#yahooeny

[yahooeny]

CND9 @ AMBLIS RECORDS BLOCK PARTY 4.18.15

[weebzone]

SAO II is Actually Pretty Good Ep. 1-6 Review - By Enoch Kim

Forget what you remember about Sword Art Online. Well, forget the second half of Season One. SAO II is actually pretty good and interesting.

WAIT- DON’T SCROLL DOWN

Stay with me, dude. Trust. SAO II is actually pretty cool right now, just give me a bit to explain myself.

Rad- Humans with Baggage

Let’s all be real here Kirito was a pretty boring protagonist who just felt like your standard shounen hero who had little to conquer, besides an excellent departure near the beginning of Season One where he had to fight with the guilt of having not saved Sachi. With new heroine Shion comes a new dynamic; dealing with the trauma after killing someone in self-defense. Shion single-handedly makes GGO’s melodramatic mood believable and relatable. Her attempt at self-therapy from being triggered by guns, after having shot a burglar in self-defense years ago, by playing a VRFPS brings to scrutiny society’s deterrence from getting people the help they need and makes her someone to root for to overcome her past.

Similarly giving Kirito the weight of having killed several members of Laughing Corpse gives him a depth of humanity he desperately needed before. Some may say it’s too late as admittedly his trauma from meeting a Death Gun member comes out of nowhere but question either my taste or low expectation that SAO has left me with but I will take what I can get.

Rad- A Gritty Cyberpunk World

After two fantasy settings GGO is actually a refreshing departure with its dark, monochromatic aesthetic and fast-paced combat sequences. It’s not just a scenery change; the duels and tournament format brings a new pace to SAO that feels different from SAO’s anthology style-format and ALO’s wandering-aimlessly-doing-nothing format. It’s still SAO, it still feels like SAO, but it feels new and that’s always relieving to feel.

Rad- God Damn Beautiful

No joke; SAO II looks stunning. And like, duh, right? This is A-1, the now giant studio that’s backed by Sony. But I don’t think that makes SAO II any less of an achievement because regardless of who’s behind the money, SAO II looks beautiful for what they got. Hey, here’s some uncomfortable truth- anime makes jack shit from the show! All the real cash comes from merchandising, so never ever has anime been treated to the comparably gigantic $1 mil+ budgets most western shows get. So the fact that SAO II looks so fluid, has such a larger-than-life cinematography, looks so freaking good while never looking like they just splurge the budget on the (numerous) action sequence should remain a triumph. Because god damn, lord knows SMC brought our standards a couple dozen notches.

Eh. - Longer, Slower Strides

You know what felt a bit bullshit about Season One? (Besides the incest?)  The fact that two giant arcs was squashed into one season. That’s not to say that the SAO arc wasn’t really well paced but it gave little time for me to give a shit about the exploits of Leafa and friends. Right when you’ve started giving a shit about Kirito and Asuna, it dragged you away to give a shit about other dudes you’ve never heard of and never end up caring (what even is Leafa’s friend’s name? I certainly don’t remember and don’t give enough enough of a shit to care).

So fittingly enough, SAO II is going at a snail’s pace. It takes three episodes for Kirito to actually get into GGO, the first episode is spent on the most goddamn boring exposition dump that obviously was trying to replicate the viewer shock of shows past and never realizes that that shit was never actually interesting. On the flipside, I actually give a shit about Shion and her struggle because SAO gave her almost two god damn episodes all to herself and almost forced me down to care about her. Maybe it backfired on some people but I’m hooked in and every slow crawl where Kirito or Shion ramble about their plights I’m invested in them and not hovering over CTRL-W.

Eh.- So Why Exactly is Kirito a Girl?

No, serious question. Why the hell did SAO feel like it needed to make Kirito look like a girl? To make some contrived bullshit drama about Shion thinking Kirito was a girl and get angry when he wasn’t? Like honestly all that did was drive Shion dangerously into tsundere territory and make Kirito honestly look predatory. Eww?

But beyond that... why? Like I’m not against it but no one really comments on it after the forth episode. It would’ve been cool if commentary about how women in MMOs are treated radically different from men but SAO comes close to that back away. So why is Kirito a girl? To cater to a female audience a little bit for once?

...Okay I’ll take that.

Lame- Piled into the Bus

Wanted to see more of Asuna being a badass? Too bad she does jack shit. Actually fucking cared about Leafa? Too bad she’s on the benches too. Cared about Klein or Yui or any other god damn character from last season? Too bad, none of them matter! Everyone who you’ve ever met’s been piled onto the bus and will probably never return this season. This is also a problem that reared its head last season, but at least then they had the decency to not shove tiny sequences of everyone’s favorites dicking around in ALO. It’s still super disappointing that the badass Asuna not only had to play the damsel last season but still gets nothing to do and it’s hard to reconcile the suspicion that SAO’s just throwing new characters for us to buy figmas of and throwing the rest away Transformers-style.

Lame- BOOTY

BOOTY SHOT. EVERYWHERE. I’m trying to give a shit about Shion but it’s really hard to do that when her ASS IS IN THE WAY. I’m really fucking tired of seeing women characters having their ass scoped in by the camera. I DON’T NEED TO SEE THEIR BOOTY TO BE INVESTED HOLY SHIT.

*Sigh*... at least there’s some of that MAN BOOTY. Needs more man booty tho.

  For the first time in forever SAO is once again a show worth watching. Seriously I’m not joking, from what’s been shown so far SAO seems like it got it’s shit together and is ready to be the fun, fascinating, adventure it once promised to be. It’s still heavily flawed, but, fuck I had fun.

[lillimlamb]

My friend Enoch when I asked if he had gotten anything from analyzing a certain song:

WHAT IS THERE TO SAY

AS THE GREAT WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ONCE SAID

"VIGOROUS WRITING IS CONCISE. THIS REQUIRES NOT THAT THE WRITER MAKE ALL HIS SENTENCES SHORT, OR THAT HE AVOID DETAIL AND TREAT HIS SUBJECTS ONLY IN OUTLINE, BUT THAT EVERY WORD TELL"

THIS IS OF COURSE

NOT SOMETHING THAT SHAKESPEARE ACTUALLY SAID

SO

FUCK YOU

IT'S WEIRD SHIT

(Actual "shakespeare" quote by William Strunk Jr.)

[yahooeny]

cyber bullies amv wip

[yahooeny]

CND9 - HLIM-7500

[yahooeny]

cyber bullies amv wip

[yahooeny]

CND9 - HLIM-7500

[yahooeny]

cyber bullies amv wip

[yahooeny]

CND9 - HLIM-7500

[yahooeny]

venoSci - I.R.C. (CND9 + Pulse-Amplitude RMX)

[yahooeny]

CND9 - CUT! PAST THE GROOVE

[yahooeny]

CND9 - JCHKM-9631

[yahooeny]

CND9 - FLX-Z80

[yahooeny]

CND9 - EAT SHIT DRINK PISS GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH feat. Ivy Hollivana

[yahooeny]

Death Grips - Artificial Death in the West (CND9 vs Pulse-Amplitude RMX)

[yahooeny]

RUSH SEQUENCE PRODUCTION LIVESTREAM