#and like …. their dialogue is SOOO filled with possible foreshadowing

[transsexualraskolnikov]

“next time we’ll be the ones to save you two” okay okay okay i have a feeling that this …. might be what we in the biz like to call foreshadowing

[taocastleprincess]

shaman king (2021) ep 1

i said i was going to type smth up last night but teaching is literally so exhausting sooo i'm here now!! i have watched the episode like a million times since Thursday LMAOOOO i think i mostly have the dialogue memorized, that's how much i've watched it. i'm just so happy though, i've been a lifelong fan of SK, i was obsessed w it in my teens (still am but i was on a DIFF LEVEL in HS), and i'm just SO HAPPY we finally got a reboot!!! Shaman King deserves a canon adaption, so glad that Takei got it :)

this post got super long rambly so my thoughts/glows/concerns are under the cut!

gonna start w the GLOWS

-- honestly, i am in LOVE w the new OST!!! i have had it on repeat since it was released in Japan!! Megumi is a godsend and i feel like both the OST and the ED kept the same vibes as the og adaption OSTs and EDs. can't really explain why that is but the melodies and the feelings you get from the new OST are very authentic to the SK-verse.

-- the animation is absolutely beautiful and i could hardly focus on anything else the first 2 times i watched it. i was really scared about how the animation was going to look bc so many weird rumors about the animation team were circulating on twitter but it is nearly perfect. they stayed true to Takei's style and the background scenery is out of this world. i also think all of the characters look brighter and more... like them? like, i love the og SK but even as a kid i felt like the animation did not really capture any of the characters (especially Yoh, Ren, and Joco) in their true essence. Like, it was just very dull and didn't accentuate any of their key features. The reboot is beautiful and I love the way certain characters' eyes are drawn. I thought that the look of Ryu's crew was a great example of the animators highlighting and emphasizing defining features of certain characters. They aren't major characters at all but we know they are important to Ryu (and his story) so their designs are given their rightful due.

-- i know that a few people didn't appreciate the beginning scene of the episode for a myriad of different reasons and i find them all totally valid and understandable, tbh. however, i think the opening scene was really great. i had a few problems w it (i do think the 'chosen one' set-up for Yoh was heavy-handed and weird bc i don't think the source material really wants us to believe that Yoh is the stereotypical 'chosen one' and i think it pushes back on that trope quite a bit but i'm open to hearing diff opinions on that) but overall, i think it gives a very cool and mysterious set-up for the anime. i don't think it does much to spoil the eventual ~Hao is Yoh's twin!!~ reveal because, to me, personally, it wasn't that big of a reveal/plot twist. what i WILL say is that the opening scene was very diluted in comparison to the manga vers and that was a bit disappointing but i think they might revisit the scene/make it more dramatic later on in the series when there is more context around the events of that night so that may just be a little tease, you know?

-- this should not be shocking to read from an account that is named 'taocastleprincess' but... AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH THE ENDING SCENE WITH REN AND BASON WAS SOOOOO PERFECT AND I DIDN'T EXPECT IT!!!! ON MY FIRST WATCH I RAN IT BACK LIKE 300x!!!! THEY BOTH LOOK AMAZINGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!

moving on from glows and to CONCERNS, i spy a lot of possible issues w pacing, character development, and authenticity. the series is currently only slated for 52 episodes, a whole 12-eps shorter than the OG adaptation, and the entirety of the series is supposedly being adapted so... 52 eps for 300 chapters? to me, that seems extremely rushed even with best-case scenarios. i have read opposing views on twitter, people think that 52 eps is just enough if they cut 'filler' and 'stick to the most important arcs.' i don't think i can agree with any part of that argument. i really think that it's a REACH to say that Shaman King has filler chapters or filler arcs. there is a purpose for each and every chapter/arc in the series. plot development, character development, foreshadowing, etc. those all hold distinct and important purposes and the love, thought, and time put into the SK manga is exactly why people love it. 'filler' does not have a true narrative purpose, it only serves to lengthen the story, so to say that there are scenes/chapters/arcs that can be glossed or skipped over you would have to make the argument that they have no narrative purpose or bearing on the story. i personally think it would be extremely difficult (near impossible) to make that argument for anything within the og 300chap work but, again, i'm open to seeing if anyone can change my mind.

the first episode of SK flew through and glossed over a lot of important scenes for character study/development. by the end of the first episode, you don't really understand or relate to Morty as one might have done after the first episode of ogSK. and although Yoh is supposed to remain mysterious/confusing/weird for the first couple of chapters/eps, at the end of ep1 there is no GRAND interest that has been developed about him. The first episode operated at a breakneck speed and to its detriment. the characters so far are extremely flat regarding everything beyond character design. the viewer is hardly invested in the partnership between Yoh and Amidamaru because there is (little to) no build-up of their partnership and both of their characters are... not real to us yet. even the scenes regarding Amidamaru's past and his friendship with Mosuke doesn't affect or interest the viewer at all because it is referenced, addressed, problematized, solved, and wrapped up all within 3.5 mins.... huh?

what REALLY destroys me, though, is that the anime seems to be foreshadowing that Manta's character will be playing a backseat role.... the first couple of adventures are from Manta's perspective. he asks the questions that we have, situates us in this very weird world and helps to world-build without it being obvious or heavyhanded, and we start to understand the nuances of his character. none of that was present in 2021 ep1. it kinda felt like Manta was a plot device instead of a character. granted, like i said, none of the characters feel real yet but Manta getting this sort of treatment so early on is dismaying. i really do feel like Manta and Yoh's (developing) friendship and trust in each other is the heart of the first quarter of the series (and is continuously referenced and exalted throughout). rushing through (or, really, just straight up cutting out) the first couple of subplots/mini-adventures that they have together feel really weird and detrimental to the overall tone and purpose of the series. those early adventures cement so much and really lay the groundwork for the rest of the story. it's disappointing that they didn't get their due.

this isn't a very organized review/breakdown, i'm just typing as i think, but to sum up what i am REALLY worried about is this: if the series continues at this extremely crazy pace, i'm a bit worried that the characters will never feel fully developed. not only that, but SK has a lot of heart-wrenching scenes and also a lot of scenes that are beautifully filled with hope and care. i just don't see how those scenes are gonna hit quite as hard or even as they SHOULD if the pace doesn't slow down and let us really sit with these characters and their feelings and motivations.

i mean, i know that this is only the 1st episode of a 52ep series but a lot of things don't look too promising... anyway, these are my initial thoughts/concerns/feelings. i'm way too busy to actually sit down and plan out all of my millions of thoughts but hopefully this was good enough!

[horrible-monstrosity]

Punchy-liney episode seven: Clever writing is doing the same thing over and over again and explaining every little bit of it every single time.

Seriously, this is dumb.

So the entire point of the fucking time loop plot is you're supposed to be trying to fight fate, change the future, fight against inevitability, right?? So of course the fucking first thing you need to have is a furry little plot device showing up and telling you you can't change anything except what's arbitrarily allowed, which is... so far nothing, becaue the plot says so and the writers are too god-awful to actually write a scenario where the scenario itself has something working against the main character to make achieving their goal difficult, so we have to have a "because I said so" roadblock shoved in there. FUCK.

So it's just a bunch of Yuuta hanging around going "oy boy wow i sure do remember then this happeninged" and fucking doing nothing of value. Except, you know, doing the same shit we've already seen OVER AND OVER AGAIN!

Yoota gets all fucking upset over writing the stupid fucking pun in the stupid book because it means so muuuuuuuuch- no, it fucking doesn't, you only saw it briefly once just about an hour ago from your point of view and it's some dumb shit anyway. Just draw a bunch of dicks in it.

So this random apartment of grils and their fucking friendships is the most iipootaat thing in the universe? Why? Boy it sure would have been nice if these assholes had been, like, developed into interesting likeable characters during the first half of the show or something, right?? How the fuck's this supposed to stop the fucking meteor

So is the only reason the previous Yuutas have failed because they didn't follow the cat's orders well enough? Not because of any actual challenges but because following instructions is just too damn hard? What the *fuck*?

Yuuta tries to keep his ghost self from blowing up, goes into Ito's room... she immediately goes full retard, not even just over the panty shot but trying to take the door of its fucking hinges just because it wouldn't immediately open. What the fuck? Why are we supposed to like this psycho again? And then he gropes Juicey's juicy tiddies and that doesn't activate his power even though a fucking picture of lil babby pumpkin panties did because why Speaking of plot devices that make no damn sense, how does ghost-Yuuta's quantum ghost time-travel work when someone can see him? Or are we just going to ignore that plot hole because now-Yuuta saved ghost-Yuuta from blowing his top all of once? And why did he even bother to try and save ghost-him? He knows there's no point... unless the way the quantum bullshit works means he'd actually get the meteoric bad end his ghost self could just go back from, BUT IF THAT WAS THE CASE THEN HE WOULDN'T HAVE BEEN ON THE ROOF AT THE END OF EPISODE SIX... GUIGSUUESIUUUEUEEUUURRRRRRRRRFGGHFGGFFGFh

And then suddenly becoming Ubermensch Aryan why the fuck did they call it that anyway just fucking inexplicably changes the way your soul is attached to your body in some overly complicated way that's just explained to the audience in way too much dialogue, because the plot of this show was written without any mind to actual coherency and we have to explain how the one thing happened one way one time and another way the other time so we have to add in ad-hoc """explanations""" later on and pretend it's all really genius. Better yet with the body swap reveal coming up at some point they could have just handwaved this somehow for now and had it later turn out that event left Yuuta's soul (as well as Juice-tan and the other one) less well-attached to the body it's currently in than a normal person's. YOU KNOW, SOME MOTHER FUCKING FORESHADOWING.

Oh, actually just kidding. I paused the episode to write that and something dumb happened immediately after I hit play

"Don't you remember, that one time you switched bodies with a bunch of your closest friends you never saw again after that?" You'd think someone, anyone, would have fucking mentioned this before, or fucking alluded to it, or the mere fact of its factuality would have exerted some influence on the events that followed from it... but no, not really. Just, fucking... casually remember that one time something fucking extraordinary happened that has a huge impact on the plot that we haven't even mentioned up until now. Ha ha.

NO, DON'T FUCKING EXPLAIN THE FUCKING SIMPLE OBVIOUS THING THE MAIN CHARACTER JUST DEMONSTRATED HE FUCKING REMEMBERS ANYWAY LIKE IT'S ANYTHING FUCKING INTERESTING AT ALL WHILE MAKING IT SOUND ACTUALLY COMLPICATED. You know what fucking happened here? All that fucking happened is the writers made a fucking Excel spreadsheet, right, they filled in three fucking rows of the sheet with the kids' names, and then they fucking... rotated... the list... once........... HOW CAN THIS BE SO FUCKING BAD???? This isn't the slightest bit complicated aside from the overwrought bullshit surrounding and enabling it while obfuscating the gaping plot holes that exist in what the writers want to do... because, I don't know, they're too fucking hackish to rework their simplistic fucking immediate ideas to work with a coherent underpinning. The fucking reveal was these three kids who we know little to nothing about and have NO FUCKING REASON TO CARE ABOUT got their souls shuffled around in a fucking obvious fashion (because there's only three of them and there's only two ways it could have possibly come out), and that's... it. That's... really fucking boring as your ultimate plot reveal. This is not worth all the fucking convoluted fucking shit that was required to justify it.

Like, here, let me just make this immediately better: Juice-tan is wimpy girl in pink-haired girl's body, the other one is pink-haired girl in the one guy's body- yeah, we leave those alone- but the trick is, Yuuta isn't Pine (what the fuck sort of name is pine anyway by the way) but some random blank-slate or even non-human soul that got succed into the wimpy girl's body when the crash happened. And the first thing that soul saw was the newly minted Juice-tan, who was traumatised and amnesiac due to what just happened and thus didn't recognise this used to be her body, leaning over (him/her/zip/zoom) and going all "are you okay??"... and thus the first character trait Yuuta develops is being in love with this girl. And Pine is the cat or something. NOW FUCKING LOOK AT THIS SHIT. You just fucking develop the three kids as close-knit frienbs (though that would help no matter what the plot was), then you have this tragedy where the group can never get back together again, one of them's gone and another's a psycho villain, but despite this the remaining member finds new love in an unexpected place or something.

And yeah, it really just was a random fucking car accident that caused this, except the car also got struck by lightning! Why'd they all go Uber at that time anyway? Was the car they were taking an Uber service?

8: oh boy more same thign oh wow yuuta didn't even go into the apartment to find pantsu he just went in there for no fucking reason and H-A-P-P-E-N-E-D to find them wow such good much writing w o w

is the villain's fucking "you wouldn't unerstaaaaand" plot just a muh next stage of human evolution plot? fuckin seriously? this is some fucking baby shit. this is babby's first villainous motive. this show doesn't fucking deserve to be compared to Higurashi with this shit

oh look more fucking tragic robot girl flashbacks and she repeats the thing about making gril a superhero and a superhero organisation with only one member that we've already fucking heard but now it's sad tn: "punch" means "five" in hindu

Turns out Yuuta casually broke a man's limbs offscreen, because even men with vaginas randomly turn into fucking psychopaths when le cutey gril is in danger. Also breaking a man's limbs your damn self is okay but just two people dying who you don't even fucking know and who nobody you know likes is just sooooooooo baaaaaaaaaaddd And then they try to play up the cat as sooo evil for saying "two lives are less important than seven billion!!" when... Yuuta just broke a man's limbs with his own damn hands... jesus christ

epitoad 9: "why did you keep this to yourself all this time, Pine?" "lol idek" Juice-tan and Yuuta have an """emotional""" reconnection where he tells her something he knew all this fucking time and could have said whenthefuckever he felt like it but just didn't feel like it I guess so now yuuta can just try really hard not to instantly cum when he sees a panties and it just somehow works now. as if we needed this to make any less sense. yuuta goes and talks to a random bunch of leading physics-cists and they actually give him the time of day for whatever reason. all to know nuke bombs don't work in space. just look that shit up online  dumbass

... It's amazing how much more pathetic some of these scenes are from the "proper" angle. Yuuta in his dumbass superhero costume just creeping on the roof IN PLAIN FUCKING SIGHT OF EVERYONE IF THEY'D JUST HAPPENED TO LOOK UP, and when the time comes he doesn't even jump into action or anything, he just stands up. It's so fucking WEAK. But it's clebverrrr because we did the thing where we watched him watch himself do the thign n now he do the thign we watched him watched himself do right ?????

More of our beloved hero being psychopathic and literally torturing a man by breaking his fingers and interrogating him... jesus fuck.

epipoo 10: how the fuck did yuuta survive and get back to the apartment

So it turn out, everything in this show could have been fixed by just tearing that little bit of tech off the satelight dish so the server hack isn't intercepted... just tell the current ghost-yuuta to tear the damn thing off the satelite dish the day beforehand next time for fuck's sake... but noooooo, saving the world is just so fucking hard wow

no one cares about these fucking kids and their dumb pseudo-romances. guriko or whichever the fuc the brunette was was a whiny little bitch. She gets into a screaming-crying match with the other girl over some toy, sits there and screams about it, then when Pine notices she hurt herself (or the other girl hurt her) in the fight and tries to help, she screams at him and demands the other girl come back and help her instead. Holy shit.

"originally it was supposed to be-" You see how fucking boring this shit is? We know exactly how the three of them swapped bodies, but you have to have Mr. Creepy McFuckNuts tell us this shit all over again like it's something that's just sooo hard to grasp when it's... so fucking simple... and it's not even in a way that gives his, her, its or zgeir'z unique perspective on it (like "I'm supposed to be in your body, but instead I'm..."), it's just... the fucking list.

chiyoo throws yuuta who she just found out was her long-lost friend pine into a fucking statue and has the gall to cry about "muh precious frienb!!" over ito... I feel like I'm watching that Diverisy and Comics video about Kim and Kim again. That's what this feels like. meanwhile gurio goes through the five stage of anime angst in like an instant. "I have so much power! But... I'm so lonely..... :'(" "the guriko i love!!!!!" she cries over someone all we've seen of them recently is them being a whiny little bitch and then yuuta goes fucking insane and destroys his room. and then has a bunch of le emotional flashbacks over characters we don't care about who have been demonstrated to be violent and uncaring toward him. lol. this is so fucking dumb

AND THEN WE'RE ALL REVED UP TO DO THE EXACT. SAME. FUCKING. THING. FUCKING AGAIN. Just.. what the fuck is Yuuta actually supposed to *do* about any of this? If he just broke the robot girl's computer or took the interceptor thing off the satelite dish everything would be fine, but he's not allowed to do that because... reasons.......????? So what the fuck is he supposed to do? What *sequence of events* is supposed to lead to the probem being over when he's not allowed to just... fucking... solve the probem??

Well whatever it is, I'm sure it's convoluted, retarded and utterly nonsensical. Everyone responsible for this shitshow needs to be fucking euthanized, for the good of humanity.