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Mordaedil posted:The setting is one where the humans are the weakest race if I recall correctly, so I think the next step is for Ainz to go challenge the real powers of the setting, which I don't think is going to anywhere nearly as easy as so far. There hasn't really been any indication of there being "real powers" that could actually oppose Nazarick. There's some dragons, but they're at the very most raid boss tier. Nazarick has an army of raid bosses, and Ainz proved he's even stronger than they are when he beat Shalltear. Gigantic super-angels summoned by the highest level human magic are effortless mid-tier trash to Ainz. I wish that there were "real powers", because the series was a lot more interesting when Ainz was forced to limit the use of his and his minions' insane power for fear of what might exist out there. It also meant that Nazarick was incentivized to do political stuff and actually attempt to coexist in the setting instead of just getting bored and killing everyone because why not, it's not like there's any reason not to. The limitations codified into the setting stagnate it pretty hard. Each race has a set in stone ultimate power level that they pretty much can never transcend under any circumstances no matter how talented they are, which means that Nazarick never has to be afraid of a threat from all the known races right now because the world simply won't allow a human or elf or dwarf or whatever strong enough to be anything more meaningful than a fly speck to someone like Shalltear or Cocytus. The only threat to Nazarick is Nazarick itself and that mostly deflated when Ainz just decided to go with the flow of whatever the hell his minions want. The Albedo thing is basically the only potential threat.
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Jun 15, 2016 11:31
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The worker arc thing is basically where Ainz is revealed as being a huge, huge loser still. I dunno if the internal conflict matters because it's essentially already over- Ainz only protects the things he likes and is protected from his innate loserdom by his vast knowledge of the world and magic as well as his Lich form being insanely intimidating and pokerfaced. He turns a blind eye to everything else. He tries to put on the act of being an immortal king (like, literally acting- trying to think "uhhh I think a really regal badass king guy would wave his arm like THIS.") rather than some salaryman loser when he meets the Empire's ruler, and because he's this monstrous lich who emanates so much actual power it's nearly impossible to remain standing in his presence he pulls it off.
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Jun 15, 2016 11:52
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Kanos posted:There hasn't really been any indication of there being "real powers" that could actually oppose Nazarick. There's some dragons, but they're at the very most raid boss tier. Nazarick has an army of raid bosses, and Ainz proved he's even stronger than they are when he beat Shalltear. Gigantic super-angels summoned by the highest level human magic are effortless mid-tier trash to Ainz. I don't think it's a bad idea to keep the viewers in the dark to what is out there that can challenge Ainz, because it's a long journey and the surprise payoff is so much greater when someone we don't see as being stoppable goes face first into the asphalt. We're essentially seeing a world-conquering monster from the perspective of the villain. We don't really know who the hero could be just yet, and while it could possibly be Climb, I worry that he too won't really make it. But there's definately beings out there with tools that are on the scale of world items from Yggdrasil and those players, if using their tools right can probably throw a giant wrench in Ainz's plans or uprising. And yes, we've seen dragons, but we've also been told they arn't all there is out there. It's kind of pointless for trying to look for an end-point any time soon, because this is going to go for the long haul with a lot of tiny goalposts. I can understand if this isn't for everyone, but it's a very unique writing style to come from a Japan.
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Jun 15, 2016 12:38
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"There might be stuff out there, you never know!" doesn't really say anything interesting if none of it is alluded to in any but the vaguest and most useless of terms; I'm talking about the series as it is now. Things have basically descended into "Ainz kills a bunch of people for no reason because he's bored and they can't stop him", which isn't really that engaging because none of the major Nazarick characters are deep enough or interesting enough to support a narrative without any form of conflict or tension and the non-Nazarick characters are always a half-heartbeat away from being messily killed by a Nazarick denizen with no recourse.
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Jun 15, 2016 13:09
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Right? So why isn't it?
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Jun 15, 2016 13:42
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I think it's more valuable the journey than the destination. We know the destination is going to be the MC conquering the world, but it's entertaining to see the gears moving: Philip being manipulated to have casus belli with the Kingdom, the Empire's trying to do a secret deal with Theocracy, the Eight Hand being infiltrated, Renner's secret plan, etc
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Jun 15, 2016 14:04
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The gears turning is neat but there's not really as much tension as there could be because all of these insane circuitous plans could come to fruition- but pretty much no matter what happens if Ainz doesn't like it he can just utterly crush all involved; possibly entirely by HIMSELF much less with the assistance of the full assets of his tomb. Like all of the countries and people involved could conspire and try to trap Ainz somehow in some insanely dramatic gamble involving all of these kingdoms that have warred/hated eachother for centuries- uniting to defeat a central evil (Ainz). ...but it wouldn't work, because Ainz is level 100 and has world items. Ainz can't be stopped by anything other than other members of the tomb, or another player.
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Jun 15, 2016 14:43
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Turin Turambar posted:I think it's more valuable the journey than the destination. We know the destination is going to be the MC conquering the world, but it's entertaining to see the gears moving: Philip being manipulated to have casus belli with the Kingdom, the Empire's trying to do a secret deal with Theocracy, the Eight Hand being infiltrated, Renner's secret plan, etc Normally I fully agree with the journey being more important than the destination, but the power disparity has been so nakedly revealed to everyone involved that... Fabricated posted:The gears turning is neat but there's not really as much tension as there could be because all of these insane circuitous plans could come to fruition- but pretty much no matter what happens if Ainz doesn't like it he can just utterly crush all involved; possibly entirely by HIMSELF much less with the assistance of the full assets of his tomb. ...exactly this occurs. Literally every other known player in the entire setting right now could combine every last ounce of their power in a concerted effort solely to defeat Ainz, and it wouldn't matter because he could pretty easily eradicate any united resistance against him virtually singlehandedly even without calling upon his dedicated legion of followers who are almost as powerful as he is. There's no actual need for Ainz to do any of the plotting stuff because plotting and setting up masterful political coups has been meaningless since he decided to openly reveal Nazarick's existence and power to the world. If he wanted to conquer the world, he could simply go "Hey, Kingdom, Empire, Theocracy, bow before Nazarick or I'll start killing you and I won't stop until you agree" and that would be that. All of the plans within plans are just going through the motions, presumably to avoid getting bored. Actually, a bored god wrestling with the concept of ennui would be a pretty rad take on this sort of setup but Overlord isn't written that way at all.
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Jun 15, 2016 14:56
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This is pure speculation, but I think this is all leading up to a civil war in Nazarick. The LN makes it pretty clear that individual guardians are loyal primarily to the Supreme Being that created them, then to the Supreme Beings that share their alignment, and only lastly loyal to the Ainz Ooal Gown guild (and by extension, Momonga). Sebas flat out states at one point that he would abandon Ainz for TouchMe in a heartbeat, and most of the other guardians seem to have similar loyalties. We also know that players from YGGDRASIL appear every hundred years or so, with Ainz and crew just being the latest in a long line (the Six Great Gods, the Eight Greed Kings, the Thirteen Heroes). We also know there are gaps in the timeline - we don't know who the players that appeared 400, 300, and 100 years ago were. Finally, Albedo seems to be fully aware that there is a possibility that other Supreme Beings are still around, but she perceives them as traitors and a threat to Ainz's authority. When Ainz puts her in charge of seeking out rumors about other players, she asks him to let her use Rubedo and Pandora's Actor claiming she wants the strongest possible party for the job. I really doubt that it's a coincidence she chose the two most powerful Guardians who just happen to be fanatically loyal to her and Ainz as her Supreme Being hunting party. The situation is a powder keg - all it's going to take is for one of the other Supreme Beings to show up. If, say, TouchMe wanders by at some point Albedo will immediately try to murder him, Sebas will switch sides and likely take all of the good-aligned guardians(Nigredo, Victim, Pestonya, and maybe some of the Pleiades) with him, and Demiurge (who hates Sebas anyway) will retaliate. ...or maybe none of that happens and it's just a story about Ainz slowly bumbling his way into world conquest.
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Jun 15, 2016 16:27
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It might already have happened.
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Jun 15, 2016 16:31
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i think the problem is that we all wish it was a better story than it turned out to be. instead of developing ainz as a character the writer seems much more inclined to write about gory, senseless deaths.
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Jun 15, 2016 17:50
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I'm with you there. I haven't liked most of the big combat-heavy chapters like the Lizardman arc or the Caster of Destroy arc. My favorite parts have been the ones where Ainz awkwardly tries to use middle-manager strategies to impress people who are way smarter than him. The suggestion box scene in the latest chapter made me laugh out loud.
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Jun 15, 2016 17:57
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My theory is that this is mostly a story about overlord building up his empire. Often the stories where the overlord gets beaten happen after he has already burned half the planet. The ending is when a bunch of heroes get together and murder Ainz and his goons despite the odds. Infighting and traitors are just some of the stuff that usually leads to the overlords downfall eventually. Basically the way i see it is Ainz is Megatron, Albeido is Soundwave, Sebas is Starscream, Gazef is optimus prime and Climb is hotrod. 
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Jun 15, 2016 19:51
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Jun 15, 2016 20:11
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Iretep posted:Sebas is Starscream 
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Jun 15, 2016 20:13
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Wow. Starscream is very clearly Demiurge.
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Jun 15, 2016 20:52
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I want to say it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what was going on with Sebas Tian's name.
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Jun 16, 2016 04:33
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I tried reading the LNs after the series finished but just flamed out in boredom. It felt like half the time was spent watching some rear end in a top hat kid pulling wings off a fly. Tell me if it ends.
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Jun 16, 2016 09:34
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Serious Frolicking posted:i think the problem is that we all wish it was a better story than it turned out to be. instead of developing ainz as a character the writer seems much more inclined to write about gory, senseless deaths. I think this is a good summary of my long-winded complaints. The setting and concept are good and the rough outlines of the characters we have are fine, it's just that instead of writing any of the interesting stories that could exist with this setup(exploring an unknown world, a human dealing with suddenly being turned into an undead monster and being surrounded by monsters, a slice of life story about monsters in the tomb of nazarick, whatever), the writing is usually a lot of torture porn. It's doubly disappointing because there's a few glimmers of genuinely interesting character writing like Enri.
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Jun 16, 2016 10:07
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Enri is objectively the best non-Nazarick cast member. It was obvious translation liberties ("too swole to control!") but Enri being bothered by the fact that all of her work duties/light combat training were making her ripped and her demonstrating her unknowingly acquired leadership class levels was great. Hopefully she doesn't get killed unceremoniously by some Nazarick inhabitant over something dumb.
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Jun 16, 2016 14:19
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I don't know, I'd say volume 10 is very different from anything that came before so far. Ainz's new goal to make his new nation a utopia for all races sounds interesting to see, though I somehow doubt the author has the will to put in the research to make it at all realistic. Still, even with the lack of challenges, the novels keep finding ways to amuse and delight me. Like in the latest translated section, the emperor goes to all this trouble to hold a secret meeting with the priesthood of his country and the Slane Theocracy in the VIP box of a coliseum, agonizes over preparations to prevent spies and magical eavesdropping, and what happens? Ainz just shows up in the arena. As a competitor. The poor emperor just about has a paranoid breakdown, as you'd expect. The whole thing is delightful.
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Jun 17, 2016 01:15
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Volume 10 is great so far.
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Jun 18, 2016 13:48
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I think people make too much of the gory bits. Yes, they all describe truly awful things happening to people who don't deserve it but they way it's written robs it of all impact. If you animated them it would be pretty disturbing, but in the books it always feels like I'm listening to an awkward teenager haltingly describe how incredibly hardcore his D&D setting is. "...and then the demon king's viceroy like, gets a bunch of families together and f-forces the parents to eat their children's eyeballs, and they're all like 'Waaaah we don't want to eat our children's eyeballs, we'd rather be sewn into a sack of starving honey badgers,' but then he smirks and is like 'oh well i just happen to have these sacks of honey badgers here,' and then the parents totally eat their kids eyes instead because that's the true dark nature of humanity, man." The moment when I realized the only difference between Clementine and the floor guardians is who they work for is when I stopped caring about the series. Which is kind of a shame because the comedy beats are solid. Pure-pure Pleiades is p. great.
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Jun 18, 2016 16:57
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Montegoraon posted:I don't know, I'd say volume 10 is very different from anything that came before so far. Ainz's new goal to make his new nation a utopia for all races sounds interesting to see, though I somehow doubt the author has the will to put in the research to make it at all realistic. See, this is actually a potentially interesting and good way to take the series if it's followed through on, because it's a goal that can't be accomplished solely by Ainz going "and then I killed everyone who disagreed, the end" and would require serious challenge, hardship, and problem solving. Rangpur posted:I think people make too much of the gory bits. Yes, they all describe truly awful things happening to people who don't deserve it but they way it's written robs it of all impact. If you animated them it would be pretty disturbing, but in the books it always feels like I'm listening to an awkward teenager haltingly describe how incredibly hardcore his D&D setting is. The torture porn descriptor really started for me because of....Volume 7, I believe? The one about the mercenaries who enter the tomb, which was a whole volume that existed entirely to lovingly set up the backstories, motivations, and character descriptions of an entire cast of characters and then describe in loving detail every last one of them being murdered horribly and pointlessly in the Tomb in a variety of ways, and the entire point of this was "to reveal Nazarick to the world"(as though there weren't a billion other ways to do that that didn't require tricking a bunch of gray market mercenaries to their deaths). It was also a story that could have been told in like five pages but was dragged out for an entire volume to make room for the gore.
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Jun 18, 2016 17:22
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Mind in terms of translating, porn is some of the worst things you can possibly translate between Japanese and English. This extends to torture porn.
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Jun 18, 2016 17:55
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Mordaedil posted:Mind in terms of translating, porn is some of the worst things you can possibly translate between Japanese and English. Stop finding excuses CGRascal
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Jun 18, 2016 18:14
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I lost interest in this after the vampire chick got impaled with a spear and left in a field. did it get better
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Jun 18, 2016 18:20
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Ibram Gaunt posted:I lost interest in this after the vampire chick got impaled with a spear and left in a field. did it get better One of the better parts of the story immediately follows this. However, the story continues to remain very uneven. Sometimes it shows glimmers of interesting, and then sometimes it slogs. It's a light novel. Great literature it is not.
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Jun 18, 2016 20:47
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Light novels are, almost by definition, guilty pleasures. Literal pandering to the audience.
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Jun 19, 2016 08:13
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I think there's a incorrect assumption here that the show -- like most shows -- is meant to be or "should" be about the struggles of a protagonist against outside opposition, when I'm watching it as just a normal person's documentary-like descent into genocidal world-conquering evil for the same reasons every genocidal world-conquering evil person in fiction does so; to make the world a better place, you know, after I've killed most of it.
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Jun 19, 2016 12:58
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Ains probably legit means well but between him having his human emotions repressed, him being sort of a loser desperately trying to keep it together, and his minions being "creative" with his orders we have the results.
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Jun 19, 2016 18:58
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Demiurge is behind most of that. He delights in torturing and killing humans. For a while a bunch of us thought that meant a conflict between him and Ainz was inevitable when Ainz learned all the nasty poo poo Demiurge was doing in his name. But nope! Ainz is actually completely cool with that and any other horror Demiurge might want to inflict on innocent people. Even if he has a problem with something he is too timid to admit as much.
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Jun 19, 2016 19:05
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I can't recall but wasn't ainz a huge retard and didn't interpret Demiurge right regarding the human farm?
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Jun 19, 2016 20:10
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Ainz misread the "To serve man" cookbook.
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Jun 19, 2016 20:31
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Fabricated posted:I can't recall but wasn't ainz a huge retard and didn't interpret Demiurge right regarding the human farm? Demiurge made a lot of incredibly wink wink nudge nudge references to "two-legged sheep" without ever saying the word "human" and Ainz interpreted this as a literal species of two-legged sheep, because yes he is a huge naive retard about stuff that isn't "plan my foe into oblivion". I forget if Ainz is ever made aware of the actual scale of Demiurge's Dr. Mengele stuff. Ainz is definitely aware that his minions like to do some horrific poo poo but is too timid/doesn't care enough to stop it though, even if he's not aware of the specific scale. That and Ainz has pretty much gotten into the spirit of torturing people, even though he prefers to do it mentally rather than physically; his appearance in the arena in the mercenary chapter was basically a long, drawn out process of giving the mercenaries some semblance of hope before revealing they never had a chance in hell to begin with. Kanos fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Jun 19, 2016 |
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Jun 19, 2016 23:09
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Kanos posted:Demiurge made a lot of incredibly wink wink nudge nudge references to "two-legged sheep" without ever saying the word "human" and Ainz interpreted this as a literal species of two-legged sheep, because yes he is a huge naive retard about stuff that isn't "plan my foe into oblivion". I forget if Ainz is ever made aware of the actual scale of Demiurge's Dr. Mengele stuff. He is not. I decided to read the most recent chapter of the novel. Demiurge and Albeto are talking about evil stuff in code and Ainz has no idea what they are talking about. And he is too much of a coward to ask because he knows they think him all knowing and does not want to look foolish.
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Jun 19, 2016 23:32
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Just make or convert a sidekick creature/pet that knows nothing and is always asking questions but is very powerful, then give it a high rank so it is able to ask those questions and relay that knowledge to Ainz later/telepathically, for a diabolical planner he has somehow missed this simple workaround!
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Jun 20, 2016 03:10
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The fan-translation is actually Japanese-Chinese-English, which doesn't help its readability. I bought the first volume in English and it's much more readable, although the prose is still very "eh".
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Jun 20, 2016 22:50
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At least it will not have the dumb "fell down like puppets having their strings cut" meme. Contrasting the two versions does give insight into how much is actually lost in translation.
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Jun 21, 2016 06:55
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Mordaedil posted:At least it will not have the dumb "fell down like puppets having their strings cut" meme. Contrasting the two versions does give insight into how much is actually lost in translation. That seems a net loss to me.
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Jun 21, 2016 07:26
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