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Technically the Americans come close. They have a pseudo alliance but, well, just look at how the Japanese's powerbase works - the ten master clans do whatever the gently caress they want and the military is largely under its own control. So basically they, quite rightly, view them as unreliable allies who are constantly getting into wars and skirmishes with the Chinese/Koreans. Then the Japanese reveal that in addition to having a bunch of other "strategic" class magicians (aka, people with stupidly powerful skills that can affect huge areas) they have one that can create an impact like a nuke on command and that the occurance a few years ago was not simply a fluke or an accident. Needless to say this upsets the world, but also the Americans to an extent - for similar reasons that North Korea having nukes is annoying for China in the real world, it escalates the possibility of its ally making GBS threads all over itself. Therefore, while performing a manhunt within Japan for rogue agents (that Japan somehow managed to let slip through their borders even though almost any mage can detect these traitors for ~reasons~), they decide that if they can find this nuke-wizard at the same time they are either going to capture or kill him. Because gently caress having an unstable ally with such a dangerous toy. So of course, these actions increase Gary Stu's harem because this is a LN.
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Jun 11, 2014 22:24
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I would be down with Sgt. Slaughter joining Ice-T's harem. It won't be nearly that cool will it? Which reminds me, why exactly is the government okay with a walking nuclear warhead who's had his brain hosed with so that he's loyal to family over all else, and his sister with the anger control issues in particular? And also his family is mostly made up of paranoid psychopaths even by the morally flexible standards of the other nine clans for that extra little bit of 
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Jun 11, 2014 22:45
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He's not loyal to the rest of the family, just Miyuki.
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Jun 11, 2014 22:49
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The Sandman posted:Better. There's a reason critics tend to have the most fun writing savage reviews of movies they hate, after all. I am of the opinion that it's good to experience bad things from time to time, so that you can really put it all in perspective and appreciate the good things.
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Jun 11, 2014 22:51
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The military isn't worried about Gary Stu because he is loyal to them. Gary Stu is loyal to the military because the military, the military, were literally the first people in his entire goddamn lifespan to say that his skills and abilities were interesting and that he wasn't a scrub failure that should be treated like dirt. Of course, that's the story reason. It's a Japanese nationalist spiel, of course the military isn't going to be worried because the hero will never betray glorious Japan.
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Jun 11, 2014 22:56
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I'll be curious if the military is every depicted in a less-than-positive light. Because if not, that would be another thing pointing in the "not only nationalist but arguably fascist as well" direction (in addition to the whole "foreigners are evil/stupid" thing). I'm not sure if elitism is really fascist.
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Jun 12, 2014 01:35
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SorcerousHam posted:The military isn't worried about Gary Stu because he is loyal to them. Gary Stu is loyal to the military because the military, the military, were literally the first people in his entire goddamn lifespan to say that his skills and abilities were interesting and that he wasn't a scrub failure that should be treated like dirt. Ugggghhh why do the interesting ideas have to be wrapped in all this stupid
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Jun 12, 2014 02:10
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I would be down for a series about a mentally unbalanced girl slavishly devoted to her walking nuclear explosion super-autist brother, who only obeys her direct commands, in a setting that's like a mashup of Harry Potter and Brazil.
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Jun 12, 2014 04:18
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gently caress, I attempted to watch more and was considering catching up completely, but gently caress! That flying episode is legit the worst, dullest directed thing I have ever seen. I don't even know if I fell asleep or not but I probably did since I really don't give a poo poo about the boring way that the inane magic works in this setting. I think I prefer seeing deplorable views being portrayed because that's *something* I could talk about. This episode was just a man fellating himself for 22 minutes, and I am not glad of it.
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Jun 12, 2014 06:18
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Me and a couple of friends have been watching the lovely animes this season for laughs but this one was too much, unlike the other ones it's not terrible in a potentially humorous way, it's terrible in an extremely dull way. It's just 20 minutes of everyone worshiping the main character and maybe 1 second of "magic", and it doesn't look like that's changing anytime soon/ever. Props to anybody who is actually able to withstand the sheer mediocrity this show provides, it might even be worse than SAO.
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Jun 12, 2014 06:37
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MrCinos posted:10th episode was probably my favorite despite little happening. I liked how Erika and Mikihiko were slowly being fleshed out as characters via dialogue/monologues. WickedHate posted:It's still early on in the series, but right now a lot of his character arc is focused on how he deals with living with his lack of emotion and all the responsibility that's been thrust on him since he was born, while dealing with his sister's affections and trying to balance keeping her safe and making her happy without giving into the desires she has, which is harder when basically the only emotion he feels is sibling love. At the same time he still manages to be heroic and isn't amoral in things not having to do with Miyuki. Early on? I'm sorry, but this is just too much. It's 10 episodes in, it's nearly at the half-way mark given that it's a two-cour series. Establishing the main character is something that's usually done by the second or third episode, tops. If we have trouble describing the character halfway through the loving series then either the writer or the director have hosed up big time.
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Jun 12, 2014 06:37
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HiveCommander posted:Early on? Heck, I feel like comparing/contrasting this to Ping Pong again. Not just because Irregular is one of the worst things I have ever seen and Ping Pong is the best anime I've seen in quite some time, but because they both have a similar sort of protagonist! Smile is shown to be nigh-perfect at ping pong and he's a fairly stoic dude. I'm not going to say emotionless because he's a human, after all (Plus, Tatsuya isn't emotionless either because he shows emotion all the time, admittedly in a stoic manner). He's even called a robot at times. But hell, the show does a fantastic job of showing the costs with his way of living. He might be perfect at ping pong, but he is by no means a perfect person. A lot of people think he's just a weird dude, even some of the people on his own team. Plus the show really hammers in how being number one requires a lot of sacrifice. This is to say nothing of all the talk about natural talent in the show. Luckily Ping Pong is a lot more sympathetic than Irregular. Irregular spits on the people without talent and is generally disgusted by them, but Ping Pong just understands that not everyone is going to be able to be the best; after all, it takes talent *and* a lot of hard work; just one isn't enough. Anyways I guess the point I'm getting at is despite the similar ideas being thrown around, Ping Pong's cast is amazingly well developed and you can say a lot about most of the cast and we're 9 episodes in. Now, granted, it's only half the length of Irregular. But still, that just goes to show you how poor Irregular's economy is. It wastes so much time that I couldn't really tell you anything about the supporting cast beyond their generic archetypes because who needs "boring" things like character development when you can spend all your time doing tedious infodumps about the magic system and/or having your protagonist instantly solve any problem without an ounce of effort? Even if we ignore the fact that 99% of the cast exists to fellate Tatsuya, this doesn't change the fact that they tend to ignore any possible character development and opt to spend way more time on its incredibly poorly thought out magic system that doesn't matter in the slightest. That flying stuff really showed me how lovely the magic is, and that it's just an excuse to talk about how Tatsuya is so awesome. I wound up typing a lot of words there so I'm just gonna end this by saying that everyone should watch Ping Pong if they're not currently doing so because it is simply impossible for me to express just how much better it is than this pile of garbage. Srice fucked around with this message at 07:18 on Jun 12, 2014 |
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Jun 12, 2014 07:07
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Here is my understanding of the flying thing. Casting a spell creates a sort of interference, so subsequent spells on the same target each have to be stronger than the last to punch through the interference. The flight device gets around that by only casting one constant spell, and then fiddling with the variables. However, I'm pretty sure that the variable thing isn't especially new. For example, Mayumi's signature spell is to create a bunch of dry ice pellets out of the atmosphere and then shoot them accurately. She doesn't have to release them all at once, and she can fire at multiple targets at the same time. She can fire at a moving target, so she has to change the variables for the target's location for each shot. That sure sounds like changing the variables of an existing spell to me. In other words, Tatsuya's brilliant scientific advance was simply applying an existing technique to an existing problem. No one else ever tried this particular approach because of Satou's narrative idiosyncrasies. That is, Satou prefers to make other characters look worse so that Tatsuya looks better by contrast instead of actually making Tatsuya someone who warrants praise. TLDR, the flight problem only existed to make Tatsuya look smart but doesn't really make sense.
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Jun 12, 2014 07:54
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I dropped the series after the first episode on the grounds of finding it incredibly boring and not liking any of the characters, but I find reading this thread interesting because the series is just so much worse than I could have guessed from just that. From looking at the first ep it looked as if it might have some cool fight scenes in future episodes, but as the protagonists are apparently totally invincible in a boring way, I suppose those will go to waste.
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Jun 12, 2014 08:14
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Rangpur posted:...so when his family got done tinkering with him on the operating table, and found out he could now disintegrate/heal/nuke at will, their reaction was, "eh, that's alright I guess." It's worse than that. He had those powers to begin with. Super spider sense, disintegration, nukes, auto-regen, etc. That's all innate. The operating table stuff was so he could fit in with their ~mage genetics sperg~. But it failed, so all they got out of that was a liability that could potentially see their entire clan destroyed by all the others (because it is illegal and other clans have been ruined for smaller offences) and it only made him able to instantly cast minor poo poo without a device. Even though he could literally destroy the entire planet with his abilities, they still treat him like poo poo. Yotsuba be dumb yo.
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Jun 12, 2014 09:33
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WickedHate posted:At the same time he still manages to be heroic and isn't amoral in things not having to do with Miyuki.[ Yo spoilers but Tatsuya only takes action against the chinese gangsters when one of their subordinates interferes with miyuki's flight casting device, despite the fact that she wouldn't have been in any danger due to safety procedures within the magic olympics. The chinese gangsters had, before this point, released what is essentially a human weapon into the crowd to attempt to kill hundreds of people so that the olympics would be called off, but tatsuya didn't give a poo poo. His internal monologue says that basically he wouldn't have cared if other people got injured, and even if someone he knew from his school had gotten killed he would only have felt a slight sense of regret. He only jumps into action when someone targets Miyuki, at which point he goes to chinatown and slaughters them all horribly from long range whilst taunting them over the phone. Tatsuya is entirely amoral in things unrelated to miyuki, and the books make that perfectly clear.
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Jun 12, 2014 11:44
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Namtab posted:Yo spoilers but Tatsuya only takes action against the chinese gangsters when one of their subordinates interferes with miyuki's flight casting device, despite the fact that she wouldn't have been in any danger due to safety procedures within the magic olympics. Could you post the monologue?
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Jun 12, 2014 12:08
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Yeah clearly I have nothing better to do with my time than lie about mahouka/search book 4 for a really specific thing. But for the cause of pointing out how moronic you are in constantly defending this I found the bit and bolded the stuff where he's amoral except for matters regarding Miyuki. quote:Even if he knew about Sanada and Yanagi's surreptitious intervention to avoid a massacre, Tatsuya's actions likely wouldn't differ by much. To be blunt, even if dozens of foreign spectators were slain, Tatsuya probably couldn't care less. quote:Four hours passed after Miyuki fell asleep, but Tatsuya did not budge from the bedside. It was as if he was loyally fulfilling Miyuki's expectations for him to remain by her side, yet Tatsuya never felt this was a trial. As stated, he doesn't give a poo poo about strangers, or even his friends/sempais. All he cares about is Miyuki and he is amoral in regards to this. Even the most generous description of Tatsuya could not call his actions "heroic".
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Jun 12, 2014 15:09
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Man I could barely stomach that paragraph, let alone the entire books. You guys are insane, even when reading it ironically.
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Jun 12, 2014 15:35
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That's some TVTropes-level poo poo right there.
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Jun 12, 2014 15:44
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Namtab posted:Yeah clearly I have nothing better to do with my time than lie about mahouka/search book 4 for a really specific thing. Jesus, yeah, that's hosed up as hell.
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Jun 12, 2014 18:10
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The show could still have been good if, despite Tatsuya being a terrible human being, the show actually acknowledged that fact and made a point of how immoral his actions/beliefs are. The problem is that it not only doesn't, but outright praises him at every turn.
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Jun 12, 2014 18:12
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Iunno, I just can't get down with all that sentiment. I mean nothing about the setting feels like it has potential to me because it's just a hodgepodge of light novel cliches and archetypes. "Good ideas" are a dime a dozen and even if those changes were made the author would likely find other ways to make it terrible. Maybe it wouldn't be as offensive, but I can't look at his writing skills and think that he has some untapped talent or anything.
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Jun 12, 2014 18:19
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The problem with looking at the author's writing skills is that this is an amateur fantranslation. That said however, the author is way too fond of exposition. E: It honestly feels like troperfiction to me, cause the author has all these insanely intricate rules regarding how magic works that ultimately adds very little to the actual story. Plus he's clearly writing with anime cliches, possibly in the hope of an eventual anime adaption. E2: If I had to compliment the author I'd say that it's obvious that he really cares about the setting. Namtab fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Jun 12, 2014 |
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Jun 12, 2014 18:29
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It doesn't matter if the LN has good ideas or not, it's simply the fact that the author is absolute poo poo at writing. There has been plenty of OP stoic/cold characters in fantastic stories, like the previously mentioned Ping Pong and Hokuto no Ken. The author just can't write anything better than a 13 year old fangirl trying to express her homo-erotic Harry-Snape fantasies across the internet. Even if it's a fan translation, it still doesn't stop it from being poorly written.
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Jun 12, 2014 18:32
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There is a point, early on in the next story arc if I recall, where someone gets pissed at him because he's completely blase about any harm that comes to people besides Miyuki. I believe that ends with some member of the student council scolding her for blaming all her problems on Tatsuya. A valid point perhaps but still completely glossing over that TatsuYHWH does in fact have a problem.
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Jun 12, 2014 18:35
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I'm truly a little disgusted and conflicted about watching the anime anymore.
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Jun 12, 2014 18:38
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we did it everyone
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Jun 12, 2014 18:40
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See, the problem with attributing the awful, awful dialogue and exposition to low quality translations is that crunchyroll usually puts out perfectly competent subs. The LN translation from baka tsuki might use awkward phrasing at times, but if you assume that the cr translations are accurate it is mostly spot on. The LN's really are that poorly written, is all. Edit: Jesus Christ! Not the rear end in a top hat japanese version, either.
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Jun 12, 2014 18:41
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jwang posted:It doesn't matter if the LN has good ideas or not, it's simply the fact that the author is absolute poo poo at writing. There has been plenty of OP stoic/cold characters in fantastic stories, like the previously mentioned Ping Pong and Hokuto no Ken. The author just can't write anything better than a 13 year old fangirl trying to express her homo-erotic Harry-Snape fantasies across the internet. Even if it's a fan translation, it still doesn't stop it from being poorly written. Yeah, basically this. Plus the anime seems to be doing a pretty accurate adaption of the work, so I think that the translation there is also a good way to judge it. After all, Funimation's translations are typically good enough. e: Dang, beaten.
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Jun 12, 2014 18:41
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WickedHate posted:I'm truly a little disgusted and conflicted about watching the anime anymore.  Omedetou. Omedetou. Omedetou.
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Jun 12, 2014 19:18
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Cake Attack posted:we did it everyone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1BPx5Wsm7k&t=156s Namtab posted:E2: If I had to compliment the author I'd say that it's obvious that he really cares about the setting. Don't most authors care about their setting?
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Jun 12, 2014 19:46
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Look man I'm grasping at straws for compliments.
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Jun 12, 2014 19:57
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I sorta feel bad that they decided to stay true to the source material. If they weren't so intent in only producing stuff they more or less own completely, I wonder how a studio such as KyoAni would approach the story. Or White Fox. Both the adaptations of Steins;Gate and Katanagatari were pretty good.
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Jun 12, 2014 20:18
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Still I like the idea of a Hogwarts that's basically the nice face on a human weapons program. They have dances, athletic events, festivals and stuff but there's still armed patrols and a fuckload of weapons pointing at the school to vaporize anyone who tries to go AWOL. Probably because school settings in YA fiction never appealed to me at all.  WickedHate posted:I'm truly a little disgusted and conflicted about watching the anime anymore.  , this thread.
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Jun 12, 2014 21:35
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WickedHate posted:I'm truly a little disgusted and conflicted about watching the anime anymore. I apologise to everyone for posting the quote
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Jun 12, 2014 22:03
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WickedHate posted:I'm truly a little disgusted and conflicted about watching the anime anymore.
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Jun 12, 2014 22:14
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Namtab posted:I apologise to everyone for posting the quote Where the hell am I supposed to get my entertainment now. You are the true monster
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Jun 12, 2014 22:20
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thread redeemed, no-one is truly beyond help, anime is bad, rename thread to 'the oniishank redemption', goldmine
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Jun 12, 2014 23:27
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Srice posted:Heck, I feel like comparing/contrasting this to Ping Pong again. Not just because Irregular is one of the worst things I have ever seen and Ping Pong is the best anime I've seen in quite some time, but because they both have a similar sort of protagonist! while it is evident that the world doesn't really need another cheerleader for ping pong or a detractor to irregular, i appreciate your analysis slicer kun and general effort posts you make
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