pack but OOPS all dead! Murando soldiers, in uniform (obviously on the clock) murdered them!

Byx is obviously distraught, angry and devastated and guilty and a lot of other stuff! However no time for that! there's an arrow in her side! the hunting group's little pathfinder boy has caught 'er, and is taking Byx! Oh no!

Blah blah, tied up on a horse, cutting the arrow out (it was barbed 3:), going back to a cave. The dairne and human get aquainted.

Human's named Khara, weird name for a boy, right? THATS BECAUSE SHE ISNT :D. Classic crossdressing in medieval times to get a job.

Byx tries to escape with Tobble, gets captured by snakes, Khara saves them with the bargain that Byx needs to not try to escape again, and they're on their way!

hehe okay now we'll be a bit more zoomed out

So they get going to La Cora Di Schola (aka the heart of scholars, bc it's shaped like a human heart) And waddaya know, there's a eulogy! For dairnes! A 'mourning' (psscht, more like celebration) for the death of Dairnes. Which is a bit conflicted considering Byx is a dairns

So they go to meet this one scientist, but he's actually chaotic neutral so he tries to have Byx killed so she doesnt crash the Eulogy. She meets Gambler (Felivet, pretty much a panther) and they escape and crash the party. Also Khara and some apprentice pretend to be in love to escape guards.

Everyone's on the run, eventually they get to the Murando. they get put in prison btw, because the apprentice was a meanyhead and tattled to the Murando.

Byx does a thing called Lying to the authorities (good for her) and gets them a royal guard to go find more dairnes. Which is good bc there's a knight with living fire as a friend trying to kill them.

They get the fire knight and the other guys to fight, and run away. Back to adventure, yippee! btw they're looking for this one living island because it's where they think they can find more Dairnes. Anyways they get really really close to finding it

but then the fucking fire guy with his stupid fire magic is STILL following them, so they build a trap in record time and he falls into it because he's showy and burned down a vine wall before looking past it. he falls on spikes and dies :3

Tobble gets his tail braiding ceremony, a show of respect when a wobbyx performs an act of bravery. He's really happy!

Anyways that's as far as I for about 2 years, because my school library only had book 1. And then I got back into it recently, I'll explain more if you want :3

Also im making an entire other post for Khara because I want to >:3

[recentanimenews]

15 Years Later, Gunbuster 2 Still Represents A Special Era In Anime History

In the beginning, there was Gunbuster. The directorial debut of famed Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno, it was released from 1988 to 1989 as an OVA, and was an unabashed celebration of everything its creators thought was cool: space adventure, giant robots, and huge scary monsters. It also helped pioneer the sense of scale and escalation that Anno’s studio, Gainax, would become famous for.

  In Gunbuster’s first episode, its heroine Noriko is a young woman training to impress her senior classmate and become a giant robot pilot. By the last episode, Noriko is piloting the superpowered robot Gunbuster with that classmate and obliterating thousands of space monsters at once in order to save humanity from extinction, while at the same time coping with the tragic consequences of time dilation. Gunbuster starts as a parody of tennis classic Aim for the Ace! and ends as a take on Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, and somehow the story never breaks under the strain.

    Years later, Gainax became a successful (if troubled) studio with multiple classics under their belt, and sought to pay homage to the past. And so Anno's protégé Kazuya Tsurumaki was tapped to direct. In 2004, 15 years ago, Gunbuster 2 (or Aim for the Top! 2: Diebuster) was released, and just like Gunbuster lives in the shadow of the books, games and movies Anno and his friends loved, Gunbuster 2 lives in the shadow of the original Gunbuster. Once more the heroine is a young woman trying to impress her senior and become a giant robot pilot. Once more there are space monsters and lots of nudity. And the sense of escalation, the growth from humble beginnings to events of cosmic significance, is the same.

  However, I think that escalation is handled better in Gunbuster 2 than in Gunbuster. While it’s hard to predict how Gunbuster will end just from watching the first episode, Gunbuster 2 is packed with careful foreshadowing that radically changes the story on second viewing. Gunbuster 2 even uses knowledge of the original series against you, restaging key set-pieces with fan-favorite music cues only to upend them in unexpected and sometimes horrifying ways.

But Gunbuster 2 also lives in the shadow of FLCL, its spiritual predecessor, and in the shadow of Revolutionary Girl Utena. All three shows were scripted by Yoji Enokido, who now primarily works with Takuya Igarashi on adapting Bungo Stray Dogs, and the director of Utena himself, Kunihiko Ikuhara, storyboards the second episode of Gunbuster 2. Like FLCL, Gunbuster 2 is concerned with adolescence and the question of what it means to become an adult.  Gunbuster also buttressed its wide-ranging narrative with at least the illusion of scientific accuracy, but Gunbuster 2 (like FLCL and Utena before it) exists solely in the world of metaphors. The spaceships are all impossible, the robots are organic creatures that defy physics, and their pilots fuel them with The Power of Youth.

    I think it’s for this reason that some fans of the original Gunbuster have an uneasy relationship with Gunbuster 2. “When the sequel to your favorite anime has an entirely different aesthetic, different themes and different characters,” they say, “how can you admire it in the same way?” I like Gunbuster 2 more than the original Gunbuster, but you can certainly argue that it doesn’t wholly live up to any of its predecessors, and it is too much in conversation with the original Gunbuster to neatly exist without it. Also, it isn’t as thematically unified or experimental as FLCL; and while it plays with Utena’s iconography (high school as purgatory, the older classmate playing god with underclassmen out of his own insecurity, the high school girl and the witch) it has neither the time or the inclination to delve too deeply into it.

  Heck, the world of Gunbuster 2 itself embodies these contradictions: a solar system boxed in by humanity’s past decisions, where older generations piloting bulky and outdated machinery live in jealous fealty to impossibly cool teens living a decadent lifestyle that will swiftly leave them broken and bereft. The story’s vestigial elements, how its protagonists reckon with the remnants of past glories they were born too late to comprehend, are baked into the premise.

    So, the best reason to watch Gunbuster 2 today, I think, is that uneasy balance between the past and the future. The Gainax of Gunbuster 2 no longer exists. The director of Gunbuster 2 now toils at Studio Khara with Hideaki Anno on the final Evangelion movie. Other members of the staff are now at Studio Trigger, or spread out across the rest of the industry. So realistically, whatever lightning in the bottle that led to FLCL and Gunbuster 2 can never be put back. There’s some incredible imagery in Gunbuster 2, marrying the surrealism of FLCL with the bombastic excess that Hiroyuki Imaishi would harness years later in Gurren Lagann. This six-episode series, occupying a transitory period in anime history, is one of the only places where you can find it.

    I love Gunbuster 2 for that reason, how it represents an intake of breath before Evangelion and what Gainax would become in the future. I love its lockbox universe full of secrets, its sense of melancholy and intrigue. But I love it even more as a fan of Gunbuster. This is because Gunbuster 2 is not just a celebration of Gunbuster, but a correction. I can just imagine someone watching the original Gunbuster and thinking that Noriko managed to saved the day because she was piloting the most powerful robot in the universe. Gunbuster 2 laughs at this. Noriko did not become a hero because she had the Gunbuster, it says. Noriko became a hero because she was Noriko. As a key character says at the turning point of Gunbuster 2, “whether you have a Buster Machine or not is irrelevant! A true Nono-ri has a Buster Machine in her heart!”

  Robots or youthful energy get you so far. But in the end there’s no substitute for the love between a young woman and her idol, and for hard work and guts.

  Are you a fan of Gunbuster 2? Do you own Gunbuster on DVD? What's your sentimental favorite Gainax show? Let us know in the comments!

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Adam W is a Features Writer at Crunchyroll. He tried his best to write this entire post with his arms crossed, but was not successful. He sporadically contributes with a loose coalition of friends to a blog called Isn't it Electrifying? Follow him at: @wendeego

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