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There Bias Two posted:The exposition was so boring that it seemed like they were going full on NGE budget cut slideshow. Even for someone who usually doesn't mind talky shows, I found myself thinking, "Okay, when are you going to do stuff?" I actually assumed they were blatantly trying to preserve resources/time when I was watching it. A significant chunk of the episode is just super static shots of people talking, and most of the rest was very short shots of people eating food. The actual content of the exposition wasn't actually that horrible aside from when it repeated itself, but it really needed to be framed in a more interesting way. Show Meteora meeting "herself" in the game and her reaction instead of her talking about it. Show Meteora's reactions to the game while she's playing it instead of her talking about how cool and awesome it was. Have a scene where Alice busts into her creator's room and begins yelling at him to change her shithole world or she'll kill him and her creator's reaction to being faced by the incredibly angry and hostile protagonist to his story without a (relatively) peaceful introduction like Selesia's creator got.
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Apr 30, 2017 15:28
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Are you kidding me? We just spent two entire episodes with characters sitting around doing nothing but explaining things to each other, so in this episode...the characters sit around and talk about the exact same thing with the government. They could have really, really easily simply merged these last two episodes and have Meteora theorize to both the government and the other characters at once.  Also the government sure is friendly and accommodating to these weird super-people who claim to have fallen out of anime/video games and who have spent their short time in the world engaging in massive fights in public places.
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May 7, 2017 20:23
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Stuff happened! There was still a whole lot of really repetitive talking in circles, but at least something is happening now.
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May 13, 2017 18:19
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It's kind of interesting how completely garbage in a fight the protagonist animes are. Life sucks when you're a mech pilot without a mech and a story exposition NPC and you're forced to fight people who were actually written to be good at fighting on foot.
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May 13, 2017 21:17
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Mordja posted:Man, I really hate the milquetoast protagonist of this show, so it's probably for the best that he's got fewer lines than most side characters so far. Why on earth is he keeping MUP's identity a secret again? Because whatever his link with and knowledge of the creator of Altair is is his only reason to still exist in the plot right now, so him telling the oddly competent government organization about it would neatly shuffle him out of the picture and we can't get rid of our milquetoast audience projection character yet.
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May 14, 2017 02:27
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AnacondaHL posted:At first I liked the concept of the Magical Girl being the strongest character in a real world without bumper pads. But now I'm actually getting into the power-level competition. Is it still the crazy sparkle hearts? Or the different bullets? What's the demon girl holding back? What if Selesia got her mech? What is Meteora's great power? Will mech pilot kid successfully pick up those chicks? That stuff is the potentially cool and fun stuff about the show which they've only just started getting into by actually having the animes interact in a big group. Talky exposition can be useful for character building. The talking between the various animes in this episode was good character building; it established Alice as hopelessly stubborn and clinging to a dream regardless of having holes poked in it, new girl as enjoying playing with her food before she kills it, BLITZ TALKER as being surprisingly reasonable and patient when talking to a magical girl despite looking like he would come from a Golgo 13 spinoff, etc. Meteora sitting in a room reading off the script while everyone else nods or makes small noises of assent doesn't do this in any way. It establishes the joke that Meteora is a plot dump NPC but nothing else.
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May 14, 2017 14:51
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Grouchio posted:Oh hey it's the preview for episode 7 Holy poo poo, why???
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May 17, 2017 18:20
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I think one of the biggest annoyances I have with the exposition segments isn't even just all the talking, it's how during the talking a character will come up with some ludicrous theory that doesn't actually have any support or backing to it whatsoever but everyone else will go "well, that makes sense" and then everyone proceeds like the ludicrous theory is an established fact. Before it was mostly Meteora reading off the script but this time we had a fat dude making up a reason why we're only seeing animes come to life and everyone going "oh, okay". It's pretty rare that a perspective character hasn't managed to justify their existence by episode 7 of their show. I get that he's not meant to be the actual protagonist, but christ, the fat dude managed to figure out a huge portion of the secret Sota is sitting on by doing searches on Nico. I'm sure the big twist is something like he helped Suicide Girl create Altair or something along those lines, but when he suffered his little crisis of confidence he tucked her away and Suicide Girl took it badly. It would explain why he's so ridiculously whiny about his art and also why he's afraid to tell anyone this staggeringly important and useful information. Magane got introduced last episode and already has dramatically more personality and menace than the main antagonist, as well as already being guilty of far more heinous poo poo thus far. For all the focus on who the Military Uniform Princess is, she sure hasn't had much presence in the show yet.
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May 21, 2017 13:01
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Clarste posted:They probably should've translated the comments he flashes back to, but basically he got flamed real bad in response to making the drawing (they call him a dumb NEET and a plagiarist and all that). He obviously stopped drawing because of that. That's probably also why Suicide Girl committed suicide. Yeah this would have been kind of useful/important to read, though I appreciate the difficulty of subtitling a bunch of internet comments quickly flashing by and having it be comprehensible. Knowing this makes me even more perplexed why they're having Sota be so damned cagey about telling them about the damned villain, though. "I got made fun of on the internet" is a pretty bad excuse.
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May 22, 2017 23:59
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He seems to gently caress with his watch whenever he flies, so it's probably a gravity manipulation gadget or something along those lines. It feels a little out of character for a character who looks so hard-boiled, but it already feels weird for a character like that to shoot exploding gravity bombs out of a revolver instead of just shooting people to begin with.
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May 25, 2017 00:59
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Yeah, I know, it's just "gritty film noir hitman" and "loading a gravity explosive into a revolver" already don't scan together to begin with so gently caress it he has a flying watch too.
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May 26, 2017 02:50
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Darth Walrus posted:Hell, the very existence of Magane is a sure sign the staff aren't taking the show too seriously. I don't know, Magane has her cutesy wacky kooky speech patterns/behavior but she's not really played as not serious. She's a psychotic murderer who has horribly killed two people on screen.
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May 30, 2017 04:46
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Darth Walrus posted:This is a Rei Hiroe script. Watch Black Lagoon, especially the Greenback Jane arc, and you'll see that that is no obstacle to being the comic relief. Pretty much every single major character in Black Lagoon except for Rock was a self-interested murderer in some capacity, so it was "normal" in that world. In fact, Rock was abnormal because he wasn't totally inured to callous death like everyone else was. In that context, it's reasonable to accept a murderer as normal enough in the setting to be a source of goofy comic relief. Magane's introduction episode showed her using her wacky personality and expressions to confuse someone shortly before deciding to murder them on a whim, which is a pretty clear indicator that they're not being played for chuckles. If anything, her being cheerful and bubbly in this setting simply accentuates how dangerous she is portrayed because she's the only character wearing a mask. Every other character in the show wears their heart on their sleeve and doesn't lie about who they are or what their deal is. Magane greets you with a smile and some silly broken Engrish and pretends to be friendly before arbitrarily deciding to murder you horribly on a whim, which makes her an order of magnitude more frightening than someone like Alice who is pretty much just going to come at you. The scene with her and Sota in this episode is a pretty good example, where she's being pretty much as absurd as possible while in the process of blackmailing Sota and his response isn't confusion at her antics, it's pretty much blind terror because he has no idea what she's going to do with that information. On the same note, Magane is literally the only person we've seen seriously hurt/kill anyone(except the scene at the end of this ep, and both of her victims were totally innocent noncombatants. That's not to say that the show doesn't have intentionally absurd moments to call attention to how silly the premise is - Mamika's first fight with Selesia is a pretty clear example of that, with the cartoon hearts and bubble pop noises superimposed over exploding buildings and Selesia puking blood from impact.
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May 30, 2017 13:01
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Pros: Magane trying to bullshit people with her sophistry is substantially more entertaining than Meteora reading off the script, and her goofy body language and expressions help this. Cons: Literally the entire episode consisted of Magane trying to bullshit people with her sophistry, including ten full minutes of her trying to bait Sota into following a plan that was immediately wasted the moment other people showed up. I'm still waiting for our actual main antagonist to do things, to be honest. The only thing she's done since the very beginning is kill Mamika, and that was in self defense.
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Jun 3, 2017 19:51
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Dzhay posted:I wonder what part of Alice's story gives her all the critical reasoning abilities of Knuckles the echidna? Alice is a super strict and honorable knight lady from a world where the enemies appear to just be incredibly powerful monsters, so I doubt there's much political intrigue going on in her source material. She's probably not used to people logic puzzling her.
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Jun 4, 2017 06:40
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Hargrimm posted:Narratively Convenient Timing is just a default attribute of the Major Anime Pro/Antagonist archetype. Alice clearly has it too. Alice actually has the inverse power, Narratively Inconvenient Timing, where she magically knows how to locate people and locations critical to the developing story but she only shows up to those situations just in time to completely misunderstand or misconstrue what's going on.
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Jun 4, 2017 09:44
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Zodack posted:As much as I loathe Meteora I think in this case it's fair to say it's an educated guess based on what she knows and observes. She's a smart mage or something, after all. Selesia fell down the same plot hole that Altair herself did.
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Jun 4, 2017 22:27
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Clarste posted:Good point. It should be a permanent effect, so it's still around. I'm guessing Alice is going to kill Meteora first though, or else this episode was entirely pointless. To be honest, it was entirely pointless anyway. Alice was already directly opposed to the protagonist group to the point of violent confrontation to begin with, with no real interest in listening to what they had to say. I have no idea why they devoted an entire scene to Magane manipulating Alice into doing something she was already doing quite willingly. Narratively, Mamika could have died instantly while fighting Altair and literally nothing about this would have meaningfully changed besides Magane having very slightly less ammo to troll Sota with.
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Jun 5, 2017 13:56
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YF-23 posted:It wasn't an Alice scene, it was a Magane scene. Even if not much changed information-wise, Magane's role has been pretty clearly elevated to that of the major antagonist right about now. It also establishes her as irrationally subject to her personality traits: she knows Altair's deal, and Altair's end goals, but her desire to gently caress with everyone around her is stronger than any thoughts of trying to stop her, self-preservation be damned. It's still moving very slowly, but the scene was not pointless. Magane was already the major antagonist, as she's the only person in the show who has actually hurt/murdered innocent people and has already been established as blackmailing Sota. The only other antagonist has spent the last 9 episodes sitting in a throne room brooding and doing literally nothing. We've also already established that Megane is more interested in acting impulsively for her own entertainment than strictly intelligently, given that her intro scene consisted of her murdering the gently caress out of a completely innocent shopkeeper for literally no reason besides entertainment, an act that needlessly drew attention to her and made the various factions aware of her existence as a creation. Nothing in the Alice scene presented strictly new information to the parties involved or meaningfully altered the plot. Then we spent another 10 minutes with Magane loving with Sota before Sota goes "nah".
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Jun 5, 2017 18:23
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Magane is very quickly becoming super tiresome for me because her power is entirely reliant on the writing making people behave incredibly stupidly. It working on random innocents who don't know what she is makes sense, but it working in the middle of battle is a bit of a stretch, and it working more than once in the same fight against the same person is pretty much ridiculous, especially when that person was just informed about how her power works and has previously been written to be observant. That said, the episode was pretty good compared to the last bunch. The most important thing is that we had actually significant plot revelations that occurred without people loving reading them off the script to us(Revisions to the story can change a character who has already been pulled into this world, Altair has some sort of operational limit to her ridiculous god mode powers) which is a massive step up for the show up to this point. It also managed to recapture some of the amazingly entertaining ludicrousness of the show's premise - "please let my tweet go viral so we can win this fight" is probably the funniest moment in the series so far in a vacuum. If we can get more episodes where they show more and tell less like this we'll be back on track.
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Jun 10, 2017 20:11
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Hidingo Kojimba posted:It's not going to happen, but it would be amusing if Yuuya wasn't bullshitting when he said his Stand was a curse and he actually let it happen because that power really does have a massive downside and not just in a bullshit "dark curse that basically just means being awesome" way. Would be quite clever too as it happened just after Magane admitted that she hadn't read his manga. Unlikely though, that's require better writing than this show has shown so far. This would also be cool/good because I'd like to see Magane react to someone actually outwitting her.
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Jun 11, 2017 12:44
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:they were all halfway ready to kill each other from the start. alice was downright eager, even. That's why I'm really baffled by the turn they took. Alice didn't actually need an additional reason to try to stab the protagonists; she had already pretty clearly committed to Altair's plan simply by virtue of the forlorn desperate hope that there was maybe possibly a vanishingly small chance that she could somehow change the nightmare world she comes from for the better, and had even already blown the heroes off once when they tried to convince her otherwise.
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Jun 16, 2017 17:20
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I don't know, I found Sota's backstory to actually be pretty understandable and sympathetic. It's incredibly realistic for a person to harbor feelings of guilt and self-reproach when they feel like they could have prevented a friend from engaging in self-harm or suicide, to the point where it can be quite crippling or debilitating. The experience Sota went through, if it happened to a real person(obviously without the animes coming to life part) would generally require a lot of counseling and therapy to truly overcome, not a "nut up, you pussy" and a kick in the rear end. This episode actually made me a lot less annoyed with his character than I was before now that the whole context of his past is apparent, and it makes pretty much everything about the character's weird tics like his constant deflection or his refusal to draw or show his art to other people feel a lot more natural. You could write a show based on the relationship he had, the loss he suffered, and how he learns to cope with it and it would probably be pretty drat good. However, we're not watching this show for a touching drama about coping with suicide, we're watching to see anime characters come to life and beat each other up. The question is where does the character go from here? He's not Altair's creator or co-creator, and everyone else knows what he knows about her creator now. The only reason he has to still be present is the potential for drama between Altair and himself, but in her appearance in the previous episode he was quite clearly on the scene and she didn't spare him a second glance so she doesn't seem to give a poo poo about him.
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Jun 18, 2017 08:28
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It's quite possible that the show's writing sins are significantly less offensive if you're binging it instead of watching it week to week.
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Jun 24, 2017 07:59
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