#so apparently he had some more aesthetic screentime than the others

[candescentkpop]

Minhyuk

Monsta X: Beautiful Liar

Monsta X Part 72 / ∞

[blogger-yura]

Entry #49 Aug 14th '23

#YurasLife #MovieMonday #Horror #Psychological #Thriller #Mystery #Religion #Abortion #Tin&Tina

𝐌𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐞 𝐌𝐨𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐲 - Tin&Tina (2023)

Title: Tin&Tina - Screentime: 119min - Director: Rubin Stein

Rotten Tomatoes

After a traumatic miscarriage, a young couple adopts two peculiar twins from a convent whose obsession with religion soon disturbs the family.

Film Affinity

Two very special twin siblings, after being orphaned and being welcomed in a convent where they receive a strict education, are adopted by a young couple.

Hello, hello, my pretty butterflies~! How are you guys doing? How did the weekend treat you all? Me... Well, the weekend brought a lot of new movies for me! And as always, I can't let slip the chance to share one of the many with you guys~. (　＾∀＾)

Have you heard of "Tin&Tina"? Apparently, the movie wasn't super successful when it was first released in Spanish theaters and festivals, but has been getting a lot of attention lately now that's been put up on streaming services.

Currently streaming on Netflix, tells the story of this spanish couple, Lola and Adolfo, that can't have kids, so they decide to adopt. For some –ironically– unholy reason they take home from a convent the most odd looking and behaving twins in existence– Tin and Tina who are fascinated with religion, god, the bible. As if them playing creepy music wasn't enough of a giveaway (*｀Д´)ノ！

Plot wise, the movie is just weird. It touches really sensitive topics, but never with enough depth. Other than religion, of course, since that's the main focus in the movie as the kids are literally obsessed and sadly lack the common sense to understand the bible. You have their tragic miscarriage. You have a bit of dysfunctional marriage, an absent husband, and even a bit too aggressive for my liking. ( I spent the whole movie telling Lola to get a divorce!) Of course, he doesn't believe anything his wife has to say, ever. Though I agree she had some untreated traumas that also built up a bit of paranoia on her side, we have overall a weird family dynamic.

Being based on a short film by the same director, I think the plot remained very consistent, at least. It becomes a bit confusing at times, but that, in my opinion, only helps build up the suspense and discomfort you feel watching the movie because you never know for sure what's going on. (* ﾟーﾟ)

I'm not sure how much budget they had, but production wise, I really like the whole aesthetic they had going. It's a movie based on the middle to late 80's, a place far away from the city, very rural. The coloring, the decoration, the little details like the shows that played on TV, the lightings, the music, the everything really. I found it very pleasant.

More than a horror, other than the one gore scene, I'd surely call it a thriller. It's very psychological, very unsettling when you put the scenario in context and you try to make sense of it all, but it's not scary in itself. It builds up tension successfully when needed. I wouldn't give it a 10/10, but I definitely enjoyed it and would watch it again in case I missed anything of relevance.

Would you watch a movie like this one? Is it down your alley at all? I didn't think I'd enjoy it as much as I did, honestly. If you do watch it, let me know your thoughts on it! (＞∇＜)ﾉ

This is all for today, lovelies! I'll see you guys around soon~. Hope you have a wonderful week ahead! Stay hydrated, and make sure to look after yourself well. Until next time!

All the love, -Yura ♡

Personal score: 🌟🌟🌟🌟☆

💗: @clubwnderland [💙] @jinju-oc @moonlightchn @kimheebby @nana-n-nono @coffeexdreamcb @silcntxnight @livealittleoc-cb @minsour-r @multi-esme @urtwice @san-cb @reve-rv @domrachaa @oppositesattraxt @lunaaofthemoon @badbf-cb @thepatchedpaw @domxbot @the-hellhounds @monsterhigh-cb @theinvitation-bot @hwangroyaltycb @welcometosector1 @multi-joong @vanilladaises-rp @beastfights-starting @halloween-idols @redlight-cb @yourmysticalgirls-cb @theonesxcb @hybridsheltercb @3rachabot @kardpackcb @beaconhillsxbot @yandereyeri @glamrockpop-cb @angelsxdemons-cb @screamcb

[gascon-en-exil]

Through Chapter 10 on my second, more Utility-focused playthrough. Lots of different paths this time.

The story so far: I went up to Chapter 10 specifically because what I was most interested in seeing in the midgame is how the story would handle its convergence points, and now I've experienced two of them from two different angles. The post-Aesfrost invasion arc is half old news from the first demo, but after killing Landroi Sorsley invades and you have to decide whether to side with Aesfrost or Hyzante (I went with Aesfrost - the Utility pick). This battle takes place at the same harbor as Chapter 1, only at night and in the rain. The rain actually matters for some of the mage characters...although I suspect that which side you pick for this story split only affects who the enemy is in this particular battle. It ends with Exharme popping up out of nowhere to say he captured Wolffort while you were away, foreshadowing Hyzante's magical purple bombs and being frustratingly badass as usual (he is the Camus equivalent for Benedict's route, as I've already seen). Then he just...leaves, and sets up exposing Sorsley's illicit salt trade to get the story back on track, along with Cordelia helping Roland escape the castle only for Benedict to have him fake his death as in the other route. For Chapter 9 I chose to transport the illegal salt which led into a second nighttime battle in the rain, this one on a map with a lot of variable elevation vs. Travis and Trish's bandit group, who are apparently just the only group of bandits in Norzelia since they pop up wherever the plot needs them to. I wonder how that'll be handled once I recruit them? Anyway, the salt goes to Frederica's uncle Svarog - I assume Exharme's counterpart in Aesfrost as a Camus figure - and after refusing to reveal Roland's identity to him I had to do a random arena fight to recoup the losses of pissing off the client. That's the second Chapter 10 I've seen set in an arena, identical in all but aesthetics and opponent (here Rufus, the mercenary elsewhere seen in Silvio's employ) to the one in the other route vs. Sorsley. At a bit more of a stretch this leads into both Serenoa and Sorsley getting calling before the Saintly Seven, where Sorsley is indicted for his salt trade and then promptly executed by Exharme - no trial of any kind necessary. Once again, Serenoa finds himself filling the vacant seat in the Saintly Seven, and tasked with getting rid of the Roselle under his family's protection.

Impressions on the story: I continue to be impressed, although it is sometimes a little transparent that the narrative has to force itself back into a linear path rather than branching further outward. Nothing feels particular egregious yet, maybe just a little rushed in places and random in others. On the other hand, it's good to see how different story splits give screentime to different members of the game's massive cast. Benedict's route dumps the knowledge of Clarus's underground arena right at the end to set him up as the third-to-last boss, but here I got to see and actively participate in it. On the flip side this route seems to have Sorsley's aide Booker disappear offscreen (he's killed in the other version of Chapter 9 I did last time) and hasn't made any mention of Silvio since he capitulated to Aesfrost. The world dumps on Roland even more, as in not revealing his identity to Svarog he's stuck having to act as the Dawnspear in a prize fight. The leadup to Sorsley's non-trial in this route also gives him a brief moment to praise Hyzante's happy populace, which I already know is going to turn into the major hook for his route. Days ago I saw people on Discord describing Roland's route as his being brainwashed by a cult...but that seems too simplistic an interpretation, in this game or in general.

Gameplay: I have all the conviction-based recruits now (except Maxwell since I think he's only available later on), although I've only used some of them sparingly because I'm trying to keep levels equal. Ezana is even better here than she was in the first demo, but Medina doesn't have much of a place in my army as she's an item-based healer and I rarely have the money to spend on consumables. Groma the dodge tank and Flanagan the flying tank are vastly more useful than Lionel who appears to be some kind of debuffing tank, and Picoletta's best use is oddly to have her decoy distract enemies since her other skills are so weak. I've only used Quahaug the time mage once, but he's got skills that are the equivalent of (from Fire Emblem) Warp, Foul Play, and a time rewind that can work as a heal so he's got fantastic support potential. The enemy scaling in New Game+ and the sheer variety of playable characters keep gameplay feeling fresh even on repeat playthroughs - and good thing too, as I'll need several more runs to see everything.

[savrenim]

hi hi hi. so I just got into the Hamilton fandom, I swear I am four years late where did everybody go, and, well. I am apparently a hamburr shipper. bcs that is my life now. anyway I saw your fic ifmlam and I swear it is my favourite of all the fics I've ever read (and trust me I've read literally thousands). I love it so so much, how do you write fics like that??? I cried about four times during the whole thing, I stayed up till 4am reading it even when I had to wake up at 7 because it is just. that. good. I could not stop thinking about it for days afterwards and ifmlam has just ruined me. I can't think of listen to Hamilton without thinking of ifmlam anymore.

on to my qursttion: is it abandoned? of course it's perfectly FINE if it is. don't let anyone tell u differently, your fic is YOURS and u are amazing.

but pls I really need closure from ur fic, it has been haunting me if its abandoned or ongoing and I've read ur other fics and they are just chefskiss and thank you so much for writing them all. thank you thank you thank you, I will never be able to thank you enough for writing this fic and for everything it's done for me. I am probably thousands of miles away but I am sending you virtual jugs through a co.puter screen right now.

(don't feel pressured to reply to this or update it flam, I know how overwhelming it can get with so many messages and after a while u get desensitized to it. u can literally reply "thx. itfmlam is abandoned" and I would still be amazingly star struck. anyway has gotten way too long and I need to sleep and I'm sorry u probably won't see this so I'm just talking to myself right now but bye!!)

and thank you so so much for writing itfmlam.

aaaah hello anon!

thank you so so much???? I am so??? honored??? that ifmlam rates so highly to you, and also that you've read my other fics??????

the answer to the "is ifmlam abandoned" question is probably the worst possible one, which is pretty much "I do want to finish it, both for the folks that still want closure as well as it bothers to me have abandoned projects that are in the public eye/ already partially published, but also, it is last on my current writing projects list"

my current actually active writing projects list, kind of in order of priority, is

I'm literally three chapters away from being Actually Fully Done with the not-quite-first-not-quite-second let's call it 1.5th draft of an actual?? full?? original?? novel?? Opus which of course then goes out to beta readers and then gets who-knows-how-much edited and then maybe beta readers again if a lot does change and then a copyeditor my mom, my copyeditor is my mom, and maybe my little brother he's one of the betas but is very good at catching typos and then I!!! get to publish it!!!! which is the single thing I am most excited for!!!!!!!!! this should be closed up in the next week or two, and then take a while for people to actually read the draft and get back to me.

I really desperately want to finish my open-but-like-90%-written fic, which means we raise it up, the final chapter of to the bottom of the river bc I realized that it was kind of incomplete, and the second chapter of a buried and a burning flame because any more work there will need to wait until the author publishes the next book in the series. this should be closed up in the next month or two.

Speedwrite the draft of the second book of the Opus series so that hopefully by the time book 1 edits are happening, I have an almost complete draft of the second book. this is mostly me side-eyeing myself about taking nearly four years to write the first book, but that is solidly in part because I had so many other open projects which point 2 is about clearing that docket. this should be done in the next year.

And then just have my major projects be, at least until books 1-5 are written and published, books 1-5 of that because that is arguably the first major 'plot arc' of the series, so if I'm looking for a pause point on writing, that's probably where to stop.

There are two or three other short side projects (a weird fun second person short story tentatively titled witch-queen, a collection of four short stories Memoirs about a not-so-evil necromancer and the shenanigans he gets up to trying to rule a kingdom, working title Perfectly Normal Recipe Blog which is a collaborative project about a perfectly normal recipe blog that definitely doesn't include anything out of the normal) that will happen when they happen

There are other projects that are on the backburner -- The Numanok Files, a series of probably 12-15 short novellas about a mercenary/ bounty hunter esque person in space whose specialty is dealing with hauntings, but, like, 80% of their jobs is actually "you are effectively a space home inspector pointing out faulty wiring reacting to solar flares/ there's a weird alien fungus/ it's carbon monoxide okay change your atmosphere filters" and 20% of it is punching ghosts; there's a post-post apocalypse novel that I want to write that I know characters and general pacing and half the setting but need to work out the other half and figure out how much aesthetic I want to commit to; there's Strangeside7 aka spacerace book that is my reaction to how much I love how Redline the anime movie commits itself to "no we are about a race, like 60% of the screentime is just fully going to be an utterly ridiculous sci fi space race"; there's even a ridiculous YA trilogy that I would have to completely transplant the setting but might end up writing because the interplay between angel-physics and physics-physics was one of my favorite things in the world. and I guess the weird ridiculous technically a sequel series to ifmlam that was going to be published as original books that was basically me having fun with 'okay I fucking love star wars prequels old rotting space bureaucracy galactic republic style' except with seers and that also still might happen because it does have some of the coolest sci fi concepts and honestly I thiiiink that's all?

but the tl;dr of that timeline is I'm trying to finish a punch of projects Right Now, so that I can write books 2-5 of Opus, and then when I'm done that (which honestly, my average fiction-writing output is close to 100k a year. if I'm concentrating purely on one project, and writing books that are about 100k, we are talking four years. although my job situation is super up in the air in that period and writing might get put solidly on the backburner as I try to make it in academia, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) I will re-evaluate which projects go next, and that's when ifmlam is likely to come up for review.

I do not have any expectations that I will make it as an original author. I'm planning on posting all of my stuff online for free, but, like. it is incredibly difficult to convince people to try out even a piece of free and easily accessibly original work even if one has a huge following, I am a very small fanfiction author, and from what I can tell the majority of the people who are interested in my work are mostly interested in me finishing ifmlam. writing is a hobby for me, and while I'm writing mostly for me--and hence the for me bit at least for the next five years is pretty solidly going to be this series that I am deeply excited about and have sunk my heart and soul into every single aspect of--I'm human, and I don't really like shouting into the void, and I expect if I spend five years publishing to absolutely no response I will either stop writing for a while and do other things gods know my life is busy enough, return to fandom in general to write some other fanfic about whatever I get deeply into, or return to a work that I actually get response to. so ifmlam will probably start getting worked on a bit at that point one way or another. unless, of course, we are in the incredibly rare timeline in which I do make it as an original author, there are people who are deeply hyped for my original works and an actual demand for them, in which case as you may have noticed there are enough ideas there to keep me busy for a decade or two, and they will just get my full attention instead of fanfiction*. in this timeline, I will do what I was considering doing a few years ago, which is officially declare ifmlam otherwise abandoned and make one more giant chapter update which is a full and cleaned up outline of what I was going to write, interspersed with the scenes already written, and have ifmlam be given at least that closure.

*I want to make it clear that I very much love fanfiction and am proud to have been a fanfiction author and in my heart of hearts would keep writing it forever, I just also have a lot of ideas for characters and settings and magic systems and Aesthetics and I have been biting at the bit to write something that is //mine// and all mine and only mine for a while, I don't see original work as superior so much as there are a dozen fandoms that I am currently in and bursting to make content about except oops these fandoms currently only exist in my head, and I want to correct that

of course given how much as writing is my vent activity and I write what I'm in the mood for, there's a chance I'll feel ifmlam cravings before then, just... expect it to take a couple of years for an update, but also for there to be an update one way of another in a couple of years? but as for right now, I'm turning to original writing, because that is what brings me joy.

but I am really deeply honored that it brought you so much joy!!! and while I will never publish spoilers in a public place, if you message me off anon I am perfectly happy to give a run-down of my current plans for the ending, bc I know "wait a couple years and see" is not the most satisfactory of answers! and hey maybe you'll be like me and once you've given Opus a try you'll decide you like it better too, it does have Seers although they are deeply different Seers than in ifmlam but imo it's very gay and fun and at least politics on one side

[zdbztumble]

GUNDAM WING review

For how much of it appears on this blog, Pokemon is more “comfort food” entertainment than a great passion of mine, and the same was true when I was a child. Back in my late grade school days, the two shows that dominated my thought, my viewing schedule, my play and my early writing were Dragon Ball Z and Gundam Wing. Like a lot of kids, I can thank Toonami for that. But while I’ve checked in on Dragon Ball, off and on, since those days, I haven’t seriously revisited Gundam Wing since it left Toonami years ago. Sharing OPs with a friend on Discord led to the Wing openings coming up, however, and with the series being free to view on Crunchyroll, I thought I’d give it a rewatch.

There’s no subtle way to put this - Gundam Wing does not hold up to my childhood memories. It’s a mess of a show that frequently falls short of its own ambition. But it remains an enjoyable - even admirable - mess.

The single biggest reason that Gundam Wing is such a mess - the single biggest reason for nearly all of its flaws - is that it’s too short. At 49 episodes (two of which are given over to a clip show recap halfway through), the show isn’t long enough to contain all the story it wants to tell. By way of demonstration, and for those who don’t know/remember the series, I tried to summarize the basic plot of the series in just a few paragraphs here.

Look at that. Look at all that text in a basic outline. That was me paring away all but the most essential details needed to understand what happens in the series. Now imagine trying to fit all of that into 47 episodes while also including character interaction and development, action sequences, aesthetic elements, and a good chunk of essential information being revealed via backstory and vague insinuations only fleshed out in the OVA and manga series.

Things start out promisingly enough, with the action beginning on Operation Meteor and the initial conflict emerging gradually. But it doesn’t take long for the brevity of the series to work against the intrigues happening within it. To say that the show falls into “tell, don’t show” would suggest that it gets across more information than it actually does. Narration opens most episodes with some degree of recap, and occasionally within episodes, but this device is established from the first episode and is usually effectively used in the context of ongoing action. The problem spots are where the show neglects to tell or show almost anything.

Because the series is so short, and because all screentime is spent with either the series leads or the major supporting characters, there’s never an opportunity to showcase the state of world and colonial affairs, and little opportunity taken to describe them outside of the opening narration. Consequently, any feeling of oppression, subjugation, or desperation for the colonies - and thus, a sense of what the Gundams are fighting for - isn’t present at the beginning of the series, and doesn’t ever really emerge. There is some sense of danger towards the end of the series, but it results from the various conflicts that happen within the show, not the state of affairs from the initial premise. Earth’s condition is similarly underdeveloped; if anything is showcased on Earth, it’s beauty. Characters will occasionally talk about the desperate straits of the Gundam pilots, and the pilots themselves will take developments like the targeting of the colonies or their betrayal to heart. The VAs and the animation are strong enough to sell such developments, but the lack of world-building to support them does hurt the series.

But it’s the developments around the Sanc Kingdom and Relena’s relevance to the story suffer the most from the show’s failure to show or tell. After Zechs liberates the kingdom, Relena’s installation as its ruler is set up but never depicted. Relena’s outreach to other nations, and her building up support for total pacifism, is also never shown, and barely discussed. She and Zechs are never even seen to have a conversation until near the very end of the series. There’s plenty of discussion of how inspiring and charismatic Relena is, and why she should be heeded and protected, but with none of the work behind that charisma shown and little of it discussed in detail, there’s little emotional resonance to be had here. Relena’s efforts as queen of the world are slightly more fleshed out, but when Zech’s declaration of war against Earth happens in the same episode - happens, if memory serves, less than a second after Relena makes significant inroads - the notion of Relena as an effective spokeswoman for pacifism is severely undercut by the series’ own haste.

Beyond the plot, all of this naturally damages Relena’s character. Relena begins the series as a somewhat bratty, somewhat depressed girl often neglected by her family due to her stepfather’s job, who finds Heero’s sudden presence in her life a vicarious if dangerous thrill. The murder of her stepfather and the revelation of her true identity further shake her out of teenage ennui and move her to take part in the great events of her time. Like the show itself, it’s a promising beginning, but because Relena’s greatest achievements are glossed over - and because, being a pacifist and a diplomat, she can’t be involved at the point of action - Relena ends up spending a lot of time on the sidelines, looking grim or worried. Worse, when the final conflict between Treize and White Fang emerges, Relena is completely ineffectual at trying for peace with Zechs, and any opportunity for her to use the soft power of her (brief) reign as ceremonial monarch to further the cause of peace isn’t taken, leaving her largely irrelevant to the finale. Relena is less a full-fledged character in Gundam Wing than a solid concept for a character that couldn’t grow to fruition in the time allotted.

The same could be said of the series protagonist, Heero Yuy. In his case, there is at least a bit more told; his scientist mentor describes him as a kind-hearted young man whose devotion to his mission has rendered him a dangerous assassin, Relena instinctively latches onto what kindness and idealism she can sense in him, various characters are inspired by his skills and his devotion to his mission. But there’s little to no evidence of the kind-hearted young man underneath the child soldier, at least not in the initial episodes. We only see the cold-blooded Gundam pilot, and that pilot has the worst starting luck out of any of them, from his Gundam being brought down to his attempts to destroy it failing. His willingness - even eagerness - to die for his cause comes up so often in the beginning of the series that it ends up losing its punch. But being the series lead, and getting more screentime by dint of being a Gundam pilot, Heero does ultimately get fleshed out more than Relena. His remorse over inadvertently killing the Alliance pacifists and his blunt but pragmatic advice to the other Gundam pilots do let his softer side emerge later on. His struggle to find a reason to keep going in the fight in the middle of the series - something multiple characters go through - is rather muddled (not helped by some obtuse and stilted dialogue, another major fault in the series), but he comes out of that mess resolved to protect Relena and defeat White Fang - so much so that he not only unites with the other pilots, but designates Quatre Raberba Winner as their leader instead of himself because he recognizes what’s best for the team. The series ultimately benefits from his being the main character because of developments like this, but the journey is more awkward and choppy than it needed to be, and his romance with Relena and rivalry with Zechs are never fully convincing even if their basic mutual interest in one another is.

Stilted dialogue more than absent material is what most works against series antagonists Zechs and Treize, though Zechs’s lack of scenes with his sister and an abrupt jump from Sanc Kingdom spokesman to genocidal avenger are an issue. The philosophical notions that pepper Zechs’s and Treize’s monologues and conversations - the nature of war, the value of soldiers’ sacrifice, mankind’s natural proclivities, the possibility of peace and what it would take to achieve it - are all fascinating, and I’m still amazed that a show that spent so much time on these subjects was put in an afterschool block bound to attract younger kids back in the day. But for every speech that’s thought-provoking and emotionally resonant, there are three that are a chore to sit through and a puzzle to comprehend. Granted, the Crunchyroll subtitles for this series aren’t the best, so that may partly explain and excuse this problem. But especially in the middle of the series, where allegiances shift and motivations collapse, having the principle antagonists be so difficult to understand isn’t ideal.

Then there are the plot holes - mostly characters who somehow survived apparent deaths with little to no explanation - and characters who just don’t work. One of them is unfortunately a Gundam pilot - Chang Wu Fei, an arrogant misogynist wrapped up in his own ideals of combat who resists any teamwork or even temporary alliances with his fellow Gundams until the very end of the series, and is an unreliable partner even then. None of this would make him a bad character - one hardly needs to be likable or relatable to be an effective and compelling presence in a story - but Wu Fei has virtually no chemistry with the other Gundams, or any character, when actually does interact with them, except for ex-Alliance soldier Sally Po. His standoffishness and stoicism are traits shared by Heero and Trowa Barton, making his seem redundant, and his professed ideals of combat are muddled by bad dialogue. His great rivalry with Treize is also on shaky ground; they only interact twice in the entire series. But Wu Fei is at least comprehensible; Dorothy Catalonia, a Romefeller spy who takes an almost sexual delight in war, is not only obnoxious and intrusive when she appears in the second half of the series, but her motivations seem to swing wildly, her allegiances impossible to follow, and I sorely wish she had died by the end of the series.

With all of those faults laid bare - I did say the show was enjoyable and admirable in spite of everything, and indeed it is. Wu Fei may be redundant and Heero only a partial success as a character, but the other three Gundam pilots are well-realized, so much so that I’m baffled to see various critiques of this show imply that they’re static and one-note. Duo Maxwell is essentially the same person at the end of the series as he was at the beginning, but he’s a wonderful source of levity in the series, and he does have his trials and his low points that contrast well with his typical personality; his moments of anger and despair are some of the best in the series for selling the stakes of the conflict in the absence of proper world-building. Trowa, while much less emotive, goes through a significant journey, with his sibling-esque relationship with circus performer Catherine far more emotionally satisfying than either the Peacecrafts’ bond or Heero and Relena’s romance.

And then there’s Quatre, my new favorite character from this series. I didn’t take a great deal of notice of him as a kid, but rediscovering his story has been my favorite thing about this rewatch. A bright, gentle, and friendly personality, disdainful of violence but prepared to fight for a worthy cause, driven to despair and madness by the loss of his father and the ZERO system, only to emerge as the repentant leader of the Gundams, instrumental in bringing them together as a unit and binding them to Relena’s ideals; of all the pilots, he sees the most growth and change, and all the essentials to his story actually make it on screen. He also has the allegiance of the Maganac Corps, a group that doesn’t have a great deal of importance to the series...but they do have a cool name and cooler mobile suits.

And if Relena is somewhat lacking as a female lead, Gundam Wing does have Sally Po, military doctor turned guerrilla fighter and stalwart Gundam ally, and Lucrezia Noin. For a character that could easily have just been Zech’s love interest, Noin sees a degree of growth throughout the series to rival Quatre’s, moving from OZ instructor to Sanc Kingdom defense captain to the instigator of the Gundams as a unit, working to defeat the man she loves. The show also avoids sexualizing any of its female cast, so - a point for that, I guess.

The designs of the Gundams are all unique (as are their abilities), and some are downright beautiful. The other mobile suits are varied as well and easy to identify, making combat easy to follow. The quality of the combat - and the animation in general - is hit and miss, but it’s never atrocious, and when it’s solid, the end result is some great shots and action. The series also boasts a fantastic soundtrack, with lovely instrumental themes and two great opening songs (though why “Rhythm Emotion” was brought in with only ten episodes left to go on the series still baffles me.) 

All this contributes to Gundam Wing being enjoyable, but what makes it admirable is actually the stilted dialogue and overstuffed story that bring it down. To attempt a series that ruminates on the nature of war and the various philosophical positions around its necessity or lack thereof, of the chances for real peace, for the evolution of humanity if were to move into the stars, and the interpersonal conflicts between various characters, would be a tall order for any series, and not the easiest thing to make into visually compelling animation. That Gundam Wing made the attempt at all shows ambition and aspiration on the part of its writers and staff. As I’ve said at length here, it was frustrated by its short running time and the weaknesses of story elements and characters, but an ambitious mixed bag - even a failure - that aims high is a much more admirable (and interesting to watch) affair than a success that aims low.

And, in its failures to get certain elements across, Gundam Wing shows enough of what it was trying to do that I, at least, can forgive some (not all) rough patches. Characters like Heero and conflicts like the Gundams’ basic fight for the colonies still work despite their flaws. And the final run of episodes, where White Fang and Treize clash and the Gundams work around the battle to save the day, are incredibly strong. It’s a finale that surpasses much of the content preceding it, and if it would’ve been improved by that content being better, it still works because the intent of that earlier content can still be perceived.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed rediscovering Gundam Wing, and I’d like to check out the dub again when I’m in a position to renew my Hulu subscription. For now, though - there’s a certain waltz to attend to...

[snicketsleuth]

Slackin’ with the Sleuth: reviewing Netflix’s “The End”

There were many goodbyes, and there were many beginnings.

“The End” is perhaps the strangest and most controversial episode to date. It’s difficult to assess the actual quality of the episode as we are constantly reminded of all the ones which preceded it.

At the risk of sounding like a fool rather than a prophet, it’s possible that Netflix’s version of “A Series of Unfortunate Events” will go down in the history of adaptations. We’ve never had quite a literary retranscription like this one: no one has dared to go as deep into the source material, its themes, its inspirations, since, perhaps, Peter Jackson’s recreation of “The Lord of the rings”. The amount of mindwork necessary to make the imagination of the original author fit the screen is absolutely comparable. Let’s wrap up the series after the cut.

Let’s get the elephant out of the room: why would you give the longest book in the series less screentime than the others? The only other example which comes to mind is David Yates’ attempt at adapting “The Order of the Phoenix”, an achievement in shoppy editing, lighting mistakes, script derailment and overall cinematographic incompetence. That is not a strong pitch. Worse of all is the fact that the idea apparently came from Daniel Handler himself! In his words, “The Penultimate Peril” is the real ending while “The End” serves as more of a coda. Even though the ending, by classical tradition, is only supposed to come after the denouement. It’s right in the name of the hotel, for crying out loud. As moving as the montage to “There’s no happy endings, not here, not now” is, its inclusion could have worked just as well in the final episode. In fact, it already worked as the conclusion of the first season!

The reasoning behind this choice is quite skewed, because "A Series of Unfortunate Events" already had a coda: it's called "Chapter Fourteenth". It's short, it's sweet, it's symbolic, it serves as a moral compass for the entire series. It's the only epilogue the series deserves. On the surface, of course, the decision to fusion "The End" with "Chapter Fourteenth" is perfectly reasonable; even the fans don't know whether to classify "Chapter Fourteenth" as a chapter of "The End" or as a fourteenth book which just happens to be published in the same volume as "The End". It's also doubtful that Netflix would allow the showrunners to release a 10-minutes episode as a conclusion. We get it. But somehow, the show writers have convinced themselves that fusioning the last act of the story and its coda turns the entire final act into a coda, and... that's simply not how narration works. There's simply too much going on in that book in terms of plot, character development and themes to adapt it in less than an hour without something missing.

There may be several reasons behind this change. One might be a personal dislike for that particular book, a reluctance to certain chapters of it, a desire to get it over with as soon as possible. But it's unlikely given that the screenwriters adapted the story rather faithfully (the deaths of Kit and Olaf, in particular, are pretty much verbatim) in spite of the time limits. We personnally believe that budget may have had something to do with it: "The End" was always supposed to be filmed last, at a time where budget may be scarce. Recreating the illusion of many exterior shots when the series is filmed mostly on soundstages can't have been cheap, and most of "The End" happens on the outside, in a tropical location. So condensing the book could work as an excuse to cut corners when it comes to money: less screentime, less sets to build. What makes it believable is the fact that "The Penultimate Peril" was officially the most expensive episode to film because of the large crowds and the many returning cast members. Prior to the season, screenwriters had sold this format to the fans as a "mega-episode", which would be longer than the others. But in reality Netflix"s version of "The End" lasts 52 minutes, while the first part of "The Penultimate Peril" stands at a whooping 55! Unless official sources deny it, there's a strong possibility that the showrunners had originally planned a hour-and-a-half episode and had no choice but to "trim the fat" as buget ran out. As we explained in our review of "The Slippery Slope", production of Season 3 was more troubled than we were led to believe, and the final episode could be its greatest casualty yet.

So what did we lose exactly? Well, namely plot elements which drive home the most important themes of the book. The island of "The End" presents the fantasy of an utopia: an opportunity to flee society and regular contact with other human beings, as well as all your problems. But as the history of the island unfolds, we see that this utopia is impossible, nefarious, even. Society inevitably recreates itself, and schisms occur. Beatrice and Bertrand tried to turn the island into a force for good in the world, but that scared the refugees who only wished to be left in peace, away from the rest of humanity. So the Baudelaire parents, who had worked so hard for the happiness of the islanders, had to be banished. And there lies the contraduction: in their effort to flee from oppression, the islanders had to resort to exclusion themselves. The Baudelaire parents tried to break the schism only to create another. And the worst part of all that is that it didn't even work. In their desperate efforts to disengage from the world, the islanders installed Ishamel as a tyrant... only for a second schism to occur when he killed them all as he started to lose power. And even before that, islanders had started another schism by aligning themselves with Olaf and freeing him from his cage. The island is not an utopia, it is just a microcosm of the world at large and a poetic recreation of VFD's tragic history. A failed experiment which only reinforces the issues it tried to solve. And that's the real reason the Baudelaire orphans decided to leave the island at the end of "Chapter Fourteenth": they know that safety and neutrality are an illusion. Had they stayed there, chaos, dissession and conflicts would have occured eventually. Accepting our inability to control things is all part of growing up.

Therefore, the question is: did Netflix's version of "The End" manage to convey that philosophical discussion? Not really. There's simply too much going on in these 52 minutes for anyone to stop and think for a moment about the moral consequences or thematical implications of staying on the island or leaving it. What we get on a screen is a mostly plot-focused adventure where characters do the things they do in the heat of the moment, because they're forced to react to other brisk events. It's not badly written, as their decisions make sense, but it's undeniably a lesser product than the original. A story of this quality needed some room to breathe and explore its symbolism.

Then again, there is another point of adaptation where Netflix's version is actually superior to the books. You see, alongside "The End", a supplementary material called "The Beatrice letters" was released, detailing the actual ending of the Baudelaires' story. It focuses on Lemony, years after the events of "The End" and now famous for writing the books, being chased by a mysterious "Beatrice". He eventually realizes that this Beatrice is actually his niece, who was raised by the Baudelaire orphans, and who is tracking them down once again. This fundamentally changes the ending of the series as 1) Beatrice's survival strongly implies that the Baudelaire orphans are alive too, 2) Lemony, after losing so much of his friends and family members, once again has someone to care for. This is in stark contrast with Lemony's depressing "rock fall, everyone dies" conclusion to "The End". Most readers will never read "The Beatrice letters" or even know it exists, which is infuriating as it contains the "real" ending of the books, one that the author very much intended. So one has to applaud the screenwriters' decision to end the series with the reunion of Beatrice and Lemony. They had obtained a deal to adapt "A Series of Unfortunate Events", not "The Beatrice Letters": they were under no contractual obligation to do so, but we're glad they did. It prevents the series from devolving into mere nihilism, and instead proposes something more interesting.

But more impressing is this episode showing how the TV series has truly come into its own in two aspects. The first one is the aesthetic, as the overly-saturated scenery engulfs the actor. The show has always dismissed realism as a passing craze, but this is the most extreme example of how cartoony the world of Lemony Snicket would look: it’s so fake, it’s real. As the island is a pretty good allegory of purgatory, it makes sense that the story would take place in a completely surreal atmosphere. The care taken to the production design remains, in our humble opinion and careful hypothesis, the real reason “The End” was cut so short, but that money is well-spent. As your eyes get used to the CGI, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish what’s real and what’s not. However even this exploit has its limits: the arboretum is a far cry from the biblical majesty of the scene as depicted in the books, but it will have to do.

The second aspect where marked improvements are to be mentioned is the acting, mostly that of Louis Hynes and Malina Weissman. We were lucky enough that they were decent at all in season 1 (casting child actors is a pretty hit-or-miss line of work), but as of season 3 they really stand head and shoulders with the rest of the cast. They deliver the right emotion in every single emotional scene, in spite of the challenge. Klaus and Violet have come alive. Their recollection of their own tragic existences in the trial scene of “The Penultimate Peril” is particularly impressive.

But the real standout of “The End”, of course, remains the death scene of Kit and Olaf. For a moment, everything goes quiet and we forget that we are watching an adaptation. It was perfect in the books and it’s perfect here, to the letter, although letting Olaf look intently into the Baudelaire orphans’ eyes as he mutters his last verse is a welcome and tasteful addition. We were all wary of the way the showrunners were going to adapt the end of “The End”: the Netflix series has taken a comedic approach and this is the least comedic scene imaginable. It should have been a monumental failure, but judging by everyone’s reaction, it seems to have worked. So bravo to the production team for having the nerve to take a risk and deliver the tragedy of it all in spite of tonal dissonances with the rest of the show. Hard work pays off.

So is this the adaptation of our hopes and dreams? Of course it’s not. But is it the best possible story we could have hoped for in the Hollywood system? No, it’s much better than that. There’s something particular about the age of streaming television which somehow allowed this adaptation to happen. We hope it’s no a fluke, and we hope the success of Netflix’s homage to “A Series of Unfortunate Events” will give inspiration to many other creators. It’s a teachable moment on how to nail down the emotion and message of an original work. And that’s perhaps why the end of the TV series is a tad more hopeful than its book version: because its showrunners were happy, so happy they could complete this project the way they had intended, in spite of impossible things. So of course they put a few less deaths into the conclusion of the overall story. Happy people write the most frightening horror stories, and, in spite of its reputation, horror loves a happy ending. After all, the publication of the books was an anomaly, a miracle in and of itself. Daniel Handler has confessed many times that he’s still dumbfounded at their success.

So for now on, and in spite of our many gripes and nitpicks, let’s be grateful. There are so many fans of other works out there who have it worse than us, guys! But not us. We had the books, we have the show, and we will have each other. At long last... we’re the fortunate ones.

[dlamp-dictator]

I’ll keep an eye on this anime. If anything, it definitely looks pretty, the fight scenes have been [done] well so far, and seeing Melida be cute in full color is great. If I just get a decent action series out of this anime, I’ll be happy.

                                                                            -Allen X, October 22 2019

 Well folks, Assassins Pride wrapped up last week and I can safely say I got what I wanted. In the end, I think this was a pretty fun and passable anime to watch weekly. Decent action, decent plot, and a decently written story. Nothing was too offensive or annoying save for one or two moments in the middle, and as much as I felt the show stumbled compared to the manga and possibly the light novel I have hope that this might just get an official translate and... well, you know, do the pacing thing better.

But since I had a habit of covering this thing after every arc I figured I’d give the show some closing thoughts and an overall opinion of the thing at the end. I hope I don’t spend a 1000+ words on this, but... well... I can get pretty wordy when I get a groove, so we’ll see. 

But anyway, let’s start with...

The Good

The Visuals

Let’s not mince words folks, this anime is pretty. It might be because I’m a sucker for night aesthetic, but the one disadvantage of the black-and-white manga is that were really never got to see just how dark the world of Flandor really was. To quote myself again:

(This is a) world trapped in perpetual night with warriors of light being the only thing keeping away further darkness, along with the last bastion of humanity being a literal chandelier city in case you missed the symbolism

And nothing makes you really feel that more than that first scene of Kufa walking through the quiet streets on his way to the Angel estate, seeing not only how dark the world is from the night sky above, but also how artificial the light within it really is. The dark aesthetic really helps a lot of the other characters pop out a lot more in terms of the actual color. Mana is literally a glowing, flaming aura that lights the darkness like a candle. The two main girls in this series are a bright blonde and white-haired girl that stand out against the black night sky like the sun and stars. 

Again, symbolism.

The list goes on, but you get the idea.

The Action

Not to say this is Trigger or Madhouse or Perriot, but it is pretty nice that we get a decent action scene every arc. Something I definitely appreciate is that they show contrast between Melida’s kind nature and friendly attitude with her brutal and dirty fighting style. 

See, Melida is a kind and gentle girl that would rather not use violence save for fighting demons, but if she has to fight she’ll use every dirty trick in the book. She’ll throw sand, she feint attacks, she go into brawling when close enough, she fake being injured to make her opponent let their guard down. It’s a nice little story detail that shows you this noblewoman was, in fact, trained by a ruthless assassin that taught her to actual fight for survival instead of like a nobleman. Her taking down stronger students by doing all but outright cheat is almost hilarious to watch sometimes.

The Overall Narrative

For as fast as the pacing was I feel like I got a good idea of Melida’s story and the trials she has to endure as the “Incompetent Talented Girl”. This story focused on Melida more than Kufa, which is something I’m very thankful for. It’s always tempting to switch over the OP male MC to overpower his way through things, but to my pleasant surprise this only happened in one arc, and it was an arc that had some justification for it, though I really didn’t care it myself. Save for the third arc everything was to show Melida’s growth from a shy and bullied girl to a competent swordswoman that can even hold her own against the other heirs of the three noble houses. 

But that’s enough of the good, so now we have to talk about... 

The Bad

The Pacing

There’s no getting around this. Even if I didn’t already read bits of the manga online ahead of time the pacing for this show is still insanely fast. Even taking out the fact that this is an adapted story we’re never given enough time to absorb certain scenes. And the worse is that a lot of the arcs have a focus on intrigue and mystery. Luna Lumiere Selection Tournament Arc had two major mysteries: who was the one that changed the plaque and who is Black Madia masquerading as? They especially took care to make Mule seem like a very suspicious party only to reveal it was a third party in the very same episode. The mystery of Black Madia was done better, though by necessity as she couldn’t reveal herself until the very last moment of the arc. This was fine in the anime, but it could had used an extra episode or two of build-up between scenes. The arc at Rosetti’s hometown was a huge mystery that had Kufa under believable suspicious, and was actually done pretty well by not revealing the true culprit until the last episode of it, it also helps that Kufa was under suspicion from the first episode of it. The Library Exam Arc was... done alright, but it could had used an extra episode or two to cook and add some more tension between the Angels and the other nobles, but it was done well. 

And that’s the main issue. Every arc could had used one or two extra episodes to really set the scene. Nothing was done poorly in terms of structure and narrative, but everything could had been better had things slowed down. Despite the action this show isn’t a shounen or action genre, it’s a political drama with a combat school setting. 

This might also be just the issue of this being a 12-episode anime adapting a novel. A  novel has the advantage of progressing its plots slowly with the knowledge the reader has the entire book to finish either that arc or at least most of it. If that reader skips around because they’re bored that says more about them than the author. With an anime or television show you don’t have that luxury, you only have a few episodes at best to keep a viewers attention, especially for something like the seasonal anime lineup where you have to keep audience retention every week and your competition is the other 50+ anime out there that might possibly be more interesting. I pity whatever decent anime has to contend with the newest My Hero Academia season along with everything else. 

I understand the need to want to just show off the cool bits to keep audience attention, but it came at the cost of the narrative. Even if this thing still holds together well it could hold together much better if they only focused on the first two arcs of this series instead of trying to shove in four, but alas... 

In any case...

Other Smaller Issues that Bugged Allen

Really, the pacing was the biggest issue in this anime, but I do have my fair share of gripes and nitpicks too. I’ll keep this in list form for the sake of simplicity.

Kufa having access to potions/medicines that can not only kick-start a mana-less person into having it, but one that can also turn half-Lyncrophyes back to humans opens up quite a few plotholes and issues. I’m sure the light novel and manga explain their existence better, probably something to the effect of them being extremely experimental and a deadly risk, but the anime doesn’t explain that and it can take you out of the story if you care about the world-building.

I feel like side characters like Nerva, Mule, and Salacha were suppose to get more screentime, or at least more development, but just didn’t due to the pacing and runtime. You get the basic idea of everyone, but it feels like the show wanted to do more with them, or at least that the source material probably did more with them.

The occasional moments fanservice don’t work too well in this series. It’s nothing to the level of Senran Kagura or Ikkitousen, but when your cast consist of mostly middle school aged girls the most fanservice that should be seen is a beach episode or a sleepover episode. And while this anime did have a sleepover episode it still also took time to put some of this girls in... compromising positions. My general rule of fanservice is that high school age characters doesn’t really count due to the wonky-ness of hormones act and how most media east and west tends to treat high school characters anyway, but middle school kids... yeah no. That’s just my morals, but it’s still a detractor from the anime.

The third arc kind of felt pointless since it tried to focus on Kufa’s relationship with Rosetti. I didn’t really need to know about Kufa’s past, and connecting it to Rosetti just... doesn’t feel right given how he dismissive treated her in the first arc. Making Rose a half-vampire was also pretty pointless to me. It feels like they were trying to give Kufa a harem when this show is mostly focused on Melida, and the most interesting part about his past is a mix of his life in the dark zone of the world and his past as an assassin, not his relationships with his apparent adoptive sister. It just felt... really focused and a waste of time. They could had cut out this arc, gave each other arc an extra episode to build up some things and be none the weaker for it.

The Dub

The nice thing about VRV is that I can see the HiDive dubcast along with the show. I only watched a handful of episodes, but here are my general throughts for those curious. Overall, the dub is fine, but like most HiDive Dubcasts it feels... off. Not bad, but it feels like they needed to be 4 or 6 weeks off the original release instead of 2 or 3 to get the director in the right place. I feel like most of the issues with this dub come from the direction and scripting rather than the actual voice-acting. But just to keep this short.

Kufa sounds too flat. This was a pretty common dubbing issue back in the early 2000s when trying to translate/localize a stoic, serious character. The director is probably trying to make the actor emulate the original Japanese voice acting and Kufa just sounds too flat and bored at times because of it. Most character like this tend to be given a more deadpan and sarcastic edge to them in English to make the have a little more emotion. In Japanese that flat tone is meant imply stoicism, resolve, and masculinity. In English... that’s just sounding flat and bored. Again, most characters like this are usually given a different kind of tone to keep them from sounding bored. For Kufa I’d say a more strict and stern tone of voice would help given he’s an instructor, almost like a even-toned drill sergeant issuing orders. He does sound like that from time to time when actually instructing, but I wish he kept that persona. Though that’s just my take.

Nerva and Rosetti... just don’t hit it for me. I don’t mind the difference in tone, but the script doesn’t lend itself to it. Rosetti’s actor makes her sounds much more like an adult in English, but her actual lines are still childish, which makes her come off as a little... cringe. Same with Nerva, but I’m willing to overlook it since she’s more of a side character anyway. Mule actually sounds pretty good in this regard. Her tone sounds less like a middle schooler and more like a young college woman, but since a lot of her actual lines has an air of condescending smugness it works out, though her actor sounds like she’s reading the script and not acting from it.

The scripting in general seemed to really want to follow the subbed version and it falls flat because of it. When I read the subtitles that take the world, systems, and general wackiness of this subpar anime so seriously it’s fine. But to actually hear it in  a language I understand... it kinda’ shows how lacking the series is. I’m not saying they should had added jokes or anything, but it feels like they could had made the dialogue a bit more casual than it was in the subs so that the lines flowed a little better. HiDive dubs, their dubcasts especially, tend to feel like a product of the early 2000s rather than something current.

Thoughts and Recommendations

Overall I do recommend this series as a decent action show with some nice colors to it and a killer OP and ED, but there's a lot better I could recommend too that does everything this anime does but better. 

So... here are a recommendations I have if Assassins Pride didn’t really click with you as much as you hoped.

A bit of an odd recommendation, but I’ll stick up Goblin Slayer first. This anime is actually a lot like Assassins Pride, being a character-focused story with decent side characters and does a lot of its world-building in the background. However,  it does its arcs far better than Assassins Pride since they aren’t intrigue-based and the cast is solving much simpler problems in the grand scheme of things. It’s also an anime based off a light novel just to add to the similarities, and said anime also has four arcs to it. I will say this is a series that’s not for the faint of heart, and I almost recommend skipping episode 1 if you’re of a weaker constitution if you plan on watching this one.

Next up would be Chivalry of a Failed Knight. It does the combat school aspect of Assassins Pride much better, taking some strides to show that each of its students are, in fact, warriors capable of harming and killing others and going to a school to hone those skills. And if you that Melida was a ruthless fighter Ikki probably takes it a step further. And this is also another light novel adaptation, though the manga did technically finish its updates online if you’re curious. A side recommendation to this one would be Armed Girl's Machiavellism.

My last recommendation will be Katana Maidens. This is another combat school anime that I feel is honestly average, but it’s an anime-original series that has 24 episodes behind it, and quite a few decent action scenes. I recommend this one more to action junkies as I feel the story really starts to drag in the second half, but an overall decent series that does do itself world-building a little better than Assassins Pride, or at least I’m not asking as many questions at the end of it.

And those are my thoughts on Assassins Pride. Now I have a Rambling on video games to work on, so I’ll see you all later.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - Summer 2019

Hey, look who finished the season perfectly on time, even if he did so by dropping a bunch of stuff last minute! (Technically, as of writing, I haven’t finished Re:Stage Dream Days, but you can rest assured that it’s bad.)

I thought I was going to do a first impressions rundown video for the entire season at once, since my impression posts don’t tend to get a lot of engagement anyway, but since I didn’t end up going through with it, I’ll summarize my point - summer started strong, and even here at the end, I can easily say it’s the best season thus far in what’s largely been a letdown year for seasonal anime (and a god damn renaissance for long shows, thanks to My Hero Academia, so if I seem down on a season that had Dororo, or Vinland Saga, or Fruits Basket, remember that I exclude those shows from my considerations until the end of the year).

This season saw several high-profile continuations like A Certain Scientific Accelerator, Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls In a Dungeon II, and Symphogear XV, but also new works by creators like Mari Okada, and anticipated adaptations of Astra: Lost in Space and Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest, and in the end, well...a lot of those were mixed bags at best, but the biggest drawback I will remember Summer 2019 for is that it was drowning in bad isekai shows. The aforementioned Arifureta, the basically-counts Danmachi, and also Isekai Cheat Magician, Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks, The Lost Ones, Demon Lord Retry!...it just never ended, and that’s not even counting If It’s For My Daughter, I’d Even Defeat a Demon Lord. 

Speaking of all that stuff, let’s get right into it, yeah?

28 shows were simulcast this season, and of those, I…

Skipped 4:

Yami Shibai 7, Starmyu Season 3, A Certain Scientific Accelerator, and Lord El-Melloi II Case Files: Rail Zeppelin Grace Note were all skipped because I have not watched the previous series.

Dropped 15:

Worst of the Season: If It’s For My Daughter, I’d Even Defeat a Demon Lord!

I dropped this after one episode because I found the aesthetic and tone to be aggressively boring and I found even the cute daugheroo character to be utterly generic in execution...and then later found out oh boy was I right to drop it, based on how many people compared it to the Bunny Drop manga that we don’t talk about. *shudders*

Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest

Wins the “biggest tryhard” award for being just the most straightforward an SAO award gets, right up to being grimdark for dumb reasons. The first episode alone had inconsistent animation, and that just did not bode well for the future...and the plot instantly reminded me of Slime, which soured on me over time. I let this one go sour after one shot.

Demon Lord, Retry!

The blandest of beige this season, Demon Lord had neither the story nor the production values to reel me in or convince me it was anything but the Overlord wannabe it so clearly was.

Isekai Cheat Magician

This show was a pretty transparent attempt to have an isekai story with a childhood friend romance plot, and while I’m fine with one and a half of those things, it couldn’t execute them in any decent way by the end of the first episode, and just wound up being largely boring.

Wasteful Days of High School Girls

Speaking of boring, what if Nichijou wasn’t funny? You’d get something like this.

Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks?

So the tone this one ultimately ended up having was pretty much exactly what I expected after the premiere - it leaned too hard on jokes that weren’t as funny as it thought they were, and too hard on the dumb hentai mom trope, and neither of those things interested me in the slightest. Pretty okay with having left this off the watchlist.

The Ones Within

I have stated multiple times in the last few weeks that Symphogear is great because it can convince you that it’s a work of genius. The Ones Within has, unfortunately, convinced itself that it’s deep social commentary of some kind, rather than a bargain-bin Danganronpa with no real thought put into it.

Are You Lost?

I’m amazed that we got another Eromanga Sensei this season and it flew entirely under the radar. For God’s sake, the first episode featured a young teenage girl eating a bug and drinking her own urine. I just didn’t see myself being particularly entertained by the shock value longer than the premiere.

Ensemble Stars (4/10)

I can’t tell if this one is actually over, but Funimation’s site doesn’t list any new episode premieres coming up, so I’m gonna assume it is? I gave this one a shot and hung onto it because it took UtaPri’s premise and gave it the slightly more serious tone I was looking for, but dropped it after the second episode started to drown us in side characters with no hint that the floodgates were closing, rather than giving ample screentime to a select cast so they could actually become at least two-dimensional before throwing in more people we’re supposed to care about.

BEM

BEM suffered from an unfortunate lack of distinct personality, which sucks when it seems to have had a decent story to tell. Nothing else about the show wound up sticking out to me, though, which has me fully convinced that Production I.G.’s name is only on this to boost recognition, and the second-billed LandQ studios did the majority of the work. And their best-known other show is Swordgai. So...

To The Abandoned Sacred Beasts (5/10)

I have gotten absolutely no pushback so far for my decision to tear into this show because it should have been a different show, so I’m gonna take that as a general agreement of my earlier statement. What a waste of a concept.

Cop Craft (5/10)

This one I still think I was not crazy to pick up after the first episode, because it wasn’t until the third that the animation tanked hard and the pacing went absolutely nuts, and apparently stayed that way. Did they write a thirty-nine-episode story that had to be condensed into twelve or something?

Magical Sempai

This one I probably would have kept watching if the majority of its humor wasn’t just the title character embarrassing herself in lewd ways. It was funny, but I didn’t see myself enjoying anything more than one episode of it.

GRANBELM (6/10)

This one I got halfway through before realizing that, during my end-of-season catchup, I had absolutely no desire to return to. The plot didn’t really start moving until the fifth episode, and in that time I had not gotten particularly invested in the characters, especially since the show makes fun of the viewer for thinking that the big mecha dream battles actually had stakes beyond “you don’t get to be The Thing”. At least it looked nice and the mecha designs were very original.

Are you willing to fall in love with a pervert, as long as she’s a cutie?

There were four shows this season with questions for titles. Just saying! This one actually had me hooked right up until the end, revealing that not only is it a fanservice show, but a fetish pandering one. That being said, if I were attracted to women, I could have seen myself getting something out of it, what with the decently moody tone and good production values.

I put 2 On Hold:

Is It Wrong to Try To Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon? II

I’ll probably come back to this when the third series comes around, just to give it one more chance to pull me back in, but ditching my favorite character for harem antics and character shilling just did not endear me to this long-awaited sequel.

Re:Stage Dream Days!!

This one’s not actually on hold, but I don’t have any other good place to mention it. This one I’m gonna make it through just on willpower, not because it’s good, but because it starts out as the most shameless rip-off I’ve ever seen in anime, specifically of Love Live!.

And I Finished 7:

Kochoki (5/10)

I thought I was gonna give this one a 7 at least, for nearly the whole season, for being a decently-told and somewhat new telling of Nobunaga’s early life with great production values for Studio Deen...right up until the structure fell completely apart at the end, almost completely out of nowhere. I’m still in awe of the gall this show had to literally skip over the final battle.

How Heavy Are The Dumbbells You Lift? (8/10)

This one came right the fuck out of nowhere and totally blew my expectations out of the way from the very first episode. Looking at the summary, I was convinced I was gonna drop this after the premiere...and found myself totally hooked by its cheery visual presentation and excellent sense of meta-comedy, not to mention its genuine educational value.

Astra: Lost In Space (8/10)

One of two adaptations I was really looking forward to this season (along with Fire Force), Astra was pretty much what I expected - a very good translation of a very good manga that ran for the perfect amount of time to be divided into twelve-ish episodes. A fantastic and memorable cast of characters enhanced a surprisingly twisty story, and Lerche made it all look just as good as I’d hoped.

The Demon Girl Next Door (8/10)

Speaking of defying my expectations, another show I was expecting pretty much nothing from, maybe one I could compare to Gabriel Dropout or something, that was instead an incredibly charming story of a girl trying to save her family by defeating a magical girl...with a very, very loose definition of the word “defeat” in play. I couldn’t have asked for much more from this one, aside from maybe a sequel?

Given (9/10)

Speaking of “Lerche” and “gorgeous”, this profoundly gripping story of a spacecase and a loner hesitantly making music together blossomed further and further as it went on, and became my new go-to reference point for explicit gay relationships in anime. It went where even Yuri On Ice!!! couldn’t, and left me desperate for a Part Two.

O Maidens In Your Savage Season (9/10)

My write up for this show was one of my longest in recent memory, and I stand by it - even if Okada had to write a few plot contrivances in to get where she’s going, at least she presented her cast in an incredibly thoughtful way and gave them a satisfying payoff, with the knowledge that they’re teenagers and all of their problems can’t be solved in one semester. The high water mark for discussions of sexuality in this medium.

BEST OF THE SEASON: Symphogear XV (9/10)

Anime is wonderful, and so am I.

So that wraps up summer! We’ve got a lot to look forward to in fall, even if My Hero Academia and Food Wars’ fourth series will both ultimately end up on a list in the distant future next year. Will Psycho-Pass 3 redeem the series? Will Azur Lane be better than Kantai Collection? Will Beastars beat Aggretsuko as the biggest furry panderer of the year? Only time will tell. And then I’ll tell you all what I think it said.

[takaraphoenix]

Review: 3x14 - A Kiss From a Rose

So, @kimmycup and I finished watching that episode!

Let’s a try a different tune and be more positive, because overall there’s such a... tired weariness that settled deep in my bones concerning this show at this point. And that’s actually actively making me sad.

So, let’s talk about the things I liked:

1.) The fact that a stranger Seelie who never met Clary makes a better Clary impersonation than Jonathan can make a Jace impersonation. Like. Boy. Your acting used to be way better. (And yes, this is under “liked” because, honestly, I find Jonathan just straight up hilarious at this point. Boy needs to get his shit together, man.)

No, but seriously - what I liked about it was how fast Clary noticed it. It’s come a time where I once again forgot that I used to actually like Clary at some point. And this was exactly why I liked her! She notices shit! Instead of wasting a whole-ass episode where a character doesn’t notice when someone is impersonating a person they should know really well (*side-eyes Alec real hard here*), she is like nearly instantly “Well that ain’t Jace, huh”. And the trick with the rose to verify was really clever.

I miss them writing Clary as clever. Most of the time they just write her as raging and loud, or insanely horny and stabby. Just... Clary being clever are her best character moments and I like them.

2.) I LOVE SOFT!JACE SOFT!JACE IS MY FAVORITE JACE. Seriously from the cute bedhead, to him again picking something really thoughtful and really romantic to do - I love that romantic!Jace is canon, considering how much he is always reduced to just being a horny playboy by the fandom that apparently never ever saw an episode of the show huh - to him being graceless for a change and falling flat on his ass. Sure, that totally destroyed my headcanon that Jace can ice-skate, but heeey, it’s cute as fuck so I forgive canon.

3.) ISABELLE DOING SCIENCE. Sure, it was only short, but urgh, I love scientist!Izzy. It got so lost in all the romance drama and addiction drama and her... suddenly... also being weapon’s master for whatever reason (y’all still haven’t explained what that shit even meant, aside from you saving on giving another character a speaking role to hand Clary her Super Special Swords). I am still calling bullshit on that entire whole plotline because it is in fact bullshit to act like Izzy and Alec haven’t know all along how the Clave operates, but if it gets Isabelle back to actually doing something productive and showing off her skills instead of just... suffering in some form? I’m all here for that.

4.) Magnus actually opening up to Alec. Y’all know that my biggest complaint about canon!Ma/ec is that they don’t communicate and would literally rather bite off their own tongues than share personal stuff with each other. I like that so far in this half-season, they have... actually been talking about their feelings. It’s low-key pathetic that you gotta praise the very baseline of what a healthy relationship is, but here we are.

Seriously though, the feeling that was conveyed, how Harry played the scene, how much Magnus’ loss stood in the forefront there.

Things I didn’t like:

1.) I don’t trust this show enough to not bring Jordan and Maia back together. Yes, I did like that they talked shit out and had a good, surprisingly long scene together (instead of the usual incredibly rushed quick moments of Actual Talking before they dive right back into drama and action), but this show... I mean, come on, they chose a shared bite that brought Izzy back into addiction to open up the S/izzy, so if you really put it past them to bring Jordan and Maia back together only based on them having One Good Conversation, you do not know this show well.

So, yeah, that’s what I’m currently wearily expecting them to do, because they have given Bat a full screentime of 5 minutes so far on this show so I am somehow not thinking Ba/ia is gonna be endgame.

2.a) That whole Lorenzo story, start to finish, is literally just forced additional drama. And I do mean from start. Seriously, what reasoning goes behind “We need a new High Warlock of New York... so let’s take this outsider instead of a proper representative of our community like, say, Catarina Loss”. But no, we couldn’t have Cat do it and it not being dramatic. We needed a secondary antagonist so let’s put an OC in here. And like, yeah, I like Lorenzo alright, in the role he is in, but it’s also rather... unnecessary. Like, there’s already enough going on and Magnus is honestly already suffering enough without additionally getting kicked while he’s on the ground??

2.b) Also I am willing to bet money that the whole entire story-point of Magnus losing his loft is so Ma/ec can find ~a place of their own~ and move in early after all. Because seriously literally every single loss and suffering Magnus has endured in this show had the sole purpose of furthering the ship. I’d like for him to be, you know, treated as his own person?

Also, high-key Alec threatening Lorenzo over the very fair deal that Lorenzo made with Magnus, regardless of how petty it was, was... Not Good. This is exactly part of the point I keep making why the “OH NO the Clave is torturing Downworlders! We would have never expected uwu” is absolute bullshit for Alec and Isabelle. Because treating Downworlders as inferior is literally how they were raised. And this little display of “I can strip you off your power for upsetting my boyfriend because I’m a Shadowhunter” was very much an act of “I am the superior species” and that’s... uh. Yeah.

2.c) What also bothers me is the magic though. I mean this was like... borrowed magic? From Lorenzo. So, does it wear off? Is this going to be like another addiction plotline where Magnus pulls a Willow Rosenberg and goes for regular magic-fixes because he needs more whenever it wears off?? Because I can’t imagine that “a higher demon took all of my magic in a deal” can literally be resolved by a 2 second, non-draining magic transfer from the High Warlock? Like, Lorenzo wasn’t even outta breath? It can’t have been that easy.

3.) Filing. Okay, hear me out on this one. Literally everything in the Institute is incredibly high tech - all their fancy screens and scans, their database of warlocks, security system, the whole 3D projection of the city they can pull up. There is just no way that they have not digitalized all those old tomes and couldn’t just cross-referrence “Morning Star Sword” in some database. No way in fucking hell.

This is part where the whole world building doesn’t seem fully thought through again. They have all of those heavy, old books in their library. They would have digitalized those. They would have created Institute-wide networks to cross-referrence instead of solely relying on heavy old books in libraries that you gotta comb in person to find shit.

Not in a world where “A Shadowhunter in Paris has just reported a Stele missing” reaches the New York Institute in five nanoseconds. They’re more organized than that and they have shown to be more digitalized than that.

Sure, they’d still have the libraries for aesthetic reasons, but they sure as shit would have used spells or something, or even the Silent Brothers who apparently have enough free time to illustrate Paradise Lost, to digitalize their books.

4.) Luke. Luke getting stalked by those cops for? What? Reason?? Seriously, what charges do they have. It’s not like 0llie died, she was apparently transferred so she could have easily cleared Luke of whatever he was accused of when she had disappeared. There is... literally no legal reason why he is still suspended and why they would have cops trailing him? And then he just... immediately gets arrested. You really think that in the what, ten minutes that you had lost sight of Luke since you stalked him at the café, he had enough time to slaughter all those people. What the fuck, man.

[blairextraordinaire]

SWTOR asks: 2, 3, 19, 20?

I’m terrible at choosing, so I definitely have more than one answer to these questions.2. which class has your favourite visual aesthetic?I love that the smuggler is such a haphazard character and just sort of throws something together and says “that should work”, which is really apparent in their fighting style and companions.3. what advanced class has your favourite combat style for levelling, pve, and/or pvp?ohh, there are a few. SInquisitor advanced classes are both pretty great, and I especially love Madness Sorcerer. Likewise with Agent, and Concealment Operative is so visually dynamic. 19. which companion traits would you like to return to the writer’s room for reevaluation?Oh boy, I have some feelings.LET ME ROMANCE ZENITH AND SCOURGE, YOU COWARDS. On a similar note, let Akaavi and Kaliyo be bisexual.If you’re gong to let f!SWarrior have a one-night stand with Pierce, let me flirt with him more, or make him romanceable.I’ve only met Doc on a f!JK, so I can’t speak to him as a non love interest, but he grates on me so much. I’m not a huge Temple fan, but I can’t really describe why, other than my suspicion that Bioware realized the Agent needed another companion and just sort of tossed her in there. Ashara needs to figure out what she’s doing with her life, but I did like her KotET reunion.I would love more Xalek screentime, but I think what he has isn’t bad.Rusk. I’m not sure what exactly to change, but he just doesn’t mesh with the rest of the JK party.Ditch Tharen’s flirting with f!JC.Throw Skadge directly into the sun. I’ve been playing for almost 4 years, and the only reason I don’t have all the class devotion achievements is because I HATE Skadge. 20. what five companions would you pick, from all of them, if you had to make a new crew?Team “Get Shit Done”: T7-01, Jorgan, Zenith, Koth, Kira Team “Cut Bitch, Get Paid”: Torian, Akaavi, Andronikos, Gault, Kaliyo

[cozcat]

I’ve been thinking about Here We Go Again... (in summary: the more I think about it, the more issues I have with it.)

a lot of the reaction seems to be hyping it up far more than I enjoyed it, and it’s weird, because I do absolutely adore Mamma Mia, so why shouldn’t I? but I think it’s adoring Mamma Mia that makes it so hard to love the sequel.

so here are some reasons I don’t think I’m connecting with it, just as a point of discussion. there are probably more that I’m forgetting. (I don’t want to study. also I’m chatting with Nicole about it and so I’m overthinking it rather than overthinking a passage from Henry V.)

the fact that it was written and directed by a man just irks me. the musical and the first movie are very much by women, primarily for women, and just... it doesn’t sit well.

it does as well feel like Ol was cashing in on the big name - with the amount of liberties taken with canon, it felt almost disrespectful to the first movie. a few blips, I can take; warping so much of it felt ridiculous.

for one, Donna’s mother is supposed to be dead. she’s supposed to be dead, and Catholic, and to have thrown her daughter out when she got pregnant. if Ruby was in the exact same situation as Donna, why did she tell Donna not to bother coming back? had we seen Cher in the flashbacks, we could have had a big number from her earlier on - when you release 80% of her screentime before the movie comes out, you can’t claim you wanted to build up to her appearance - as a flashback with young Donna, maybe a distant-over-time duet with Donna, have her pop up again at the end when they all partied with their younger selves. viciously Catholic Ruby with a fraught relationship with her daughter would have worked, would have made more sense. and then we could have seen Cher acting, rather than Cher playing fictional-Cher.

young Rosie and young Tanya meeting the young dads in passing also absolutely didn’t work for me. Rosie harbouring a crush on Bill for twenty years just felt... weird. Donna in MM1 reveals to Tanya and Rosie that there were two other potential fathers - why did they then need to meet them?

(however, you can pry aromantic bisexual Tanya out of my cold, dead hands.)

on the young fathers - their personalities were fine, but honestly, they could have rolled with the designs from MM1 a little bit. I’m not saying replicate them exactly, but where was Sam’s long hair and seventies facial hair? where was Harry Headbanger’s headbanger aesthetic? Bill seemed alright, but “long blonde hair” is still a thing now. they definitely seemed to want them to be modern-day-attractive, which was depressing.

also, they could have at least mentioned Harry being gay in passing. have the ticket guy hitting on him, and a panicked “no sorry I have a husband”. he doesn’t even need to actually have a partner, just acknowledge that he’s gay. (he’s the only major lead not paired off by the end. Tanya is hinted to hook up with Fernando’s brother. Bill and Rosie are back together. come on, Ol, you wrote and directed Imagine Me And You for fuck’s sake.)

and they could have at least checked the timelines from the first movie. that was just lazy.

young Donna didn’t gel with me as Donna. (I’m not the only person to say this, but it bears repeating.) it’s not really because of the acting, but the writing; I couldn’t connect the Donna we all know to the Donna we were shown. young Tanya and young Rosie were brilliant - but let’s be real, they weren’t given enough to work with to go either way, so while their portrayals were great, we didn’t have enough of them onscreen.

having Donna die, offscreen, a year prior, with no explanation just felt cheap, and like a disservice to the character. apparently Meryl wasn’t available for most of the filming, but that’s not the answer. if Meryl is your main character, you work around her, and you don’t do a character such a massive disservice. but if you have to do that - what happened? was it an accident, an aneurysm, a long-term illness? these things matter, and it’s something that detracted from the movie for me - I kept expecting to find out, but we didn’t.

but really. have the arc with Sophie and Sky all take place in NYC, so that modern Kalokairi isn’t the focus for as much of it. have Donna be in NYC with Sky, marketing the villa or just working on something to do with it, or fuck it she’s just travelling and Sky’s away for a different reason, and have Sophie realise while Donna is away that she’s pregnant - do the parallels that way. she didn’t need to die to be offscreen less!

(spitballing with Nicole: Donna was recording an album. Donna finds out her mother is dying, so flies out to see her, rolls up with Cher in tow at the end. I actually fucking love that idea. but really. ANYTHING.)

seriously, don’t sell me this as the feel-good-movie-of-the-summer when I’m sat in the cinema crying for most of it. My Love, My Life was beautiful but I can’t listen to that or I’ve Been Waiting For You now without having a bit of a crying fit. which is bad, because I LIKE THOSE SONGS. starting a feel-good movie by killing off a main character with no real reason is not a good way to start it.

also they did Kisses of Fire dirty. ABBA has plenty of weird songs that would have worked, why did they have to mangle one I genuinely love for the laughs. and yeah that’s eight separate links to peppy ABBA songs that have genuinely bizarre lyrics or themes.

also they really could have warned us when they released the soundtrack that The Day Before You Came was only ever intended to be album-only. I kept expecting it - it would have been lovely during the credits - and then, well, it’s the song that never came.

and where the fuck was Hasta Manana on the soundtrack. the best sung song in your entire film and you don’t even release a full recording? some of the songs sounded a bit gutsless - When I Kissed The Teacher was so clearly recorded in a studio, and it grated on me when a lot of the songs sounded like that.

but seriously. it wasn’t as happy as it could have been, it wasn’t as in-character for a lot of it as it could have been.

there were things I did like, but as you can tell, there were a lot of things I didn’t. and overall, it was enough to detract from me enjoying the movie. like... it was fun, I’ll watch it again, I’ll buy the DVD (mostly for the special features they’ll probably skimp on), but fuck me the first movie is so much better, and I’m trying to pretend this one isn’t even canon. it’s Sophie having a weird pregnancy fever dream? whatever reason I can think of is better than accepting it, because otherwise it kind of poisons the first movie in hindsight.

[chacusha]

FFVI live-blogging (1/?)

While I wait for all my game consoles and my PC to make their way here, I decided I would replay Final Fantasy VI on an emulator. In particular, I’m trying out the GBA edition for the very first time. Exciting!

Little known fact: I have never finished FFVI despite it being one of my favorite games. I have probably started a new game and played through a significant portion of the story about five or six times (the farthest I got was the World of Ruin after having re-collected most of party again i.e. able to fight Kefka at any point but still dicking around with sidequests).

Followup fact: This is because there are some aspects of this game that I struggle with because I’m really obsessive about how I play games. In particular, the magicite/Esper system is really hard for me to deal with, because I obsessively try to make sure every person in my party builds up a fairly complete repertoire of magic, which takes an insane amount of grinding. (And then I don’t really use magic other than healing spells, so uh... I don’t know why I do that.) The second thing is Gau’s Rage skills. I also get really obsessive about building up a fairly complete collection, which usually involves HOURS of grinding on the Veldt (an activity that doesn’t even give EXP, apparently? somehow I never realized that...).

So anyway, I’m now at the point where Terra rejoins your party after turning into her esper form (and Celes is back in the empire). In other words, I am now at the point where I have a new flood of magicite and the Veldt is newly accessible again and uh... it might be a while before I move on. 😅

Anyway some thoughts:

One thing I like about the early Final Fantasy games is how obviously inspired they are by Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, and I think FFVI is the game that makes that inspiration most clear. The story framing of a small group of people (each of them a distinguished person in their own right -- a king, a general, the strongest knight of a kingdom, a gambling airship pilot, etc. etc.) band together to take down an expansionist empire against all odds, even if that means sneaking behind enemy lines to carry out a dangerous mission. (I forever love Biggs and Wedge, and the “Aren’t you a little short to be an Imperial trooper?” line.)

I love the maximally steampunk aesthetic of Figaro Castle going into submerging mode.

Edgar is a very similar character to Ringabel -- charming and flirts with every woman in a kind of gallant way. Despite how that kind of behavior would be irritating in real life (and occasionally crosses into sketchy territory, like when flirting with children), they are both perennially popular characters among women. I find that fascinating. Like, I also know I’d find that behavior annoying if I encountered it in real life, but I also really enjoy both of these characters??

The reveal of Locke’s literal dead girlfriend in a basement will never not be amazingly hilarious, creepy, and very sad all at the same time.

Guy in Jidoor: “After they threw out all the poor people in town...” Me: After they did what now? (Not sure how I feel about the class politics of “all the poor people are pathological liars” that is Zozo. Then again, they also had a “rich dude betrayed everyone in South Figaro to fascists the empire for money” so maybe that makes up for it.)

The opera scene is still A+++. Like, one of the things that make it so great is that the sets (like the balcony that Celes is on) would be crazy amazing if they actually existed in real life. Like, imagine going to the opera, and they have this amazing multi-level tower, complete with a balcony, pillars, and a beautiful night sky backdrop. You’d be like, holy shit, they didn’t hold back!!

Having played FFIX, I now can see how much of FFVI is in that game. The theatre troupe, the auction house, the lady-protecting thief, etc. are all very familiar.

The scene with Celes and Locke in the Magitek Factory (where Kefka claims that Celes was on the Empire’s side the entire time) reads differently to me than it did in the SNES version for some reason. I always thought that Celes was obviously what she appeared to be (a deserting general) and that Locke’s “omg is it true, Celes?? 😧” reaction was just him being dumb/gullible. But during this playthrough, this scene makes it seem like Celes actually WAS meant to infiltrate the Returners and she had a change of heart halfway through. I think the reasons it reads differently are (1) that there isn’t as much flavor text that indicates Celes’s character or personality (the SNES description of Celes having “a spirit as pure as snow” makes it sound like she deserted the Empire because she could no longer stand its crimes, but the more accurate GBA description that people have never seen the woman that lies underneath the general simply suggests that she is hard to read AKA a good spy), and (2) Kefka’s more detailed claim that Celes “deserted” and was “rescued” in order to infiltrate the Returners seems too specific for him to be making that up on the fly. I wonder if that was the writers’ intention, though... Okay, wow, looking up information on the FF Wikia and comparing game scripts, and I think spy!Celes is canon: “Celes was originally meant to be a ‘conflicted spy’ archetype—a spy working for the antagonists, but swayed by the benevolence of the people she was supposed to be spying on and how nice Locke was to her.” Woolsey translation: Cid: Can it be true that you came here as a spy, seeking to cause an uprising!? Locke: !? Celes...? Kefka: So that's it! Magicite... Cid, you miserable blockhead! Now... General Celes!! The game's over. Bring me those Magicite shards! Locke: Celes! You... decieved me!? Celes: Of course not! Have a little faith! Kefka: G'hee, hee, hee! She has tricked you all! Celes, that's so... YOU! Celes: Locke... Please believe me... GBA translation: Cid: Is it true you worked your way in amongst the rebels as a spy? Locke: ...!? Celes...? Kefka: Oh, I see! Magicite...! Excellent work, Cid! General Celes! We needn't keep up the charade any longer. Bring me those magicite crystals! Locke: Celes! You...tricked us!? Celes: Of course not! Please, trust me! Kefka: Hee-hee-hee! The sweet taste of betrayal! Oh, Celes! That's so...you! Celes: Locke... Believe me... (Cid’s line is no longer ambiguous which side Celes is spying for. Coming from Cid (a more reliable character than Kefka), the story that Celes is a spy is not so easily dismissed. Kefka is also so unruffled at encountering Celes in a secure empire facility that it just doesn’t seem like he’s improvising either...)

I love the Maduin flashback. I don’t know if it’s significantly different/pared down in the English SNES version or what, but those scenes never really stuck with me before... But seeing them this playthrough? OMG the feels. First, the ominous esper music playing throughout is so Atmospheric and Foreboding. You really get the feeling that the events depicted changed the fate of the world. (Also, it reminds me of this track from the Sailor Moon RPG, which is also a great track.) Second, Madeline is such a clear and striking character given how little screentime she has. The one trait she most clearly has is, like, a misanthropic hatred of humanity. And throughout her scenes, you get this really strong impression that she’s really fierce, bitter, and almost... thorny? Like really hard to get close to -- a determined loner. Third, the Maduin/Madeline relationship -- first off, I appreciate the metaphorical sex scene where they dance/fly around a cave together and drop two sparkles that combine to form a baby. Second, that last scene where Madeline kind of foolishly runs off and Maduin chases after her and they have this “you’re being a dummy” “I know” “let’s go home” kind of tender moment before EVERYTHING GOES WRONG. Ouch my heart.

Also, it strikes me that Terra and Aerith are very parallel characters -- half-human, half-supernatural race, captured and experimented on as a baby, mom dies trying to save her, etc.

Also, I find Gestahl a very unsettling character. I feel like Kefka is the Voldemort or Bellatrix of Final Fantasy VI -- unstable, weird, very over-the-top, god complex villain who screams “eeeeevil” with his design -- while Gestahl is the Umbridge of Final Fantasy VI -- civil, polite, reasonable, functional, and yet utterly uncaring and dismissive of other people’s concerns. Whereas with the Kefka type, you’re like, “who would follow this person?” and don’t feel threatened, Gestahl is not only a person people would follow; he’s a person many people already ARE. That’s scary to me.

[tepkunset]

A list of things I liked and didn’t like about The Last Jedi

I know literally everyone has beaten me to the party by now, but I’m gonna do it anyway, just cause I wanna talk about it.

Things I didn’t like:

Poe Dameron is a completely different character. Like the only thing the same is his charisma, which I'm pretty sure is thanks to the actor. And I'm just gonna say it: It's suspicious that this drastic character change is for the benefit of demonstrating heroism for some rando new white woman who dies anyway.

Also the conflict between him and Holdo was so ridiculously artificially created. What actual reason did she have for not telling people the plan? Besides one-upping Poe? Leia then says Holdo “cared more about being a hero than looking like one” but I would disagree--because the only damn conclusion I can come up with for why she wouldn’t tell people what she was doing is to appear superior.

While there were some fleeting scenes where Luke Skywalker felt right, he mostly just felt so off to me, especially his sudden, vague dislike of the Jedi. And are you seriously telling me Luke motherfucking Skywalker was going to murder his nephew??? Because he sensed the dark side in him? He spent most of the original trilogy convinced that Darth Vader could be saved from the dark side, but not some kid?!?!?

But like that’s just it--So much screentime and character continuity flaws were all for the sake of trying to make us pity Kylo Ren. Only to then end the film with the same message we got loud and clear from the last one: He chose the dark side. We get it. We got it the minute he killed Han Solo. It just makes it all the more frustrating that we had to sit through all that BS without any actual story progression.

Finn was majorly sidelined in comparison to the large role he played in TFA. There were a few good “That’s Finn” moments, though. But Finn also apparently had to learn the lesson “you can’t run away from what’s right” all over again too, despite, you know, that being a major point in his character arc in the first movie as well!

Luke says the Jedi should end, but doesn’t ever really get into it? Besides just saying that Jedi are too prideful? Ignoring that Luke would never give up on the Jedi, Rian my dude there is an actual, legitimate list of things you could pull together to make a real case for why the Jedi Order wasn’t so great. But I guess it was just easier to have him constantly interrupted or act illusive.

I can only assume that it was Snoke’s manipulation that was leading Rey to the dark side all of a sudden, since she was so purely, strongly light in the first movie. Like, that was how she defeated Kylo Ren! She finds her focus in the light, where he was unbalanced!

This is something I’ve seen pointed out a lot already, and I’m sure as hell not gonna avoid it either: It’s really suspicious how poorly the characters of colour are treated in this film, in comparison to the white characters. That comparison is important, because a classic defence I always see in any media where lots of people die and get hurt, is that “well it happens to everyone.” Because somehow some (white) people can’t see the disproportions? Or maybe they just don’t look.

The “humour” about the little creatures on the island constantly having to clean up after Rey’s destruction of ancient structures was really uncomfortable.

I am now 100% sure there are no actual rules about what the Force can and can’t do. (But TBH this one doesn’t really bother me that much; the Force has always had evolving lore.)

The screenshots of Kylo Ren’s shirtless scene cannot do justice to how gratuitous and awfully inserted the actual scene is.

I know a lot of people like the porgs but... TBH I found them annoying.

The scene where Kylo Ren and Rey are both trying to reach for the lightsaber with the force doesn’t add up; in the last movie the same thing happened, and it went to Rey without competition--But now it’s portraying them as equal? Rey was deserving of the lightsaber, Kylo Ren was not.

Despite getting to see Rey kick some major ass... TBH the fact that a lot of her story revolves around male characters’ stories just felt like a downgrade from the last film, where her arc was quite independent. It overlapped with the other characters around her, like any good movie with an ensemble cast does, but it was not driven by them.

Almost the entire film felt like filler. I get that the moral of the story is what Yoda says; failure is an important learning tool. But it would have perhaps hit home better if more failure was even in the characters control? The only sense of growth through failure was with Poe, which was a lesson he didn’t even need to learn in the first place except Rian decided to rewrite him entirely so he did.

Things I did like:

Snoke’s shiny gold bathrobe was hilarious to me. Jeff Goldblum from Thor: Ragnarok wore it better.

I am super fucking relieved that the “romance” between Rey and Kylo Ren was drastically overstated by those who actually somehow ship them together. THANK. FUCK. Rey even symbolically closes the door to the Falcon when he tries to reach out to her. Like I said, it frustrated me how bordering total pointlessness the whole thing was between them, I’d rather it be pointless than take Rey in a total 180 degree direction.

R2-D2 showing Luke the recording of Leia in order to try and convince him to help.

When Luke guides Rey through connecting with the Force around the island, and talking about how the Force doesn’t belong to anyone, but is part of everyone and everything, that was really good.

Pretty much everything about Rose, but especially her passion against the rich and corrupt. I can’t wait for more with her.

When Leia uses the force to guide herself back onto the ship.

BB-8′s imitation of the little mouse droids.

When Kylo Ren ignites the lightsaber through that guy’s eye.

Finn’s face-off with Phasma, and the part where her helmet breaks just showing her eye, and she calls him scum, and he so proudly says “Rebel scum.” Like what a power move OMF. And she falls to a fiery death.

The red under the salt was such an aesthetic for that final battle.

When Luke brushes off his shoulder after his Force projection was hit with a billion lasers LMFAO.

The whole stand-off between Luke and Kylo Ren. It reminded me a lot of Obi-Wan and Vader in A New Hope.

Luke's death was a satisfying one. I definitely figured he'd be dying, so I wasn't surprised when it happened. I was just concerned it wouldn't feel... complete? Like you know that feeling when writers kill off characters just for the sake of getting them out of the way, or for shock value? But this really did feel fitting, and it was a beautiful callback to the famous scene in the first movie, where he looks up at the sunset and the music swells like it does. 

Poe’s reunion with BB-8, and rubbing BB-8 like a pet.

Rey’s reunion with Finn and the Resistance, oh my gosh. It just felt all the more powerful after Kylo Ren told her she’s nothing and no one cares about her except him, and like, there’s Finn who literally runs to hug her, and she and Leia exchange a knowing, connected look, and she just fits in so well with the whole crew, like, this is her new family. People do care about her.

Anyway, overall I don't regret watching it at all, and I will with certainty watch it again. I just, very plain and simply, did not enjoy it as much as the last one. And I hope the third one gets more of that spark, if you will, back.

[apicturewithasmile]

LOST rewatch (season 3):

[follow the entire rewatch-tag here]

episode 1 – A Tale of Two Cities:

Time for Dooooowntooooown!!!

“So I guess I’m out of the book club.”

Aaaah it’s THAT Jack flashback episode aka the lowest he’s ever been aka

It’s not that Matthew Fox is a bad actor… it’s just that everyone else on the show is better than him. It becomes even more apparent with the presence of Michael “I single-handedly invented acting” Emerson being around there to stay now.

Sawyer solving the bear cage puzzle is so cute I wanna hug him.

episode 2 – The Glass Ballerina:

Awwww yaaaaas Ben’s round glasses jkdgnidfgnoidsfg

It always baffles me how long it takes for the credits to finish. Going on minute 8 of this episode and they still rolling.

It’s Sally Slingshot

Only Ben Linus can use a camping chair as a dramatic prop

“My name is Benjamin Linus and I’ve lived on this island all my life.”

episode 3 – Further Instructions:

John being speechless after seeing naked Desmond running through the jungle – #same

Wait… is that the sweat lodge episode? If so it means sweaty topless Terry O’Quinn and my body is absolutely and 100% ready!!!

Charlie just made the same “you don’t call, you don’t write” joke on John that he already pulled on Eko

It’s probably the only totally… useless John flashback. Like… we don’t really learn anything about his character that we didn’t already know. I still enjoy every second of John screentime we get but… I wish they had used this one for something else.

“amendable for coercion” is probably what Ben has written in John’s file as well

episode 4 – Every Man For Himself:

Oh shut up Charlie, you jealous ass.

It’s the episode in which Ben knocks Sawyer out with his phallic baton.

“the big kahuna”

First time appearance of the true star of the show: bunny #8

I love that of all the characters on the show, Sawyer’s the one who reads every book he can get his hands on.

Murder cactus hair!!!

Ben’s Bunny Bag™!!!

episode 5 – The Cost of Living:

Sexy linen outfit, Ben! Love the abundance of chest hair!

“Do you believe in God, Jack?” – “Do you?” – “Two days after I found out I had a fatal tumour on my spine a spinal surgeon fall out of the sky, and if that’s not proof of God then I don’t know what is.”

“I guess he’ll be expecting us.”

episode 6 – I Do:

Yet another bad wig for Evangeline Lilly

Random Nathan Fillion

I love the cage frickle frackle scene

Nice psychological warfare, Benjamin fucking Linus!

episode 7 – Not In Portland:

 I love Juliet’s curly hair <3

“I’m Tom btw.” – nice timing, Tom!

RICHARD ALPERT!!!

Ben just lying there, chilling with his back cut open… getting some fresh air on that spine.

There it is: Angel Hair Pasta story 2.0

“I wanna know what he said. You owe me an answer.” Good God what is it with Jack and this overly possessive behaviour? Why does he always have to know everything about the women in his life?!?!?! That’s not healthy, Jack!

episode 8 – Flashes Before Your Eyes:

More Desmond, hell yes!

istg that blue semi-unbuttoned shirt is such an iconic look for Desmond and it’s also hot as fuck

OF COURSE Charlie is playing Wonderwall

episode 9 – Stranger In A Strange Land:

The worst episode yet it gives us topless Benjamin Linus.

Seriously, I have hardly anything else to say about this one.

“Your bedside manner leaves something to be desired, Jack.”

Good fucking God, Jack you entitled self-righteous asshole!

episode 10 – Tricia Tanaka Is Dead:

Roger Workman!

Where’s Sayid btw?!??!?! Haven’t seen him in a while!

Aaaah there he is my bebe Sayid!!!

“SHUT UP! Red…. Neck… Man….”

episode 11 – Enter 77:

It’s the Mikhail Bakunin episode!!!

Oh wait…. Is that a Sayid episode? The one with the cat that I had completely forgotten about until now?!?!?!

I loves Sayid’s flashback hair in this episode.

NOT EVERY NOOK AND CRANNY, JOHN!!!

Oh John, what is it with you and beeping computers?

episode 12 – Par Avion:

“Remind me why we’re keeping him alive?” – “What do you suggest? We shoot him like a dog?” – “No. I like dogs.”

I love you, Danielle!

“The John Locke I know was…” nice time travel foreshadowing

Claire’s aunt is such an asshole!

John throwing Mikhail through the sonic fence is my jam!

DADDY SHEPHARD!

Okay but… if you can just go over the fence? Then why does Smokey not just… fly over it?!

episode 13 – The Man From Tallahassee:

OH NO NOT THAT EPISODE!!! Right in the feels!!!

John finally reunited with his future island husband.

The bedroom scene! Yassss!!!

“The man from Tallahassee? What is that, some kind of code?” – “No, John, unfortunately we don’t have a code for: there’s a man in my closet with a gun to my daughter’s head. Although we obviously should.” FUCK YAAAAS!!!!

“I know you, John Locke. […] Tell me John, did it hurt?” – “I felt my back break. What do you think?”

I like Tom Friendly – he really lives up to his name.

I can’t believe that Jack – the only doctor the survivors have – wants to leave the island all because Kate fucked Sawyer. Sounds like something a guy would do who’d detonate a hydrogen bomb because his girlfriend left him.

Ben and John out-sassing and manipulating each other is foreplay tbh.

“I was born on this island…” LIAR!

THE MAGIC BOX!!!! Fgnidgnidflsgnlkdd FUUUUUCK!!!! SHIT’S GETTING REAL!!!

Also a very rare occasion in which Ben’s beautiful face has no wounds, scratches, bruises…

You can see I adore this episode by how much I have to say about it even if it’s just a ramble of feels

And now it’s bondage John!

“And then you came striding out of the jungle, John, to make my dream come true.”

episode 14 – Expose:

Wow… I can’t believe I’m already that far down into my rewatch.

Unpopular opinion: I actually love Expose. It’s so… useless and dorky that it’s amazing!

“I’m just a guest star and we all know what happens to guest stars.”

It’s Boone and Shannon *cries forever*

I can’t believe someone called Maggie Grace and told her “hey, we know you got totally screwed over and we killed your character before you could have any substantial character development but… we need you back for an episode, you gotta scream your fucking lungs out of your body once more!”

Seriously…. This is the creepiest death on the whole show.

episode 15 – Left Behind:

Hahahaha it’s the one where Hurley tricks Sawyer into being nice

I loooove Cassidy and I love they mirrored this flashback with the Kate-and-Juliet-are-handcuffed-together episode

“My name is Kate.”

episode 16 – One Of Us:

It’s the one where Ben is very very creepy

That’s probably the only episode in which I can somehow understand the people who dislike Ben…. But I still love my dear rat boy!

episode 17 – Catch 22:

Ooowwww I love Desmond episodes

Oh Kate…why?!?!

I deadass forgot the whole freighter plot, like… I knew Miles & Co. where about to appear but I forgot how this whole thing started

episode 18 – D.O.C.:

Jin’s the only one who has a nice dad and a terrible mother

Also I just typed “John” instead of “Jin” which makes me wonder: where’s my bald jungle baby?

Aaaah first mention of fake 815

episode 19 – The Brig:

Fuuuuuck I’M NOT READY!!!

They made me miss my dear John for two (three?) entire episodes only to come back with this to totally rip my heart out

The “previously on” bit already wrecks me

IT’S THE PINS AND NEEDLES SCENE!!! Also known as: Ben tries this “flirting” all the cool kids are talking about.

Terry’s looking hot as fuck in that entire episode

Ben knocking out Anthony Cooper with his walking stick is my aesthetic.

Danielle causally poppin by to get some dynamite

“little hot for heaven, isn’t it?” – I would looooove this whole red herring if it weren’t for the “they were dead the whole time”-crowd

God that Anthony Cooper = The OG Mister Sawyer reveal is AMAZING!

“I thought I was special.” – “Well, everyone makes mistakes.”

Yes, James, KILL THAT ASSHOLE!!!

“I’m on my own journey now.”

episode 20 – The Man Behind The Curtain:

My precious Carrie Preston!

Uncle Horace

“Call him Benjamin.”

“You are the man behind the curtain – the wizard of Oz. And you’re a liar.”

Namaste!

Sterling Beaumon was the best casting choice for baby Ben!!!

Mikhail Bakunin still running like the devil’s chasing him (literally, kinda, considering Smokey revived him.)

John: [Ben] and I are going to see Jacob. – Everyone else: Wuaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa?

Ben really has a history of very shitty birthdays.

And this is making me very emotional because it reminds me of the “video of tears and pain” which makes me wanna cry my fucking soul out.

“Kinda hard to celebrate on the day you killed you mom.” Oh fuck off, Roger.

Ben’s Bunny Bag™ back in action

“I don’t wanna go back there. I hate it there.”

The way Richard talks to baby Ben is soooo similar to the way Ben talks to John I’m gonna scream!!!

Okay but this is no kiddon the best episode of this entire show so far. Like… Nothing that happened up until this point compares to this!!!

I FORGOT ABOUT BEN SPEAKING TO AN EMPTY CHAIR!!!!

Still baffles me they thought they could slap some fake hair and make-up on Emerson’s face and make him look like a 20yo – when he was already older than Ben is in our now-timeline… like… was there no 20yo actor with a big nose and bug eyes around?!?!

“Goodbye, Dad!”

“The Dharma Initiative. They came here seeking harmony, but they couldn't even coexist with the Island's original inhabitants. And when it became clear that one side had to go, one side had to be purged, I did what I had to do. I was one of the people that was smart enough to make sure that I didn't end up in that ditch, which makes me considerably smarter than you, John.”

John Locke seriously bringing a knife to a gun fight!

alright kiddos, I am #fucked up now.

episode 21 – Greatest Hits:

How many episodes actually start with someone running through the jungle?

Danielle just showing up to blow something up!

According to Jack this is day 90? So it takes another 18 days for them to actually get off the island at that point?!?! Wow.

Guess that’s the end of bunny #8

episodes 22 & 23 – Through the Looking Glass:

OH MY GOD IT’S THE FIRST FLASH FORWARD!!!

“WE HAVE TO GO BACK, KATE!!!!”

“I’m a dentist. I am not Rambo.” – I love these two so much!!

Can you believe they thought it was a good idea to give Ben round glasses that make his eyes look even bigger than they already are? He looks like straight out of a manga.

There really is a lot of fatphobia in this episode.

It’s taller ghost Walt

ALEX AND DANIELLE MEET FOR THE FIRST TIME!!!! WELP!!!

Ben letting himself be tackled and punched by Jack is such a power move. I am 100% convinced he let it happen on purpose because it’s already canon that he can easily knock out friggin Sawyer!!!

NOT PENNY’S BOAT

From Ben’s perspective this is once again John “striding out of that jungle to make my dream come true”

“I don’t wanna shoot you.”

Remember when you watched that finale for the first time and didn’t know all the time it was a flash forward and not a flashback?!?!? And then Kate steps out of that car and you were all like WOOOOAAAAHHHH?!?!?!

Remember when you didn’t know whose funeral they were talking about?!?!?!

That last scene was the first time I found Jack actually likable and relatable!

WE HAVE TO GO BACK!!!

[bluering8]

Fandom: Transformers Animated

THE OTP: Either Jazz/Prowl or Lockdown/Prowl. On the one hand, Jazz/Prowl is very cute and I think their shared background as cyberninjas gives them enough in common that they can complement each other rather than clash in the areas where they differ. On the other hand, Lockdown/Prowl is an awful awful ship full of terrible things and slow corruption and possible coercion and I just (thumbs up) I’m human garbage and I am so here for this.

M/F OTP: Lugnut/Strika. I feel bad for caring about a ship where one of the characters gets like five seconds and a paragraph of personality, but oh my god look at how Lugnut acts towards Megatron, don’t tell me he wouldn’t act exactly the same way towards his wife. It would be adorable. Like my absolute favourite dynamic for M/F ships is the one where she’s a complete powerhouse who could effortlessly snap him in two and he is completely unabashed about thinking that’s the hottest thing ever.

M/M OTP: Not counting Jazz/Prowl or Lockdown/Prowl… aaargh I don’t know. I’ll pretty much ship anything but there aren’t a lot of ships I’m invested in. Optimus/Sentinel I guess, although I prefer them as a trio with Elita-1.

F/F OTP: Nope. Look man I love this dumb cartoon about shapeshifting robots but it has a major dearth of ladies. Basically like I just (gestures) (shrugs) I don’t know.

Fav Female: SARI SUMDAC. I love Sari she is a treasure and a delight. I wish she’d had more screentime towards the end, I kind of feel like there should’ve been more exploration of her character and how she was dealing with things.Fav Male: Lockdown. Look man I just. I love bounty hunters and I love his aesthetic and I love what a piece of shit he is. He’s like the second most attractive character in the whole show ngl

Least Fav Female: uh. Slo-Mo. Her speech patterns just piss me right the fuck off, okay.Least Fav Male: The Constructicons oh god I loathe the Constructicons. I don’t even remember what they did to make me hate them so much I just remember the all-consuming white-edged rage they provoked in me.

Why I joined the fandom: Once upon a time I was reading a thread where some people were discussing a comic about shapeshifting robots and then I accidentally got emotionally invested in the shapeshifting robot characters so I read the comic and then I fell in love and then oh look here’s a cartoon which is also about shapeshifting robots and apparently it’s really good? And it was super good.

[lex1nat0r]

Akame ga Kill!

Kill All These Words

Alright, heads up right off the bat: there’s some uncomfortable homophobia in this show towards Bulat, one of the male characters introduced early on who pretty clearly has a preference for men. The show treats this as a joke, and it’s a real sore spot. 

Akame ga Kill! (exclamation mark included) is... not what I was expecting. I’d heard it built up as a grimdark murderfest where you never know which character’s going to bite the dust next and it never quite felt as dire as all that. Mostly because all the murderkilling is interspersed with wacky slapstick bits. It’s a mixed bag, really. I like it, sure, but it doesn’t quite gel with me enough that I’m really into it.

Join me for a deep dive and spoilers below.

Akame ga Kill! suffers from a problem I’ve seen a few times in anime, which is that it rubberbands between two tonal extremes. On one hand, there will be scenes of slapstick comedy with chibi character models, and on the other hand are the scenes of violence and cruelty. Like in the first episode where it turns out that the nice rich girl who shelters Tatsumi tortures poor people in her spare time.

Yeah, it’s a sadistic show, or at least feels like it wants you to think it is.

Don’t believe her lies.

Let me first take a step back and give the rundown of some basic stuff. Akame ga Kill! is about Tatsumi, a guy from some podunk village who tries to join the imperial army in the city to get money to send back home. He ends up falling in with Night Raid, an elite group of assassins working for the Revolutionary Army trying to overthrow the corrupt empire. And right there I think the show missed a trick. I was expecting a mid-season twist where it would turn out that the Revolutionary Army was just as corrupt as the current regime and Night Raid would have to deal with that, but for the most part the Revolutionary Army is a non-entity in the show. Outside the final two episodes its presence is limited to a few resistance contacts.

An almost unforgivable oversight is how little attention the show gives to the danger beasts, the monsters that inhabit the land of... wherever Akame ga Kill! takes place. They get very little screentime as the show focuses mostly on Night Raid’s assassination targets. Another missed opportunity, I feel. On the upside, at least the danger beasts get lip service in that each of the Imperial Relics wielded by the tough fighters in the series is made from a legendary danger beast. It would have been nice to, y’know, see these powerful monsters on screen, but one takes what one can get.

The worldbuilding on the whole is pretty weak. The general aesthetic is pretty generic fantasy, but the major characters have some pretty anachronistic outfits and apparently guns are semi-standard issue to the armed forces? It’s a little distracting, but still forgivable because it feels like the background details take a definite back seat to the characters.

And speaking of characters: Esdeath.

Not gonna lie, I did originally get into Akame ga Kill because I wanted to know what Esdeath’s whole deal was.

Esdeath’s relationship with Tatsumi initially made me roll my eyes pretty hard, but it is handled better than I was afraid it would be and at least affects the plot in interesting ways while adding flavor to both characters. My one gripe is really that it should have had more setup instead of Esdeath falling in love at first sight. And it does eventually lead to the most emotionally affecting part of the whole show (more on that later).

Esdeath drawing Tatsumi in that amateurish anime style is one of the best little bits of character I’ve seen in an anime.

Now to get back into the meat of the thing:

Accusing a work of being emotionally manipulative is pointless because yes, every creative work is trying to make you feel something. But problems arise when you can see the strings. Akame ga Kill!’s attempts to make you feel sorry for a character who has just died or is about to die they just become tedious. It’s kind of fun to guess who’s going to get killed off based on what (usually tragic) backstory we see during an episode, but once the show actually starts drawing out the actual death scenes I start losing interest.

This is even more of a problem when the show tries to get us to care about the Jaegers, Esdeath’s team of relic-wielders who try to hunt down Night Raid. It spends a lot of time building up their characters and relationships, but my problem is that they’re the bad guys. They all work for a system that we’ve only seen to be oppressive and corrupt and none of them seem at all interested in bettering it, only protecting the status quo. So in the end I just can’t find it in me to dredge up any real feeling for them beyond wondering when they’ll die and how melodramatic it’ll be. The worst offender here is Seryuu, the Paladin type who’s definitely Lawful... something (let’s not get into D&D alignment quibbling here). She’s constantly talking about Justice while seemingly ignorant of the irony when the ‘justice’ she’s championing is rotten to the core. It might have been nice to see her have a change of heart and join Night Raid but there was never any real hope of that happening.

Seryuu (who’s family name is inexplicably ‘Ubiquitous’), pictured here with her relic Coro in the form of a jacked-as-fuck puppy. 

Now, to be fair in the final few episodes Run does reveal that he joined the Jaegers to try and change the empire from the inside, but he’s also the Jaeger we know the least about so it doesn’t have a whole lot of weight. Plus, he survives so we don’t get to revel in the tragedy of seeing someone with good intentions cut down before they get a chance to effect real change. In a similar vein, Wave feels underused as it takes him to the final few episodes to finally decide to start bucking the system.

There is one death that did get me though, and that’s Tatsumi’s death in the second-to-last episode. It works so well because up to this point the show had been treating Tatsumi like the main character, letting us forget that it’s Akame’s name in the title. Tatsumi’s death also provides a nice emotional payoff to the romance subplot with Esdeath. It’s one of the real high points of the series because how genuinely unexpected it was.

That one moment aside, the thing about Akame ga Kill! is that I’m not sure if it’s making a sincere effort to tug at heartstrings or if the melodramatic deaths are just part of the show’s whole overblown aesthetic. While not tonally consistent with each other, the wacky comedy bits and the girmdark gore bits at least feel like they tie into each other thematically in that they’re both extremes. This also matches the show’s bright, cartoony artstyle. Even the character designs are over-the-top, with the aforementioned anachronistic design elements. Plus the initial members of Night Raid have hints of a sentai team’s color-coding going on. It took me a while to figure out that’s because the show’s leaning into being something of a caricature.

I mean, the fact that the second-to-last battle is against a gigantic mech should clue you in that the show was trying to be over-the-top and not taking itself too seriously the whole time. Something I admit to being kind of slow on the uptake about. Even the main villain, the corrupt Prime Minister Honest is a total cartoon. And I can’t mention the ridiculousness of the show without a special shoutout to Seryuu’s mid-season upgrade where during fights she gets Coro to bite off her robotic arms to replace them with various weapons.

This over-the-topness is even more emphasized with Akame ga Kill! Theater, a series of web shorts that aired on the official website and are supposed to be watched after the corresponding episode of the main series. Each episode of Akame ga Kill! Theater is about a minute and a half and consists solely of chibi slapstick

So where does that leave us?

Well, technically I think that Akame ga Kill! is a good show. The antagonists Night Raid goes up against have interesting and varied abilities, the action scenes range from well done to amazing, the animation is good, and when the music stands out it really stands out. My own lack of enthusiasm for the show comes from I think one part unrealized expectations and two parts finding the melodrama tedious.

Akame ga Kill! is a series that’s worthy of respect, even if it didn’t end up blowing me away.

A happy Esdeath. She is possibly the best-defined character in the show.

Postscript: Akame ga Kill! feels to me like it’s cut from the same cloth as Blood-C. So if for whatever impossible reason you want a show that is 100% Lex-approved and have a limited amount of time, I’d say check that one out instead.