#also a lot of agito crossreferencing goes on here

[bykalopsia]

faiz 41-50 notes + final thoughts

(also like w/ ryuki i'll watch the supplementary movies when i feel like it i'm faized out)

faiz is a Show.

surprisingly came out of this show as a Kusaka Understander. not apologist i think he's a fucking asshole but if i think like any amount of hard about the ryusei kids and kusaka's specific position within that whole mess i get a bit Miserable. so tbh i get it.

also when i sincerely look at myself this is actually not surprising. it's actually more surprising i like takumi so much i legitimately can't remember the last time my favorite character in anything was the actual protagonist. like i'm the master of Glup Shitto-ism this is terrible for my rep.

so far both of the inoue shows i've watched have followed a similar-ish pattern of slow start, really strong middle episodes that do a lot for character building but don't fit within a conflict structure that is conducive to a finale (ex. agito sticking to either fighting regular lords or each other while the overlord and the apostle piddle around in his hospital room / while lucky clover throwing Every Orphnoch In Tokyo at faiz and co is funny it's not really great for the whole Orphnochs Aren't Ontologically Evil thesis), and then rushed back fifth with hurried plot drops / shit that really should have been seeded beforehand / (ex. Prettyboy Jesus killing massive swathes of humans / the orphnoch king introducing the concept of a higher threat than orphnochs / the idea of orphnochs being terminal)

anyway tldr i think it has pretty much the same structural issues as agito but with a stronger cast / funner general premise for me personally.

the only thing i can think of that doesn't necessarily happen in agito is the large amount of back-fourth focus given to absolute Nothing Characters. given though that faiz (at least seemingly) has a larger cast than agito... it's still bad idk why i'm thinking of making excuses. kaido had potential when he was introduced and was turned into a complete joke for thirty episodes and i'm supposed to take his weird plot with teruo seriously. (notably this plot got better once teruo actually started interacting with characters that didn't have a one-dimensional personality. but it still needed more time in the oven either way whatever). on top of this mihara is such a dogshit tertiary i felt insulted as a viewer whenever the show expected me to give a fuck. his entire deal is "i don't want to fight :( but i guess i will anyways :( even though i'm not providing any new depth or value to the ryusei plot whatsoever :( someone needs to somehow make delta look like a terrible suit... :(" if you don't give that shit back to kitazaki right now djfjfgdfgkd. like it would have been so easy to like give him a plot that introduces hanagata's whole Deal earlier but he literally does NOTHING!!!!!!! how we go from ryou to this i have no clue. like the closest we get to this in agito is omuro being hojo's lackey when he's on his anti-agito bullshit

the stuff with smart brain and the police's orphnoch lab was really interesting. I Wish It Was A Bit Earlier. bc it comes and goes very quick and thus yuka's death and yuji's rejection of humanity also seem very quick because of this.

i'm not going into detail about yuka's death btw all i'm going to say is that inoue should hope we never cross paths. Ever. GET HER AWAY FROM THESE BUMS. ohhhhhh yuka i'm sorry inoue can only handle at maximum two women per series................. (and even then saeko is really a stock-standard femme fatale archetype and mari is arbitrarily limited from using the belts so even then.... lol.... lmao.....)

also i feel i should note this is really the first season where the cgi usage passed the point of "i know its the early 2000s i know it'll look bad" like i fundamentally couldn't understand whether or not people thought stuff like the jetsliger looked good. like at least the cgi hoverbike in agito they had some shame about it. where did that go...

also yuji's death.... i mean it didn't take a rocket scientist to intuit that it was going to happen but like ARGHHHHHHHHHHHH. i get its supposed to be tragic but COME ONNNNNNNN HE CROSSED OVER TO THE SIDE OF HUMANITY.............. AND THEN THEY FRAME THE ENDING SCENE THROUGH THAT HOLE IN THE NET AND HE CAN'T BE THERE AND OUGHHHHHHHHHHH ITS HORRIBLE. i wasn't even that crazy about yuji i'm pissed that this makes me this mad.

okay i feel like i need to talk about the good parts. i'm really bad at talking about the good parts. um. kusaka funny.... takumi and yuji made me want to die..... mari was really cool....lucky clover were really fun..... orphnochs were really cool conceptually even if i think some aspects really needed some more time to cook.... idk. ultimately i think faiz has a lot of really strong building blocks that sometimes aren't in the right order..... or that it just needs better connective tissue...... idk man.

but yeah. i think i enjoyed faiz more than agito. like there are certainly Problems (as you might be able to tell) but overall i had fun even with the stuff that annoyed me. and i was never bored!

now onto blade! i know the general contextless things most people know (bench, various tachibana screencaps, etc) but i am excited!!!