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chiasaur11 posted:Something I've seen pointed out is that the viewers generally relate to Schwarzwald's monomaniacal quest for TRUTH, but the show endorses Roger, who accepts there's always going to be poo poo he doesn't know. While Smith faces down harsh realities when they come up, he generally tries to let sleeping dogs lie. He's not a reporter seeking facts, he's a negotiator trying to find a solution everyone can live with. And in the end, the show gives an ending that's satisfying if you can just accept it in the broad strokes, and completely maddening if you try to find the Real Answer. That's how you end up with jokes like even Raymond Chandler not knowing who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep.
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Nov 20, 2019 07:30
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chiasaur11 posted:Something I've seen pointed out is that the viewers generally relate to Schwarzwald's monomaniacal quest for TRUTH, but the show endorses Roger, who accepts there's always going to be poo poo he doesn't know. This is super neat. I was always so obsessed with the mystery that I never really stopped to think about my relationship, as a viewer, with the show. Which is lol at me considering the show is filled with stuff like this: 
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Nov 21, 2019 15:56
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Raxivace posted:I think that's something that comes really strongly from the film noir (And the hard-boiled novels they're based on) roots that influenced The Big O, where half the time the solutions don't necessarily quite feel like they've guided you out of their labyrinthine mysteries even if the story itself gets resolved. The solutions themselves aren't necessarily the point as much as the act of trying to make just enough sense of the messy world we live in is. “I remember, several years ago when Howard Hawks was making “The Big Sleep”, he and Bogart got into an argument as to whether one of the characters was murdered or committed suicide. They sent me a wire (there’s a joke about this too) asking me, and dammit I didn’t know either." (Of course, if memory serves, the reason for that was the Big Sleep starting as two short stories that were combined into one novel. Some of the details got lost in the process.) But I've been looking like a smart person for too long here, talking about themes and the like. Time to return to a more comfortable environment with New Dominion Tank Police, a very stupid show that barely has mechs at all. Now, I'm going to go on record as a fan of Shirow's mangas, both the original and No More Noise. It's a fun romp of a story, with good action, over-the-top characters, and a pretty good sense of self-awareness. It even explicitly comments that, if it wasn't a goofy comedy, it'd be a terrifying dystopian hellscape. New Dominon Tank Police doesn't have that awareness. Despite reducing the goofiness and trying to include more serious stakes, it doesn't get how bad its core concept can go. Where the manga gleefully admits that the heroes are psychos, with Buaku as the Wile E Coyote to their Road Runner (or perhaps the reverse is more appropriate). In the anime, however, they fight a couple of eeevil megacorps, portrayed as seriously bad people who justify the excessive force in the same way as the villains of traditional cop shows. Similarly, in the manga, the Tank Police have a fundamentally antagonistic relationship with the government proper, since they are, again, gleeful psychos, here the mayor and the Tank Police are both on the same side. The Murtaugh to their Riggs rather than the chief to their Calhoun. And this goes into the show's deeply stupid political plot. Now, different countries have different laws and prospectives on private firearm ownership, so I won't step on that mine, but if a show has criminals able to pick up illegal weapons easier than a Sunday paper, and the eeeevil megacorp casually having police officers murdered, then maybe passing a law against them selling guns won't... do much. It's even worse, though, because those gun sales make up about 80 percent of the city's tax revenue. (For context, the largest employer in the USA only pays about .2 percent of the country's tax revenue.) From the facts as presented, the law would hurt the city a lot more than the corp, but the city is enthusiastic and the evil megacorp is terrified. It's weird. It's also weird for the characters. If this was Patlabor, sure. Goto's all about minimum force and de-escalation. I can see him wanting less weapons on the street. But Brenten and Leona are all about the big booms, and the whole unit tends to agree with them. If the type of cop who gets comic relief scenes where he talks to little old ladies about what kind of magnum would provide the best mix of stopping power and reliability suddenly turns around to endorse a gun ban, it feels less like a desire to reduce the harm to his fellow man and more like he wants to make sure nobody can shoot back when he rampages. So, yeah. The jokes weren't as funny as the manga, the plots were bad, there were poorly managed flashbacks, and in general it just wasn't very good.
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Nov 22, 2019 03:21
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I remember talking with someone years ago who watched season 1 of The Big O when it originally aired on.. Cartoon Network? who was convinced for ages they kept somehow missing the last episode
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Nov 22, 2019 19:18
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I legitimately missed the last episode or two of Cowboy Bebop on Cartoon Network for years and years and thought someone was yanking my chain as to how it ended. Edit: Holy poo poo he's so definitely dead he even gets a Joe frame. Ranzear fucked around with this message at 08:54 on Nov 23, 2019 |
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Nov 23, 2019 08:47
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Same but with Evangelion instead, me as a teen was positive they wouldn't end the show like that. I kinda like how dumb is it now though.
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Nov 23, 2019 08:59
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My family is cursed to see the last episode of a show. My dad saw the last episode of Cowboy Bebop before knowing what the show was about and I saw the last episodes of Trigun and Reign the Conqueror years before I actually watched the shows. I also read the last volume of the Gundam Wing manga without knowing anything else about it because that was the only Gundam thing my library had
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Nov 23, 2019 18:17
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So, looking for something short, I watched Mazinkaiser SKL. At three episodes, it's difficult to fit in any real character development for more than a few leads, but they didn't even try. With no deep themes, complicated motivations, or attempts to be more than a series of metal album covers, Mazinkaiser is stupid even by mech anime standards, and if there's a single thought in its head, it got there completely by accident. And it kinda rules? I'm not saying it's for everyone, to be clear. It's stupid, there's the cliche of attempted rape as a cheap way to characterize antagonists as unforgivable, and the heroes are basically a delivery mechanism for a string of tough guy one liners. But that's why it works. Where I criticized Mazinger Infinity for pretensions of sophistication and dramatic dialogue scenes it clearly didn't care about, SKL just embraces its nature. It has a bare minimum of exposition and subplots to justify its action, with psychic powers, long lost twins, the apocalypse and weird notions of destiny floating around, but that's all just vague set dressing for absurd action set pieces. And the female lead is surprisingly solid. Yuuki's the rookie engineer, but she actually shoves back when Death Caprice act like assholes, holds her own when she's in a fight, and figures out how to solve problems. In general, she's treated more like a person than anyone else in the cast without also being treated like a liability. Again, I don't blame anyone for not picking up what it puts down. It's a show with very specific goals, and no concessions for anything else, including good taste. But it's very good at being itself, and at less than an hour and a half, it doesn't overstay its welcome. Probably my favorite Mazinger related thing I've seen but to be fair, that's not an incredibly high bar.
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Nov 26, 2019 09:10
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Yeah SKL is in full Nagai grimdark batshit mode but can be kind of fun if you’re up for that.
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Nov 26, 2019 09:31
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Also chiasaur have you just bowed out on G-Reco?
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Nov 26, 2019 09:33
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Edit: The curse of the double post.
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Nov 26, 2019 09:33
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Raxivace posted:Also chiasaur have you just bowed out on G-Reco? For now at least, yeah. Didn't seem like anyone else was getting much from my posts, and I was juggling a bunch of other shows that were shorter or that I enjoyed more, so I kinda let it slip. Might or might not catch up some time, just to finish it. Speaking of other shows that I didn't enjoy more, Five Star Stories. It's interesting to see it right after SKL, since they're such opposites. Where SKL grudgingly has short non-fighting scenes to provide context, 5 Star only has one mech fight at the end. Where SKL was aggressively macho, Five Star Stories has a protagonist who's continually confused for a girl. And where SKL has minor villains threatening rape to show they're bad... Okay, that's the same. Unfortunately. Set in a distant galaxy, Five Star Stories is about a world where everyone wants to buy robot girls as slaves because nobody can pilot a mech without them. One robot slave girl maker decided not to include mind control, which may or may not have been a factor in a local rear end in a top hat invading and kidnapping them. This leads to our mech engineer hero to join with a local pilot to rescue the two stolen slaves so he can marry one of them who he... helped raise. Anyway, there's more attempts at kidnapping foiled by invincible mech pilots with laser swords, the villain's plan is foiled by the hero just walking in and grabbing the girl when the villain says she can leave with whoever she wants (as part of a scheme, yes, but not a particularly clever one.), the villains chase the heroes right on top of his mech which was buried in a random spot in the desert, and he kills them all with lasers. Oh, and he was the emperor of the galaxy and his friend (who got drunk and tried to rape him, in a charming bit of "comedy") is the president of the planet, so they could have solved everything at any point just by calling on their authority, but why do that when faffing about is so much... something-er. So, yeah. Was curious, now I know.
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Nov 26, 2019 13:06
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I'm still a little mad that SKL killed off the swearing drill sergeant lady, apparently she lives in the manga but that will never be translated.
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Nov 27, 2019 04:43
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It's my understanding that the pacing of the Five Star Stories movie is completely bonkers out-of-whack and even still managed to leave out one or two other mecha battles entirely and other things happening, but I forget who around here gave that synopsis. I just know it's only the first book out of twelve.
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Nov 28, 2019 06:12
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Ranzear posted:It's my understanding that the pacing of the Five Star Stories movie is completely bonkers out-of-whack and even still managed to leave out one or two other mecha battles entirely and other things happening, but I forget who around here gave that synopsis. I just know it's only the first book out of twelve. It's not even the full first volume, kinda two-thirds of book 1 which was written in the '80s. And the movie added stuff even. I've heard that Mamoru Nagano was NOT happy with the movie and it's a reason the movie that he created (GothicMade) has never gotten a non-cinema release.
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Nov 28, 2019 07:58
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To be fair, Five Star Stories in general just laughs at the idea of pacing or structure. Iirc, it literally opens with the ending and the first volume has a timeline of the whole series.
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Nov 28, 2019 19:49
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Isn't it also basically a small-yet-giant self-insert myth-fic and people just like cool robots?
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Nov 28, 2019 20:59
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https://twitter.com/hyliii/status/1200250274062983168?s=19
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Nov 30, 2019 00:18
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That’s awesome. Wataru really needed a new batch of English subs anyways.
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Nov 30, 2019 00:27
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Fafner the Beyond ep 3's been subbed https://nyaa.si/view/1199200
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Nov 30, 2019 01:48
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Nice! Can't wait to watch all 350 episodes
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Nov 30, 2019 06:13
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Nov 30, 2019 07:11
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Wataru has a banging soundtrack and Himeko is good.
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Nov 30, 2019 16:21
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Well, I definitely can't miss the chance to see this series now that it's so easy to watch subtitled. I'm definitely watching this, and the first two episodes were really good.
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Nov 30, 2019 21:34
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kimi no namida, saigo ni suru wake wa niji no hashi ga, mou sugu kakaru kara kirameku Rainbow kokoro no oku no kagi o akereba, kagayaku no sa
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Dec 1, 2019 07:40
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So, still going through VOTOMs, and the Kummen arc is really an improvement so far. Chirico has clear objectives he's working towards, rather than just being vaguely curious, and the plot feels like it's advancing, rather than just going in circles. That said, man. Perfect Soldiers aren't living up to the hype. For all the talk of them overwhelming enemies with ease, and Chirico saying that they could send as many ATs as they like at them without getting anything back but bodybags, they're getting their asses kicked regularly. Not just by Chirico, either. The hero managing to outwit and outfight people who should, by all objective metrics, have his number is a standard genre move. But we aren't getting the usual setup scenes either. Most of us have seen enough Gundam to know them, I think. We see a bunch of mook pilots, they're going through easy as you please, when they start getting picked off. They chatter about how many enemies, it turns out it's just one pilot, they all die and we get hyped for the new super pilot. We even had some pretty good fodder with Chirico's new merc buddies. They're pros, so the Perfect Soldier dropping them (even if he's not actually killing them) says he's a big deal. Only we don't do that. Instead, we see them lose their practice duels with the prince, who's just a regular human as far as the show's said so far. And they lose badly. It's weird for a show to spend so much time both hyping up an opponent and undermining that hype without it being a punchline, you know?
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Dec 4, 2019 13:12
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I think there's only two Perfect Soldiers in VOTOMS - Fyana and Ypsilon. Chirico's also special, but in a slightly different way. All three of those are very dangerous pilots.
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Dec 4, 2019 13:32
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Yeah there's only two, there's a bunch of people that are really good in different ways, but there's only two actual Perfect Soldiers.
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Dec 4, 2019 18:39
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EthanSteele posted:Yeah there's only two, there's a bunch of people that are really good in different ways, but there's only two actual Perfect Soldiers. Those are, admittedly, the two I was thinking of. I know that the show can (and likely will) have scenes better selling them later but right now it feels like they don't justify the "ultimate deadliest thing ever worth more than an army" hype. They're impressive, but they've lost enough to not feel like a game changer. The OVAs don't really help, thinking about it. Irvine was a regular pilot who wiped out both sides when caught in a horrific ambush, and Mellowlink was... Mellowlink. When the elite baselines show more impressive victories, it's harder to feel like the Super Soldiers were worth the full investment. Especially when there's nothing like funnels to be a hard line between elite "regular" soldiers and the actual Perfect Soldiers. Ties into another issue there, thinking about it. Everyone in VOTOMs using the same crappy disposable machines is cool and helps give the show a grounded tone. Having everyone also use the same paint schemes? Not so good. Just giving armies different primary colors would make battles much easier to follow. Things like the red shoulder also feel weirdly under-represented considering the art on real world fighter jets. Moving past VOTOMS, though, (with a brief pause for considering how much worse a negotiator Roger Smith is in SRW Z than in the anime), I also saw a couple more shows for one episode as a sampler. Rideback had a distinct setup, but didn't really do too much. It also has the central premise of a weird new terrorist movement managing to take over the world with their mechs and... Look. I'm willing to accept giant robots as a legitimate weapon of war, so suspension of disbelief is pretty high here. But it's not unlimited. If Mazinger Z is trashing an army, fine. If Eva unit 1 is ignoring nukes, sure, let's see that monster rampage. If a motorcycle with legs is enough to turn the tide against modern combined arms... that's a little more difficult to buy. Especially when the same vehicles are cleared for civilian use. And having that in the middle of the show makes it harder to take the personal drama seriously. (Which isn't that interesting itself yet.) Still much better than the first episode of Linebarrels, though. The main character is pretty intolerable, the plot has a lot of Proper Nouns that mean nothing, and the CG integration is some of the worst I've ever seen. Oh, and Hirai face. Can't forget that. I now understand why people say so many bad things about it.
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Dec 5, 2019 09:13
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chiasaur11 posted:Those are, admittedly, the two I was thinking of. Yes, please stop watching the Linebarrels anime.
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Dec 5, 2019 17:40
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Do not watch Linebarrels anime.
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Dec 5, 2019 17:51
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The Linebarrel manga is pretty cool, the main character is still a dick early on but that's intentional and he grows out of it. The translation is poop from a butt though. Edit: Unrelated but I just remembered the GGG novel updated again and the same translator also did the psx game's cutscenes: https://pyroxenescanning.wordpress.com/
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Dec 5, 2019 17:54
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One day, we will have Grandpa Lincoln with the Rail-Splitter in SRW.
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Dec 5, 2019 18:20
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Linebarrels manga is great and I loved reading it, translation weirdness aside. Linebarrels anime is...not. Please do not watch the Linebarrels anime.
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Dec 5, 2019 18:44
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Blaze Dragon posted:Linebarrels manga is great and I loved reading it, translation weirdness aside. I just had to see one episode to confirm that, yes. It is that terrible. The true method of knowledge is experiment and all. Definitely not going to keep sticking my hand on the stove now that I've confirmed it's hot, but I'd heard so much bad I wanted to see it for myself, if only to be able to understand the vitriol. And now I don't just understand why people hate it, but why CG in mech anime is so derided.
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Dec 5, 2019 23:57
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Now watch Psybuster.
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Dec 6, 2019 00:41
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Psybuster's OP is a banger; I have the full & instrumental versions kicking around somewhere and I use them a lot in G Gen and such. No clue about the actual show besides the fact that it started from Winkysoft throwing a hissy fit about SRW being handed over to Banpresto tho
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Dec 6, 2019 17:40
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Sordas Volantyr posted:Psybuster's OP is a banger; I have the full & instrumental versions kicking around somewhere and I use them a lot in G Gen and such. It's bad.
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Dec 6, 2019 21:18
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There's this trope in Gundam and whatever of the quiet stoic protagonist, but then there's an extra step further of the truly unflinching ones like Heero and Mikazuki. What sets these two apart for me is they never ever talk about their own aspirations or goals, and I kinda want to dig into the prevalence of this archetype. They aren't psychopaths though, just very capable and sometimes robotic. Are there any others that stand out like that? I may have realized why these characters in particular resonate with me, but I want to study a few more examples. The tl;dr is that Mikazuki definitely reads to me as potentially aphantasic. Ranzear fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Dec 7, 2019 |
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Dec 7, 2019 02:50
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The guy from Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet is like that. The whole show is about that kind of character finding himself in a situation without any immediate mission and having to adjust to a slow, peaceful life defined by relationships with other people
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Dec 7, 2019 03:26
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