#mostly just additions. i dont think Anything got taken out now that i think abt it

[buttercupart]

late night concept stuff for a redesigned/reimagined oc story i’ve been plotting in my head since i was 10, these characters and their story are very dear to me lol

[forme-withme]

ive seen a few others post their thoughts on the black so i figured I’d do the same! serious spoilers under the read more!

I’ll start with the designs:

I’ll admit the transition to cgi was something that I was really dreading while watching the trailers, but once I got into the show it really faded into the background on the humans and looked really cool with the kaiju. 

As for the designs themselves, the people were largely Basic Anime Protagonists and there’s not much to talk about there, but the kaiju! oh, the kaiju. Copperhead’s colors and the detailing with black made it really stand out. And then there’s the dogs! puppies! super super fun n funky and felt very much an organic transition from the giant kaiju and seems to be a subtle nod to the ideas posed at the end (which i will get into later) and then that leaves Apex and Boy’s designs! Apex is a pretty straight forward Jaeger design that has only slightly been Kaijufied but I think the front acting as literal eyes was cool as well as the way they animated the attempted driftings. Boy was really interesting because they were so sure to make him Different and his color schemes as well as the size-difference was a really interesting way to do that. Having the literal dark vs light fight at the end was fun and appropriately on the nose for a pacific rim spinoff. 

And now for the plot and characters:

The plot, while fun and with no huge errors or egregious mishandlings of the franchise, was mostly predictable and typical of anything in this vein. There were genuinely quite a few scenes that had me either feeling for the characters or genuinely shocked (joel :( u deserved better. also that was cheap shock-value but at least it made sense within the story and what shane is capable of) 

My first real issue (besides the main conceit of abandoning australia and why the kaiju don’t go towards  comes almost immediately with the pacing. Why would we care about all of these people in this encampment when we have spent all of 5 minutes with them. Their voice actors aren’t even in the credits because they have so few lines. We are told they were friends but never really shown it. After they leave, the pacing gets truly terrible. The boy is introduced and clearly breaks out on his own, which no one notices. For some reason. And eats a butterfly which good for him but I’m not really sure why they did that if they wanted any kind of reveal that he was part Kaiju. Then they’re taken to the camp and the show spend just as long on a deal for some eggs as they did in that first place (not to mention hayley immediately accidentally causes more deaths which is. an interesting thing to keep up) and we stay at this camp for entirely too long,(seriously? 3 out of 7 episodes?) considering shane and mei’s interactions show clearly there is something More and something Wrong between them. It was extremely easy to note for note see what would happen in the fight after they leave: ooh shocker the boy is fine. i did think it was a good enough way to portray that to the characters, though, since they had their back turned every time he ate something a human shouldn’t or slapped it out of his hand or fully refused to interpret the things he was staring wistfully at even though they found him in a literal tube of the stuff we see them preserving kaiju parts (including Alice) in the movies. After leaving the camp, because they spent so long there they have to race to the finish line. They establish ghost drift side effects (which. was ghost drifting a canon word before this or did they take the word we used to explain side effects and use it for literal ghosts. also what year is this set it please i dont understand-) and also bring in Loa malfunctioning (not review but. im thinking shes a little more advanced than she’s supposed to be when taking into account her snide remarks and “unintentional sarcasm” as joel puts it. like once agian: would be highly predictable given everything but shes simply the funniest one around) and then after this they meet back up w mei and she has one of the better cut scenes with her in the restaurant remembering trauma cut with the dance scene which while out of place was v cute and honestly yeah. sometimes you remember a trauma and go ok tabling that. and then get up and dance w ur friends and then the Reveals happen (which. why would they know for sure that it’s the precursors and not the ppdc’s work still? Taylor seemed pretty confident that it wasn’t their military even though it was in their labs and the whole initial idea behind the jaegers was to ‘make monsters of our own’) and the fight happens and then it’s over! And also the sisters that are mentioned Once are there talking abt the Kaiju Messiah which while an interesting tie in to the kaiju cult from the movies was. a rlly weird and laughable line to end the season on. 

i just realized I was very negative there but overall I thought it was a fun show despite the pacing issues. I think the things they chose to revamp or callback to were interesting and good choices and it’s clear that we’re going to be getting a lot of the answers to questions in the next season (besides probably why they left australia in the first place but I digress) I thought the acting was well done and the character relationships were fairly strong for what is a 7 episode show: the siblings clearly cared about each other, didn’t do anything outrageously out of character to further the plot, mei (and joel while he was there) felt an organic addition to the group, and the villain felt like enough of a threat to keep things moving even when kaiju weren’t around. 

Ultimately I think I feel about the show the same way I do about uprising: It’s fun. There’s a lot you have to ignore to see it that way, but it brings up some interesting ideas and has a lot to offer if you can get past the issues.