#anyway i like the manga/anime well enough but mostly its special to me for all the associations i have with it lmfao

[applesandbannas747]

if i had a nickel for every time hikaru no go was tangentially involved in one of my special interests, i'd have two nickels. but it's weird that it happened twice

[ruanbaijie]

hiii hanyi!! ive tried writing this like 5 times idk if you got the other ones bc they wouldn't send if you did ignore them XD

I'm your secret santa from ccnet! this ask is gonna be all over the place because im too excited about this event, we have a few things in common!

first of all your header is beautiful!! did you see the jjk vol 0 trailer?? whos your fav jjk character?? (im obsessed with nanami rn)

do you read manga or just watch anime or both?

i just finished tokyo revengers yesterday and i cried! i loved it! who are your favs from the manji gang? i love baji and chifuyu (little bebe)!

kmy season 2 is coming soon are you ready?? IM NOT 😭 who are your favs from kmy??

also what are your fav colors? do you have any anime or film recs for me? what kind of music do you listen to?

ok thats all for now if you watch kmy season 2 as it comes out we can scream about that together sdkfjks as the event nears XD. The more asks i send i'll end them with this emoji 🎄 so you know its me :))

have a nice day love <3

omg helluu!!! alkslkdf this is the first ask I'm getting from you I guess tumblr ate the previous ones up (`皿´＃)

(your excitement is rubbing off on me omg)

thankyoooooo~ (*/▽＼*) yes I did (see the jjk vol 0 trailer)!!! I like gojo and maki and nanami (*tsudaken*) as well hehe but cough yeah full disclosure (and related to your next question) I'm responding solely based on where the anime is up till currently because I very rarely read manga (I have a Very Bad track record of keeping up with any form of reading material that isn't complete yet and I can't binge at one go ▓▒░(°◡°)░▒▓ the only manga I miraculously managed to finish was kny ahahahaha)

omg yes season 2 tokrev when hello that cliffhanger _:(´ཀ`」 ∠):_ (I'm assuming - again... haven't read the manga... - he will go back in time again and prevent chifuyu's death...?) I like a lot of characters there but baji has a special place (╥ω╥) and that one episode for chifuyu and baji's past???? I broke (chifuyu's hair back then tho)

one of my biggest regrets is that I didn't watch kny mugen train in the cinemas because when I finally watched it at home with my headphones the audio was so damn good and I was literal TEARS (mostly because it was so painful to watch but yes also good audio) the experience would've been so much more impactful surrounded by it in the cinema (｡•́︿•̀｡) ANYWAY I digress season 2 yess!! (I should probably catch up but I'm procrastinating a little so I can binge since the first few episodes are more or less mugen train again oop) but omg so hyped for the entertainment district arc it's gonna be UZUI TENGEN TIME. I like giyu, kocho, and akaza - the one that really ripped me to shreds when I was reading the manga was akaza aha (ง ื▿ ื)ว (also I probably have yelled enough about it in the tags before but ishida akira as akaza is 💯💯💯💯💯)

I like red, black, and white! especially red and black when matched together it's like gothic / evil character / gonna raise hell vibes haahaha (⁄ ⁄•⁄ω⁄•⁄ ⁄) what genres of anime/ shows in general do you like? other (comparably) less known anime I really enjoyed are charlotte, shiki, and noblesse (speaking of which I should really get about finishing the webtoon since it's long been completed... refer to previous point of having a Very Bad track record on keeping up with regular releases) but I don't know if they're less known maybe because they're older and/ or smaller releases... (＾＾＃)

the music I listen to... is a mess (ノ*°▽°*) I usually switch from anime soundtracks to kdrama soundtracks to cdrama soundtracks + random chinese songs to random english songs... the one band whose songs I like... considerably more than others is imagine dragons? but even so I don't follow their news religiously so I don't know if I can be considered a huge fan... (I only went to one concert of theirs hah but then again I rarely went to concerts even pre-covid...)

okay I swear I'll start watching kny season 2 soon I also need to catch up on 2 manhuas I started reading but have been procrastinating on aslkdlflk (ง ื▿ ื)ว

ok this ended up being very rambly and long-winded (bad habit hah) have a nice day/ evening too!

[skyhopedango]

State of the Season (OMG IT’S ALREADY MARCH???!)

So... yeah. Time really does fly, huh. :O I’ve been so swept away by work and politics/activism and trying to rock an undercut that is the surprisingly fortunate result of trying to cut my own hair, that all these months just kind of passed me by. Holy shit, it’s almost summer. And covid is still here.

Anyway, so the shows I’ve been watching, or not watching as the case might be.

Dropped: 

SK8: I ranted about it a while back - I tried watching a couple more episodes, but nah, sorry. The show is trying to do one thing and another completely different thing, and it just fails to do either well, missing the balance by a shot so long it fades into infinity. It doesn’t lean fully into just being crazy and OTT fun, but it leans into it enough that there’s a tonal dissonance between the crazy OTT parts and the “real” and “drama” parts, which result in neither parts working for me. The “adults trying to write cool kids” factor and the really dated visual design doesn’t do it any favors either. It’s 2021 guys! If you want to be “hip and cool” come up with something that doesn’t smell like moth balls.

As for the rest: 

Osomatsu-san S3: This is... kind of a pity. I talked about this before, but it really feels like the writing has lost its touch, and its sight of who/what the characters are. Also, the extended cast just doesn’t work. Totoko and Nyaa are just not interesting enough to carry so much of the show, and the AIs are perplexing and not in a good way. They feel completely pointless, characterless and boring. 

It’s not like the show is bad though. The voice work continues to be absolutely amazing (why is this cast so good), it’s still mildly entertaining, and there are flashes of brilliance every now and then - the pizza skit is one of the Osomatsu-san greats, as is the entirety of episode 22, with the detective show spoof and the crazy hide-and-seek skit. Even the AIs had an unexpectedly fun and relatable moment, the skit with the shitty senpai you kinda pity but also don’t really want to associate with. Overall though, this season is a miss, which is a pity.

Jujutsu Kaisen: This has been precariously teetering on the edge of being dropped, but eh, I might as well finish this season. Like, the show is mostly harmless, really, mostly inoffensive, but also 90% of why I’m still watching it is so I can listen to Nakamura Yuuichi, Shimazaki Nobunaga, and a couple more seiyuu. It’s bogstandard WSJ action stuff. But also, it’s at the “let’s have a tournament arc, and introduce tons of new characters and their super special powers and angsty backstories!” part where these stories always lose me. Like, I don’t really care about all the power wankery, yes, the character is super strong, but if that’s all then I don’t care about the details, let’s move on. Also, I just want to spend time with the main cast, y’know? I don’t need two thousand characters, and OK, we can have a huge cast but flesh out your main people first? 

Aside of the cast, the animation continues to be its saving grace, but even there some things grate on me - things I wouldn’t care about normally, but since the show is clearly an animator wank fest, these things stand out. Like how the composition is often kinda dodgy, with the characters not integrating fully with the background? Or how there’s the "telling not showing” thing where they have characters telling us things that could be so easily conveyed by animation. Yes, that’s necessary in manga where the images are not moving, but here, especially with all the animation wankery, it just feels like the director just wanted to show off, and didn’t put a lot of effort into actually creating a good and complete translation of static to dynamic, manga to anime.

Back Arrow: This one is... well, it’s entertaining. It’s a bit of a letdown in that it doesn’t really go as hard as it could and should. Like, the jokes are good in theory, but in practice more ofthen than not the punchlines don’t quite land. Still, I’m being entertained so I’ll keep watching. (Mostly, I just like what a terrible, stupid bunch the characters are. :D) Will I remember this show a week after the finale, though? Not likely, but hey, I don’t need all shows I watch to be unforgettable masterpieces.

Beastars: This is, well, good. It’s really good, actually, it’s a great show! It’s just that I kind of lost my enthusiasm for Beastars so I just can’t get hyped. And without the hype, my brain just starts thinking too deeply about things I’m not supposed to think about, like... yes, I understand the allegories and whatnot, but also isn’t it just awfully convenient that like all of herbivores we see on the regular are the “small, soft, prey” type? Where are all the tough, often aggressive herbivores that predators think twice (three times, four times) about messing with? Where are the African buffalos, the bisons, the elephants, the rhinos? I’m just saying, it’s really convenient for the story that those are out of the picture. Also, what with all the focus on size and strength, it’s kind of dodgy how the show just handwaves away the fact that there are small carnivores and large herbivores, and the latter could kick the formers’ ass any day, like come on, a horse vs a cat? Yeah. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

But anyway, yeah, show is good. I’m enjoying it a lot. I hope they won’t adapt the rest of the manga.

Tenchi Souzou Design-bu: This is just tons of fun. :D It takes an issue that I very often think about (namely, “why is this creature like that? what the hell, Mother Nature?”) and puts it in a context that makes complete sense (”oh I see, it was created by overworked designers based on vague and arbitrary instructions, gotcha, I can relate to that” :D). And even though it’s just basically the same settings and jokes over and over it doesn’t get old. :D

Kemono Jihen: This one is fine? It’s not mindblowingly amazing, but not bland or mediocre either. It’s just a solid, good show, although I really hope that Aya is not a permanent addition to the cast because I really hate the “jealous girls fighting over a guy” trope. That aside, I actually started reading the manga for this, but... well, this is one of those cases where the anime format just works better for me. I hope it will get a second season.

But most of all I really really look forward to the spring season, partly because there’s quite a lot of shows I’m interested in, and also it’s one step closer to the summer season and Night Head 2041. :D

[animegenork]

Fruits Baskets Final Season Episodes 2 & 3

What? No, I didn’t watch these on the Fridays of the weeks they came out. No, I wasn’t dying from school---

Anyway, back to the grind.

Episode 2

I swear the gif search function HATES me and what I’m trying to do---

Anyway.

I would like to make this very clear. Shigure is a little bit evil. A little bit. But it’s mostly from being twisted by the zodiac curse and his strange form of love. So if you wanted to punch him this episode, that’s good. He needs to be punched. A lot. Like a lot. God, he’s so evil. Moving on.

So the episode begins with young Akito asking Shigure if he loves her. This is, as we’ve seen, something that Akito fixates on, mostly due to her father accidentally warping her with the idea of being eternally loved by the zodiac members. He responds with a very earnest love confession that sort of explains why they spend so much time together, but it also confuses things a bit, at least at first. What with the zodiac spirit, it’s unclear how much of Shigure’s love is real and how much isn’t up to him. That may factor in to whatever the hell is up with him now.

Cut to Tohru working on graduation ceremony flowers and nearly asking Shigure about breaking the curse. Of course, she can’t, because it’s hard to bring up, and she’s only seen 2 sides of Shigure at most. Naturally, he already knows what she’s thinking about, because he’s Shigure. He’s just that good.

Tohru continues to struggle even at school, when she realizes that there’s so much she knows that she probably can’t talk about with Momiji or Haru or anyone else. And since the curse is this ever-present thing to them, she’s not even sure if they’ll believe her or how they’ll react. Rin is the exception to this, of course, since she was already looking for information on it.

There are some shenanigans with the Prince Yuki Fan Club, and Tohru and Kyo are left alone (probably on purpose) by Hanajima, Uotani, and company. But I’ll get back to that in a sec.

Yuki tries to help out other classes with things, but they won’t let him because... well, uh, they think he’s too busy... and he... isn’t... I’m sorry, that’s just so funny to me. So anyway, he runs into Machi, who is being all adorable and stubborn because she wanted to say hello and chased him all over the school to do so. It’s cute, because Yuki’s not used to that much effort being put in to something for his sake. I love Machi like that UwU

Back to Tohru and Kyo, they’ve been waiting for HOURS. Tohru decides to tentatively try out her Kureno talking point, but as soon as she brings up the curse maybe being broken, Kyo tells her that hypotheticals like that are pointless (this is implied paraphrase). He does this mostly because he’s in that pit of despair of “I’m never getting out of this” but also because he doesn’t want to give himself a false hope that might never come true. Tohru, however, becomes sad, because of course she wants to save him from having to be locked away like the previous Cat. So there’s a bit of moment where she’s about to cry.

And then Kyo *sniffle* gives her a flower to make her feel better. *sobs*

Technically speaking, this scene should’ve been in the last season or SOMETHING, I honestly thought they WEREN’T going to put my FAVORITE scene in the anime, and then they did. What’s cute about this scene is how torn up Kyo is from hurting Tohru’s feelings, and how almost desperate he is to make her feel better. It’s a sweet moment, if slightly awkwardly animated, but it’s a rare Tohru and Kyo moment where they don’t even say anything and you can SEE everything they want to say. Of course, they’re interrupted, because they always are (HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT LIKE NEVER HAPPENS WHENEVER YUKI AND TOHRU HAVE A MOMENT?), but hey, I got my fluff, I am fed.

There’s brief mention of Rin and how Tohru hasn’t seen her lately, and I hate it because I know where she is.

Anyway, now on to Shigure being Shigure.

He’s torturing his poor editor again, and he walks away from what appears to have been a heated conversation with... HIS PARENTS. THEY EXIST. I dunno what it is with rarely seeing zodiac parents (besides the obvious cases of Kyo and Momiji), but there you have it. We see then that there’s a big Sohma dinner outing with Akito there, so clearly Shigure planned that. His skills of perception and foresight are serious scary, and I really wonder how the hell he developed them.

There’s a flashback to before Tohru and Kureno’s revealing conversation, and we see that Shigure hates Kureno for being so close to Akito. Of course, Kureno makes it clear that Akito doesn’t love him, that she’s always wanted.... well, he doesn’t say, but I think all of us are familiar enough with how this anime works that we know who he means. But Kureno basically wants Shigure to stop being so cold to Akito, and this is because of how much he wants to keep her happy more than any personal feelings about Shigure.

This is where it gets a bit dicey. I’ve actually got a strange fondness for this scene, if only because it sort of but also not really gets to the heart of why Shigure is the way he is.

Shigure appears in Akito’s room, and she’s basically jealous that he was out with another woman. Then she brings up his sexual relationship with his editor (nonexistent), which is rather petty, but then, when was this duo not about pettiness? The implication Akito makes is that he sleeps with every woman he meets (explains a lot). She then mentions that Shigure slept with Ren, Akito’s mother (I’m not going to touch on how screwed up that is), which is why he’s living in a house away from the main estate. Shigure acts all cool and says that was a long time ago, he’s been punished, but Akito points out that he almost wanted to leave. Which... he did, but not for any lack of love on his part. And he says that. He recalls the conversation we see at the beginning, in which he tells her he cares about her more than anyone else. Understandably, she’s frustrated, and she asks why he always tests her.

It’s because she slept with Kureno. Petty, I know.

The phone conversation comes back. Everything you need to understand about Shigure is in one sentence: “I love her so much that sometimes I want to spoil her rotten, and sometimes I want to crush her into a pulp.” This is nearly verbatim of the manga translation I read a long time ago, and it’s always stuck with me. The thing is, Akito was always told she’s special and she can do with the zodiac as she pleases (which she says directly in this episode). It seems a part of Shigure didn’t like that that extended to those that weren’t him (Kureno), and his love for her warped and twisted into this kinda toxic relationship. (Kinda, she says, as if it’s not very.) This makes him want to be kind to her, but at the same time, he wants to be mean to her and show her how much pain she’s put him through, too. It’s pettiness at its extreme, but it’s somehow more believable than other forms of petty jealousy I’ve seen.

Oh yeah, and then they have sex.

Once again, there’s brief mention of Rin, perhaps she’s in the hospital, we don’t really know. But the main part of this all is Shigure remembering that before Akito was born/in his life, he had always been sort of waiting for her, which is mostly the zodiac spirit talking but is also interesting nonetheless. How much of Shigure’s love is influenced by the zodiac curse? How much of it is him? I don’t know if we ever find that out, because frankly, the curse did a lot of things to everyone involved, including him.

I still love Shigure, don’t get me wrong, but this is SUCH an interesting episode.

Episode 3

Precisely the gif I wanted. Hehehe.

IT’S A MACHI EPISODE! AND I LOVE HER, SO THAT’S ALRIGHT!

Still pissed about Kyo’s screentime being so awful lately. ads;fkjsad;fklsda

Some student council shenangians occur as always, and it’s revealed that Nao has a crush on someone, which is why he declared Yuki to be his rival on day one. Also, Kimi is a golddigger.

Some girls come in and gossip about Machi making a mess again with one of her outbursts, and they mention a rumor about her trying to kill her brother, which is why she lives alone. Kakeru looks quite displeased to hear this, and Machi walks in on the conversation and runs away, with Yuki wanting to go after her. 

Kakeru tells Yuki later that the rumor is “mostly true”--that is, that’s the story he’s been told as well. Of course, he’s wary to believe it, because while they’re not terribly close, he knows her a little better than the parents do. He then tells a story of seeing Machi making footprints in the snow, almost obsessively, and he’s not quite sure why she did it (but Kakeru has a Shigure streak, so I wonder if maybe he does know?).

So Kakeru decides to pull a sort of jerk move and visit Machi while with Yuki, and she tries to turn them away to no avail. Of course, Yuki isn’t put off by the mess, since he and Shigure used to live that way, so he’s all cheerful about it while Machi is dying in the corner. I will not talk much about the bra incident, but that was honestly the most hilarious few seconds.

Finally left alone, Machi asks why Yuki is there, assuming it’s about the rumor her classmates mentioned. She says she’s done trying to correct everybody, since no one ever seems to believe her anyway. (That is all too relatable, especially in high school.)

But Yuki doesn’t even mind. He asks something else instead: does she hate perfection? And she says yes. TEN POINTS TO GRYFFINDOR.

Wait. My bad.

Anyway, Machi has a flashback to what I believe I’ve mentioned before, which is Machi’s mom forcing her to be perfect so that she could beat Kakeru in the succession war (England?) with her family. When that was called off, her mother would say right in front of her face (jerk) that Machi was boring. Machi asked her why she would say that when she was just trying to do what she was told. Her mother has the gall to be offended by the implication that it’s her fault (IT IS, YOU IDIOT--) and then turns around and says maybe she raised Machi wrong.

Here’s a hint: that’s not what you say to your CHILD.

Poor Machi didn’t know what to do with herself. What is she supposed to do if she’s just a “mistake” her mother made?

Yuki, in his cute way of knowing precisely what she means, tells her she’s worked hard to get where she is, and that he’s glad she’s here. She’s not used to compliments like that, and it’s a very sweet moment. That’s when she admits that she was just trying to take care of her brother, but her parents wrongly and automatically assumed she was jealous and trying to kill him (which says a lot about how god awful they are). And she’s finally able to let it out and cry with Yuki, who offers to go leave footprints in the snow with her.

My heart might’ve burst during that, not gonna lie--

I think my favorite part of the episode is the next day, during a student council meeting. A new, perfect box of chalk is placed in front of Machi, and you can see in her eyes that the perfection is about to make her snap. Yuki, knowing this, calmly reaches over and breaks a piece of chalk, ruining the “perfection” of it. It’s very sweet of him and a very cute moment for both.

Then we cut to Tohru handing Kyo a flower, which is whiplash to the previous episode I’m glad we got.

The next sequence was a bit confusing at first, as I thought we’d sort of covered this already in season one, but we get to see Motoko. She’s called Yuki out in order to tell him that he made her high school days happier, and that she truly loved him. Motoko also hopes that Yuki himself will find happiness, which I think is a nod at her recognizing Tohru’s influence on him. It’s kind of cute, because even Yuki seems to appreciate her words, and we get to cut to a nice graduation song that actually kind of made me cry.

Motoko is still in a classroom when someone finds her. It’s Nao, and it appears that she was the girl he was in love with, which I LOVE. I HOPE HE OR SHE OR THEY ARE HAPPY TOGETHER OR EVEN APART, JUST THAT HE EVENTUALLY GOT TO TELL HER OR SOMETHING AND AHHHHHH. He tells her that goodbye is not the end, and it always leads to “nice to meet you,” which is sweet for both of them, considering her graduation and his being left behind.

Then we get to meet Hiro’s baby sister, Hinata, a true cutie pie. I think I cried here, too, for different reasons.

Finally, we see Kagura having picked up Rin’s diploma (YAY SHE GRADUATED YAYYYY), and wondering where she is despite her mother’s warnings not to investigate. Hatori and Shigure are a bit suspicious, too, and we see Akito with a pair of scissors.... OwO

[I know what happened and I hate it.]

I’m glad I could finally do these, it’s been a couple of weeks of hell, to be honest. Hopefully, Fruits Basket will be back at it again and I’ll have something more to wax poetic about, haha. Thanks for reading!

[amisbro]

If UtaPri had/gets a 5th season...

What would it look like? So this is a question I have thought about for a while because of the fact that I think a lot of people (Myself included) believe there is more of a story to tell in the world of UtaPri.  I think with enough time we could get a very interesting idea for a season and honestly I think WHATEVER this project we got coming up actually IS could be an interesting testing ground for something. Let me explain

So if we think about how Season 4 ended it seemed rather definitive.  Like the way that message was wrote made you believe ,to a degree, that the series had ended as far as an Anime project.  Then we got the end card AFTER that and that kind of made things turn on its head cos no one knew what that was supposed to be until 6th stage happened right? One thing that always stands out to me is the fact that Season 4 was a bit of a mess and I say that in the most objective and neutral way possible because...when you have an Anime that is based on a Manga we typically get a story based around that in some fashion.  It might not be panel for panel and word for word but we get one and that is always fun to see how certain scenes get animated for sure.  When you do an Anime based on an Otome game you almost always do whomever is considered the “true route” or just leave it open ended so people will want to play the games (which is what I think DiaLovers did when it had its run). UtaPri has a very interesting situation because the series DOES have an idol component (and the Anime made sure to really focus on that mostly) but it is also an Otome game so the studio (A-1 Pictures) had that to work off of for the most part.  The problem is that when they were done with the material they DID USE it created a problem because Season 4 was a mess if I am being as objective as possible about it. So here was the problem You had 3 groups in play here STARISH QUARTET NIGHT HEAVENS Forget whom your group was for a second...this was going to be a problem because 2 of the 3 groups had content that was used in the first 3 seasons but Season 4 was going to be a problem.  How this would have been remedied I have no fucking idea!  Like if Broccoli knew they were going to do this season they needed to get something out BEFORE IT so people would have had something to go off of for HEAVENS so we could have had 7 episodes that made sense instead of episodes where it felt like they didn’t know how to have the HEAVENS member that was being featured in it not look like a complete ass!  If we are honest this is what happened and its frustrating to remember One of the biggest issues with the season was that you had a group that HAD been Antags during Season 2.  I said HAD because I genuinely believe that the marching orders for A-1 was to write a season where STARISH was still THE focus but HEAVENS could be rehabbed into a group that was more “likable/marketable” so when the time came to sell CDs and merch that they would fly off the shelves and could be a contender to at least QN if not both them and STARISH.  As we saw during the Oricon charts it was a puzzling time because the duet CDs sold like garbage in the sense that only TWO our the 7 actually charted in the top 10 Ren/Van - Lovely Eyes Syo/Yamato - Justice Impulse This was the most puzzling thing I ever dealt with because I tried to figure out WHY and to this day the best thing I could come up with is the fact that the CD releases were slated to come 10 days after the episode aired which seemed like the dumbest thing to do (IMHO) because when I looked at Season 3 all of the releases charted in the top 10 and a big reason for that was the gap between CD/Episode was only 4 days...well we got to QN and HEAVENS’ CDs they did VERY WELL in Season 4 and its because of how close they released them (I think) to the episodes...funny how that works! What was really weird also was during the “Duet Project” episodes the writers didn’t know WHO to make the focus of the episodes and that was weird BUT ,looking back on it, this whole season was gonna be weird because of how quickly the season was coming in the turnaround vs. its normal time for a season.  Typically a UtaPri season gets a 2 year window and this time they were going under that...about a year and 4 months so this was going to cause a crunch and also a mess of a message as to what the writers wanted to do!  I personally believe that the writers wanted to make HEAVENS all the more sympathetic and they were able to get SOME of the backstories in that they could for certain characters but a few others (Nagi and Eiichi for example) “kind of” tried to show you the “why they were acting the way they were” but it felt (at least Internationally) that the episodes didn’t register or if they did not as well as they hoped.  I do wonder if a big reason that the content is as out of sorts in terms of balance for HEAVENS vs. the other two groups is because of how jacked up that season got.  I genuinely wish I could sit down and discuss that season with someone that was in the room when they were given the orders on how that season was supposed to go vs. what actually happened after the fact! So this brings me back to the “What would a 5th Season look like if we got/get one in the future?” The weird thing is I think A-1 already knows but they have to get the reference materials FIRST before they start writing it.  I genuinely think they saw/heard about what happened Internationally when it came to the “NEXT DOOR” saga and they didn’t want to see that happen again so NOW they want to work on these projects to get the idea other there right now that all the groups are separated as first we have STARISH and then no doubt QN but the big question of course is HEAVENS...can they do a concert with them at some point with hopefully more songs under their belt OR will Broccoli start to really consider them a lost cause and that the fandom just doesn’t want them.  You can only go with the “Round peg/Square Hole” philosophy so much before people get mad and don’t want to deal with the series (or at the very least HEAVENS) anymore. The other big issue is HEAVENS’ role in Dolce Vita because, As of this writing, we still don’t know ANYTHING about that game...like we don’t know if its a straight up VN or is there going to be something similar to the original La Corda back in the day which ,fun fact time, had Kishou and Mamo in it.  Like if anyone would know how a game like that worked it would be them (And they ARE in the new game “Starlight Orchestra” btw) so they HAVE to have had given some input about how the mechanics worked and all that...right?! (Oh and unrelated but Kishou’s original character in Len Tsukimori is a special character in that game.  He was unlocked through a campaign we had in that fandom a bit ago) So again...what would Season 5 look like? Well my guess is that it would have to be a STARISH/HEAVENS season again but with new duets unlike last time.  The other possibility (And I think they were teasing this at the end of Season 4) is that it would somehow be a HEAVENS/QN season which could be interesting especially if they did something like how Season 2 was probably supposed to go...and in a way didn’t because of how the story worked. The thing is its been almost 5 years since we had a proper season...FIVE! Let’s assume that the “Anime Project” as we know it is over alright?  STARISH and QN’s brand is already established so what do you use to help HEAVENS’ get on the same level?  That’s a big reason why I don’t think they could/should end the “Anime Proper” because to do that you literally would be cutting off a way to properly market a group that actually needs it vs. the groups that clearly don’t.  I won’t go so far as to say that the STARISH/QN Animated concerts are going to be “Vanity Projects” because they aren’t.  They are clearly something that Broccoli believed in as far as a project to do for the series BUT I will say that having 7th Stage so close to this project is a bit...weird?! Like okay to be fair this probably was planned well in advance and the Pandemic fucked everything up because it was supposed to be announced at 7th stage in 2020...okay cool fine but let’s say it was right?  What stopped them from revealing it at 10th Anniversary when it would have been a bigger “Holy Shit” moment?  What was really so important that they had to do EVERYTHING ELSE and not that?  Just seemed weird to me. But anyways HOLY SHIT did we go around the block here...I need to stop If you were going to script out a proper 5th season when would you do it and how?  The thing to remember is we have a 3 group scenario and now HEAVENS is trying to become an even better group to finally beat STARISH and QN so do you have QN and HEAVENS do a thing together or do you do a 3 cour season where each is dedicated to a particular group? Love to hear your answers on this and take care

[kuriboo]

Aerial Twist

Fandoms: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga), Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's, Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V Words: 2,090 Characters: Kaiba Mokuba, Akaba Reira, Izayoi Aki Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Pre-Canon, Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Family, this is post arc v and pre 5ds, and takes place in the early duel monsters manga, Arcadia Movement, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Future, Panic Attacks, Trauma, we use dub names here but only most of the time I apologize in advance, Links in Notes

When Kaiba told Mokuba he was meeting with the CEO’s younger brother, Mokuba felt a little insulted. Even if they were the same age, Mokuba was KaibaCorp’s VP, and Riley held no position within the Leo Corporation. This was glorified babysitting while the ‘grown ups’ talked.

He never should have underestimated them.

The vice-presidential position included a lot of duties in its job description, but babysitting was not one of them.

To be honest, Mokuba felt a little insulted. He oversaw a lot of important projects within KaibaCorp, and usually wasn't involved with any big meetings with other corporations. Either that was Seto’s thing, or they both were too important and busy to get involved. So when Seto told Mokuba he was needed for a meeting with the Leo Corporation, he was surprised. When Seto told him he was seeing the CEO's younger brother, he wasn't happy. As the VP of KaibaCorp, Mokuba was aware of the hierarchies of many of the corporations his brother did business with. Even if he and Riley were around the same age, Riley held no position within the Leo Corporation . This was glorified babysitting while the ‘grown ups’ talked. 

What did a kid their age who didn't help run one of the biggest companies in the world do? Before Seto acquired KaibaCorp, Mokuba spent most of his time being bullied and being rescued from bullies by Seto. Sure, he liked to duel and play capsule monsters and stuff, but that didn't mean Riley would. He'd never met Riley in/person before, so he didn't know what to expect. 

Eventually, Reiji Akaba brought Riley into Mokuba’s office himself. He introduced himself as well as Riley to Mokuba. Then he bent down to Riley's level and calmly told Riley they would be spending time with Mokuba until he returned. Once he was sure Riley was okay with that, he left to attend his meeting with Seto.

The two of them were alone. 

"I'm Mokuba." Mokuba had no idea whether to offer Riley a handshake or not. Riley stared at him blankly, not seeming to expect one." To be honest, I don't know what we're supposed to be doing,” Mokuba admitted. Talk business? Play with cars?

Riley shrugged. "Don't know." 

Well, great, this was already going well. 

Unfortunately Mokuba couldn't give up on this meeting altogether. Seto had warned Mokuba to leave a good impression with Riley; leaving a good impression with Riley meant leaving a good impression with Reiji, and good impressions were everything. Mokuba had to do his best to like, make friends and interact. Ew. He had to think of something.

"Do you like dueling?”

"Uh huh." 

"Do you want to duel now?" 

This was a more difficult question for Riley to answer. It took them over a minute to think. "Okay." 

Well, for being such a hesitant duelist, Riley sure was a good one. Not better than Mokuba, of course. He liked the occasional Ritual Monster (Hungry Burger was a given), but he was mostly a dragon user. It was hard not to be a fan of dragons when your brother was Seto Kaiba. At least Mokiba had some monsters to help set himself apart. But while Mokuba’s deck used a lot of special summoning, Riley's was on a whole other level. Fusion, XYZ, they had it all. Mokuba wouldn't be surprised if they had any Ritual Monsters in there, too.

Mokuba still had the upper hand, obviously, but he never should have underestimated his opponent.

The duel never got to end. 

At the sound of glass shattering, Mokuba immediately was alert. The glass came from the big window in his office -- it was supposed to be bulletproof, and he didn't work on the ground floor, but somehow this wasn't the first time this had happened. He'd been kidnapped enough times to know a kidnapping attempt when he saw one. Who was after him? Why now? He was the middle of very important work with a business partner. At least they should wait until Mokuba was alone. That’s Kidnapping 101! He turned to the window, but he couldn't immediately see anyone there. 

Mokibar looked towards Riley. They were staring at the broken glass, their hands covering their ears. Tears were forming in their eyes as they dropped to the floor. 

This was all going to leave a really bad impression on the Leo Corporation.

At least both of them still had their duel disks. Maybe they could duel their way out of this. 

Vines covered in thorns stretched through the hole in the window and into Mokuba’s office. Someone climbed up and jumped into the room. The way their face was covered by a mask prevented Mokuba from knowing if he recognized them or not.

"Who are you?” Mokuba demanded.

"I am the Black Rose Witch.” 

A stranger, then. Mokoba forced himself to relax. “If you want to meet with me or my brother, you'll have to make an appointment with our secretaries. Both of us have very busy schedules; as you can see, I'm in the middle of an important meeting.”

“I don't need an appointment with the likes of you," the witch said, as they turned their face in Riley's direction. Tears were falling down Riley's face uncontrollably, but they seemed to be trying to pull their hands away from their ears. “Besides, this meeting does not seem so important." 

Mokuba rolled his eyes. So the witch thought they were above everyone else, but that was nothing new to him. He grew up with Seto Kaiba. "So if you don't want an appointment, what are you here for, then?" 

“I am here on behalf of the Arcadia Movement.”

"Arcadia?" Mokuba blinked. He hadn’t been expecting that, though the plants made more sense now. "The psychic duelist group?" Cult, more like, but he had no interest in calling out his would-be kidnapper on that and aggravating them. Of course he knew about Arcadia. KaibaCorp knew about everything. 

“Psychic duelist?" Riley whispered. They didn't seem capable of much more than that. Mokuba was barely close enough to hear them.

"Duelists that can summon duel monsters and card effects to the real world,” Mokuba explained. "My brother doesn't believe in that stuff, but I'm not him. I mean, we do actually know a psychic duelist. Though they don't really call themself that.” He glared of the witch. “What do a bunch of psychic duelists want with me, anyway?"

“I told you, you are not the one I seek!” A violent wind started whipping through the room. There was no way the wind outside was this strong!

Mokobe reflexively lifted his duel disk in front of him. Yeah, that'll help a lot against a psychic duelist. "Then what do you want?"

“The Arcadia Movement is here for Riley Akaba.” The witch took a step towards Riley and Mokuba. The wind picked up, pulling cards from their duel disks and sending them flying around the room.

"The Leo Corporation apparently does a good job of making sure Riley is never alone, like a possession to be guarded. That's why we're here to free you. Of all the people you were to be around, Mokuba Kaiba, despite being the vice-president of Kaiba Corp, was determined to be the least threat, which is why we are here now.”

“Hey!” Mokuba  allowed himself only a moment to feel hurt by that. He knew he had to be the one to act, he was used to these situations while Riley still didn’t look like they were doing too well. This was weird, though. Mokuba was used to the one being kidnapped, but not so much to being there during the kidnapping while not being the target. What was he supposed to do? What could he do? He jumped in front of Riley, putting himself between them and the witch. "Not on my watch! You'll have to get through me to get to Riley.” 

The Black Rose Witch seemed unphased by Mokuba’s declaration (though it was hard to tell under their mask). They held up a card. "Ivy Shackles!" 

Mokuba felt himself thrown towards the side of the room. He couldn't stop the scream that flew out of him. He didn't feel himself make contact with the wall, but the next thing he knew he was next to it, tangled up in a bunch of plants. This must be the Ivy Shackles, huh? 

Riley turned to look at Mokuba. Tears were still falling down their face, slowly now. Yeah, this was going to leave a great impression. At this rate, Kaiba Corp would never get to speak to the Leo Corporation again, Shakily, Riley stood up on their feet. As they looked at Mokuba, he saw something change in their eyes. A darkness appeared that he hadn't seen before now.

The witch took a step towards Riley. 

Riley's head snapped back in the witch's direction. One remained in their Extra Deck; Riley looked down as if as if he were listening to something, then drew the card out of their duel disk. "Psychic duelist... " They stared at the card as they held it in their hand. “Dark Rebellion Supreme King Dragon, I need help.” 

A huge dragon curled itself around Riley, roaring; there was bavely enough room for it in Mokuba’s office. Riley placed one of their hands against it. It was as real as the Ivy Shackles of the Black Rose Witch. The dragon bent its head towards Mokuba. Mokuba flinched, not knowing what to expect, but the dragon used its mouth to tear away the Ivy Shackles and free him.

The Black Rose Witch took a step back. “You’re..." 

“I don't need your help. I don't need to be freed." They bared their teeth, scowling at the witch. "I want to be here! I want to be with my brother and my friends. This is what I want!” 

Dark Rebellion Supreme King Dragon stepped around Mokuba and Riley before roaring at the witch, swiping at them with its claws. Pretty soon the witch was retreating, even though Mokuba had the feeling they could have fought back. He wondered if they would come back, if they would go after Riley again.

Mokuba looked to Riley again. He could still see that darkness there, but it was disappearing. Now he couldn't believe the way he'd looked down on them , how incompetent he'd thought they were when they first walked into his office.

"I'm not being watched because I need to be guarded. It's because I'm dangerous.” 

“Uh, thanks," he said weakly.

The door to Mokuba’s office flew open. "What happened?" Reiji ran into the room; the commotion must been able to be heard in Seto's office, then. Reiji ran to Riley's side to check on them. He did not appear phased by the giant real dragon in the room that disappeared the second Riley saw him. 

“I am so sorry, we should have better security than this,” Mokuba immediately said. "I did my best--"

Reiji silenced Molaba with a look. His expression was hard to read. "I am not mad with you." Reiji was able to quickly  tell that Riley was unharmed. 

“Someone tried to kidnap me," Riley told Reiji. "But Mokuba and I were able to chase them away.” 

Mokube really hadn't been able to do much besides getting smacked around, but at the moment he didn't have it in him to protest. 

He blinked, and Seto was by his side. His brother had come, too. "Mokuba, what happened?" 

“It was Arcadia.” A wave of exhaustion was hitting Mokuba. He hadn't realized it until it really hit him that they were safe now. 

Selo frowned. He looked closely at Mokuba. "This meeting is over. You need to get checked out”

“I'm fine," Mokuba protested. He wasn't so weak that he needed to be helped with every little thing. Reiji and Riley Akaba were right there. This was embarrassing.

Seto rolled his eyes. “You’re covered in scratches and you hit your head against the wall. I won't let you take chances with your health like this, Mokuba." 

Did he hit his head against the wall? Mokuba didn't remember that happening, but his head did hurt. The scene melted away for a second. For just a moment it wasn't KaibaCorp’s president checking on his vice president after an attack during a business meeting. It was Seto and Mokuba alone in the world, Seto checking on Mokuba after a bully came after him. Mokuba tried not to tear up. He hadn't thought about those days in a long time. He’d hardered up since those days, a conscious effort to become more self-reliant. Seto had changed since then, too. 

But in all the time that had passed, Seto still had Mokuba’s back when he needed it. In all that had changed, they hadn't lost each other.

[imnobodyuknow]

Surprise!!!

I’d just like to take a moment to remind you of something that’s been way too easy to forget lately: life is good.

This is a little something I’ve been working on while not working on other things (hence why it took so long), and now, here it is in all its Vocaloidy glory!

As explained in my first Vocaloid drawing, these musical characters are the mascots for the Character Vocal Series made by Crypton Future Media, Inc.  As far as I’m aware, no official manga, anime, or other piece of media exists that stars any of them as the main characters -- not yet, anyway -- but this hasn’t stopped people from making all sorts of fan art about them, so I decided I may as well contribute some of my own.  In this picture, you can see each of the four most well-known characters enjoying life in their own special way.

In the top-left corner, Hatsune Miku is listening to the sweet sound of music though her iconic headphones.

What sort of music she’s listening to is up to your imagination.  Maybe it’s hip-hop, maybe it’s an orchestral piece, or maybe it’s one of her own songs, such as this recently-released masterpiece.  Whatever it is, it’s enough to bring a smile to her face, which I imagine is true of most music anyway.

In the top-right corner, Megurine Luka is enjoying the texture of a brand new winter scarf.  She isn’t wearing it for the warmth, as you may have guessed from her bare arms -- she just likes how it feels.  I also like to imagine it was given to her as a gift, which adds another layer of “warmth” to it (as evidenced by the hearts around her).

In the bottom-left corner, Kagamine Len is viewing a beautiful landscape through his binoculars, which happen to be a bit small for his huge eyes, but still do the trick just fine for him.

I actually drew the eye on the right side a little too high, but I fixed that problem through the magic of Microsoft Paint, so just pretend you didn’t read this part.  ; )

And finally, in the bottom-right corner, we have Kagamine Rin enjoying a bite of pepperoni pizza, as well as the smell and taste of every separate ingredient -- tomato sauce, cheese, bread, and pepperoni.

Her picture sort of reminds me of the movie Ratatouille, now that I think about it.

My main goal for this drawing was to work on facial expressions and color effects, but I also just wanted to add some personality to these well-known but mostly hollow characters.  All we really know about that them as that they can sing and dance beautifully, so it’s a lot of fun (especially for creative folks like me) to fill in some of the unknown details.  In this case, I decided to depict their reactions to some of their favorite parts of life.

And of course, as previously stated, I also wanted to create a visual reminder of how good is to be alive.  Whether you’re jamming to one of your favorite songs, feeling great physically or emotionally, taking in the visual beauty of creation, or having a pleasant culinary experience, there’s always something in life that can (and should) be appreciated.  God sure knew what He was doing, didn’t He?

Miku, Len, and Rin’s pictures were all based on the same ones I used before (from their box art):

Luka, on the other hand, was based on an artwork whose creator I haven’t been able to identify.  If any of you happen to know who it is, please inform me, ‘cause I think it’s gorgeous.

Happy living, everyone!

[elencelebrindal]

Honest Opinion - Scorpio Milo (Hades)

Buckle up, this is going to be a roller coaster of emotions.  Also yes, the Italian dub kept his Italian classic name, Scorpio, though his voice actor changed (his main and best one, Enrico Carabelli, unfortunately passed away).

Overall score (character, not looks): 20/10 Can you tell I love him? Good.

Hades Chapter: Sanctuary

Overall score: 20/10

If you’re thinking “hey, this is not a honest opinion if you play favorites like this”, think again. In this series Milo was one of the absolute best characters I’ve ever seen.  His personal growth and characterization since the classic series was absolutely spot on, and he never got involved into any shenanigans.  But let’s start from the beginning. 

Kanon’s redemption.  One of the best scenes I’ve ever seen in this entire franchise, especially regarding the behavior of its characters. The only thing I was pissed off at was the fact that people not familiar with the manga (I’m talking about Kanon saving Athena from Poseidon) might not get what the hell was really going on with Kanon being so ready to protect Athena.  And that’s it.  Milo was so good in this part. I loved how, instead of following Athena’s request from the get go, he wanted to make sure Kanon wasn’t dangerous. I loved how his personality showed through, as he attacked him to get him out of the Sanctuary dead or alive.  It’s not like he was disobeying Athena; he knew Kanon wanted to kill her and almost succeeded, so it makes sense he was angry as all hell at him. 

And all his dialogues... with the Italian dub making every line somewhat solemn, this scene was amazing. Milo’s internal monologue about Kanon not responding to his attacks was absolutely beautiful, and you could tell the exact moment he stopped seeing Kanon as an enemy and started testing his resolution.  I think the whole ordeal showed us how clever and smart Milo actually is, how faithful to his goddess he can be, and how high he holds the standards of a Gold Saint.  It got to the point I didn’t even know if Milo wanted to really kill him or if he was bluffing. I loved that. 

Him telling Kanon something along the lines of “I don’t see any traitors here, only a battle companion” was the last bit of dialogue I needed from him to decide he is the best of all the twelve Gold Saints objectively. This is the Italian quote:

Non vedo alcun traditore qui, ma solo un compagno di battaglia. Si chiama Kanon di Gemini, un coraggioso Cavaliere d'oro

He not only let Kanon live, but he forgave him and recognized him as one of his fellows. That is so genuinely kind and understanding, I can’t even comprehend this level of acceptance. He saw the good in Kanon’s heart, and decided “hey, maybe we could get along”. That might be the best thing I’ve ever witnessed a character on Saint Seiya do (aside from Shun). 

And now, onto the fight against the resurrected Saints.  Can I bring to your attention, right off the bat, how painful had to be for him? I didn’t bring this up with Mu and Aiolia because none of them had any particular ties with those three (if anything, Aiolia should have been deadly mad at Shura and Saga), but Milo? I’m not bringing any kind of shipping and/or fanon stuff into this, but Milo and Camus are canonically (thanks to the classic anime, so from then onward) very close friends.  Would you even dare telling me that Milo, upon seeing his friend (who was previously killed by Hyoga and by his own decision to let Hyoga go) sided with Hades, took it lightly and without a care in the world. I know that entire fight showed us a - mostly - indifferent and angry Milo, but seriously. If your best friend died, and you suddenly see him fighting against you, would you be that indifferent?

Yeah, I thought so.  But I loved that they showed Milo as angry. Even if there hasn’t been a care in the world for any kind of other realistic reactions, I thoroughly enjoyed (and by enjoyed I mean I was looking at the screen with the most heartbroken expression I could muster) it.  Also, let’s not forget he was mad about Shaka’s death as well.  And he was clever  - and a tad bit suicidal to be honest - enough to suggest using the Athena Exclamation to retaliate the resurrected Saints’ attempt at fighting back using it again.  Reasonable? Absolutely not (which is kind of a good thing, because have you ever been reasonable while hurt?). Effective? Hell yeah. 

And this brings us to the very next scene, when Athena gave up her life. I’m not going to lie, I was a little upset at Milo here.  And at the other Gold Saints. I think I forgot to talk about this in their entries... They literally saw Athena willingly hand the gold dagger to Saga and willingly accept her death, but still wanted to kill their “enemies”.  But as much as I’m upset, I’m also understanding of that reaction; they were so hurt, Milo maybe even more than them, that I get why their reaction was to obliterate who led to Athena’s death.  God, that scene of Milo crying while strangling Camus destroyed me. More so because I kept thinking “is he crying just because Athena died or is he crying also because he had to kill Camus?”.  I don’t think my over-emotional stressed-over-exams brain took it well. 

Damn, i just loved how Milo’s personality played a huge role in this thing. 

But are we done? Nope. There’s still the fight against Rhadamanthys. There’s still the amount of determination he put into that futile attempt at defeating him.  Milo put his life on the line to protect the Bronze Saints and give them enough time to reach the Underworld, knowing he wasn’t going to survive with his cosmo completely drained.  It’s the same thing I said for Mu and Aiolia, but with him... I don’t know, with the amount of emotional pain he has to have gone through, that seemingly selfless decision didn’t look like that selfless. My mind took the darkest turn it could have ever taken and told me “what if he doesn’t care if he dies, at this point, since he has really nothing to lose anymore?” and I just... you know the windows xp error sound? That’s the sound my brain made. 

Anyways, he went straight to Hell, so everything’s just an assumption.

Hades Chapter: Inferno

Overall score: 20/10

Same thing for him: he gave up his life in order to save Athena and the world, so that full score is fully deserved. It’s a 20 because my opinion is honest but also biased by my love for him. I gave everyone else full points, leave me alone if I want to cheat my own system every once in a while. 

Also, can we appreciate how happy he looked? How proud he was of what he accomplished as a Saint? This man was about to sacrifice his life, yet he still smiled. This can also be said of the other Gold Saints, it’s an incredible detail.  Milo already had a special place in my heart, but this series made me love him even more. 

[thatoneitaliangirl]

Obey Me! Soulmate AU’!~ Leviathan

This one I really like! Its a bit longer than the other two. Also, I’m confirming here and now that I’m definitely making part two’s because this one is far from over! OH! And SPOILERS FOR THE GAME I just got to the part where they explain that Satan was born from Lucifer’s anger, like- wasn’t expecting that! I mean, I remember them mentioning that Satan wasn’t there when they were angles, but I never thought he was born that way. Interesting!~ Also also, I’m not sure if I wrote Satan’s character all that well. He’s next up and I’m a bit nervous about writing for him, but I’ll do my best!! 

Link to Opening Paragraph. 

Leviathan

Having spent most of the day searching for Mammon's soulmate, the seven brothers reluctantly went back to the Devildom to regain strength and think of a more efficient way of searching for the next day. And take showers, because, as Asmodeus had stated previously, the sun was HOT. Nervousness wracked Leviathan's body to the point where he couldn't even work up the nerve to play a video game.

All he could do was lay on his bed and stare at the ceiling, thinking about what his soulmate would be like. Lucifer's was a beautiful, energetic ghost hunter with a tendency to babble, Mammon's was their human exchange student, though there was no surprise there. The two of them were crushing so hard on each other, that the other brothers had almost broken a few times and shoved them in a closet together.

Or maybe that was just Levi? He'd seen it in a couple of anime before and in the end, the two lovers always end up confessing and sharing their first kiss. Was that what meeting his soulmate was gonna be like? Poor Levi barely slept a wink that night. And now, as the other brothers discuss plans for the new day, he still can't think about anything but his soulmate. What is she gonna be like? Will she like anime and manga just like him? Or will she be a boring normie like his brothers?

She is supposed to be his soulmate, so it would really suck if she didn't like Ruri-chan! What if she's never even heard of anime? Then he gets to teach her all about it! "Levi, are you even listening?" Levi jumps, not expecting to hear Lucifer's voice calling out his name. Usually, that means something bad is about to happen . . . "Uh, no, I spaced out." Lucifer sighs.

"As I was saying, Lord Diavolo has made special arrangements for us in the human world. Given his kind and generous nature, he has called in a few favors to help us navigate the human world much faster and through more secretive means. Us getting caught could mean exposure of both the Devildom and Magic and could have devastating effects." "How kind of Lord Diavolo to grant his favorite such luxuries," Satan speaks up as he takes a sip of his beverage.

"Yes. Lord Diavolo's generosity knows no bounds. Now, with that settled, we leave in an hour. I suggest you get your ducks in a row and prepare yourselves. Levi, we find your soulmate next." They leave the breakfast table one by one, all heading to their respective rooms to 'prepare', whatever that means. Levi sure doesn't know what it means.

Does he shower again? Change his clothes? Would he look more presentable in his school uniform or his normal clothes? What if she hates him . . . I mean, he is an otaku. While he takes pride in that, he's not oblivious to the negativity otaku's receive in the human world.

They're generally looked down upon, and though he can take the criticism from his brothers, from the girl that's supposed to love him . . . He doesn't know if he can handle that. Taking his handheld gaming device off its charger, Levi places it into a small bag along with extra games and a manga to read in case he gets bored. Who knows how long their gonna be in the human world this time. Should he take a change of clothes?

Deciding it best, he folds up some clothes and places them into the bag and throws it over his shoulder. He doesn't think that it's been an hour, maybe twenty minutes, but he heads out towards the dining room anyway and places his stuff down. A loud commotion in the kitchen spikes his curiosity, so he follows the noise to find his three brothers, Mammon, Satan, and Beelzebub.

"What's going on?" Satan looks up at Levi with anger in his eyes. Levi has known his brother long enough to not take it personally. The anger is not directed towards him. "What's going on is that the 'help' Lord Diavolo gave Lucifer is a portal key!" Satan sighs at Levi's confused face.

"It's a key that allows us to go anywhere in the human world we want. I've been trying to get my hands on one for years, and now I find out that Lord Diavolo has had one just laying on his desk this whole time?!" He begins to pace, a sure sign that his anger is getting out of control. It's his attempt to try and calm himself before things escalate.

"The worst part is that he didn't even know what it was until that sneaky little butler of his told him to give it to Lucifer!" Mammon, not quite understanding that this was Satan's time to rant, cuts in. "What's so special about it anyway? Sure, it gets us to where we're going, but why do you find it so important?

The only use it could ever have to me is a pretty penny at the pawnshop!" He says, laughing. Satan glares at him. "It's not because it's worth something that I want it. It's because its made with one of the purest forms of magic from the human world! Not even Soloman would be able to comprehend the intricacies it takes to make such an item.

It's the craftsmanship, the number of years a human puts into making the keys, the effort they exert! A fragile human making something so powerful and beautiful? Hardly heard of!" Levi rolls his eyes. "Don't roll your eyes at me! How many times have you gone off on a tangent about some video game and forced all of us to listen?" Levi scoffs.

"That's different!" "Not really . . . " The sixth brother Beelzebub speaks up, crumbs falling from his mouth. "Whatever! It doesn't matter anyway. All that does matter is that we have the key now. The faster we find our . . . Soulmates, the better." Mammon laughs obnoxiously while sitting on the counter.

"Good for you, guys! I think I'm gonna hit up a human world casino! My luck seems to be off the walls, so naturally, I'm gonna bring home some intense bacon!" "Absolutely not." The brother's pale as the stern voice of Lucifer breaks through Mammon's stupid laugh. The second-born grunts. "And why not? I found my human!"

"And so have I, but that doesn't mean I'm going to let you wander around the human world by yourself. And that goes for everybody. You are all going no matter who you find, so I can keep my eyes on you at all times. Understood?" Satan tsks, and crosses his arms, still slightly ticked off about the key. But, they all agree, mostly because Mammon set loose in the human world sounds like the Biblical Apocolypse.

After the seven brothers finish up getting ready, Lucifer gathers them in the dining room. "This key was given to us by Lord Diavolo. It's true that he . . . Didn't actually know what it did . . . But none the less, we should still keep is safe to return it to him when we're done. Any questions?" The brothers shake their heads, Satan still upset but not wanting to cause another argument.

"Good. Levi, I believe it is your turn." Lucifer hands a confused Levi the shiny golden key. With a deep breath, Levi enters the key into the lock on the kitchen door (put there by Lucifer when Beel's sleep-eating was bad a few years ago) and thinks of a place. A lab of some sort . . . With white walls and lots of windows. Leviathan turns the key and opens the door, revealing crispt white walls and blue-tiled floors.

They all enter, skeptical of where exactly the key led them. "What is this place?" Mammon wonders, scrunching his nose. "It smells terrible." "Sorry, sorry! That would be the bleach!" A voice with an English accent speaks from down the hall and startles them.

"_____ and Joshua spilled a whole tub of vinegar in the main hall yesterday and bleach seems to be the only thing that gets rid of the smell." A man wearing a long white coat comes walking out of one of the rooms along the long hallway and extends his hand.

Lucifer shakes it hesitantly. The man pushes up his smart-looking glasses and smiles at the brothers. "My name is Damian, and I run this floor of Greenville Labs. What can I do for you gentleman?" Levi steps forward, slightly nervous. "We're looking for someone . . . I think you just mentioned her." "_____?" Levi nods.

"Ahh, what has she done this time?" Damian shakes his head and gestures for the men the follow him to the room he had just come out of. "Whatever it is, I'll pay for the damages. No need to get the cops involved."

Levi scratches the back fo his neck and laughs nervously. What kind of person is this girl? "Actually, she didn't do anything . . ." "Oh? Well, that's good. You're probably here about her project then?" "No-" "Yes, that's exactly why we're here." Lucifer agrees, placing his hand on Levi's shoulder.

"Good, good! Uh, disregard what I said before then hehe. They are good kids! When they want to be." The sound of a door slamming and heavy footsteps echo in the hall as Damian's eyes widen. "Oh, Be careful, I just washed the- floor . . ." A young boy comes running in and slips, falling on his backside.

"Ha! Dumbass- gah!" A girl walks in, slipping and falling in the same spot. Damian sighs. "I present to you, Dumb and Dumber." A hand reaches up from the floor and slams on the desk, pulling the girl up.

"What does that make you, Damian? Dumbest?" She pulls herself up the rest of the way and straightens out her clothes. "I mean, who washes the floor and DOESN'T put a wet floor sign!" "To be fair, the only reason it HAD to be washed was because of that rediculous stunt you and Joshua pulled!"

"I thought that was hilarious actually," Joshua says, standing up and leaning on _____. This makes Leviathan's blood boil. He can feel it in his bones; this girl is his soulmate. Who does this normie think he is, touching HIS soulmate?!

"Whatever, I've got stuff to do, levels to beat, Joshua to leave crying like a little baby after I kick his ass in Super Smash Bros. Later losers!" _____ pulls Joshua by the hand out of the lab. Lucifer sighs. This ones gonna be a handful.

[charmspoint]

Got tagged by @autumn-foxfire to do this ask game :3c

Name your top 5 favorite anime/manga! (or cartoons/shows if you’re not into anime and manga)

Here we go!

 1.      Beastars – Haru is right there in my profile pic you can't expect anything else. The anime is perfectly fine and I adore the op and the ed but it’s the manga where it’s really at. It remains one of the only manga where I could consistently keep up despite not being hugely involved with the fandom and I adore the world, I adore the characters and most of all I adore the expressions. The anime really suffers from having to be pretty and not allowing for the amount of stupid goat faces Louis makes, or Legosi’s puppy excitability or Haru just being a fucking wierdo. The only complaint I have is that I wish the girls got more screen time, they are amazing every time they appear I just wish they had more of a chance to. Especially Juno, Juno really suffered from being just dropped out of the plot. Also one of the lions’ should have been Louis’ age so they could have been gay together, like ye Louis’s ending makes sense but you will never be able to take away ‘I feel more at ease surrounded by male carnivores then with a female herbivore’, just let Louis be gay oh my god, even his fucking dad saw it. Anyway Beastars is great and I love it very much and I am very sad it’s done ;-;

 2.      Re: Creators – I have very conflicted opinions about this one, despite it being number two. I really owe it an objective rewatch because the second part of it really slapped me in the face with the sudden boatload of fanservice so much that it soured my opinion on it through the rest of the show. Paired with both of my favs getting the short end of the stick in two different ways, by the end of Re Creators I was left with a rather bitter taste in my mouth so I really want to see how it holds up once I know what will happen. So why is it so high up if all I do is complain about it? The first part was just that amazing. It was the first and only time I watched an anime and felt ‘wow this was written for ME, this was written with someone like me in mind’. A story has never felt so personal and so lovingly crafted and I just adored every bit of it and god every time I think about the good aspects of it I want to sit down and rewatch it again to reevaluate the bad. In the end it felt personal, it felt like it was speaking to me and it felt heartfelt and cared for and that for me is something special. Also Magane really needs her own show, like I remember thinking ‘shes izaya but better’ and if that doesn’t scream she needs her own show I don’t know what does. Still bitter at the way they just dropped her at the end my god.

 3.      Durarara – This one has been a giant in my fandom experience. I wrote my first fanfiction for Durarara and one of very indulgent self-insert stories lead to me roleplaying in private for the first time and the person I roleplayed with eventually introduced me to group roleplay (Blu if ur reading this I love u <3) so it kinda lead to the way I’m mostly active in fandom today and some of my favorite OC’s originated from making Durarara OC’s not to mention Izaya remaining one of my favorite characters ever and someone who I look to whenever I want to make a fun villain. Durarara is a show that is filled with complex human interactions and at some points it really seems like a love letter to humanity. We are all weird, we all have our rich inner lives, even people who look ordinary get up to some stuff you would never have guessed, that’s what it feels like it’s saying. I don’t know there is no objective way to talk about it because it’s been so ingrained in my fandom experience it will simply always remain one of my favorites, no two ways about it. The fics I wrote for Durarara when I was a teen were cringy af and horribly planned but I received so much positive comments and support and I think that always remained a big part of why I kept on writing and why I felt that writing is something that I’m good at. Even now, knowing how bad they were it just motivates me more to keep on improving and whenever I feel down about my writing I always think ‘well people liked that trash and this is better so some people will like this too’. It’s also the reason why I can’t stand cringe culture, honestly I think I’m even more grateful to all the people who saw my baby fics went ‘yikes that’s edgy’ and then didn’t comment, those guys were the real troopers.

  4.      Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki- Kun – number four is where the going gets tough because of my poor memory and differentiating shows I watched, remembered and liked, from shows that left some kind of impact. Nozaki-kun is a dumbass comedy anime/manga and it’s the only manga I can remember ever making me consistently laugh at loud and I feel that that earns it number four spot well enough. The characters are all just lovable and stupid and lovably stupid, and I honestly can’t say there is a pair I dislike. Like it never feels like ‘oh its x character chapter yawn’ it’s always a fun time no matter what the matchup is. I don’t have anything smart to say about it, it makes me laugh, it’s a good time, it doesn’t take itself seriously I love it.

 5.      Servamp – this really shouldn’t be here because I stopped halfway through the manga and STILL haven’t caught up. But Servamp is the manga that’s constantly on my mind and I never stop thinking ‘man I really should catch up’. The only reason I haven’t is cuz I’m so terribly bad at reading stuff online even though the arc I left off was tense and I really want to know what happened with Tsurugi and Wrath was just given a time to shine and aaaaa one day I’ll catch up. There’s really nothing to say about this show, it’s dumbass vampire shonen and I’m really not sure why I like it so much. The character designs are fun and on point and anime is kinda horrible CUZ THEY DIDN’T PUT IN A WHOLE ARC WHO DOES THAT, but the op is delightfully edgy and the ed is a shameless high school theater style rip off of the kekkai sensen sen ed which is just amazing in how bad and awkward it is. This ed is such awkward dumb trash and I somehow just love it more for it, like it’s so bold about being a trashy rip off, bby what is you doing. Honestly I can’t say anything objective about this series cuz it’s been so long since I actually read it but it lives in my head rent free and that must count for something. Slaps gold star on.

I feel like I should also mention Bnha cuz its the fandom I’m most active in but hvhjvj I mostly like the fanside of BNHA rather than the show itself. For the show itself i think its good with some great moments but that’s about it. I’m just here for fan shit cuz hori made such a wonderful sandbox.

Imma tag @megacarapa @prince-liest @viiyverns-den @livie-stark @lanamnesis and honestly whoever else wants to do this because i dont feel like doing so many tags anymore, i just have a lot of people whos answers i’m interested in uwu

[mst3kproject]

The Star Wars Holiday Special

Happy Holidays, MSTies!  Your present is Episodes that Never Were are back!  Remember last year, when I said Elves was so bad I wished I’d watched the Star Wars Holiday Special instead?  Let’s find out what those words taste like.

The galaxy may be in the midst of a rebellion, but Chewbacca promised his family he will be back for Life Day, and god damn it, he’s gonna get there!  He and Han Solo dodge Imperial forces and asteroid fields on the way, but the real danger may be waiting for them at home, as Stormtroopers do a treehouse-to-treehouse search for rebel sympathizers.  It won’t be much of a holiday if Chewie arrives home only to be immediately arrested!

That sounds exciting, doesn’t it?  It even sounds like it could be made to mean something. There is perhaps a point here about inter-ethnic empathy – Life Day may be a Wookiee holiday, but Chewbacca’s alien friends still know how important it is to him and they’re gonna help him keep his promise.  We could also compare it to Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.  In that movie, the Martians want to celebrate Christmas but aren’t particularly interested in what it means.  They get all their information about it from pirated television and from children who don’t understand anything much more than ‘free stuff’.  We didn’t give Christmas to them, they literally stole it by kidnapping Santa.  In the Holiday Special, the Wookiees are sharing their cultural traditions with outsiders who have become part of their family – Leia’s speech at the ends notes the humans’ respect for this.

But none of that’s relevant, because this is just a bad 70’s variety hour in a Star Wars costume.  We don’t get to see claustrophobic scenes of our brave heroes hiding from the Storm Troopers.  We don’t get sweeping space battles or bickering robots or weird new planets… we don’t get anything we go to see Star Wars for.  Instead, we mostly watch the Wookiees sitting around their house passing the time as they wait helplessly for Chewbacca to get home.  This could have been neat in itself if Wookiees had an interesting culture, but they live in a Mod 70’s Treehouse and seem to spend most of their time watching television.  The brief opening sequence, in which Solo and Chewie outrun their pursuers in the Millennium Falcon, is just a tantalizing offer of chocolate on the tip of a giant turd.

The actual point of the show, as far as the people who produced it were concerned, was the various little musical numbers and comedy sequences along the way, some of which are more Star Wars-themed than others.  Most of these are presented as one or other of the characters watching them on some form of television, which often doesn’t make any sense.  The sequences themselves are usually not very well-presented and a lot of them are just downright boring, so let’s go through them one by one. Top up your eggnog, folks.  We may be here a while.

Our first setpiece is a holographic circus featuring jugglers and acrobats, which the adults use to distract Lumpy so he’ll stop bothering them – like parents at the mall letting their kids watch Paw Patrol on a tablet while they shop.  When you see televised circus acts, they’re usually filmed up close and at interesting angles, to heighten the sense of danger, and give you a good look at what’s going on.  The Star Wars Holiday Special presents it as tiny figures on a table, always shot from far away and looking down, which removes all the drama from the stunts.  Lumpy enlarges a figure, but it’s only the ringmaster.  The others remain tiny, all while this little Wookiee looms over them like a kaiju that will start stomping if it isn’t entertained.

Then we get Mark Hamill’s cameo (in which he looks weirdly like one of the puppets from Invaders from the Deep), followed by Malla’s attempt to cook Bantha Surprise by following the directions on a tv show.  I’m not very interested in cooking shows anyway, but I have a hard time imagining anybody being interested in a fake cooking show featuring fictional ingredients from other planets.  What we see on Malla’s screen comes across as a sort of parody, but not actually a funny one. I’m tempted to think Harvey Korman must have been making fun of some particular 70’s cooking show maven but I don’t begin to know who that might be.

The ‘humour’ of the sequence is supposed to come from Malla’s attempt to follow the directions even though the cook on the show has four arms and Malla only two.  I could pull some commentary on ableism in cooking and cooking shows out of this, but it would be a stretch, and nobody on the writing end was thinking about it that hard.  It’s just stupid, and so is Korman’s plastic wig.  Malla eventually turns it off in frustration, long after we’re tired of listening to it.

By the way, if you’re wondering whose stupid idea it was to set the whole thing on Kashyyyk (or, as a guy in the Special calls it, Kazook) and not have any subtitles to the Wookiee’s dialogue?  That was apparently 100% George Lucas.  The actual script and everything was in the hands of the television producers, but Lucas would not budge on the premise being Wookiee-centric.  At least he exorcised that particular demon here, instead of subjecting us to it on the big screen.

Anyway, next Art Carney drops by to deliver some Life Day presents, among which is the source of our next setpiece: a VR machine which reads Itchy’s mind to present a personalized fantasy!  This takes the form of Diahann Carroll in a sparkly feather wig, singing a song and saying things like “I am your fantasy, experience me!”  The song is okay, I guess, and Carroll has a lovely voice, but what we’re seeing is basically a boring music video.  She’s just standing there on a glittery black background, and we can’t forget that she’s singing to a geriatric Wookiee who is doing the Wookiee equivalent of jacking off to this (emphasized by the appearance of literal little swimmers in part of the sequence!).  The fact that it’s a personal fantasy plucked from his subconscious makes it feel like this was something we weren’t supposed to be privy to, like we’re looking through somebody else’s computer at his girlfriend’s nudes.

Princess Leia (also looking disturbingly puppet-like… are we sure the actual actors appeared in this, and not look-a-likes in heavy makeup?) and C3P0 get their cameo, and then there’s the single actually effective moment in the Special.  This is when we think Han Solo and Chewie are about to arrive home, ending our torment a full hour early, but no, it’s the Storm Troopers!  This bit isn’t fantastic, but it does work.  Then, sadly, we’re on to the next variety act.

This is a holographic music video which Carney shows to the Imperial troops as a demonstration that the device he has brought Malla for Life Day is harmless.  It’s Jefferson Starship moaning out a rock song, in which I can understand at best one word in three.  The visuals are in intense soft-focus that’s probably supposed to be artsy.  The costumes (what I can see of them) aren’t any more Star-Wars-y than anything else bands wore in the 70’s.  And the song sounds like something you’d find in the ‘easy’ setting on Rock Band.  Why does Black Helmet sit there and watch the whole thing when he’s supposed to be searching every house on Kashyyyk/Kazook for rebel sympathizers?

The version of the Special currently available on YouTube, which tragically lacks the commercials, has a lot of comments along the lines of this is what you hallucinate after buying Death Sticks from that guy on Coruscant.

To drive the point home, the next thing we see is Lumpy watching a cartoon about Han Solo and Chewbacca crash-landing on an ocean planet while searching for a mystical talisman that makes things invisible (I wish they hadn’t actually shown this object – then I could have made jokes about it being the One Ring).  This sequence is generally regarded as the best thing in the Special, and it introduced Boba Fett and provided some characterization for him.  It is definitely true that this is the only segment with a plot, and with its weird aliens and grubby outposts it feels a lot more like Star Wars than anything else going on here.

The main thing that keeps me from enjoying this segment is that it just looks weird.  The animators use exaggerated squash-and-stretch on the droids, even more so than on the living characters, which makes them look like they’re made out of jell-o. Princess Leia looks like something out of a cheap 60’s manga and Luke like he was drawn by a twelve-year-old based on an action figure that wasn’t actually of Luke Skywalker.  Luke has no pupils, which is very distressing, but not as distressing as when C3P0 blinks.  Even worse, as far as I can tell Han Solo has no eyes at all.

The design of the alien planet in this sequence is pretty cool, though.  It appears to be entirely covered in a kind of goopy ocean and the creatures that live in it are neat-looking, even if not terribly plausible.  Animation is really a great medium for fantasy and science fiction, because it levels the playing field: we’re not thinking about the special effects because everything on screen looks equally unreal.  This is something Disney, who used it to such beautiful effect in Lilo and Stitch, totally forgot at just about the same time as they acquired the rights to Star Wars.  Oh, for what could have been.

I want to note here that the average review on this blog is about as long as what you’ve read so far.  We’re only about two thirds of the way through the Special, though, and I can’t really divide a holiday review up into two weeks.  Therefore, consider this your permission to take a break and go snag another latke or whatever you’re snacking on, and then we’ll continue.

There’s one fun bit of background social commentary in the animated sequence, too: the only way for humans to survive the virus is to hang them upside-down so their brains will get enough oxygen despite their weakened hearts.  In the city there’s an advertisement for the cure – and the upside-down human pictured in the ad is, of course, a woman in her underwear.  The image isn’t detailed and it’s not the focus of the shot, so I don’t think it’s an actual piece of gratuitous cheesecake.  Apparently somebody at Nelvana Ltd was just salty about the advertising industry.

The self-contained story in the cartoon makes sense within itself. It justifies Fett’s fearsome reputation far better than anything in The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi, and the characters seem to be in-character even when they’re off-model.  The problem is with it as a part of the framing story about the Imperial troops searching Chewbacca’s house!  The Special is very explicit that this is not something that’s actually happening in the real world at the same time as the other events – it is a cartoon Lumpy is watching on TV.  Why, in a galaxy controlled by the Empire, would there be cartoons using the real names of real rebel operatives and presenting them as the heroes?  If nobody’s supposed to know Boba Fett is connected with the Empire, why does the show blow his cover?

More importantly, where can I get one of those awesome giant stuffed Banthas Lumpy has in his room?  I don’t know if that’s a real toy that was available in the late 70’s, but Comic Images does make something similar and you can buy them at Wal-Mart or Toys R Us.

While cleaning up the mess the Stormtroopers made of his room, Lumpy watches an instructional video of how to put together some kind of radio. This features Harvey Korman as an android who keeps getting jammed.  Like cooking shows, instructional videos aren’t very interesting unless you’re trying to follow the directions – since we can’t follow the directions, this one is pointless to begin with.  The ‘joke’ is not funny, and lines like “every one of the ten thousand terminals on your circuit breaker module is a different colour” might be amusing when written down but they just don’t work when somebody says them aloud.  Fortunately, it doesn’t last long.

Then we get on to what’s probably the second-best thing in the Special, the bit where we learn that the Mos Eisley cantina is owned by Bea Arthur.  It would be easily the most expensive thing in the Special were it not made up of b-roll footage and re-used puppets from Episode IV.  It’s also kind of got a plot, in that a guy with a baking soda volcano on top of his head (this is certainly an efficient way to get the alcohol directly to your brain) is trying to confess his love to Bea while she just wants to get on with running her business.  Eventually he gets his heart broken and leaves, and then the Empire shuts the bar down, so Bea throws everybody out with a song.

I have to admit, in The Force Awakens when Han Solo mentioned a female friend who ran a ‘watering hole’… there was a moment there when I was half-expecting it to be Bea Arthur’s character.  I’m relieved that it wasn’t, but also just the slightest bit disappointed.  We had to wait for The Mandalorian to get a proper Holiday Special callback.

This bit almost had a chance to say something with its ‘thwarted romance’ plot.  Usually such a thing in a tv show would get what the male character would consider a happy ending.  He would prove to his love interest that being cared for is important, she would realize that love is better than money, and they would metaphorically ride off into the sunset.  What it looks like we’re going to get here instead is something more like the episode of South Park where Butters fell in love with the Hooters waitress. Harvey Korman’s character (yes, he plays three different characters in this Special and this was apparently supposed to be a selling point) realizes his crush is based on a misunderstanding, and while it makes him sad, he’s not going to be an asshole about it.

Nor is Bea’s character vilified for rejecting him, which she does tactfully but firmly, as if she’s gone through this many times before. He’s just a minor annoyance in her day before she goes on to worry about bigger problems, like getting everybody to obey that Imperial curfew.  Then, however, at the last second he pops up from behind the counter after everybody has left – and that’s where the segment ends.  I think we’re supposed to assume they got together after all, but I kind of hope she just threw him out with the rest of them.  No means no, damn it.

Bea Arthur’s Go Home Song is to the tune the Cantina Band was playing in Episode IV, so it pretty much goes without saying it’s the catchiest piece in the Special.

Then, finally, it’s time to celebrate Life Day!  The Wookiees hold up some glowing Christmas balls, then dress in red robes and walk through outer space into a, uh, wormhole, I guess, that takes them to the base of the giant tree from Avatar.  There it’s time for our final setpiece, the culmination of this whole ninety-minute ordeal… Princess Leia sings!  The Life Day Carol is to the tune of the main Star Wars theme, and the lyrics sound like something from a generic Christmas album you get free if you buy three cards at Hallmark.  Carrie Fisher is a decent singer but she looks like she’s as glad this is over as we are.

Much like Howard the Duck, The Star Wars Holiday Special is a production in which they made all the worst decisions they possibly could.  Focusing on the Wookiees at home rather than following Han Solo and Chewbacca through the action killed the whole thing at the starting gate.  Then that plot is nothing but a frame on which they can hang the various variety acts, and none of those are very good.  It’s only towards the end of the sequence that what we’re seeing even has anything to do with Star Wars.  Watching it is an ordeal on the order of an un-riffed Coleman Francis film.  It’s so bad, it’s not even something people get together and watch like they do Manos or The Room.

So why do we still have it?  The Holiday Special was only broadcast once, and was met by fathomless loathing from critics, Star Wars fans, and ordinary people alike. It has never been released in any other format (Andrew Borntreger of badmovies.org has a story about how Lucas had him thrown out of a Q&A panel for asking if it were getting a DVD release), so the fact that you can find it on YouTube today is down to some nameless hero who recorded it on their newfangled VCR back in 1978.  That person then showed it to friends, apparently on the basis of oh my god, you guys, this is so bad, you have to see it, and then because misery loves company they copied it to show to their friends. What we have today is copies of copies of copies of copies, like fragments of Sappho only with VHS artefacts instead of holes in the papyrus (and without the artistic vision).

Humans like to preserve remarkable things.  Sappho we’ve preserved because it’s remarkably good, but the Star Wars Holiday Special we preserve because it’s remarkably bad.  Lucasfilm has tried very hard to stamp it out.  George Lucas himself has said that if he could he would gather up every copy that exists and smash them with a sledgehammer… but we won’t let him do it. We keep copying the Special and passing it along, in a way that’s very familiar to MSTies in particular.  We’re circulating the tapes!  Why this tape in particular?

I don’t claim to know, but my working theory is that it keeps us humble.  We are a species that can produce great things when we put our minds to it.  We landed on the moon.  We eradicated smallpox.  We built the Taj Mahal and the Sagrada Familia.  We wrote The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Einstein Field Equations and the aforementioned works of Sappho.  But for all that, we are also capable of throwing the same kind of effort into creating utter disasters – and the Star Wars Holiday Special is the rare example of an unmitigated disaster that didn’t actually hurt anybody.  It reminds us to take a step back and look at what we’re doing without getting too invested in it, but does so while being harmless and at times humorous.

Would I still rather watch this than Elves?  You bet your shaggy Wookiee ass I would.  The Star Wars Holiday Special may be longer, but it doesn’t leave nearly such a bad taste in my mouth.

I will leave you with this: the Special was, as I mentioned, only broadcast once, in 1978 – that means its signal is now forty-one light years from Earth and still going.  There are several hundred stars within that bubble, around two dozen of which are known to have planets.  Somewhere out there, aliens might be getting their first signal from humanity right now and it’s the Star Wars Holiday Special.

[wearesorcerer]

DIO’s Hired Assassins Ranked

I’ve been rewatching JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders lately because it finally came to Netflix and thus I could get my old DM to watch it (for the sake of memes). I haven’t watched it since it came out and remembered having something against it, but I couldn’t remember what exactly; my fondness has only grown thanks to how memetic it is.

The answer: it’s too long and the villains aren’t especially memorable, DIO aside.

After I got to Alessi, I decided I wanted to rank them (specifically to put him as dead last, though I ended up not doing that). I was originally going to put this on my personal blog, but realized that I’m evaluating a bunch of weird spells, so it’s here.

IMHO, Stands split pretty well between Monk (fighting spirit, etc.) and some sort of caster (so many of them are just flat-out spells). The majority of the villains are the latter type, so I figured this would work here.

I’m going to skip anyone on Team Joestar and DIO because that’s just unfair.

Murder Stands

Before I get underway, I want to introduce a term I’ll be using again and again: “Murder Stand.” This is a Stand which has no ability beyond hurting/killing people. I take off points for this because even Punch Ghosts like Star Platinum have other utility.

Unranked: Thoth (Boingo) -- Precognitive Manga

Thoth is all potential and little application -- mostly because the Oingo Boingo brothers are comic relief villains. Thoth’s ability is to predict what will happen to the reader (who doesn’t necessarily have to be the Stand user) in the next few minutes, but without enough context for it to get used reliably. Indeed, every character who uses it ends up hurt. Since it’s an item, it’s possible that someone could steal it from Boingo permanently. That said, the possibilities with this Stand are immense, so it should be far more powerful than presented.

25 - Sun (Arabia Fats): A miniature sun with a suite of solar powers.

Illuminates a large area as though it were noon. (Sun sits at approximately 100 meters in the air and has a very wide area of effect.)

Raises the ambient temperature in that area to intolerable levels

Can fire highly accurate energy blasts at anything in the area

This Stand appears in a single episode (not quite a BLAM episode: it fits contextually, but it’s never discussed beforehand or afterward) and the only dialogue we get comes from Team Joestar, so we don’t know what the Stand’s actual parameters are. We do know that its use range is largely taken up by how high it sits in the sky and that it affects everything in its area of effect indiscriminately because Arabia Fats is present and has to take precautions against it. This makes the Murder Stand aspect of this suspect: there just aren’t many situations where you need (or would even want) to kill on that scale. Since we don’t know if Arabia Fats can control the light or heat his Stand produces (beyond firing lasers), any further utility is also suspect.

24 - Emperor (Hol Horse): magic missile in the form of a gun with a homing bullet.

Don’t get me wrong, having magic missile at-will is a great thing, but this isn’t an unerring missile (as in D&D) but a homing missile (as in most incarnations of the spell I’ve found elsewhere). It can miss. It’s also a 1st-level spell and there are far more powerful effects on this list. (No idea why this is called “Emperor.”)

23 - Deep Blue Moon (Imposter Captain Teneil): punch ghost fishfolk with various underwater abilities.

This Stand is powerful only if encountered in the water. It’s more powerful than the Emperor and has slightly more utility, but not by much. (Not terribly lunar beyond the association with water.)

22 - Khnum (Oingo): alter self (or possibly disguise self as a Transmutation).

Oingo only ever uses this on his face and hair, but supposedly he can use this on the rest of his body, altering height, weight, and possibly clothing in the process. This has more utility than any of the above, but Oingo’s an idiot (comic relief villain) and there’s another Stand that can do this and more. (”Khnum” because Oingo rearranges his face as though it were clay.)

21 - Tower of Gray (Gray Fly): stag beetle with super speed and xenomorph bite. Mainly used to cause airplane disasters and similar.

The range on this stand is fairly short (the user has to be on the plane he’s trying to crash, for one), but longer than most punch ghosts while still remaining potent. It’s small enough to escape some attention and fast enough to give Star Platinum problems. (”Tower” because it’s used for mass murder via disasters.)

20 - Set(han) (Alessi): user’s shadow animates, de-aging the bodies (and gradually minds) of opponents it comes in contact with; can wield any object the user holds.

By range, this would be a Punch Ghost, but it doesn’t have the other stats for it. Its special ability is rather powerful, but it puts Alessi in difficult situations (he’d be a suspect in any missing person cases seeking his victims); it doesn’t have to be used to murder people, but it’s of limited-enough utility that it may as well be used that way. Finally, the entire arc screams “pedo,” so it doesn’t deserve a high rank even if it had more power. (”Set” doesn’t really fit, but I think they picked it because it’s an approximation of an inimical/evil entity. Not sure why it’s rendered as “Sethan” in English sources: that’s an uncommon transliteration [not related to many inscriptions] and the Japanese rendering is “Seto- 神” [Set-god].)

19 - Ebony Devil (Devo): Chucky. Stand activates after the user is injured, then possesses an object (generally a doll) to seek out vengeance. Stand’s power amplified by user’s hatred of the target.

This is the first truly remote Stand on the list, which is its main perk. Generally speaking, long-range Stands lack power, so having an ability that amplifies power is really handy. However, the fact that it basically requires that the user gets severely injured to work is a deal-breaker. The seeming need to have a doll present to use is also a drawback, but it’s not clear how far the user can be from the Stand, so maybe that’s not that big of a deal. (As for Devil, it works. I guess. I mean, that card has a lot of meanings.)

18 - Wheel of Fortune (ZZ): Stand attaches to a car, manipulating its attributes and making it far deadlier than usual.

From what the episode implied, the user has to be driving the Stand for it to work, which could be an issue. It’s not entirely a Murder Stand (it provides off-road capabilities -- and even vertical surface scaling), so there’s quite a bit of bonus there. (This really should be The Chariot [Silver Chariot doesn’t fit that card anyway].)

17 - Strength (Forever the Orangutan): Stand attaches to a small boat and turns it into a giant tanker. Like Wheel of Fortune, can manipulate any part of the ship. Unlike Wheel of Fortune, can merge/phase the user through its parts.

You’d think I’d rank this lower because it’s water-based, but since it can work on a lifeboat and Forever is an Orangutan, there’s no reason why Forever couldn’t carry a boat around (sneakily), activate the Stand, and then go to town in a town. It’s big, it’s lethal, and it’s easy for the user to hide while killing people. Its just a little too specific to get much use. And, well, you’ve got the user. (”Strength” because of the user.)

16 - Death 13 (Mannish Boy): nightmare; clownish grim reaper kills people in their dreams Freddy Krueger-style. Upon waking, targets who manage to survive do not remember what happened in their dreams without taking extra precautions while asleep. Stand users cannot use their Stands if the Stand was inactive prior to the dream.

If you want to get away with murder some of the time, this might work. Most of the Stand’s abilities are designed for the user to escape attention, but there are two major problems. First, anyone killed in the dream manifests the injuries they receive on their waking bodies, which tend to be gruesome. Second, it’s an incredibly short-range Stand without much developmental potential. If Mannish Boy were to avoid using it much, he could survive to adulthood, but his presence at the scenes of his murders would eventually be his undoing.

15 - Bastet (Mariah): Stand creates an electrical outlet that shocks targets who get too close, thereby magnetizing them. This magnetism grows in strength over time, eventually leading to death from dangerous metal objects impaling or crushing the target. Can affect multiple targets simultaneously.

It’s not entirely clear how close Mariah has to be for this to work, but it’s farther than Death 13. Since the conditions for this Murder Stand are easier to meet, it’s slightly better. There might be added utility to the magnetism, but that’s dubious. Still, the range is close enough that it should be easy to catch Mariah in the act and the Schmuck Bait gimmick is too silly. It’s also unclear if non-Stand users can see it, so it might have less utility than Death 13, but I’m assuming as the sort of Stand it is that they can. (Bastet = cat = curiosity killed the cat.)

14 - Empress (Nena): parasitic growth latches onto target, growing and attacking them until finally killing them.

I strongly suspect that there’s more that someone could do with this Stand than simply killing people (or getting them into trouble), but we don’t see that at all during this episode. Since it’s a physical Stand, even though it’s not technically alive, it’s easier to attack than most Stands and thus remains a liability to its user. (The whole episode has a lot of father-child talk, referring to the fact that the Empress has much to do with fertility and pregnancy.)

13 - Geb (N’Doul): water elemental with incredible range.

In 3.x terms, this isn’t even summon nature’s ally II, which is the earliest available summon that can summon a Water Elemental. The reason is that the smallest elementals in the core rules are all Small and this one is Tiny. It makes up for its size by being deadlier than usual (it might have vorpal attacks, but then again it is JoJo, so it’s hard to say), but it’s not considered a powerful Stand (Destructive Power is C). Its fairly fast, but its main strength is its range: N’Doul was able to command it at a distance of four kilometers (2.5 miles) when attacking Team Joestar, which is insane. (Despite being a water elemental, it’s named after the Egyptian god of the Earth because N’Doul, a blind Stand user, uses Tremorsense.)

12 - Lovers (Steely Dan): microscopic Stand can invade people’s bodies, transmitting and amplifying its user’s pain to them.

This Stand has fantastic potential that’s left unanswered: how much damage can it cause on its own? The episode revolves around Lovers planting spores of DIO’s flesh buds inside brains, leading to death, but given its size and ability to manipulate brain cells, one would think that this thing could cause heart attacks, strokes, severe brain damage, and various other major (or minor) conditions. The range on it and the sorts of deaths it might be able to cause would make it much better at assassination than Death 13 or Bastet. However, it’s not clear what the limits of this Stand’s powers are. I’ve ranked it here for potential, but it might be unable to do all of that. (No, the name doesn’t really fit here, either.)

11 - Tenore Sax (Kenny G.): mirage arcana.

We don’t see this Stand (at all), only its effects, and Kenny G gets killed very quickly (no fight), so who knows? That said, mirage arcana is a fairly high level spell, hence the ranking.

10 - Anubis (various): intelligent sword which provides its wielder with exceptional speed and skill; can phase through matter selectively and learn enemy techniques.

Anubis is pretty standard as far as evil weapons possessing people go, save that it also learns any attack used against it the first time it sees it and afterward can perfectly counter that ability. This makes it a difficult foe to defeat in general; the fact that it can choose to ignore any matter it chooses (though apparently not Stands) is just icing on that cake. However, as it is attached to a sword, it is susceptible to anything that would damage or destroy its “body.”

9 - Yellow Temperance (Rubber Soul): ooze. Invulnerable to damage, devours anything it touches as it wishes. Can coat user to grant imperviousness and disguises (as disguise self).

As Khnum, but also a perfect defense and a fantastic offense. Its main issues are that it requires sustenance, it has limited range, and the trick to defeating it is to separate it from its user and then attack the user directly, which is easier than attacking a Stand in general anyway. (I guess having a defense is temperate, right?)

8 - High Priestess (Midler): imp-like Stand can merge with minerals, growing in size the closer it gets to its user.

Vulnerable to Star Platinum, but otherwise this is an incredibly useful Stand: it’s both a reconnaissance Stand and a Punch Ghost Elemental. As a long-range Stand that can merge with any mineral, any deaths it causes would be difficult to pin on the user (they could all be accidents and the user wouldn’t be suspect). (The only similarity to the High Priestess is in gender.)

7 - Horus (Pet Shop): cryokinesis.

Pet Shop demonstrates a variety of techniques with this Stand (similar to how Abdul has many uses for Magician’s Red), so it may as well be “any spell with the [Cold] descriptor.” (It’s “Horus” because the user is a falcon.)

6 - Hanged Man (J. Geil): light-based Stand attacks from reflections.

It was utterly implausible how they defeated this one, given that it’s able to move at the speed of light from one reflection to another. Mainly a Murder Stand, but plausibly a reconnaissance one, as well. (Not sure how this is the Hanged Man. I guess because it’s limited in where it can go.)

5 - Judgment (Cameo): “Grants wishes” (uses an improved form of fabricate to create perfect copies of whatever its targets wants [down to memories and bits of personality for people] out of clay, but subverts the wishes)

There’s a lot of potential here, with the main limit being the durability of the materials used. That said, one wonders if there are other limits to its ability. Could it fabricate a functional death ray or a supercomputer? (Personally, I think this should have been Khnum, given that Khnum is a potter. It’s probably “Judgment” [as in “Last Judgment”] because Polnareff wishes for his sister to be resurrected.)

4 - Osiris (Daniel J. D’Arby [the Elder]): Steals the souls of those who admit defeat, storing them as coins/poker chips.

Soul bind (a 9th-level spell) as a spell-like ability (so no focus component - ordinarily an expensive gem), used by a professional gambler (so someone with an incredibly high Bluff/Deception). Yeah, it’s a Murder Stand, but it’s one that’s going to make the user very wealthy. (Osiris as lord of the underworld, so souls.)

3 - Atum (Terrence D. D’Arby [the Younger]): Steals the souls of those who admit defeat, storing them in dolls; can read an opponent’s soul (mind), answering yes or no questions.

As Osiris, but also with a faster-acting (but limited) form of detect thoughts. There’s so much potential here, it’s almost terrifying. (Atum doesn’t really fit here. Anubis might, but Anubis wasn’t part of the actual Ennead anyway.)

2 - Justice (Enya the Hag): air elemental manifests as city-spanning fog (as control weather rather than fog cloud), providing mirage arcana and veil to anything and anyone in the area (but selectively); can control bodies (living or deceased) through its tendrils entering wounds; gaseous, so impervious to damage.

As Tenore Sax, but it does way more. Its animate dead-style ability provides total control over corpses in the area without actually being necromancy (it’s actually control body, but seems to work on any type of body so long as it has been wounded). The only thing it lacks is the ability to attack, despite having claws. Still, when you have several spells as spell-like abilities usable over a vast area without the standard limitations those spells ordinarily have and one of those gives you minions, it’s not like you need to be able to attack. In theory, this should have been one of the most powerful Stands in the entire series; the only way Team Joestar defeated it was through shenanigans which made no sense (Star Platinum inhaling the Stand, causing Enya to black out -- because Stands have lungs). (”Justice” because Enya uses it for revenge.)

1 - Cream (Vanilla Ice): Stand’s mouth is a portal to a dimension of darkness. Anything the Stand swallows is destroyed by portal cut (as disintegrate). The Stand can swallow itself and its user without harm, removing them from this reality (as etherealness) and disintegrating anything else which comes in contact with it (as an orb of annihilation).

Invisible. Almost undetectable. Intangible. Wholly destructive. The invisibility comes with the drawback of having to be careful while moving if wanting to go entirely undetected, but that’s not a major drawback. While ethereal, the user doesn’t seem to be able to see where it’s going, though this is inconsistent.

[rigelmejo]

 2 more thoughts regarding the massive immersion approach:

Flashcards and Massive Immersion Method

while i’ve seen some people who do it insist that its about moving AWAY from flashcards/srs grinding, and only doing that in order to make it easier to immerse... i am not sure that’s how it ends up in practice. i’ve read comments by some people about how immersion should be where the a lot of the progress is coming from. But on the other hand, from my view, even the immersion eventually involves a lot of sentence mining (you making srs flashcards from immersion, to study). And the creator of the method, Matt, seems to think a good indication this method will work for you is if you have a decent tolerance for flashcard grinding. 

Also, on a more practical level, he thinks structured study is very helpful for your learning and is part of what helps you learn faster. He thinks a combination of immersion (both reading and pure listening) starting early on and regularly, with structured study to help you learn first very useful things to you (common words, writing system, grammar patterns, eventually words/grammar in the things you specifically want to understand) helps support your immersion efforts. Structured study in his plan is srs flashcards and sentence mining - although I personally think you could also substitute ‘structured study’ for textbooks, word lists/flashcards/podcasts you pick based on your needs, basically any material where you’re actively studying and reviewing instead of immersing. Now I mainly agree with this point, as much as I don’t like structured study of any kind any more then much anyone else. It really does help make immersion more tolerable, and more effective, at least for me. Structured learning is kind of like scaffolding you put on yourself, or floaties before diving into the deep end. It gives you things you can grab onto more easily when you immerse, and help you remember more effectively the things you pick up as you immerse. It’s probably why most language learners, no matter what structured study methods they use, do more then ONLY listen/read in the language with absolutely nothing else being done (a lot of polyglots on youtube seem fond of making word lists with example sentences which sounds a lot like a more chill non srs sentence mining method, a lot of articles i’ve read of learners going for basic ability to speak/read go for using frequency lists and grammar guides early on as their base to learn from - which is what i tend to do). 

Anyway... basically, as much as I’d love if massive immersion approach had less flashcards... it doesn’t appear (to me) to have any less flashcards than AJATT or 10k sentences methods. Maybe it does, but once the sentence flashcards go into the thousands it all seems like an Awful Lot to me. On the upside, I would again like to mention there is at least one example of a guy named Chris who did the massive immersion approach for japanese for 18 months and got to a good reading comprehension, listening comprehension, and speaking level, who did the kanji flashcards and 2000ish frequent words in sentences and grammar example sentences in the beginning, then mostly did not sentence mine after. Here’s his interview about it. During, and after those initial flashcards, he immersed, looked up words occasionally (and did not always make flashcards of new words). He tried to switch to a monolingual dictionary halfway through, which seemed to help him. And he didn’t really study/immerse more than 1-3 hrs a day, with the heaviest ‘dedicated’ time in the earlier months when he grinded through the Heisig kanji flashcards. He’s a good example of a ‘less flashcards in the sentence mining’ version of the approach, that seemed to work out fine for him. So burning out on flashcards, and eventually doing less of them and primarily immersion/looking occasional words up, is a possible way to do the massive immersion approach. And I think this might be the way some people are viewing the massive immersion approach who say the flashcards are really just needed to push you to get into immersion easier - perhaps they’re also people who used less flashcards once the immersion part became more comfortable for them. 

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Immersion

A second note: I really do want to reiterate again how much effort I do think this method takes. From an outsider’s perspective, to me it initially looked kind of ridiculous until I actually looked it up. Because all i saw were learners making targeted videos about Only one element of their studies (so it was helpful in a specialized way, but i wrongly thought that video’s tips would be about ALL of studying the language lol). So I kept seeing videos insisting you need to immerse immerse immerse and you’ll learn super fast! But like of course, these learners were also doing studying from sentence mining and grammar example sentences and I just did not know that. 

About immersion: it really does help though. At the bare minimum, you should try it some time just because it will REALLY reaffirm your goals in the language. Or it will help you set goals, if you aren’t sure what those goals are. It is also a real fast way to actually check if you’ve 1. made any improvement, 2. are lacking in any areas you’d intended to make improvement (and therefore you need to fix your study plan to address this), 3. what you immerse in might help you realize what you really want to prioritize learning first. It also gives you a dose of reality, to see if you’re worse or better than you thought you were. It gives you chances to PRACTICE what you’ve learned, which will help you remember that info and recall it faster, and get you more comfortable so it’s easier to use that info you know the next time you immerse etc. It puts you into real material you want to eventually be able to engage with, so you can actually see how you’re doing in the language up against more realistic use of the language (versus textbooks and learner made material that is probably on some level tailored to either be easier or focus on some specialties a bit more than the real world which focuses on all kinds of things). 

In French, I unintentionally ‘immersed’ in reading from the first few months, and I fully believe that boosted my ability to comprehend the language immensely. I really genuinely did not put that much effort into studying french. I took one well made beginner semester in college, most notably great because our teacher focused on pronunciation, speaking often, learning a ton of regular verbs and conjugations, and learning basic ways of saying past/present/future tense immediately (which broadened what we could talk out in a tremendous way - especially compared to any other beginner course I’ve ever taken). I studied one 300 word list, then sort of studied a 625 and 1000 word list, none of them with flashcards - just looking at and reviewing somewhat regularly. And I read... a lot... especially in the beginning when it was super hard. I read and looked up a handful of words (only ever handfuls, cause I’m lazy). Eventually, I read and rarely looked up words, because I’m lazy and context guesses were enough to me. Eventually, I speed read through a beginners grammar guide in english. Then an intermediate grammar guide in french. My listening suffered cause i rarely ever practiced that, but when i do practice it the skill builds up pretty fast since i generally know most words i run into now. If I went back to french, it’d mostly be a lot of listening/shadowing immersion (shows, and comprehensible input youtube channels), and then having lots of convos to boost my speaking/writing abilities. French... genuinely was SO hard in the beginning. But I think immersing very early got me through the “doing this for more then 5 minutes FRIES my brain its so HARD” stage within a few months. 

I think whenever I put off immersion... that just delays when i’m gonna feel that frustration. And its not fun to feel that frustration, but its expected because there will always be some difficulty as you get adjusted to it. And when you’ve studied for over a year? It really sucks to feel like you’ve made progress, only to try to read simple captions on pictures or headlines and website links and understand NOTHING. That’s what happened to me in japanese - I didn’t try to read real stuff for a year, and when I finally did I was pretty crushed that outside of the most basic school/daily life discussions, I couldn’t comprehend anything. Even though in my studies I’d flown through my textbook materials. I should also note, for languages ‘more difficult to learn’ for an english speaker, yes its going to take longer or more study hours to comprehend the same as one could in a ‘less difficult’ language like french. So immersion hurt that much MORE cause I knew even less then after a year of french, even with more hours of study, and immersion was so much harder. It was super demotivating. But in retrospect, I should have just pushed through and planned my goals according to what specifics were making that initial push SO HARD so I could fix them and make my life easier. I eventually did, but I would have loved that kind of clear focus on what I needed to do with my goals BACK THEN.  

Because of how my French versus Japanese studies went, when I started Chinese I just immersed right away. A great thing about studying chinese, is at the time I was super into their storytelling and works, and the chinese world has a HUGE amount of incredible works AND a ton of them are easy to access. It’s super easy to immerse in chinese! (I imagine similar is true of english). In French, I only really was invested in french history books, so I didn’t dive into reading much unless it was just those or ‘informational’ stuff like news. (Thankfully french took less effort to improve in). In Japanese, while I’m into some very specific creators and works, I’m actually not really that into anime or manga. And the stuff I am into, I need to grind though goal-focused study to actually finally be able to comprehend enough to immerse in (it took 2.5 years to even scratch the bottom of ‘maybe’ for trying to do that, since I didn’t immerse early on and build my comfort in being able to immerse). I started trying to read in Chinese early, just because I was like “well i did it in month 3 in french so WHY NOT do it with chinese too, it helped my french a ton!” And, well... it did help my chinese a ton, and still does. 

It’s also been... way harder every single step of the way then french ever was. And I’m so glad I did it with french first... I built up some tolerance at engaging with materials i only 50% comprehended in french, I built up reading skills with that kind of difficult material, and I had experience seeing that comprehension level noticeably improve every few months. So in chinese, I started with like 20% comprehension and it HURT my brain. But I expected it to be harder than french, and i expected any foreign language to start off well below the comfortable suggestion of ‘98%’ for reading for pleasure. On the upside, it helped me set goals I needed FOR the goal of reading super early. It helped me practice parsing how hard chinese was going to be to comprehend, super early. And I think the difficult comprehension curve for immersing in chinese, compared to romance languages for english speakers, might be why a lot of learners on forums insist reading in chinese took them 2-4 years to even start graded readers. And why many of them say its taking them 20 minutes to read a page, or they ‘pre-study’ with flashcards for like 1 hr a day when they read, etc. While I’m sure those approaches work for them, I think in a way its also kind of a matter of When do YOU want to do those things? When do you want to face that super-intolerable low comprehensibility curve? 

Because it will be a few phases: first it will be brutally intolerable, then you’ll get used to seeing a huge amount of incomprehensibility and not getting so bothered by it even though you still don’t understand much, then you start comprehending a bit more each time (possibly aided by some other study methods/reading strategies etc), you feel relieved the comprehension is getting EASIER (even though its only like 60% now that feels WAY less brutally frustrating then 20% did!), and the process continues. You basically first get used to tolerating how brutally incomprehensible it is, how much lower than 98% comprehensible it is. Then every step after feels like achievement and relief because it just keeps getting easier. And by the time you do get to a decently high comprehensibility, it feels fantastic and much easier. No matter when you start immersing, it’s going to progress like this. So if you go from ‘comfortable 98%ish percent comprehensible textbook sentences and flashcards, or podcasts, and comfortable comprehension in your own language mainly’ to ‘dropped into native material in your target language where you just definitely are not 98%, maybe 80-90% at best?’ Its still going to feel brutal. 

In a big way I do think it’s partially just a matter of when you want to face the brutal beginning of the comprehensibility curve. Do you want to tackle it early on in the learning stages, in the first couple years? The upsides are, you will only feel like its easier over time, so once you’ve studied more, your immersion also is getting easier. So study progress lines up better with how comprehension progress ‘feels.’ The downside is, of course, you face a brutal challenge that feels insurmountable early on. That could cause you to give up. And because its actual native content in the language - realistically you are NOT going to be able to comprehend as much as you can in your own native language in a year. It’s going to start a low comprehension level, and you aren’t going to be able to just quickly bring it up to comfortable 98%ish comprehension level. It’s still going to take years of study for that. So part of the process genuinely is getting more okay with accepting lower comprehensibility in your target language, and learning to not let that frustrate or demotivate you, learning to not get upset, learning to let go of trying to absolutely always understand everything perfectly, and instead learning to notice milestones in your own personal progress. Learning to appreciate an improvement from 20% comprehended, to 50% comprehended, to 70% comprehended. Instead of super angry you’ve studied for months, only to still be struggling to comprehend - because it will definitely still technically be a struggle at least until you do hit those 90%s in comprehension. So it could be demotivating to think ‘oh yeah, I’m gonna be fluent in a year!’ then you immerse early on, and realize that you may not actually to able to comprehend this target language as easily as your native language in a year. But it definitely grounds to back to reality. On the upside, even if you waited to immerse, you’re probably going to hit this difficult comprehension experience for at least a few months - so you’ll eventually get the reality check. It’s just when do you want to experience it. Early on - so you can use the experiences to both practice and focus your goals on what YOU specifically need? 

Or after studying for years - finally getting practice, and now needing to possibly readjust a lot of your long-used study methods because they left some noticeable blank spots that are now impeding your ability to comprehend what you want to comprehend? There are of course benefits to waiting to do immersion until later - you’re less likely to quit studying the language, if you’ve already been studying it for years and are dedicated. Depending on how good your study plan was, you might be starting out at 70-90% comprehension of materials, instead of 20-50%. Which means your difficulty curve might take less time to power through, and be more tolerable depending on if you can handle moderate incomprehensibility more than significant amount incomprehensibility. I don’t know... I tried to do immersion later on with Japanese, and while I definitely won’t give up, it was also such a huge difficulty curve that I had to replan my study methods to fill in all the blanks before I was ready to try immersion properly. I think with chinese, where i started some immersion early on, i would have been SUPER ready to give up and quit, if I didn’t have my french experience telling me ‘just stick with it, it always starts hard and gets easier over time, chinese will just probably take longer to make progress with than french did.’ 

I only pushed through with immersing in chinese early on, because I KNEW the same study methods worked for me in french so I was going to use them again. And I adamantly tried to just tell myself it wasn’t that hard. I had a chinese teacher in high school, he was great, and one of the things he did was never treat anything as hard. He didn’t act like tones were hard, he just gave us an example and had us repeat him. He didn’t act like hanzi were hard, he just wrote vocab, gave us the pinyin, then told us to write it in our notes - and write only hanzi in tests and homework and classwork. Bam, that’s it. No insistence that we had to use mnemonics to ever learn them (although mnemonics would’ve helped speed it up probably in retrospect). No insistence anything was hard, it was just how the words sounded and were spelled, so we learned. He had a class of 40 kids who were rambunctious and many of whom didn’t pick chinese and just got put into the class, and he still managed to teach well enough that most people passed just fine. That class was fun, and not any harder then any other class. I think one part of the reason was how he treated nothing as overtly difficult or challenging, just another thing to learn. In comparison, I’ve had a japanese class where things WERE taught as very difficult to learn, and i think that intimidated me and demotivated me (along with the myriad of language study tip sites that really hammer home how ‘hard’ japanese is). Realistically, they aren’t necessarily hard, some languages just take more study time then others to cover the same ‘ground’. So anyway, whenever I study chinese, I just remind myself its not any harder then french to learn - it just takes me some extra study time. And I really think this mindset has made tackling both immersion and even just studying vocab much easier to me. I don’t see new words made of characters and freak out, I just think ok ‘this sounds like X, looks like this Y, do I need to do anything extra to remember this?’ Then come up with some mnemonics or examples of it being used etc if it will help me remember it, then move on. With chinese I really... mostly tackled studying the same way I studied French (but BETTER, because I practice speaking, writing, and listening MUCH more in chinese then i ever did in french). But like... I did not study the hanzi with Heisig or anything - and I do think in retrospect, I should, since I think it’ll make new words a bit easier to remember. (I remember new words way easier when I already know each individual character from other words - I don’t need mnemonics for the meaning or the pronunciation when I already know the characters that spell a new word so I can speed up learning it). The only extra thing I did with chinese was listen to tones in the beginning, some tone explanations, and listen to the audio of new words (so i can better remember the tones, so i can have better listening/speaking skills then i did in french). Overall, my progress was not too bad for just diving into chinese with the same overall study method. I managed to learn 1000 words and all the characters in them without heisig etc. (Although, genuinely, shout out to the Tuttle Learn Chinese Characters - 800 characters book, because the mnemonics include pronunciation, help a ton, and I learned probably 500 characters from that book starting out that served as a helpful foundation in studying chinese). 

I did not ever try to go the route of ‘study with only pinyin first.’ I know some people think learn to speak first, read/write later, and it is easier. But like? Reading’s always my main goal baby. Everything else is a secondary goal, so there was no point to me putting off characters and real reading. Plus? In chinese??? Knowing how to read helps with shows SO MUCH cause nearly every show has mandarin subtitles!!! If you can read some basic mandarin, picking up words and some phrases from shows gets so much easier! Also, like my chinese teacher did not treat them as overly hard, I don’t want to treat characters as overly hard either. Pinyin is very good to know for typing, and for learning tones/seeing how to pronounce words. But I didn’t want to use it as the only thing i could rely on, any longer then the minimal necessary amount of time I needed to. Also, my lacking listening skills in french really hammered home how important it is to listen to pronunciations ALL THE TIME and especially when learning new words, so I try to make sure a majority of my chinese study and immersion materials have audio I can listen to. I try to learn most new words with audio, since pinyin is not the same as me hearing how to actually say it and recognize it. 

[natsspammityspamspamham]

Dino Watches Anime (April 26)

I haven’t made one of these for a while, and after the first draft went and deleted itself, I wondered whether it was worth making another one (I make these primarily for myself then get really surprised whenever people notice these). During harsh times like these, I find myself being drawn to the cheesiest and the most cringe-inducing shows, but maybe I just like them because you can put them on double-speed without missing a thing because you know what’s going on. It’s like instant noodle broth: satisfying, warming, but you know it’s going to kill your insides with self-crisis. Seriously, I didn’t come to terms that I really, really like romance as a genre until a little while ago. 

With that being said, I want to take a short break from romance now. 

I often ask myself, “Why are you watching these when you can be watching really good anime?” Well, that’s probably because I don’t want to have my analytical brain on right now. I want to watch an anime that takes two brain cells to enjoy. I only have two. Once I garden some more, maybe then will I get into the stuff I know I will enjoy like Hunter x Hunter (2011)

Things that I just started but couldn’t get into

NHK ni Youkoso! (1/24)

For one, I didn’t want to watch this before because it would’ve hit too close to home. The show’s about a NEET aka a freeloader (not in employment, education, or training), and I’m... almost that description (but that’s mostly because of the pandemic). Really, this show is riddled with paranoia, and it wants you to really know that with its changing art styles to its cynical script lines to its main character honestly needing some help (seriously, he needs help). I read further (aka spoilers) and realized that I probably won’t have fun with this anime right now, and I will never touch the manga because that stuff is even more insane than its adaptation. NHK ni Youkoso is about people who fall between the cracks of normal standard society and their desire to seek their own normal by any means necessary, and during stressful times, I think it belongs on the backburner.

Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei (2/12)

After seeing how much I enjoyed Kakushigoto (which will be mentioned later, I just thought, “Wow, I want to see that other really famous work!” I didn’t enjoy it at all. I forgot why I put the series on-hold. It’s about a suicidal teacher who will stop at nothing to die then ask people why they almost killed them. Through a bunch of errors, he ends up becoming some sort of a harem king to his students (and he attracts the weirdos). I enjoyed the lengths Studio Shaft went to to make this anime appear the way it does (which helps in a lot of ways), but I just can’t continue with it until a much later date.

Appare-Ranman! (2/?)

I just lost interest after looking at the rest of the cast. I’m all for being vibrant and out there, but some of those character designs imitate more of a “racial stereotype/caricature”. I’m not saying that I dropped the show only because of that (I’m quite dense when it comes to that), but I didn’t like the characters either. I can’t get behind a show that won’t let me enjoy it a single moment over two episodes. 

I’ll pick it up again later (probably)

Free! (5/12)

I feel like they’re shoving fanservice a lot. I try to skip every fanservice scene, and I managed to watch up to episode 5 in less than an hour, and I didn’t even get through them all. But I will say that ending is stuck in my head now. (humming)

This show has taken me at least two attempts to watch so far. Let’s see how many more it takes before I finish/give up!

Darker Than Black (18/25)

I’ll probably finish this one for the sake of finishing it. I just find that the episodic nature gets stale after a while, and the overarching story is often disregarded. In exchange, we do get some fun side stories, character development, and world building, but I’d like to settle down too, you know?

Clannad (1/23)

Yeah, I’m doing that now. I’m going to see whether my feels bones are as strong as they were before... after I take a hiatus because I’m not sure if I’m in the appetite for that kind of romance now that I’ve watched two shoujo in a row. 

Sousei no Onmyouji (20/50)

I bet you, someone was like, “Let’s throw all these shounen cliches into a pot then see what comes out!” Bruh, this is bordering that story I wrote when I was 14, and I’m not even dissing this anime. I enjoyed it but need a break now. It’s very cliche, predictable, and honestly, I can see why it has such a low rating. Studio Perriot likes cutting corners sometimes with their long-running series (*stares at Naruto*), and this anime is no exception. Sometimes, it feels like a visual novel. “We don’t need to animate anything if she’s so fast that no one can see her.” Dang, but it gets repetitive. It also has a magical girl power that only works when the main couple does it? Cool, but that also gets repetitive. I just didn’t see myself watching the same thing another 30 times (at least right now).

Maison Ikkoku

I’m actually on the fence about continuing this one. It’s really sweet, but I’ve had my fill of romance. I have been wanting to watch some more Rumiko Takahashi works though. There’s no reason for me not to continue this. It gives me strong Princess Jellyfish vibes (which I should also finish). 

Recently Finished

Itazura na Kiss

Just... end my suffering. It’s not worth it. The thing about shoujo anime is that I watch it late at night when my brain is at its worst when it comes to analyzing or taking in any emotional circumstances. Then I asked myself, “Would I want any young, impressionable people to watch this?” And my first thought was “F**K NO!” This anime was an absolute trainwreck. As my Discord friend put it “It’s so bad, yet you can’t look away!” But what makes this anime unique? What sets it apart? It shows life after high school. Just like Clannad, it shows that life is more than your secondary education. There is more to life than just being a teenager. I’m not saying these characters ever grew though because that’d be a FAT JOKE. 

Episodes 1-13: Girl gives boy a love letter. He laughs and doesn't even want it and goes "no thanks". Girl gets upset. Then they find out they're living under the same roof after the girl's dad made them a house out of popsicle sticks (because the dads are childhood friends). She keeps trying to push herself onto him, and his mom joins in and is plotting so much more than you'd expect. The best part is that this main girl already has a childhood friend who's like "please marry me. I'll cook for you, work for you, take a bullet for you, slice my head off if it means you won't chip a nail--" then the girl replied by chasing after the guy who calls her stupid on a daily basis and genuinely believes she can't do anything. 

Episodes 14-25: Guy gets dragged to his own wedding and generally does not care for the girl unless she’s either not looking or is on death’s bed. He practically deserts her every other time, and we’re supposed to think it’s romantic when he finally gives a crap about his wife (even when she’s pregnant). The show constantly reminds you that even other characters have doubts that our main character cares about anyone other than himself and his aloofness. They have a bunch of missed affairs including a hoe that tries to leave her husband on her honeymoon to get with Mr. Aloof and a nursing student that genuinely cares about MC and the fact that her husband doesn’t care about her at all.

The moral of the story of this anime: If you chase after somebody long enough, they will cave in and marry you even if they don’t like you, want you, insult you, bully you, or generally show all the signs of an unwilling partner.

Anyway, this anime is crap. I can’t believe I watched it. I want those few hours back (I fast-forwarded a lot, okay?) I can’t believe I finished it. Looking back makes me want to press undo. Having this under my history is a shame to my family. Even if I was sleepy and generally out of it, that’s no excuse for choosing this. Sayonara

 I will say that Daisuke Hirakawa and Nana Mizuki did give good character voices despite the circumstances. That, and I haven’t heard from Hirakawa besides those couple of scenes from School Days (which... is a different type of romance), Free! (which I dropped when his character joined), that gumball scene from Jojo, and that introduction to him being the new Demon Slayer villain. I didn’t realize he was that old though.

Special A

This is one of the anime that my sister watched, and I thought, “I need to be reminded of what a somewhat healthy relationship can be” I wasn’t disappointed because the last anime left such a bad taste in my mouth that literally anything could’ve soothed the aching wound which was bad decision making. Even under regular circumstances, I probably still would’ve enjoyed it, but since it came at the right time, I give it an extra nod of approval. I also never realized that the second opening was inadvertently drilled into my brain because I kept overhearing my sister watching it. Now that I’ve grown up, I realize I was listening to the voices of some of my favourite seiyuu. Go figure. 

The story was really sweet with characters that I genuinely liked by the end (not my favourite cast by a very long shot, but it was slightly above average). It was slightly above average for me in a lot of ways (ironically), and it was enjoyable. The art is very fitting for its time, the music was very... ordinary, and the story was simple enough that you knew exactly what was going to happen at any given moment. This show should be titled: Special A(ppreciation for those brave people who have fallen in the friendzone; we’ll get ‘em next time). 

Akatsuki no Yona OVAs 

Unlike the actual TV series, this stuff actually ends conclusively without ending on the CLIMAX OF THE BIG ARC. SERIOUSLY, I WAS ROBBED. You can say, “There’s a perfectly good manga right there.” Shut up. I want my fight scenes animated with a big helping of a strong female lead. It gave me a sudden appreciation for Hiro Shimono and his character Zeno who literally just inserted himself in last minute in the anime (but these OVAs perfectly explain everything). You probably shouldn’t watch the anime without watching these OVAs because they’re canon, funny, and touching at times. It enhances the series.

According to the animation, we know it can do fight scenes. Give us another season, cowards! Actually, it’s Studio Perriot, so if we ever get it, it might be two stickmen duking it out. 

Haikara-san ga Tooru Movie 2

You know, I really enjoyed the movie. The first one. This one? Not so much. Actually, I felt so done. I was looking forward to this so much. It’s like going to a restaurant, expecting really good pasta, and then being served some leaves from the weeds out back. Eventually, it tastes better when you add some dressing and cheese, but it still isn’t a bowl of pasta. This show casts aside everything I like about it (present-tense because they didn’t kill everything of it) and leaves one little inkling of its valued ideas. Instead, we get a romance-chasing movie that feels a bit more like an amnesia fiction that’s slightly higher quality than usual. I can’t say I regret watching the movie. There were some redeeming qualities, but they jumped from a 9/10 to a high 6/10 that managed to squeak itself into an overall 7/10. 

(This gif is from the first movie, but I can’t find any from the second movie anyway)

Currently Watching (Not Seasonal)

Samurai Champloo

This anime is a staple of Shinichiro Watanabe, and after this, I will probably watch Cowboy Bebop, Carole & Tuesday, and Space Dandy. I did enjoy Sakamichi no Apollon and Zankyou no Terror. 

Plus, after all that romance, I need some samurai slaughter. The fight scenes and the music get me every time. I don’t even need to say anything else about the anime. The fight scenes are enough to watch alone.

[scoutception]

Ranking the next 5 animes I’ve recently watched

After many distractions on my part, including playing through Steins;Gate, something that has quickly become something I adore like few others, I’ve continued my descent into the world of anime with 5 more series. The stuff I watched was a lot shorter on average than last time, and my attempts to be “objective” and my personal biases align much more closely compared to last time. With that, I’ll begin. 5. Soni-Ani: Super Sonico the Animation

Number of episodes: 12. Language options: subs only. Streaming availability: Crunchyroll. When it comes to visual novels, nitro+ is one of the biggest developers out there, alongside Key. Whereas Key is mainly out to make you really, really sad, nitro+ prefers a different approach. To my understanding, at best, their works are really, really dark, and at worst, they’re going straight for your nightmares, with stuff like Song of Saya and Sweet Pool. So clearly, the best mascot for them is the pink haired, constantly headphoned, and downright adorable Super Sonico. Even if it’s not outright official, it’s pretty jarring. Anyway, with that little rant out of the way, here’s the only thing on this list I actually wouldn’t recommend. Produced by White Fox back in 2014, this anime apparently got slammed pretty hard, and honestly, I have no idea why I even ended up watching this one. Perhaps this’ll be a reminder to be less impulsive in my choices in the future. Soni-Ani focuses on, who else, Super Sonico herself, an energetic and kind, yet clumsy college student who should reasonably be dead from stress and exhaustion. Along with college, she’s an idol, gravure model, helper at her grandmother’s restaurant and guitarist and main singer in the band First Astronomical Velocity with her friends Suzu Fujimi, the witty and manipulative bassist and official leader of the band, and Fuuri Watanuki, the mysterious drummer single mindedly obsessed with food. The series just explores some of the odd, extremely fanservice filled days of her life. It’s ok idea on paper, but in practice it’s just not really anything special or even entertaining for the most part. While I can usually ignore fanservice, it’s downright distractingly prevalent in the earlier episodes, to the point of several episode premises pretty much only catering themselves to it. Even without that, there’s just not much to be found; aside from Suzu and Sonico’s manager, the honestly hilarious Kitamura, who constantly wears a hannya mask and is willing to attack people for attempting to take advantage of Sonico, the characters aren’t anything memorable or entertaining on their own, leaving a lot of episodes feeling dry. They do improve in the second half, featuring episodes like a fairly charming murder mystery spoof, and an episode focusing on Sonico’s cats, of all things, but they’re still not something going out of your way to watch. The voice acting and animation, while at least ok, don’t stick out much either. Overall, again, this is the one thing I’d say to just avoid. There’s tons of other slice of life animes out there that are way better. If nothing else, though, I’m kinda glad I stuck to it just for the surprise cameo by Kurisu Makise’s outfit, considering I was already playing Steins;Gate.

4. Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun

Number of episodes: 12. Language options: dub (video release only, apparently) and subs available. Streaming availability: Crunchyroll, Hulu, Netflix. Moving onto stuff I’d actually recommend, here’s a nice little anime adaptation of a gag manga by Izumi Tsubaki, produced by Dogakobo. Chiyo Sakura, a high school student who stands at an impressive 4′9″, confesses her love to the tall and mysterious Umetaro Nozaki, and gets his autograph, of all things, for her troubles. Trying again, Nozaki instead takes her to his apartment... to assist him with his manga. As it turns out, Nozaki is a popular romance manga author, whose interests in life start an end at manga, rendering him utterly oblivious to Chiyo’s feelings. Thusly, Chiyo officially becomes his assistant in order to grow closer to her crush, meeting his other associates along the way. The main thing that must be said is that this is not a serious anime in the slightest, and it’s all just big parody of romance manga more than anything, especially with the characters, like Mikoshiba, who acts like a playboy, but in reality is cripplingly shy, and Kashima, the “prince” of the school who is both actually a girl and an airhead who’s frequently on the nerves of the drama club’s president, Hori. A lot of the humor thrives on miscommunication, and it’s exaggerated enough that it works well. Every character is an idiot, in their own ways, but endearingly so, and each of them stands out, from Chiyo, who mostly plays the straight man but has her moments of over imagination, or the hilariously abrasive Seo. The plots are the right kind of dumb too, like Nozaki and Mikoshiba becoming obsessed over a helper NPC in a dating sim, or Hori gaining an intense hatred for people standing on boxes due to Nozaki’s attempts to fix perspective problems. The jokes can get a bit predictable after a while, especially with Nozaki, but overall it’s a pretty funny time. The voice acting is good, and the animation is charming. Overall, this is definitely a fun watch. If you want a good laugh, or just something that doesn’t take itself too seriously, this is definitely something to check out. 3. Angel Beats!

Number of episodes: 13 (+ some OVAs not on streaming services). Language options: dub and subs available. Streaming availability: Netflix, Crunchyroll, Funimation. As it turned out, visual novels, or at least visual novel developers, became a theme in the things I watched this time around. As mentioned before, Key is one of the biggest VN developers out there, who specialize in making you really sad. From Kanon, to Clannad, to Planetarian, to Little Busters, Key’s made a lot of great stuff, and had some great anime adaptations made, particularly for Kanon and Clannad. Thus, Jun Maeda, co-founder of Key, conceived Angel Beats to originate as an anime, produced by P.A. Works in 2010. Angel Beats focuses on Otonashi, a teenager who wakes up in a strange high school with amnesia, only able to remember his last name. He soon meets a girl named Yuri Nakamura, who informs him that they’re dead, and stuck in a sort of afterlife, seemingly ruled over by a mysterious girl they only know as Angel. In this purgatory, they’re unable to die, as Otonashi finds out first hand at Angel’s hands, and the school is populated by fabricated teachers and students, but the real people stuck there are at risk of being “obliterated” if they act like normal students, ceasing to exist. Unwilling to accept this, Yuri leads class SSS in opposition of Angel and the assumed God that created this world for the cruel fates that everyone stuck in the afterlife met, Otonashi seemingly included. With seemingly no other path to take, Otonashi joins forces with the SSS. The main strength of Angel Beats is its cast of characters. From the pretty mean yet charming Yuri, to the reliable, yet often abused Hinata, to the crazy and energetic Yui, to even some of the side characters, like Shiina, the ninja girl with a crippling weakness for wind up dog toys, or TK, who speaks in gloriously mangled English and dances constantly. The premise as well is honestly fascinating to me, and makes for some very interesting episodes. It’s got some pretty entertaining action scenes, along with some really funny moments, mostly by playing the “nobody can actually die” tidbit for all its worth, with the second episode devoting a good amount of time to slowly killing off the main group in horrible, yet blase fashions. It delivers emotionally too, with the second half in particular having a good deal of touching episodes, especially episode 10. Unfortunately, there’s one giant problem with this anime that brings it down quite a bit: it’s only 13 episodes long. While I’m not a fan of 12 or 13 episode seasons, I can’t say that’s a problem by itself. What is a problem is that they were planning to have double that amount of episodes, causing the storyline to feel very rushed, and leaving nearly every character in the cast that isn’t part of the main group very underdeveloped. While there’s an entire expanded universe of stuff, good luck tracking it all down, and while Key themselves were making a 6 part visual novel of Angel Beats to expand upon it all, something that’s very promising, only the first volume has been released so far, back in 2015, with no word since, very likely because of Jun Maeda’s health issues. Overall, Angel Beats genuinely is a good watch, but it’s kinda depressing, just because of how much potential was cut short thanks to whatever genius decided to cut the episode amount in half. Unless the VN project really gets going again, it’ll probably just remain a bunch of what could have beens. 2. Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Number of episodes: 12. Language options: dub and subs available. Streaming availability: Netflix, Hulu, Crunchyroll, Funimation. Continuing the theme I unintentionally set up, here’s this famous little thing, from the mind of Gen Urobuchi, who, among other things, has worked on several nitro+ visual novels, mostly notably Song of Saya, wrote the apparently horribly depressing Fate/Zero, and was a scriptwriter for Kamen Rider Gaim, which, to my understanding, is one of the darkest Kamen Rider shows out there. Will all this in mind, there’s no real hiding that this isn’t going to be anywhere near as innocent as it tries to appear. Even if you didn’t know that, its reputation probably far exceeds it by now. Madoka Kaname is an average middle school student whose life is thrown into chaos when a mysterious girl named Homura Akemi transfers into her class, whom Madoka later finds attacking a strange creature called Kyubey. After rescuing it, Madoka and her best friend Sayaka are attacked by a strange creature known as a witch, only to be rescued by Mami Tomoe, a “magical girl” given power by Kyubey. Kyubey sees much potential in Madoka, and offers to grant her any wish of her choosing, in exchange for her becoming a magical girl as well and helping fight the witches. Homura, however, is completely determined to keep that from happening. Thus starts a chain of event in the lives of Madoka and Sayaka that, suffice it to say, don’t go very well. Without getting too specific, what starts as a mostly typical, if slightly odd, magical girl show quickly goes to very dark and twisted places, comparative to Neon Genesis Evangelion, though not quite as in depthly depressing with it. Everyone takes a beating in some way, and even with just 12 episodes, it can get a bit much for some people, even when it doesn’t end quite as awfully as you might expect. Still, it’s actually very well done. The characters are complex and flawed, but ultimately sympathetic, the overall plot is fascinating, and it ends in a very fitting way. It’s emotional, and has surprisingly good action. The dub voice work is solid, and the animation by Studio Shaft is as well, especially helped by the abstract designs of the witches themselves. While I’m not quite as passionate about it all as some are, it’s definitely earned its reputation. It’s a great watch, and definitely a big recommendation. 1. Steins;Gate

Number of episodes: 24 (+ 1 OVA). Language options: dub and subs available. Streaming availability: Funimation, Hulu, Crunchyroll. Finishing off my unintentional theme with an actual adaptation of a visual novel, there was no way I wasn’t checking this one out with how utterly passionate the VN made me. This is at least partially a bias placement, but this anime is a very, very good adaptation, and a great way to experience the story without the VN, and a great watch even having gone through it. Rintaro Okabe is a college student on break living in his “laboratory” in Akihabara. A self proclaimed mad scientist, he whittles his days away hanging out with his friends Mayuri Shiina and Itaru Hashida, inventing useless gadgets in a supposed fight against an evil organization. One day, Rintaro and Mayuri go to attend a press conference by Doctor Nakabachi in Radi-Kan, who claims to have invented a time machine, only for it to end horribly for all involved when Rintaro discovers Kurisu Makise, a young neuroscientist who had recently had her thesis published in a major science magazine, murdered by an unknown assailant. Sending an email to Itaru about the incident, Rintaro suddenly finds the world to have changed. According to everyone else, the press conference had been canceled due to a mysterious satellite that crashed into Radi-Kan, and Rintaro later runs into Kurisu, alive and well. Investigating, Rintaro finds that, by complete accident, his modified microwave has become a device capable of sending emails to the past- and that SERN, a French research organization, has been conducting time travel experiments of their own. In his attempts to understand the capabilities of what he’s invented, and his curiosity as to why his memories appear to be out of sync with everyone else’s, Rintaro rushes into a series of experiments that change his life, and those of friends old and new. This is something I could rant about all day, but putting it as succinctly as I can, I’ve never been as fascinated by time travel as Steins;Gate has made me. As fantastic as it, it’s also shown to be unpredictable, limited, and downright unsettling, especially when nobody knows just how time even works. It’s a story about the concept of time travel as much as a story about using it. The story definitely starts a bit slowly, but it’s well worth pushing past. As an adaptation, it doesn’t even need to sacrifice much, with the most that’s lost being some details in a few later arcs that aren’t worth much in the long run anyway. Beyond that, the main strength of the story is the cast of characters. Rintaro, with his rather severe case of chuunibyou, is a unique protagonist to begin with, but the events of the story turn him into an honestly fascinating and downright tragic character, and easily one of my favorite protagonists in a long time. The rest of the cast is just as good, with Kurisu being a great mix of intelligence, ravenous curiosity, and flusterability, with her and Rintaro’s interactions always being entertaining. As well, there’s the always kind, yet ditzy Mayuri, the outgoing, but odd Suzuha Amane, the endearingly gentle Luka Urushibara, and the energetic and wily Faris, just for some examples. The cast is downright loveable and very easy to get attached to. While I prefer the Japanese voice cast overall, the dub isn’t to be overlooked, with Trina Nishimura as Kurisu, Tyson Rinehart as Itaru, Cherami Leigh as Suzuha, Lindsay Seidel as Luka, and especially J. Michael Tatum as Rintaro giving great performances. Visually, White Fox did a great job giving it a distinct look. While the VN had a gorgeous and unique artstyle, it’s not really something that can be translated into animation. Instead, they used a whole lot of washed out colors and saturated lights that, combined with the sparse use of flashy effects and even music, gives a very subtle atmosphere to it all. Even beyond the style, it looks very good on its own, and it’s especially nice not having Rintaro look like a ghoul half the time, like he does in the VN.

Overall, this is very much something worth checking out. I’m beating a dead horse here since Steins;Gate is already wildly popular, but it’s that way for a very good reason. There’s also an extra OVA episode, along with a sequel movie, though both are only available via Funimation. They aren’t quite the best, but they make for entertaining watches worth checking out. And with that, that’s the end to my rambling. With the exception of, again, Super Sonico, everything here is very much worth a watch. I’m sure, once I emerge from the hell of Steins;Gate spinoffs, I’ll get to watching even more stuff. Till then, though. -Scout

[baconpal]

talkin bout fire force

shit boys it’s been too long time for another unprompted juvenile rant about manga, click keep reading if you’re insane and keep scrolling if you aren’t 

So Fire Force anime starts in just about a week and I decided to just read it all instead of waiting for any anime. It took a while to read all of it and now I just kind of have a lot to say about the manga, the anime, and the author. So here we go. 

I actually have a lot of good things to talk about, but I’ll get the bad shit out of the way first:

THE WRITING

idk his name it doesn’t really matter since he’s made like 2 things he’s just the soul eater guy; his art style has always been charming and the action scenes keep improving but his actual narrative writing is real bad. I’ll talk about the characters themselves since I actually think FF’s characters are a ridiculous improvement from soul eater, and the setting/aesthetic are on point as well but the plot is just as bad if not worse than whatever soul eater was.

The story is riddled with what should obviously be throwaway characters that keep being brought back and doing something evil and unexpected because it’s a shounen manga and if you aren’t being betrayed then the plot isn’t moving forward, or someone introduced as an obviously villainous character just kind of agrees to be friends in a couple chapters. This is used as a constant cycle of introducing both a set of “evil” and “good” characters, then one of the old “good” sets of characters does something evil and the newest “evil” guys turn out to be good. It’s not interesting or shocking to have a character you can’t even remember come back and act like they’re important, especially if it’s repeated over and over.

FF pretends to have some kind of politic overtones where religions and businesses and such act as their own entities and betray each other and prey on the civilians, but you see absolutely none of the impact anybody’s actions have on the world despite ridiculous things constantly happening and world shaking truths being brought to light over and over, nothing happens. Villains will also  have ridiculous unbeatable abilities but then just be ignored, such as making zombie apocalypses or controlling minds and such. This is also likely a concession of being a shounen manga, where you can’t expect readers to read every single chapter, and usually on a week to week basis, so every chapter needs to have its own big shit happening, even if there’s no plans to follow through on anything. 

The worst part about the writing is how much stuff that the reader didn’t know about and has no idea what it is is passed of as some shocking twist when it’s introduced. This mostly happens with powers and with new factions. There’s a ridiculous amount of times where a new group steps in as the bad guy like mentioned earlier. But for the powers, there’s so many things layered on top of an actually acceptable power system that just seem to cause a DBZ type of escalation of power without the fight scenes actually becoming that much crazier at all. On top of the simple 2nd/3rd generation fire fighter powers, the main character is meant to utilize the adolla burst, the adolla link, the preacher’s divine protection, the okay hand emoji that makes you go fast, the breath of life, and superfire fighting. None of that means anything to anyone and are just used as “MC needs to be better at something but only temporarily” over and over. It’s similar to Maka and Soul’s deals with the devil in soul eater except much more common and with absolutely no downsides.

Also not the fault of the writer himself but there is not ANY good translation of this manga out there holy shit. There’s so many incredibly obvious puns and connections and choices of words to be made that are just entirely ignored, the typesetting is always awful, and no name for moves, characters, or even the title are ever agreed upon. It took until the official release titled “Fire Force” before people stopped trying to call the manga “Burning Firefighter Squad of Fire”.

THE ANIME

Just a bit more bad to say before I go into all the shit about this manga i actually like. The anime looks awful. A lot of anime does right now, very little of note has been coming out or seems to be coming in the future, which is usually the case but its not getting better and that sucks! 

But specifically the fire force anime, following up after soul eater, has absolutely none of the visual charm translated from the manga to anime, the voice casting is absolutely abysmal, and there’s nothing to give me hope in it, not enough to even give it an episode most likely. People might try to defend David productions because woah man I love jojo!!! but they’re pretty fucking bad at animating anything. The choice of color is gross and the visual effects are bland, which is a bad place to start for a show that will contain tons of fire and other bombastic effects. Big shame.

OKAY ONTO THAT GOOD SHIT

CHARACTER DESIGN

The visual designs in soul eater were cool if a bit janky, and the actual concepts for characters were far from astounding, usually being able to fully describe characters in single words and not having much development outside of combat abilities. But Fire Force has some of the most tight characters I’ve seen in a while, they’re all simple and focused with strong thematic elements.

Ya’ll know me, hopefully. I really appreciate simple designs and simple characters. Complicated does not equal deep, and simple does not equal shallow. The characters in fire force will usually embody a concept, or a concept and its exact opposite, and be never waver from their design. I’ll talk about em for specific characters when I get to em but even lots of minor characters are very well focused and I appreciate it.

SHINRA

The main character, and while his grocery list of special abilities and “chosen one” kinda shit is annoying, he starts of as a very strong introspective of the weight of your actions vs the impression you give of in the eyes of society. The easiest way to describe it is through the very obvious identity struggle he goes through of wanting to be known as a “Hero” but instead being “The Devil”. All Shinra ever does is selflessly save peoples lives and put himself at extreme risk, he tells everyone and their grandma that they can call on him when they need a hero, and yet his visuals consist of a dark haired punk who constantly smiles a sharp toothy smile, his ability that he uses to fly in and do kamen rider kicks with spews fire from his feet in the shape of pointy wings, and this fire puts a heavy shadow over his face, giving him a monsterous siloutte. It’s not at all subtle that he just looks as evil and menacing as possible, and so his reputation is constantly negative no matter how kind he is. It’s not explored all that deeply but it is still a strong contrast.

ARTHUR

What a fucking idiot. What an absolute buffoon. This stupid fuck functions as a very simple gag character by being nearly too dumb to function and living in a made up reality as a fantasy knight, but is also able to exist as one of the strongest characters in combat. His ridiculous power is handled in a much more engaging way than Shinra’s. As instead of layering multiple chosen one abilities on him, he becomes weaker or stronger depending on his suspension of disbelief. The more in character as a powerful knight he becomes, the stronger he is. It’s a clean way to make a funny delusional characters struggle actually mean something to the people around them, instead of being left to his own devices or constantly told to fuck off. And while I said the plot isn’t very good, the smaller character beats can be very powerful. For example, It was already pretty easy to just accept Arthur as he was, but his family situation is explored late into the manga, and it’s shown that he began to live in fantasy to escape from his families arguments and poor living conditions. His parents take advantage of his disconnect and abandon their home with him in it, leaving all their responsibilities to him with a note saying he’s now the king and has inherited their castle. This pushes him to an even more absurd degree of fantasy in order to just live out his life knowing he was unloved and unwanted. It very understated how you can make a character that’s mostly used for jokes still be very easy to connect to and empathize. 

TAMAKI 

This one is likely to be the hottest take made from me here today, but this is the most interesting character in this series for a variety of reasons. 

Visuals out of the way, the fire fighter outfits everyone wears already look cool as shit and big puffy coats just get me goin, this girl absolutely rocks it on top of having twintails and a cute face. That’s not objective in anyway this is just a character designed to bait specifically me and its fucking working, okay? The writing is the actually interesting part.

So something that’s usually not even worth talking about is fan service. Show of a girls titties cus its what dudes in their teens want to see, its free (You)s for shounen manga, and soul eater was full of it. It was pretty bad in soul eater and could come at jarring and unneeded times for characters that didn’t seem to exist for any sexual reasons. It was a very poor way to include fan service. 

Fire Force also begins in a similar spot, the 3 main girls that are around in the beginning chapters are occasionally seen changing or in a bath or covered in water or whatever, with one particularly bad spread of them with the classic no nipple no vagina bodies all standing together in a shower. Its awkward and stiff and even as a fan of anime tiddie it just wasn’t worth having. 

But then that wildman just does it. He creates one single character to put literally every single ounce of horny energy in to. A character who exists to fall over and get her tits pushed into someones face, but pushed to a cartoonish extreme. It sounds silly to try to pass off fanservice as funny, but it is. It’s so ridiculously intended and impossible and always varied that its actually fun to see her do something stupid and for something to happen. Sometimes its just her ass landing on a dudes face (god i wish that were me) or her body being exposed and drawn in pretty high detail. Sometimes instead they get an entire dude stuck in her shirt after just tripping in a way that is not not being sexual to the reader at all since you see absolutely no skin. She’s simply destined to be put into lewd situations in universe, not in regards to the manga itself. For an example, here she is just standing completely still, and suddenly becoming naked, drawn in a distant, goofy way: 

It’s stupid. It’s definitely still fan service, but it’s just ridiculous. And that’s way more interesting than having every girl in your series randomly get naked at some point. Despite being insane it still works on boys, as Tamaki is the most popular girl in the series by far, ranked as the second most popular character consistently. 

Tamaki also leads to the single best chapter of the manga where a horribly designed throw-away assassin who was beaten by her returns for revenge, but just ends up as a short, self contained, well paced comedic story of love. 

And guess what, she’s still interesting outside of being funny and having fan service. Her cartoonish luck is essentially treated as her actual power, and her fire cat abilities aren’t explored too deeply during most of the series, but this is done for a greater purpose of essentially spitting in the face of high stakes. Tamaki easily witnesses the most deaths in the series, and most of them are cruel and unusual. She witnesses children being killed by a man who inspired her, she sees people she just met be beheaded in some gruesome shots that aren’t anywhere else in the series, and she gets involved in all sorts of life threatening situations. She still just falls over and gets naked. She’ll have fairly serious fights where she tries her hardest or the people around her are completely serious, and without bringing any direct attention to it she still ends up showing skin. There’s a point where every single character is at risk of dying at once to a trap set by the enemy, and Tamaki quietly laments over how she’ll be the only one to survive. She is completely aware of her ridiculous luck and her complete immunity to stakes, which is honestly just great.

Even beyond that, Tamaki is slowly being built up as more and more of an actual character, she has a short backstory section where her own hard work and effort is basically ignored by everyone around her, as if her success in life is only a result of her good luck, which is a feeling that hits very close to home to me (fuck you if you’ve ever discredited someones hard work because they’re “””””talented””””). And in the most recent couple of chapters, shes made an active effort to train alongside Shinra and Arthur, who both value the improvements they can make to themselves through hard work. No other characters in the cast make conscious efforts to improve from their status in the way Tamaki does. She moves up from a joke character to now trying to stand along side the main character as a useful and though out character. It’s a genuinely wonderful character to have been developed and the best thing I’ve gotten from this author.

VISUALS AND COMPOSITION

Okay enough about the characters, the last little thing I wanna touch on is just some of the absolutely bonkers kinds of compositions in this manga. One of the villains has an ability that is explained incredibly poorly. Pretty sure it’s just a time slowing ability that has nothing to do with fire but whatever. The pages where he uses the ability have this absolutely sick warped look to them that plays with the panels in a way that couldn’t be depicted in any other medium. Just look at this shit.

Every panel has a different background and yet still describes a single cut in time. It might not really mean anything, but that’s fucking sick dude.

Another pretty interesting one is this one kid named Nataku, who has an ability forced onto him by a maniac with a motif of stars for eyes, who dies immediately after. This event is shown to have absolutely traumatized him not because its directly said, but because this dead character appears constantly in panels with this kid, sometimes taking up the entire background to yell at him, or being an almost impossible to see spec lingering behind him. Nataku is also drawn in this strange sketchy style where he seems to be melting, and sometimes melds into shapes that resemble this dead character, such Nataku’s mouth becoming the fucking eyeball of the dead guy, star pupil and everything. It’s just such a specific and horrific way to depict that kind of identity trauma and it really stuck out to me.

I’LL SHUT UP NOW

And ye that’s about it. It was a lot of rambling and there are still lots of little things i like about the manga, good designs and cool fights and stuff but i just wanted to talk about the things that were really noteworthy to me. 

It’s been a long time since I’ve spent 4 hours just typing about stuff but if you actually read any of this, on this dead website of all places, you’re cool. Hope you found something interesting too.