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I thought the original Ellis stuff was really, really good overall. The characterisation was simple, basically broad to the point of iconicity, but the characters all represented complex ideas and situations that he wanted to explore. So you ended up with this very talky series that was fairly succinct in its incites, and always felt like it was covering new ground even if the characters spent most of a season bumming around maybe one or two locations dealing with one or two problems. It also had a fairly grand scope to its events, meaning that even if you do have a season that's just a bunch of capital-e Evil people hanging around in a large castle chatting with each other, when they finally unleashed their clusterfuck of dumbshit betrayals and backstabbings on one another there was a grandiosity to what happened. The castle teleportation is an absolutely amazing set-piece, but it's mostly impressive because of how the script treats it as a huge deal and the scenario goes into the physics of the thing and characters who aren't meant to be freaked by teleporting castles have small existential meltdowns, etc. It's strange how the first season of Nocturne has a genuinely crazy thing happen about three-quarters through, bigger than anything else that's affected a series which has featured multiple sieges, mass killings and revolutions, but it feels weirdly small and kind of shabby. Blotting out the sun should be a straightforwardly apocalyptic event, and even though it's temporary it'd still completely derail the course of human history. Despite this the show treats it fairly casually. No mass panic, no fires, no screaming on the streets, no shots of people cowering in their homes, no cuts to other parts of the country or shocked reactions by randoms who are out hanging clothes on the line, no cutaways to the populace in any way shape or form.
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Oct 5, 2023 19:38
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Open Source Idiom posted:I thought the original Ellis stuff was really, really good overall. The characterisation was simple, basically broad to the point of iconicity, but the characters all represented complex ideas and situations that he wanted to explore. So you ended up with this very talky series that was fairly succinct in its incites, and always felt like it was covering new ground even if the characters spent most of a season bumming around maybe one or two locations dealing with one or two problems. I loved the part from your second paragraph so much that I made a dumb video where I put the scenes together (spoiler- season 2 of Castlevania) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYZXe22PbHk Noctourne final episode spoiler: If the eclipse is magical then it must be localised. I immediately thought it was deception with Sekhmet having been around for millennia knowing exactly when an eclipse would occur.
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Oct 5, 2023 20:14
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Turpitude posted:Noctourne final episode spoiler: If the eclipse is magical then it must be localised. I immediately thought it was deception with Sekhmet having been around for millennia knowing exactly when an eclipse would occur. She's not even actually Sekhmet, right? She's got a strong Russian accent and talks about everyone thinking she was crazy when she was a little girl. She also talks about Sekhmet's blood being in her, so maybe she could have drunk from a sleeping god? Maybe? That said, if it's just a trick that's vaguely lame and a very dumb plan. Just a completely unsustainable con. So I'd hope not, just for narrative's sake.
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Oct 5, 2023 20:25
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Open Source Idiom posted:She's not even actually Sekhmet, right? She's got a strong Russian accent and talks about everyone thinking she was crazy when she was a little girl. I get the vibe that Erzebet both is and isn't Sekhmet. To put it another way, she's just a spoiled, sadistic Hungarian aristocrat who was fed the blood of an ancient Egyptian deity so she could serve as the front-woman for a 'vampire messiah' plot, and inherited some of the goddess's memories in the process. Her power is real and obvious, but she herself feels like a bit of a posturing tryhard.
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Oct 5, 2023 20:33
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Open Source Idiom posted:She's not even actually Sekhmet, right? She's got a strong Russian accent and talks about everyone thinking she was crazy when she was a little girl. One character outright says that she drank the blood of Sekhmet which would mean she is a new kind of vampire whose powers we don't know the true extent of. It is kept deliberately vague so that the stakes are high for the viewer as well as the heroes. There is no reason to take her claims, or that of her zealots, as the actual truth. She is also being supported by demons from hell which could be adding to the deceptive plot. I think it is powerful magic that can only be sustained through extended sacrifice and worship and also that she is being fed power by the faction I just mentioned. I think the fact that the reactions you were looking for from around the world to what happens are not there is a big clue as to what is really going on rather than a giant plot hole. We won't find out until we get more episodes though
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Oct 5, 2023 20:41
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Turpitude posted:I think the fact that the reactions you were looking for from around the world to what happens are not there is a big clue as to what is really going on rather than a giant plot hole. We won't find out until we get more episodes though There aren't any reactions from randoms in the town either tbh. Not when it happens anyway. Everyone is very chill until right at the end of the season when a handful of randos wander out into the street. It just doesn't have the emotional scale of the castle sequence, despite apparently being more significant, is my point.
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Oct 5, 2023 20:59
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Neito posted:Yeah. The movie was honestly a better stopping point, and I'm kinda annoyed Future exists. It's not as bad as some other endings (How I Met Your Mother, Eden of the East, etc), but it's like a 7/10 ending to a 9/10 show that had a 10/10 ending. Yeah I really enjoyed the movie, great songs, but I hear many conflicting things about Future so I'm debating whether to watch it or just go back to shows made for my age group containing much less emotionally mature characters but lots more blood and sex.
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Oct 6, 2023 00:53
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What have you got to lose?
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Oct 6, 2023 02:42
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Turpitude posted:I never considered Castlevania to have a real "story" so the show to me is more of a vibe. Just all around great animation, action, voice acting, and characterization. The story told in the first series is quite good and unique. The most videogamey part is in the final episode and has a character even say "good game" as a wink to the gamers. You're not wrong, but boy do the Castlevania games put a lot of time into their plot that doesn't matter at all.
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Oct 6, 2023 03:50
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I caught up on Krapopolis and I don't hate it? The voice cast is great, the writing is clever at times, and I guess I'm a sucker for ancient Greece. I don't like all of the "in the future" stuff but otherwise I'm enjoying it enough to keep watching.
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Oct 6, 2023 04:05
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Ccs posted:Yeah I really enjoyed the movie, great songs, but I hear many conflicting things about Future so I'm debating whether to watch it or just go back to shows made for my age group containing much less emotionally mature characters but lots more blood and sex. Future is a mess, yes, but it also puts the needed capstone on all the dangling threads the show and the movie leave twisting, so it really is the Ending to the series. Unfortunately because a lot of those dangling threads are messy bitch drama, the ending is a messy bitch mess. But it's 3 and a half hours and then it's done. Just power through it and then move on to whatever else you wanna do or watch.
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Oct 6, 2023 04:05
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drat, I am hard pressed to think of a better act 1 in western animation, and most TV shows that are trying to tell one long serialized story throughout their run, than Castlevania Nocturne pulled off there. I put off watching the last 3 episodes for awhile and now I'm sad that I waited. I also liked the animation style they used for some of the fights in the last episode. I think it was probably just a standard animation trick of changing up the animation frames, but man it made things look super hectic at times. I'm looking forward to lots of characters getting absurd powerups video game style through the rest of the show's run, and then hopefully seeing one more solid Castlevania show so that we get plenty of animation but not so much that it wears out its welcome or premise. Booky posted:how gorey is netflix castlevania anyways? it seems kinda interesting but, im not very great with gore It's usually not too bad, but it absolutely features stabbing, burning, bleeding (and blood in general), displays of dead bodies in various states of harm, and the occasional lost limb or head. That being said, the truly gnarly stuff is almost always cut away from or implied. It's also definitely not a constant gorefest by any means and there's far more scenes of characters talking than there are of gore or violence. I suggest checking out the pretty short first season to see how you feel about it. There may be a short thing here and there that gets more intense than what's in that, but I feel like generally what you see there is what you're going to get from the OG Castlevania on Netflix and Castlevania Nocturne. NowonSA fucked around with this message at 04:29 on Oct 6, 2023 |
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Oct 6, 2023 04:15
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Ccs posted:Yeah I really enjoyed the movie, great songs, but I hear many conflicting things about Future so I'm debating whether to watch it or just go back to shows made for my age group containing much less emotionally mature characters but lots more blood and sex. Let me put it this way. How I Met Your Mother had an ending I regret watching, which changed the context of the entire previous 9 years of TV and spent all that goodwill for the worst ending in the history of television, an ending that doesn't just annoy the audience but actively insults them and purposefully throws away years and years of character development and is basically character assassination. THAT'S a bad ending. Steven Universe Future is like a B- ending to an A+ show. IF you're happy after the Movie, you're not missing any top-tier TV by skipping it, but if you're thinking "I'd like just a little more in this universe, a coda if you will", go for it.
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Oct 6, 2023 04:31
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Did...Adult Swim just play like a half hour of Very Scary People? or Did I just have a mini-stroke?
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Oct 6, 2023 04:34
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fuckingtest posted:Did...Adult Swim just play like a half hour of Very Scary People? or Did I just have a mini-stroke? They've been doing spooky streams on YouTube, wouldn't surprise me.
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Oct 6, 2023 04:36
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Just mainlined all of Fionna and Cake and God I loving loved all of it especially the message at the end about recovery and depression. Rare you actually get a realistic take on that.
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Oct 6, 2023 05:31
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NowonSA posted:It's usually not too bad, but it absolutely features stabbing, burning, bleeding (and blood in general), displays of dead bodies in various states of harm, and the occasional lost limb or head. That being said, the truly gnarly stuff is almost always cut away from or implied. i see... thank you! i might check it out one of these days then 
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Oct 6, 2023 05:38
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fuckingtest posted:Did...Adult Swim just play like a half hour of Very Scary People? or Did I just have a mini-stroke? All of the Warner Stations were having trouble transitioning to Discovery's Brodcast method. Could be just another error.
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Oct 6, 2023 07:00
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Neito posted:They've been doing spooky streams on YouTube, wouldn't surprise me. To be clear, Very Scary People is a seemingly garbage True Crime show hosted by Donnie Wahlberg. It was just a straight up short documentary about the BTK Killer, and yeah, seemed to be a very odd error in programming.
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Oct 6, 2023 07:30
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Neito posted:Let me put it this way. I bailed on this show before the end and just read a synopsis. Yikes!
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Oct 6, 2023 13:38
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i am a moron posted:I bailed on this show before the end and just read a synopsis. Yikes! Nearly a decade after it's finish, it's still my gold standard for bad endings.
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Oct 6, 2023 15:25
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Neito posted:Nearly a decade after it's finish, it's still my gold standard for bad endings. It’s especially jarring given they had a much better ending ready to go, but they were too married to their original plan, I guess.
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Oct 6, 2023 16:41
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Yvonmukluk posted:It’s especially jarring given they had a much better ending ready to go, but they were too married to their original plan, I guess. There was a writeup from Sepinwall, I think, about how this was basically going to be the best argument against "it's bad because they didn't plan anything out." How I Met Your Mother was committed to an insanely terrible ending long after it made any sense and after they committed to an extra season or 2 that specifically undermined the ending. It was a fun trainwreck to see though. I remember goons managed to call the ending about month or so in advance and it was great to see it go from crazy theory to "oh my god, they're really going to do it  ."
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Oct 6, 2023 17:46
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people are allowed to dislike castlevania nocturne, but let's not go back and rewrite how excited we were for the first season of the original show. it kept getting better over the seasons, but obviously good luck beating s2's massive rear end-kicking to bloody tears the plotting and dialogue felt fairly weak, and as a european, i am just not a fan of accents for the sake of accents, specially when the accents sound off most of the time. but i probably felt the same way about sypha in s1 hopefully all of this will be tightened up for the next season. the worldbuilding was genuinely impressive, and obviously that comes with a lot of complications, but that's what you need to do if you want to keep exploring the universe. although i am not sure what they were doing with bathory who felt like a weird r34 miyazaki boss basically disliking a lot of things in nocturne would mean me also disliking a lot of aspects of the old show, and i'd rather rememebr it more fondly also the soundtrack is out! https://open.spotify.com/album/1RXziB6CQgiMH4j28vt6NQ e: nocturne also just got confirmed for season 2 kliras fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Oct 6, 2023 |
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Oct 6, 2023 17:56
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Nocturne's been renewed for season two, though tbh I suspect both seasons were ordered together. We'll see how it goes.
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Oct 6, 2023 18:23
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That's awesome news!
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Oct 6, 2023 18:33
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Open Source Idiom posted:Nocturne's been renewed for season two, though tbh I suspect both seasons were ordered together. We'll see how it goes. I'd be surprised if they actually gave them a two season order right out the gate no matter how good the OG Castlevania numbers were. It's good to have that renewal in the pocket though, even if that news is much less set in stone now than it has been in the past. Still it seems like the numbers for the first season were good and animation's pricey but it can't be anywhere close to "gotta throw all the money at Stranger Things" pricey, so it always seemed like a pretty safe bet to me. I do think I'm gonna have to start worrying about basically all the shows I like after the new writer's guild and SAG contracts get set up and all these places start looking for areas to save money.
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Oct 6, 2023 21:48
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Neito posted:Nearly a decade after it's finish, it's still my gold standard for bad endings. To quote a really great Tumblr post about it: HIMYM's ending was so bad that when it came time to coin a phrase for a show with an ending so bad it actively made the preceeding episodes of the series worse they called it...the Game of Thrones Effect, because by that point, How I Met Your Mother had been so thoroughly memoryholed, even by people who previously loved the series edit: found it 
Happy Landfill fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Oct 7, 2023 |
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Oct 6, 2023 22:55
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Happy Landfill posted:To quote a really great Tumblr post about it: HIMYM's ending was so bad that when it came time to coin a phrase for a show with an ending so bad it actively made the preceeding episodes of the series worse they called it...the Game of Thrones Effect, because by that point, How I Met Your Mother had been so thoroughly memoryholed, even by people who previously loved the series Never was interested in How I Met Your Mother but I think it might be useful if somebody compiled a list of these shows that literally bombed their endings. Mostly from a writing point of view I'm fascinated by looking at bad examples. The silver lining is there's possibly something to learn from them so these mistakes can be avoided in the future. Lost was another example of that I think but again I wasn't very invested in it so i can't say for sure.
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Oct 7, 2023 00:39
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Battlestar Galactica is great example of a show that completely hosed the ending, and made the entire series seem really stupid.
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Oct 7, 2023 00:51
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Flopsy posted:Never was interested in How I Met Your Mother but I think it might be useful if somebody compiled a list of these shows that literally bombed their endings. Mostly from a writing point of view I'm fascinated by looking at bad examples. The silver lining is there's possibly something to learn from them so these mistakes can be avoided in the future. Lost was another example of that I think but again I wasn't very invested in it so i can't say for sure. Lost, HIMYM, GoT, and Galactica come to mind.
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Oct 7, 2023 00:53
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Dexter sucked for a long time but I think it deserves a mention because the finale really managed to stand out as terrible in spite of that
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Oct 7, 2023 00:56
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Neito posted:Lost, HIMYM, GoT, and Galactica come to mind. Out of curiosity I looked up what they did with HIMYM and literally laughed out loud because holy poo poo.
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Oct 7, 2023 01:23
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HIMYM's ending is especially funny because it honestly could've been accepted if the show had ended way way earlier. Unfortunately, the show dragged on for 9 seasons and by the end of it NO one wanted Ted and Robin to ever get together anymore. People were sick of the Ted/Robin thing by that point, so to end it the way they did was astonishing
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Oct 7, 2023 01:35
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Macaluso posted:HIMYM's ending is especially funny because it honestly could've been accepted if the show had ended way way earlier. Unfortunately, the show dragged on for 9 seasons and by the end of it NO one wanted Ted and Robin to ever get together anymore. People were sick of the Ted/Robin thing by that point, so to end it the way they did was astonishing Yeah, not to keep up the derail but for people who didn't watch it they literally had, I believe, 2 seasons dedicated to the idea that Robin and Barney were actually a surprisingly good match and Barney was ready to settle down and it would force Ted to move on. Then they had their marriage turn into a trainwreck in a couple minute montage in the finale so they could force the ending. Lol.
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Oct 7, 2023 01:46
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The last season took place almost entirely over the course of Robin and Barney's wedding, in fact E: Parakeet vs. Phone posted:it would force Ted to move on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygYUtfX5shA&t=79s FireWorksWell fucked around with this message at 02:10 on Oct 7, 2023 |
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Oct 7, 2023 02:06
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Yeah. The ending to HIMYM was clearly written circa season 4 or 5 and they just kinda put it in a box and didn't think about it again until they pulled it out of the box several seasons later and just went "Good enough, make it fit". (Part of that may have been justified by them recording the final scene with the kids in the first season and them being like, grown-rear end adults by the end). Neito fucked around with this message at 02:15 on Oct 7, 2023 |
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Oct 7, 2023 02:13
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IShallRiseAgain posted:Battlestar Galactica is great example of a show that completely hosed the ending, and made the entire series seem really stupid. Fraked*
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Oct 7, 2023 02:26
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What sucks about HIMYM is that I feel like if they put in the work and actually spent time showing stuff like Ted losing his wife to disease and Robin and Barney's relationship collapsing over the course of a season then I don't see how you don't end up with at least an adequate ending (even if that's not the relationship pairing you wanted to see at the end as a fan). But nope, spend lots of time getting to the mother character, make her very likeable and a nice, and then kill her off INSANELY quickly while also ending Robin/Barney INSANELY quickly and just rush rush rush and nope let's just skip some incredibly vital things for these characters because we spun our wheels during previous seasons doing who the gently caress knows. If I can recognize that as a sensible approach as someone who barely ever watched the show, I don't know how the hell the people making it couldn't realize this. GOT still takes my spot as the worst punted finale in recent memory because it was a legit cultural phenomenon and then pissed that all away, so it fell from a way higher point.
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Oct 7, 2023 02:57
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Fionna & Cake ended up inspiring me to watch Bee & Puppycat and honestly I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would (having only seen the pilot and the first few youtube shorts back in the day) because it's got a really... stupid (and I mean this as a compliment) sense of humor. Like seriously some of the jokes literally had me laughing even though I usually don't laugh out loud at stuff when I watch stuff by myself. Honestly there's like a stark dissonance between the art style and how grossout some of the humor can get. Notably Pen Ward was a writer on the Netflix run (and a lot of episodes from other writers were based on outlines written by Allegri and Ward) and you can kinda get some of that early-seasons-Adventure Time vibes from the humor. Don't go in expecting something like Steven Universe, though doing so would be understandable because there's a lot of overlap in art style (particularly with the background art) due to the show's art directors (Efrain Farias and Hans Tseng) also working as color designers on SU (actually they were on B&PC first, though Hans didn't become a full blown art director until the Netflix run). The circumstances with the show's production are also pretty fascinating and weird. You've got the pilot produced as part of one of Frederator's pilot incubator series (notably being a 2-parter due to being a proper 11-minutes while other pilots in that show were usually 5-7 minutes), then you got the original Youtube/VRV run, which is ostensibly 10 5-8 minute episodes but in reality since they're all multi-parters more like 3 11-minute episodes and a half-hour episode. Jump ahead a few years and a 13 half-hour episode 2nd season made by Netflix was announced subtitled "Lazy in Space", this time co-produced (like not just outsourcing the animation, but also having a direct role in storyboarding and directing) by the japanese studio OLM (Pokemon anime, 90s Berserk OVA, etc), set to release in 2019... but doesn't come out that year, but does accidentally get leaked via the Frederator head guy's vimeo and thus gets  'd around. Then it finally comes out last year and it turns out they used that time to make 3 more new starting episodes made by the Lazy in Space team that are like a weird remix/remake of the original pilot and youtube/VRV run.
Digamma-F-Wau fucked around with this message at 03:21 on Oct 7, 2023 |
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Oct 7, 2023 03:05
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