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i still don't think the show is great, but at least they didn't spend a third of the episode over-explaining everything, instead they only wasted a small part of the episode...
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Apr 19, 2016 22:06
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Did not expect them to dive into the war that fast. I thought they'd mess around with all the pre-war China shenanigans first. Interesting.
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Apr 19, 2016 22:47
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jng2058 posted:Did not expect them to dive into the war that fast. I thought they'd mess around with all the pre-war China shenanigans first. Interesting. Yeah, the timeskip is pretty huge and confused me a fair bit at first. The Resistance guys were pants on head retarded though, all three of them.
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Apr 19, 2016 23:16
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:The Resistance guys were pants on head retarded though, all three of them. Seriously, it was cool to dive right into cool spy poo poo but those guys were real dumb. Also, wasn't Britain funneling them weapons and materiel during the war?
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Apr 20, 2016 00:11
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:Yeah, the timeskip is pretty huge and confused me a fair bit at first. The Resistance guys were pants on head retarded though, all three of them. That's actually pretty historically accurate. The date of this episode is somewhere between June 22 (the surrender of France) and September 27 (the signing of the Tripartite Pact that allied Japan with Germany), 1940. In other words, the Resistance had had somewhere around two or three months to get up and running. At this point, it really was mostly just a few disgruntled students - the real horror of Nazi occupation hadn't yet set in, and France was largely still too shellshocked by its crushing defeat to put up much more of a fight. It wasn't until May 5, 1941, that the British Special Operations Executive would start sending agents into France to evaluate the Resistance with an eye to arming and training them, and even once that got underway, they were a small, highly fractured movement with an appalling lack of military training or spycraft. One of the first groups the SOE evaluated, for instance, was the 'Carte Organisation', a supposed secret army of thousands that mostly consisted of a list that an artist called Andre Girard had drawn up of people who he thought might possibly be interested in his ideals. The SOE were initially impressed, and took Girard at his word... and so, unfortunately, did the Abwehr, when the list fell into their hands. End result - a lot of British guns getting funneled to nowhere, and a lot of (actual or potential) resistance sympathisers getting turned or otherwise compromised by the Germans. There were some genuinely competent, organised French Resistance cells who pulled off some spectacular acts of cunning and heroism, and some of them were formed surprisingly early - Charles de Gaulle's British-backed BCRA spy network, for instance, sent its first agents back into France in August 1940, and founded one of its most effective and tenacious creations, the Notre-Dame Brotherhood, in November - but the minimally-skilled, minimally-backed dumbasses Hatano met with were pretty much the norm for their time and place, and comprised a not-insignificant part of the Resistance for a not-insignificant amount of the war.
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Apr 20, 2016 00:52
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:Yeah, the timeskip is pretty huge and confused me a fair bit at first. The Resistance guys were pants on head retarded though, all three of them. I would expect resistance fighters to be dumb, at least some of them. No training, no filtering of recruits, it's inevitable really.
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Apr 20, 2016 00:52
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A sizable chunk of the Resistance being coerced moles would probably put a damper on operations too.
Strange Quark fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Apr 20, 2016 |
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Apr 20, 2016 00:54
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Strange Quark posted:Most of the Resistance being coerced moles would probably put a damper on operations. It kind of did. They lost a shitload of people to double agents. In fact, one of the things that made the Notre-Dame Brotherhood such a big deal was that every time they got almost entirely wiped out by an intel leak, they'd dust themselves off, start recruiting again to replace their massive losses, and go back to business as usual.
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Apr 20, 2016 01:01
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Traveller posted:And then Hatano McGyvered his way out of trouble while suffering amnesia. very cool I'm up for some episodic spy shenanigans for the next few episodes so I hope everyone gets their own feature mission. Doing time-skips between episodes seems like a good way to advance things so the action escalates and keeps the pace rolling along so I wonder if that'll be a thing we'll see again -- especially since the show certainly isn't afraid to explain things to keep everyone up to speed lol.
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Apr 20, 2016 02:00
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Am I the only one who found "you may lose your memory during a mission, so your orders should be imprinted on your subconscious" to be stupid? Is that even remotely plausible? Am I totally out of the loop with spy stuff, or is that just ridiculous?
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Apr 20, 2016 12:56
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I thought it was a little silly
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Apr 20, 2016 15:52
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"There's no evidence of outside powers supplying them weapons" *ignoring that the Chekhov gun this episode is the liberator, a mass produced gun designed explicitly for the resistance by the Americans (technically it's also an anachronism, pretty sure they started air dropping those far later)*
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Apr 20, 2016 18:24
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Nine of Eight posted:"There's no evidence of outside powers supplying them weapons" That's not a Liberator. I mean, it would be weird for it to be a Liberator, given the chronology you mentioned and how rare the gun was in the first place, but it's completely the wrong shape (and way too upmarket-looking), too. Compare and contrast:  
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Apr 20, 2016 18:45
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AVeryLargeRadish posted:I would expect resistance fighters to be dumb, at least some of them. No training, no filtering of recruits, it's inevitable really. True, but one being a mole is understandable, but the guy chasing after and protecting the "love of his life" who'd endangered his life and works for LITERALLY HITLER is unjustifiable. That's not just dumb, that's enough idiocy to deserve being shot.
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Apr 20, 2016 19:58
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:True, but one being a mole is understandable, but the guy chasing after and protecting the "love of his life" who'd endangered his life and works for LITERALLY HITLER is unjustifiable. That's not just dumb, that's enough idiocy to deserve being shot. Working for Literally Hitler was pretty popular at the time. Hatano's ninety-eight-two ratio was actually a generous estimate for the height of the Resistance, when less than two per cent of the French population were active fighters in it and approximately ten per cent were connected to it in some way. This early on, when the Nazis hadn't become properly established? Yeah, people just weren't feeling the urgency, or were too terrified to seriously entertain the idea of fighting back. They'd just had one of the mightiest militaries on the planet completely thunderfucked in one and a half months, remember?
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Apr 20, 2016 20:27
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:True, but one being a mole is understandable, but the guy chasing after and protecting the "love of his life" who'd endangered his life and works for LITERALLY HITLER is unjustifiable. That's not just dumb, that's enough idiocy to deserve being shot. i might've bought it if the build up to it was a little more clear. the way that it came a little out of the blue (with a weak kind of "oh i guess that's what was going on" realization afterwords) makes it pretty hard to not see that as dumb.
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Apr 20, 2016 20:34
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Darth Walrus posted:They'd just had one of the mightiest militaries on the planet completely thunderfucked in one and a half months, remember? Yeah, but they had just thunderfucked their own military. And threatened families and old people. There is no sane world where someone, not threatened by the Nazis, would willingly aid a Nazi conspirator when they have just aimed a gun and threatened all of you at once, and no matter what you say I'll have big issues with accepting that dipshit's actions. It's a "The power of boners is strong" cop out to resolving the situation in an actually interesting way.
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Apr 20, 2016 20:35
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:Yeah, but they had just thunderfucked their own military. And threatened families and old people. There is no sane world where someone, not threatened by the Nazis, would willingly aid a Nazi conspirator when they have just aimed a gun and threatened all of you at once, and no matter what you say I'll have big issues with accepting that dipshit's actions. It's a "The power of boners is strong" cop out to resolving the situation in an actually interesting way. You have an extremely idealistic view of the world that unfortunately wasn't borne out by historical fact. The Nazis were not, at the time, the byword for absolute evil that they are now. They were a terrifyingly powerful invading army who were a bit heavy-handed and had some less than civil views about Jews (which were shared by a remarkable amount of the French population - one popular attitude that the Vichy government fostered and exploited was that France's ruination was because it had been pushed into a 'Jewish war' against its brother-country, Germany) - not people you wanted to gently caress with, but basically 'our people'. It took some really creative brutality for the Resistance to start seriously taking off, and even at its peak, the collaborators outnumbered them, and they kept getting their poo poo wrecked by moles and defectors. The big guy was basically tagging along with his idealistic student politician friend to protect his crush (who was apparently a bit too enamoured with said friend's ideals for her own good), and then bailed as soon as things got a bit too real and he no longer had a reason to stay. We never get the impression that he actually has that much investment in the cause, and he seems to kind of resent his friend/leader. It's a story you see in insurgencies all over the world against even the most monstrous regimes, and the Nazi occupation in 1940 certainly wasn't as immediately, urgently nightmarish as, say, ISIS rolling into town and dividing people into sex slaves, regular slaves, and corpses-to-be. Unless you were Jewish, of course, and this lot weren't, as far as we know.
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Apr 20, 2016 21:23
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Darth Walrus posted:You have an extremely idealistic view of the world that unfortunately wasn't borne out by historical fact. You're talking to someone with a Hetalia avatar. What did you expect here? I mean, come on
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Apr 20, 2016 21:30
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there were a lot of collaborators lol
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Apr 20, 2016 21:34
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Just decided to watch this, wow this is way better than I thought! I love me some spy poo poo, and post-war Japan doesn't get touched much in that genre. Really glad I watched and eager for more.Clarste posted:Am I the only one who found "you may lose your memory during a mission, so your orders should be imprinted on your subconscious" to be stupid? Is that even remotely plausible? Am I totally out of the loop with spy stuff, or is that just ridiculous? It is absolutely one of the dumbest things ever but also something if you told me 'no this was a legit thing multiple spy agencies tried to do for real' I'd believe it. We as a general world are real dumb about spying in a lot of ways but post-war and cold war spy poo poo was beyond parody at times. If a man in a decent suit said an idea would totally keep those drat (insert bad guys here) from finding your plans or whatever someone probably said 'yea ok good idea, let's do it'.
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Apr 23, 2016 06:08
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I don't think it was so much in case of sudden amnesia as it was to prevent being careless. If they imprint their orders they won't let anything slip, in theory at least.
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Apr 23, 2016 06:12
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Tatum Girlparts posted:Just decided to watch this, wow this is way better than I thought! I love me some spy poo poo, and post-war Japan doesn't get touched much in that genre. Really glad I watched and eager for more. Errr, it's not covering post-WWII Japan so far, just pre-WWII Japan and during Japan's involvement in WWII. And yeah, I agree that intelligence agencies would try to do the imprinting thing, they have a long and illustrious history of trying ridiculous bullshit, see stuff the CIA did trying to kill Castro for instance.
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Apr 23, 2016 07:21
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Serious Frolicking posted:I don't think it was so much in case of sudden amnesia as it was to prevent being careless. If they imprint their orders they won't let anything slip, in theory at least. my impression as well, as a hedge against the agent being semi-incapacitated
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Apr 23, 2016 07:25
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HenryEx posted:You're talking to someone with a Hetalia avatar. What did you expect here? I did not choose this avatar, and my issues are solely with what is being presented within the context of the show, not the context of history. He lamped the guy who saved him for the sake of a woman who had been trying to kill him and pointed a gun at him. The fact that she was collaborating with the nazis is secondary, but it's still a factor. This show features some bad writing. It's still okay, but it does have issues that require suspension of disbelief. Beyond the normal badass spy stuff of course.
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Apr 23, 2016 16:41
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:I did not choose this avatar, and my issues are solely with what is being presented within the context of the show, not the context of history. He lamped the guy who saved him for the sake of a woman who had been trying to kill him and pointed a gun at him. The fact that she was collaborating with the nazis is secondary, but it's still a factor.  Are you really complaining about that? People who are in love are frequently irrational when it comes to their partner, this is super basic stuff. If you have to suspend your disbelief for that then I expect you have to suspend it when interacting with real flesh and blood human beings too.
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Apr 23, 2016 17:14
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AVeryLargeRadish posted:Errr, it's not covering post-WWII Japan so far, just pre-WWII Japan and during Japan's involvement in WWII. Did you miss the disclaimer at the beginning of every episode of the show? They say very clearly that the locations, people and events shown in the show bear no relation to any locations, people or events in reality. Completely different Paris, completely different France, completely different Japan and completely different Germany.
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Apr 23, 2016 17:18
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:I did not choose this avatar, and my issues are solely with what is being presented within the context of the show, not the context of history. He lamped the guy who saved him for the sake of a woman who had been trying to kill him and pointed a gun at him. The fact that she was collaborating with the nazis is secondary, but it's still a factor. Whoever gave you a hetalia avatar knew what they were doing.
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Apr 23, 2016 17:23
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So can the great discussions from the Gate thread continue on here?
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Apr 23, 2016 18:19
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The anime clearly states it's totally not based on real events, ya'll be crazy.
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Apr 23, 2016 18:39
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On the imprinting thing, we do obviously have to take into account that the D-Agency crew are very much James Bond superhumans, with their abilities augmented by pure rule of cool, but it's honestly not that far outside the realm of real-life plausibility. Let's look at what happened here. Hatano basically got temporary retrograde amnesia, the most common form of the disorder and the most likely to result from a bump on the head (technically, if it results from an injury, it's traumatic retrograde amnesia). Retrograde amnesia directly damages your existing stored memories, with short-term ones taking the worst hit. It's pretty normal for retrograde amnesiacs to lose their identity and their recent memories, but not their ingrained skills or long-term memories. You know, the stereotypical 'who am I, where is this, what am I doing here'. It's also pretty common for it to be quickly and easily recoverable from if the brain damage is light enough, especially if exposed to whatever you've forgotten. So, basically what happened in this episode. If you're wondering what the other type is, that's anterograde amnesia, which is a little nastier - it prevents you converting short-term memories into long-term ones, essentially meaning you forget things learned after the amnesia trigger far faster than anyone else would. 'Fifty First Dates' amnesia, basically. Now, remember how I said that more ingrained memories are more resistant to retrograde amnesia? We do have techniques for making memories more durable - mnemonics, as they're called - and they've been shown to be effective against progressive memory loss through aging, so they should presumably work to harden our brains against retrograde amnesia as well. Examples include phrases like Roy G Biv, the ABC song, and so on. While it probably would have been more plausible (if silly) to have it linked to a song, a poem, or a particular visual (for instance, linking the resistance members' names and faces to particular places, although I guess if those bits of him speaking from the purple mist were a result of him talking into a mirror to link sound and vision to the words, that would work), Hatano was basically running off a simple mnemonic script for most of the episode - three key phrases ('ninety-eight-two', 'don't give the enemy any information', and 'don't die, don't kill'), three names and faces, and the name and entry point of his cover identity - and trusting in his impressive skills, which a bump on the head probably wouldn't affect, to see him through. Basically, it's possible, but a real person would have more difficulty at it, wouldn't get to look as cool while doing it, and probably wouldn't be as good at everything else as well. Much like everything else the D-Agency do in this show.
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Apr 23, 2016 18:44
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Waffleman_ posted:A note about the setting  lol
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Apr 24, 2016 01:11
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Looks like I was wrong. And I'm glad.
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Apr 25, 2016 23:15
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I thought half of this episode was a flashback until I realized what was going on
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Apr 26, 2016 19:03
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Honma doesn't know how he got played, and is probably better off for it.
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Apr 26, 2016 20:48
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Traveller posted:Honma doesn't know how he got played, and is probably better off for it. I'll admit that my eyebrows were raised a little by a former member of the loving Tokko, the original, real-life thought police, being the principled, upright, and talented (if somewhat naive) newbie, though. I mean, yeah, they were elite compared to the Kempeitai, but not in any sort of good way, and they were in almost as deep with organised crime - yakuza gangs were one of their major weapons against left-wing activists. Darth Walrus fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Apr 26, 2016 |
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Apr 26, 2016 22:07
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Well, that episode was more what I expected. Shanghai is the quintessential Japanese spy story locale. Not bad, for all that.
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Apr 26, 2016 22:31
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what a disappointing show. the sub-james bond tier villain rant really helps solidify the loss of my interest along with the episodic structure of the show
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Apr 26, 2016 22:59
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Davincie posted:what a disappointing show. the sub-james bond tier villain rant really helps solidify the loss of my interest along with the episodic structure of the show I liked the villain rant, but I have to admit that the episodic structure has been annoying me. Every episode seems to have an rear end-pull at the very end to make the whole thing work. Most recent episode, for example, they decide to tell us in the very end that "Oh, yeah, there was confiscated opium missing from the vaults", a fact that Honma knew but the audience had never heard about it before. I get that the show's mainly about the 30 seconds or so our spy buddy spent on-screen, and how that was able to radically alter the course of the investigation. And honestly? That was cool. But for that to work, we, as the audience, need to be able to discern where the investigation would go minus the proverbial finger on the scales, which we cannot without knowing everything the investigating agent does.
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Apr 27, 2016 16:05
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At least the relationship in this one was foreshadowed somewhat better, but it's pretty drat lazy writing to have "But the third guy was in love with a person so they did the thing". This is a bad show that is very pretty.
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Apr 27, 2016 21:14
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