It took a truly bland vanilla soft serve protagonist like Kirito to show the possibilities of ten billion iterations on stabbing orcs with your waifus
I had the hardest time figuring out wtf you were saying because I kept reading it like vanillawaresoft, which isn't the name of the game company but my brain refused to understand it as anything other than that.
The funny thing is that Sword Art Online isn't even an isekai. Like, even ignoring the whole "they're not actually in another world, and they're out of it by the end of the first volume" thing, the story is very much just real people playing an MMO with NPCs (and the Other World as a whole) being pushed to the wayside.
It's definitely a foundational text when it comes to the bafflingly large VRMMORPG genre, alongside the obvious stuff like .hack and actual MMOs and RPGs, but for the actual modern isekai genre I suspect patient zero is probably some niche Syosetsu novel that never got huge in the west?
...actually, reading up on it I guess maybe Familiar of Zero (2004) was patient zero for popularizing the genre on syosetsu? Huh. And Re:Zero's author apparently wrote FoZ fanfiction before he hit it big with Re:Zero. Huh.
Also Mushoku Tensei (2012) is the one that popularized the entire reincarnated scumbag thing, I guess?
It feels kind of weird to be able to point at something and say "this one's at fault", really.
All I've ever seen of familiar of zero is random snippets in YouTube clips of some dude getting abused by presumably the titular Zero for laughs, and that is like the opposite of something I'd ever want to watch. It's like a three stooges bit with even less nuance.
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
This latest episode of Kaiju No 8 is white knuckle.
All I've ever seen of familiar of zero is random snippets in YouTube clips of some dude getting abused by presumably the titular Zero for laughs, and that is like the opposite of something I'd ever want to watch. It's like a three stooges bit with even less nuance.
oh it's definitely not a great series
but I guess looking at it it's an early series of its type, that being "milquetoast Japanese student gets portal'd into a fantasy world, gets romcom harem shenanigans while being the Special Boy"
also one reason this is weirding me out is because I'm suddenly finding out that Familiar of Zero fanfics were obviously a Japanese thing in addition to being a horribly cliché English thing
(seriously, people have written so many bad stations-of-canon crossovers)
although it's definitely worth noting that we're talking about multiple waves here
Familiar of Zero and Sword Art Online are in 2004, Tsukimichi and Mushoku Tensei are in 2012
it just takes a while for the thing to go from web novel -> light novel -> anime, and in that time dozens of other web novel authors have copied what they saw as a winning formula and suddenly get snapped up by light novel publishers who see the success of the original thing and want in on that cash train.
like, Bakarina? My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom? It got an anime in 2020, sure, but it (and that first wave of other otome villainess stories) got published in Syosetsu in 2014.
Yeah, probably can blame Familiar of Zero for milquetoast protagonist that is the special little boy, that losers can easily self insert themselves into trope bullshit.
SoA, probably can be blamed for gamification becoming over done, while having the MC be the bestest at everything and rendering all the other characters as baggage bullshit.
Kind of feel that the slavery apologia and hero being a giant piece of shit, is going to be on Shield Hero.
Honestly, the things I would really love to see dropped from the formula most. Are the slavery because it's fucking disgusting and people should be shamed for trying to make that shit sound good; especially, when you get the slave harems that are essentially rape apologia. The "I'm the bestest at everything" bullshit because it just results in boring ass stories and makes all the other characters window dressing. The bland milquetoast fucker MCs, if people want self inserts they can either write their own fan fiction or pick up a video game that has a setup where you can make choices, which impact the story. Hell, I'm trying to figure out what the fuck happen because the big thing use to be people imagined fighting alongside the protagonists in the the make believe world instead of wanting to actually be the MC.
The other stuff, if done in moderation and not the only thing the genre does, are okay. The scumbag MC can make for interesting stories, granted they shouldn't be all the stories and there should be some hard fucking limits because the MC from Mushoku Tensei is such a dogshit individual, that it completely ruins the story; especially, when it's made very clear at the beginning that he will not improve as an individual. Chosen one or having a special ability that is a step down from chosen one, are things that can be done well and can help setup interesting situations. Gamification is another thing where it can be done well, I do think fantasy in general should try to avoid always becoming an RPG. Part of that is the setting is in a universe that isn't a game, ergo there isn't a need for game balance. The funny thing is, when you read the official lore for some of the bigger games, many of the NPCs don't bother to stick to the rigid mechanical classes you see in the games because the writers get there is no need for it. That said, there are some aspects that are welcome, even in things that aren't set in a video game. Having the text box pop up with the name of an ability and what it does or another that lists the name name and role of a character, are fine because that can save some time by avoiding exposition dumps via dialogue on things that might not be as engaging for the audience.
Harem stuff has been around ages, and I feel like you can trace the trends pretty well. Even going back to even like Ranma. It got especially popular with stuff like Love Hina and visual novels especially which was the standard pipeline for amateur/doujin works into adaptations, and generally had the structure of X girls which bland self-insert protagonist would become the landlord or new student and be the only one to notice that they had some issue and thereby resolve it. As VNs declined and LNs rose up, that gave way a bit to the more post-modern harems of about ten years ago where it tended to be more one girl at a time, and more magical girlfriend because the first one was always the star (Shana, Zero, Index, etc), but stuff like Haruhi, Monogatari, or the less metaphysical Oregairu, etc, still had the harem trend going strong. Even the magical girlfriend stuff almost always did the "new girl to fix every novel" thing. Plus the thankfully brief dabble into incest being all the rage (OreImo).
Then, yeah, we hit not only Sword Art Online, but light/web novels absolutely fucking explode, and there's a lot of factors there that make the puerile power fantasy a lot stickier and harder to change. I think the two biggest factors are that a huge portion of the LN industry is being run off online popularity contests, and the online population is... what it is. But just being population contests in any shape or form makes it significantly harder for anything original or outside the norm to break through and trends to change.
And the other thing is losing whale spenders. VNs and anime DVDs were (are) absurdly expensive, but if you had your collection of a couple thousand superfans who'd buy up all the merchandise, that's more than enough to make a big profit. By that audience's very nature though, it's smaller and more volatile. But the VN industry collapsed, DVD sales became streaming income, and gacha rose up devouring the whale economy. But LNs are super cheap, and when the industry finally got web publishing and distribution figured out, they became the pulpy cheap entertainment available to everybody, so now your audience is WAAAAY the fuck bigger, but also younger and less discerning, so it becomes more about throwing a billion things at the wall for the thinnest slice of a ginormous pie, so they recruit way too many authors who are untrained and just copy what's popular.
Why it's gotten stuck on slave harems, power fantasies and these people are lazy/bad writers, and it turns out that audiences are nowhere near as discerning as previously assumed. How do we show that the protagonist is a good guy? Everybody else is super racist/evil. But not him. But we're not changing society either. We don't DO THAT here. It also justifies every horrific and grotesque act of abuse and torture they act out upon the transgressors. Everything's fine if the evildoer totally deserved it. Slave and slave adjacent stuff has gone hand in hand with harem things for a long time though, especially during the maid and robot era (eg Chobits, Saber Marionette, etc), but it was a lot more blunted when the default protagonist was Billy Wallflower who was totally embarrassed to have all these girls throwing themselves at him instead of power fantasy dipshits with divine right.
Same goes for the gamification. Why is he strong? He has the high numbers. Nobody has time for complicated lore or suspense about powers, and definitely not creativity in use of them. Biggest number wins. Audience is here to see assholes acting out abuse towards the deserving, not struggle and grow over even a couple paragraphs.
It probably shouldn't surprise anyone that Rising of the Shield Hero is also from 2012. (Like I said, web novels get started in waves as someone comes up with a popular concept and others start piggy-backing onto it in the hope of catching some of that attention. Syosetsu, and web fiction in general, is a competitive space.)
So you know where I'm coming from, I'm a Gundam SEED enjoyer (I'd give it a B rating) and a Gundam SEED Destiny hater (I'd give it a D- rating). The first hour gave me hopes that this would maybe be something along the lines of Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz, which is still up there with my favorite Gundam movies, and easily my favorite one that's a continuation of a series instead of just its own story. The second half fell off to an INCREDIBLE degree. The animation is not what I would call theatrical quality. It looks MUCH worse than Hathaway and honestly not to the level of Doan's Island in a lot of ways. The most bizarre thing about it was that the basic proportions of characters seem extremely off, all the time. Characters seem to be deformed, having too large heads or being too short relative to their surroundings, then in other scenes or from other perspectives, they look fine. Lacus frequently looks like she's had collagen injections... and then was battered about the head until concussed. There are random insert scenes from the two shows, which has the unfortunate effect of reminding you that... yes, the characters were routinely animated better in THOSE than they are being done in this movie you're watching. All of ONE character has a moment of extreme emotion portrayed interestingly in their face and mannerisms, in the entire film. I'll say that the CGI mobile suits mainly look... fine, except that... well. The action choreography is just not good, frankly. Despite everything being animated fresh, they used that animation to just redo the most reused frames from the series (Kira's Gundam fires 6 beams at once, a suit fires its gun, then a missile blade, etc) instead of going for really detailed, unique moments. SEED was never the best animated in terms of Gundam fights, but this movie has to rank among the worst. There were a few moments I appreciated, and they were essentially all finishing moves. I'll have to dig into it in the spoiler section, but the plot is initially intriguing, and then eventually extremely silly (not in a fun way, unfortunately).
Full on spoilers
-The basic idea of the plot is that there's a new kind of genetically engineered human which are even better-er than Coordinators, in a way that is explained not at all (like how it was possible in the first place). These guys want to bring back the Destiny Plan from their Argentinian Nazi holdout island. Not actually that in universe, but that's where your mind should be about their politics and how they plan to go about it. If you've forgotten, the Destiny Plan is the Futurama "everyone will be assigned a job for life based on their DNA" thing, but even MORE fascist. For some reason, the heroes are consistently tongue tied about why, specifically, this plan is the most evil thing in their universe, and do a lot of falling back on "We should believe in love and the dreams of little boys and girls" instead of "No part of this makes sense and is a transparent attempt to set the richest people in the setting up as Gods for life." The bad guys pull off a false flag operation, combined with a kidnapping and several mind whammies to bring the setting to another crisis point that will start a new war/genocide/kerfuffle. In the end, the power of heterosexual love and new marketable toys with horrifyingly violent weapons will save the day.
-There's a shocking amount of the plot that amounts to boyfriend/girlfriend drama. I guess you could see this coming based on how Destiny trivialized national politics to the last part of a romcom where Athrun shows up in a mobile suit to get the girl. But I assure you, Freedom is MUCH worse about this. The one bad guy is just Prince Xizor from Star Wars Shadows of the Empire. He blasts Lacus with magical pheromone powers to say "I was literally created in a lab to be the best at fucking you... also Nazi genetics rhetoric is awesome, right?" Lacus struggles with this for about 2/3rds of the movie, which isn't a relevant test of her character, she's being macrodosed with magical sex chemicals. When things get dire enough, she finally wakes up and goes "No, I don't want to fuck weird Nazi creepazoids, get lost!" which isn't really a satisfying ending to a conflict, it's the immediately obvious outcome from the moment the character is introduced.
-The new movie MS's are textually kind of bad?? Rising Freedom and Immortal Justice get dominated and blown up the first time they're challenged and then Shinn spends the rest of the movie shit talking that mobile suit. I honestly was a bit shocked that they would so openly shit on products that are there to be sold, that's like... the idea of new variants.
-Kira's character arc in the two series was about violence vs interventionism. In the first part of the first series, he struggles with committing violence to save others and it nearly breaks him. Then Lacus gives him a much better mobile suit than everyone else and basically instructs him to just "Win every fight without killing, 4head!" which he then does. For Freedom, they wanted to do something new with him and it is... wretched. He's basically a sitcom husband who is far too busy at the office and doesn't feel like he's spending enough time with the girlfriend. Then a romantic rival is like "you are not the right social class to be dating your hot girlfriend!" which Kira 100% seems to agree with, which is extremely bizarre. Athrun does some Bright punches to point out what an asshole he's being, so he goes to save Lacus and she confirms that they're extremely sexually compatible so... that's good enough, surely. I'm not exaggerating at all.
-Shinn is, hilariously, the butt of the joke for the first two thirds of the movie. Kira invited him to join his mobile suit squadron but then doesn't trust him to take on important tasks, and the rest of the squad is like, "Yeah, because you're total shit," instead of being like "Listen, he believes in you and you'll see that when it counts." This is the funniest possible outcome for his character, which I pretty much despise, so I'm very much in favor of it, especially the designated hater in the squad (Agnes) who is just RELENTLESS about being mean to him.
-Lacus has a TERRIBLE role in this movie (mentioned before) and the new dub pronounces her name as "La koos" instead of the original dub's "La cuss", which just sounded way better. I do not care if the new dub is "more accurate", it sounds worse in English and they should not have done that (I will SQUARE UP against that Netflix Eva dub).
-Athrun doesn't show up for the first part of the movie and then eventually appears in a mask doing mystery stuff and then arrives in a mobile suit to save Kira. What he was up to and his behavior up to that point goes COMPLETELY unexplained. Perhaps there's some LN or manga that goes into it, but that shit is really not acceptable in a self contained feature film. He is the only one of the primary trio (Kira, himself, Shinn) not acting wildly out of character or horribly pathetic, so he gets major points for just being a dude here.
-Cagalli has a serious diplomatic role in the plot for 90% of the runtime, then suddenly becomes the butt of jokes for the end part. Specifically, booby and jokey fanservice in the FINAL FIGHT. It's of a piece with how God awful the final fight is otherwise, so it doesn't stand out, but it's legitimately terrible, nonetheless.
-The new "hero" pilot, Agnes, was presumably hand picked by Kira to fight with him in his international anti-terrorist mecha squad. She is an insane yandere who spends most of her runtime cutting diss tracks about Shinn. She also wants to have sex with Kira, who is all but a married man, which is super well known to anyone who knows him. When he turns down this extremely inappropriate offer, she goes MORE insane and defects to the Nazi geneticist terror squad, at first opportunity. I think she's supposed to be this story's version of Quess? Which is a pretty fair revamp, since Quess is one of the worst Gundam characters of all time.
-The Black Knights are the most obvious Ginyu Squad in all of Gundam. It's very funny when they are briefly pretending not to be evil (they are not trying very hard). They're literally shoulder checking Lacus' protection team like they're the evil hockey team from Mighty Ducks. Unfortunately, they are not very fun as rivals as they're given MS' that are just magically better and also magic mind powers to just open up their opponents for attacks. It would have been a lot more entertaining if they were just extremely well coordinated pilots who made progress against the heroes because the heroes were held back by politics and infighting.
tl;dr It is the worst thing in this franchise. I got really busy and didn't write this up for too long, but hopefully it was worth it to get it down in writing.
As an aside, I kinda wish Beltorchika’s Children had been the plot they went with for the Char’s Counterattack movie. Seems to make the Quess and Hathaway situation a lot better.
Having a scumbag protagonist is alright in a story so long as it's made clear he is a scumbag and that his behavior is not to be applauded. And if they get shit for it then all the better.
A good example of this would be Lloyd in Greatest Estate Developer. The dude is absolutely a scumbag protagonist, even if he's doing it for the benefit of those around him. And he justifiably gets called on it, even by those who know he's got an angle. Usually by Javier, who is technically the real protagonist in the story the world is following.
Is there a fantasy series that has levels and stats and all that crap, and it's actually good?
Spoofs like Konosuba don't count. Also it doesn't count if they really are just playing a video game like Bofuri or Shangri-La Frontier.
I'm a Spider, So What is (arguably) at it's best early on, when Kumoko is basically a tiny spider underdog who's abusing the game system to have a chance against much higher level mobs she shares her dungeon with in clever ways.
Some people will say/argue I'm a Spider, so What isn't good, but pretty much all the complaints I've seen online are about things that happen after it stops being mostly about Kumoko abusing stats and skills and starts being about the larger plot and world.
Yeah, levels and stats can be handled well in a straight up fantasy that isn't in a game. I'd argue it's harder to do and not just because it begs the question of "why?" The other big issue with put a number next to things, is that it does limit the authors ability to be creative; especially, if a difference in levels, stats or both ends up being absolutely oppressive because then the author has to explain how the plucky heroes got over the stat wall when the villain of the week had higher levels and the MC only had 1-2 days to surmount that.
I mean, it's okay to have fights where there are no levels or stats or attribute systems (ex. the triangle of water > fire > grass/wood > water). Sometimes someone can just lose the fight one day and come back a few days later and secure a win. Kind of like how it works in real life, where you can have a fighting tournament that goes exactly like that. Where sometimes even the favorite that has solid technique has something happen and they lose to the less skill fighter as a result of it. People might not like the outcome but they pretty much have to accept it because there are no writers that will retcon the fight that a ton of people were unhappy about.
Unfortunately Kase-san is very cute before they get together and then kind of crap afterwards. There's not much about their actual relationship, instead it's all like misunderstandings and jealousy and basically the same tropes that are tiring before they start going out.
But it is cute when flowers grow on Yamada's head whenever she's happy.
Kase-san does have a bad jealousy streak that the author doesn't seem to want to address though. Hopefully things will be better now that...
...they're finally living together.
I'm just reading through this and am onto the first volume of "the second section" of it, and whoa, you're not kidding, they both need to Chill Out A Lot, it is just exhausting at this point. The non-dumb-misunderstanding plots are still cute, and they do seem to generally speaking resolve the "XYZ happened and I assumed the worst" sort of thing quickly, but boy howdy they should just calm down a bit.
So you know where I'm coming from, I'm a Gundam SEED enjoyer (I'd give it a B rating) and a Gundam SEED Destiny hater (I'd give it a D- rating). The first hour gave me hopes that this would maybe be something along the lines of Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz, which is still up there with my favorite Gundam movies, and easily my favorite one that's a continuation of a series instead of just its own story. The second half fell off to an INCREDIBLE degree. The animation is not what I would call theatrical quality. It looks MUCH worse than Hathaway and honestly not to the level of Doan's Island in a lot of ways. The most bizarre thing about it was that the basic proportions of characters seem extremely off, all the time. Characters seem to be deformed, having too large heads or being too short relative to their surroundings, then in other scenes or from other perspectives, they look fine. Lacus frequently looks like she's had collagen injections... and then was battered about the head until concussed. There are random insert scenes from the two shows, which has the unfortunate effect of reminding you that... yes, the characters were routinely animated better in THOSE than they are being done in this movie you're watching. All of ONE character has a moment of extreme emotion portrayed interestingly in their face and mannerisms, in the entire film. I'll say that the CGI mobile suits mainly look... fine, except that... well. The action choreography is just not good, frankly. Despite everything being animated fresh, they used that animation to just redo the most reused frames from the series (Kira's Gundam fires 6 beams at once, a suit fires its gun, then a missile blade, etc) instead of going for really detailed, unique moments. SEED was never the best animated in terms of Gundam fights, but this movie has to rank among the worst. There were a few moments I appreciated, and they were essentially all finishing moves. I'll have to dig into it in the spoiler section, but the plot is initially intriguing, and then eventually extremely silly (not in a fun way, unfortunately).
Full on spoilers
-The basic idea of the plot is that there's a new kind of genetically engineered human which are even better-er than Coordinators, in a way that is explained not at all (like how it was possible in the first place). These guys want to bring back the Destiny Plan from their Argentinian Nazi holdout island. Not actually that in universe, but that's where your mind should be about their politics and how they plan to go about it. If you've forgotten, the Destiny Plan is the Futurama "everyone will be assigned a job for life based on their DNA" thing, but even MORE fascist. For some reason, the heroes are consistently tongue tied about why, specifically, this plan is the most evil thing in their universe, and do a lot of falling back on "We should believe in love and the dreams of little boys and girls" instead of "No part of this makes sense and is a transparent attempt to set the richest people in the setting up as Gods for life." The bad guys pull off a false flag operation, combined with a kidnapping and several mind whammies to bring the setting to another crisis point that will start a new war/genocide/kerfuffle. In the end, the power of heterosexual love and new marketable toys with horrifyingly violent weapons will save the day.
-There's a shocking amount of the plot that amounts to boyfriend/girlfriend drama. I guess you could see this coming based on how Destiny trivialized national politics to the last part of a romcom where Athrun shows up in a mobile suit to get the girl. But I assure you, Freedom is MUCH worse about this. The one bad guy is just Prince Xizor from Star Wars Shadows of the Empire. He blasts Lacus with magical pheromone powers to say "I was literally created in a lab to be the best at fucking you... also Nazi genetics rhetoric is awesome, right?" Lacus struggles with this for about 2/3rds of the movie, which isn't a relevant test of her character, she's being macrodosed with magical sex chemicals. When things get dire enough, she finally wakes up and goes "No, I don't want to fuck weird Nazi creepazoids, get lost!" which isn't really a satisfying ending to a conflict, it's the immediately obvious outcome from the moment the character is introduced.
-The new movie MS's are textually kind of bad?? Rising Freedom and Immortal Justice get dominated and blown up the first time they're challenged and then Shinn spends the rest of the movie shit talking that mobile suit. I honestly was a bit shocked that they would so openly shit on products that are there to be sold, that's like... the idea of new variants.
-Kira's character arc in the two series was about violence vs interventionism. In the first part of the first series, he struggles with committing violence to save others and it nearly breaks him. Then Lacus gives him a much better mobile suit than everyone else and basically instructs him to just "Win every fight without killing, 4head!" which he then does. For Freedom, they wanted to do something new with him and it is... wretched. He's basically a sitcom husband who is far too busy at the office and doesn't feel like he's spending enough time with the girlfriend. Then a romantic rival is like "you are not the right social class to be dating your hot girlfriend!" which Kira 100% seems to agree with, which is extremely bizarre. Athrun does some Bright punches to point out what an asshole he's being, so he goes to save Lacus and she confirms that they're extremely sexually compatible so... that's good enough, surely. I'm not exaggerating at all.
-Shinn is, hilariously, the butt of the joke for the first two thirds of the movie. Kira invited him to join his mobile suit squadron but then doesn't trust him to take on important tasks, and the rest of the squad is like, "Yeah, because you're total shit," instead of being like "Listen, he believes in you and you'll see that when it counts." This is the funniest possible outcome for his character, which I pretty much despise, so I'm very much in favor of it, especially the designated hater in the squad (Agnes) who is just RELENTLESS about being mean to him.
-Lacus has a TERRIBLE role in this movie (mentioned before) and the new dub pronounces her name as "La koos" instead of the original dub's "La cuss", which just sounded way better. I do not care if the new dub is "more accurate", it sounds worse in English and they should not have done that (I will SQUARE UP against that Netflix Eva dub).
-Athrun doesn't show up for the first part of the movie and then eventually appears in a mask doing mystery stuff and then arrives in a mobile suit to save Kira. What he was up to and his behavior up to that point goes COMPLETELY unexplained. Perhaps there's some LN or manga that goes into it, but that shit is really not acceptable in a self contained feature film. He is the only one of the primary trio (Kira, himself, Shinn) not acting wildly out of character or horribly pathetic, so he gets major points for just being a dude here.
-Cagalli has a serious diplomatic role in the plot for 90% of the runtime, then suddenly becomes the butt of jokes for the end part. Specifically, booby and jokey fanservice in the FINAL FIGHT. It's of a piece with how God awful the final fight is otherwise, so it doesn't stand out, but it's legitimately terrible, nonetheless.
-The new "hero" pilot, Agnes, was presumably hand picked by Kira to fight with him in his international anti-terrorist mecha squad. She is an insane yandere who spends most of her runtime cutting diss tracks about Shinn. She also wants to have sex with Kira, who is all but a married man, which is super well known to anyone who knows him. When he turns down this extremely inappropriate offer, she goes MORE insane and defects to the Nazi geneticist terror squad, at first opportunity. I think she's supposed to be this story's version of Quess? Which is a pretty fair revamp, since Quess is one of the worst Gundam characters of all time.
-The Black Knights are the most obvious Ginyu Squad in all of Gundam. It's very funny when they are briefly pretending not to be evil (they are not trying very hard). They're literally shoulder checking Lacus' protection team like they're the evil hockey team from Mighty Ducks. Unfortunately, they are not very fun as rivals as they're given MS' that are just magically better and also magic mind powers to just open up their opponents for attacks. It would have been a lot more entertaining if they were just extremely well coordinated pilots who made progress against the heroes because the heroes were held back by politics and infighting.
tl;dr It is the worst thing in this franchise. I got really busy and didn't write this up for too long, but hopefully it was worth it to get it down in writing.
Everyone listen to this poster
DO NOT BE LIKE US
DO NOT BE LIKE US
JEDDY WHY IS THE EVIL EUGENICS SCIENTIST NOW A LITTLE GIRL NINETEEN YEARS LATER?
WHY IS THAT
IS SHE FROM ORK, LIKE MORK MINDY PLANET ORK?
HOW DID THIS MOVIE TAKE TWENTY YEARS TO WRITE AND PRODUCE
TWENTY YEARS
TWENTY. YEARS.
WHY DOES IT SEEM ALL OF KIRA’S, ADMITTEDLY PAPER THIN, CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT HAS DISAPPEARED AND RETURNED HIM TO THE AGGRESSIVE NEGGING WEIRDO WHO DUNKED ON SAI WHILE GETTING GASLIT BY FLAY. LIKE IS THAT JUST A SWITCH IN HIS HEAD?
WHY IS THERE TWO NEAR BACK TO BACK FANSERVICE GAGS IN THE MIDDLE OF WATCHING PEOPLE BE BURNT ALIVE AND EARTH BE RENT ASUNDER BY NUCLEAR HELLFIRE
WHY DID THEY SPLIT THE SEED EQUIVALENT OF PAPTIMUS SCIROCCO INTO TWO CHARACTERS, MAKING THE GENIUS PLANNER AND POLITICAL ARCHITECT DESTINY’S DURANDAL AND ALL THE PSYCHIC SEX PEST PARTS INTO THIS MOVIE’S FUCKER
WHY IS THIS MOVIE JUST LOOSELY STRINGING IDEAS TOGETHER REGARDLESS OF ESTABLISHED DEVELOPMENT, WHILE BOLTING THEM TO RETREADS OF SUPERFICIAL REPRESENTATIONS OF PREVIOUS SEED CONFLICTS
WHY DO CHARACTERS FREQUENTLY MAKE FACES LIKE A CONFUSED BIRD?
WHY DOES THE MOVIE JUST SPEND ITS TIME SHOUTING ITS THEMES INSTEAD OF WORKING THEM ORGANICALLY INTO THE WORK
WHY IS THIS MOVIE, JEDDY
WHY IS THIS MOVIE?
Lanz on
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
Is there a fantasy series that has levels and stats and all that crap, and it's actually good?
Spoofs like Konosuba don't count. Also it doesn't count if they really are just playing a video game like Bofuri or Shangri-La Frontier.
I'm a Spider, So What is (arguably) at it's best early on, when Kumoko is basically a tiny spider underdog who's abusing the game system to have a chance against much higher level mobs she shares her dungeon with in clever ways.
Some people will say/argue I'm a Spider, so What isn't good, but pretty much all the complaints I've seen online are about things that happen after it stops being mostly about Kumoko abusing stats and skills and starts being about the larger plot and world.
I'd forgotten about that one, it's the only mentioned one I've seen. It was great whenever the spider was on screen. Otherwise it was a "where's Poochy?" situation.
I'll check out some of the others when I get a chance. Already added a few to HiDive/CR watchlists.
---
Today's chapter of the Spy x Family manga:
Oh, there's even a tragic backstory behind Mr. Henderson's monocle. He's not wearing that just to be elegant, the first time he ever stood up to authority, soldiers busted up his eye and threw him in prison.
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silence1186Character shields down!As a wingmanRegistered Userregular
So I read most of the Spider Light Novels, and after the anime it goes back to being about the spider for ~6 books almost exclusively.
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I had the hardest time figuring out wtf you were saying because I kept reading it like vanillawaresoft, which isn't the name of the game company but my brain refused to understand it as anything other than that.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198004484595
It's definitely a foundational text when it comes to the bafflingly large VRMMORPG genre, alongside the obvious stuff like .hack and actual MMOs and RPGs, but for the actual modern isekai genre I suspect patient zero is probably some niche Syosetsu novel that never got huge in the west?
...actually, reading up on it I guess maybe Familiar of Zero (2004) was patient zero for popularizing the genre on syosetsu? Huh. And Re:Zero's author apparently wrote FoZ fanfiction before he hit it big with Re:Zero. Huh.
Also Mushoku Tensei (2012) is the one that popularized the entire reincarnated scumbag thing, I guess?
It feels kind of weird to be able to point at something and say "this one's at fault", really.
but I guess looking at it it's an early series of its type, that being "milquetoast Japanese student gets portal'd into a fantasy world, gets romcom harem shenanigans while being the Special Boy"
also one reason this is weirding me out is because I'm suddenly finding out that Familiar of Zero fanfics were obviously a Japanese thing in addition to being a horribly cliché English thing
(seriously, people have written so many bad stations-of-canon crossovers)
Familiar of Zero and Sword Art Online are in 2004, Tsukimichi and Mushoku Tensei are in 2012
it just takes a while for the thing to go from web novel -> light novel -> anime, and in that time dozens of other web novel authors have copied what they saw as a winning formula and suddenly get snapped up by light novel publishers who see the success of the original thing and want in on that cash train.
like, Bakarina? My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom? It got an anime in 2020, sure, but it (and that first wave of other otome villainess stories) got published in Syosetsu in 2014.
SoA, probably can be blamed for gamification becoming over done, while having the MC be the bestest at everything and rendering all the other characters as baggage bullshit.
Kind of feel that the slavery apologia and hero being a giant piece of shit, is going to be on Shield Hero.
Honestly, the things I would really love to see dropped from the formula most. Are the slavery because it's fucking disgusting and people should be shamed for trying to make that shit sound good; especially, when you get the slave harems that are essentially rape apologia. The "I'm the bestest at everything" bullshit because it just results in boring ass stories and makes all the other characters window dressing. The bland milquetoast fucker MCs, if people want self inserts they can either write their own fan fiction or pick up a video game that has a setup where you can make choices, which impact the story. Hell, I'm trying to figure out what the fuck happen because the big thing use to be people imagined fighting alongside the protagonists in the the make believe world instead of wanting to actually be the MC.
The other stuff, if done in moderation and not the only thing the genre does, are okay. The scumbag MC can make for interesting stories, granted they shouldn't be all the stories and there should be some hard fucking limits because the MC from Mushoku Tensei is such a dogshit individual, that it completely ruins the story; especially, when it's made very clear at the beginning that he will not improve as an individual. Chosen one or having a special ability that is a step down from chosen one, are things that can be done well and can help setup interesting situations. Gamification is another thing where it can be done well, I do think fantasy in general should try to avoid always becoming an RPG. Part of that is the setting is in a universe that isn't a game, ergo there isn't a need for game balance. The funny thing is, when you read the official lore for some of the bigger games, many of the NPCs don't bother to stick to the rigid mechanical classes you see in the games because the writers get there is no need for it. That said, there are some aspects that are welcome, even in things that aren't set in a video game. Having the text box pop up with the name of an ability and what it does or another that lists the name name and role of a character, are fine because that can save some time by avoiding exposition dumps via dialogue on things that might not be as engaging for the audience.
Then, yeah, we hit not only Sword Art Online, but light/web novels absolutely fucking explode, and there's a lot of factors there that make the puerile power fantasy a lot stickier and harder to change. I think the two biggest factors are that a huge portion of the LN industry is being run off online popularity contests, and the online population is... what it is. But just being population contests in any shape or form makes it significantly harder for anything original or outside the norm to break through and trends to change.
And the other thing is losing whale spenders. VNs and anime DVDs were (are) absurdly expensive, but if you had your collection of a couple thousand superfans who'd buy up all the merchandise, that's more than enough to make a big profit. By that audience's very nature though, it's smaller and more volatile. But the VN industry collapsed, DVD sales became streaming income, and gacha rose up devouring the whale economy. But LNs are super cheap, and when the industry finally got web publishing and distribution figured out, they became the pulpy cheap entertainment available to everybody, so now your audience is WAAAAY the fuck bigger, but also younger and less discerning, so it becomes more about throwing a billion things at the wall for the thinnest slice of a ginormous pie, so they recruit way too many authors who are untrained and just copy what's popular.
Why it's gotten stuck on slave harems, power fantasies and these people are lazy/bad writers, and it turns out that audiences are nowhere near as discerning as previously assumed. How do we show that the protagonist is a good guy? Everybody else is super racist/evil. But not him. But we're not changing society either. We don't DO THAT here. It also justifies every horrific and grotesque act of abuse and torture they act out upon the transgressors. Everything's fine if the evildoer totally deserved it. Slave and slave adjacent stuff has gone hand in hand with harem things for a long time though, especially during the maid and robot era (eg Chobits, Saber Marionette, etc), but it was a lot more blunted when the default protagonist was Billy Wallflower who was totally embarrassed to have all these girls throwing themselves at him instead of power fantasy dipshits with divine right.
Same goes for the gamification. Why is he strong? He has the high numbers. Nobody has time for complicated lore or suspense about powers, and definitely not creativity in use of them. Biggest number wins. Audience is here to see assholes acting out abuse towards the deserving, not struggle and grow over even a couple paragraphs.
https://x.com/WoolieWoolz/status/1788426622036533518
So you know where I'm coming from, I'm a Gundam SEED enjoyer (I'd give it a B rating) and a Gundam SEED Destiny hater (I'd give it a D- rating). The first hour gave me hopes that this would maybe be something along the lines of Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz, which is still up there with my favorite Gundam movies, and easily my favorite one that's a continuation of a series instead of just its own story. The second half fell off to an INCREDIBLE degree. The animation is not what I would call theatrical quality. It looks MUCH worse than Hathaway and honestly not to the level of Doan's Island in a lot of ways. The most bizarre thing about it was that the basic proportions of characters seem extremely off, all the time. Characters seem to be deformed, having too large heads or being too short relative to their surroundings, then in other scenes or from other perspectives, they look fine. Lacus frequently looks like she's had collagen injections... and then was battered about the head until concussed. There are random insert scenes from the two shows, which has the unfortunate effect of reminding you that... yes, the characters were routinely animated better in THOSE than they are being done in this movie you're watching. All of ONE character has a moment of extreme emotion portrayed interestingly in their face and mannerisms, in the entire film. I'll say that the CGI mobile suits mainly look... fine, except that... well. The action choreography is just not good, frankly. Despite everything being animated fresh, they used that animation to just redo the most reused frames from the series (Kira's Gundam fires 6 beams at once, a suit fires its gun, then a missile blade, etc) instead of going for really detailed, unique moments. SEED was never the best animated in terms of Gundam fights, but this movie has to rank among the worst. There were a few moments I appreciated, and they were essentially all finishing moves. I'll have to dig into it in the spoiler section, but the plot is initially intriguing, and then eventually extremely silly (not in a fun way, unfortunately).
Full on spoilers
-There's a shocking amount of the plot that amounts to boyfriend/girlfriend drama. I guess you could see this coming based on how Destiny trivialized national politics to the last part of a romcom where Athrun shows up in a mobile suit to get the girl. But I assure you, Freedom is MUCH worse about this. The one bad guy is just Prince Xizor from Star Wars Shadows of the Empire. He blasts Lacus with magical pheromone powers to say "I was literally created in a lab to be the best at fucking you... also Nazi genetics rhetoric is awesome, right?" Lacus struggles with this for about 2/3rds of the movie, which isn't a relevant test of her character, she's being macrodosed with magical sex chemicals. When things get dire enough, she finally wakes up and goes "No, I don't want to fuck weird Nazi creepazoids, get lost!" which isn't really a satisfying ending to a conflict, it's the immediately obvious outcome from the moment the character is introduced.
-The new movie MS's are textually kind of bad?? Rising Freedom and Immortal Justice get dominated and blown up the first time they're challenged and then Shinn spends the rest of the movie shit talking that mobile suit. I honestly was a bit shocked that they would so openly shit on products that are there to be sold, that's like... the idea of new variants.
-Kira's character arc in the two series was about violence vs interventionism. In the first part of the first series, he struggles with committing violence to save others and it nearly breaks him. Then Lacus gives him a much better mobile suit than everyone else and basically instructs him to just "Win every fight without killing, 4head!" which he then does. For Freedom, they wanted to do something new with him and it is... wretched. He's basically a sitcom husband who is far too busy at the office and doesn't feel like he's spending enough time with the girlfriend. Then a romantic rival is like "you are not the right social class to be dating your hot girlfriend!" which Kira 100% seems to agree with, which is extremely bizarre. Athrun does some Bright punches to point out what an asshole he's being, so he goes to save Lacus and she confirms that they're extremely sexually compatible so... that's good enough, surely. I'm not exaggerating at all.
-Shinn is, hilariously, the butt of the joke for the first two thirds of the movie. Kira invited him to join his mobile suit squadron but then doesn't trust him to take on important tasks, and the rest of the squad is like, "Yeah, because you're total shit," instead of being like "Listen, he believes in you and you'll see that when it counts." This is the funniest possible outcome for his character, which I pretty much despise, so I'm very much in favor of it, especially the designated hater in the squad (Agnes) who is just RELENTLESS about being mean to him.
-Lacus has a TERRIBLE role in this movie (mentioned before) and the new dub pronounces her name as "La koos" instead of the original dub's "La cuss", which just sounded way better. I do not care if the new dub is "more accurate", it sounds worse in English and they should not have done that (I will SQUARE UP against that Netflix Eva dub).
-Athrun doesn't show up for the first part of the movie and then eventually appears in a mask doing mystery stuff and then arrives in a mobile suit to save Kira. What he was up to and his behavior up to that point goes COMPLETELY unexplained. Perhaps there's some LN or manga that goes into it, but that shit is really not acceptable in a self contained feature film. He is the only one of the primary trio (Kira, himself, Shinn) not acting wildly out of character or horribly pathetic, so he gets major points for just being a dude here.
-Cagalli has a serious diplomatic role in the plot for 90% of the runtime, then suddenly becomes the butt of jokes for the end part. Specifically, booby and jokey fanservice in the FINAL FIGHT. It's of a piece with how God awful the final fight is otherwise, so it doesn't stand out, but it's legitimately terrible, nonetheless.
-The new "hero" pilot, Agnes, was presumably hand picked by Kira to fight with him in his international anti-terrorist mecha squad. She is an insane yandere who spends most of her runtime cutting diss tracks about Shinn. She also wants to have sex with Kira, who is all but a married man, which is super well known to anyone who knows him. When he turns down this extremely inappropriate offer, she goes MORE insane and defects to the Nazi geneticist terror squad, at first opportunity. I think she's supposed to be this story's version of Quess? Which is a pretty fair revamp, since Quess is one of the worst Gundam characters of all time.
-The Black Knights are the most obvious Ginyu Squad in all of Gundam. It's very funny when they are briefly pretending not to be evil (they are not trying very hard). They're literally shoulder checking Lacus' protection team like they're the evil hockey team from Mighty Ducks. Unfortunately, they are not very fun as rivals as they're given MS' that are just magically better and also magic mind powers to just open up their opponents for attacks. It would have been a lot more entertaining if they were just extremely well coordinated pilots who made progress against the heroes because the heroes were held back by politics and infighting.
tl;dr It is the worst thing in this franchise. I got really busy and didn't write this up for too long, but hopefully it was worth it to get it down in writing.
We were all hunkered down in the bunker and quite safe, you really didn't need, but your sacrifice will be remembered.
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Also let Amuro be a dad.
A good example of this would be Lloyd in Greatest Estate Developer. The dude is absolutely a scumbag protagonist, even if he's doing it for the benefit of those around him. And he justifiably gets called on it, even by those who know he's got an angle. Usually by Javier, who is technically the real protagonist in the story the world is following.
Spoofs like Konosuba don't count. Also it doesn't count if they really are just playing a video game like Bofuri or Shangri-La Frontier.
Reincarnated as a Sword
I'm a Spider, So What is (arguably) at it's best early on, when Kumoko is basically a tiny spider underdog who's abusing the game system to have a chance against much higher level mobs she shares her dungeon with in clever ways.
Some people will say/argue I'm a Spider, so What isn't good, but pretty much all the complaints I've seen online are about things that happen after it stops being mostly about Kumoko abusing stats and skills and starts being about the larger plot and world.
I mean, it's okay to have fights where there are no levels or stats or attribute systems (ex. the triangle of water > fire > grass/wood > water). Sometimes someone can just lose the fight one day and come back a few days later and secure a win. Kind of like how it works in real life, where you can have a fighting tournament that goes exactly like that. Where sometimes even the favorite that has solid technique has something happen and they lose to the less skill fighter as a result of it. People might not like the outcome but they pretty much have to accept it because there are no writers that will retcon the fight that a ton of people were unhappy about.
Surviving the Game as a Barbarian has its hooks deeeeeeeeeeeep in me and I will defend its honor (despite the name, not a game).
Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint is excellent (and just got a gigguk video today in fact).
SSS-Class suicide Hunter has levels I think, right?
Latna Kingdom (survival story of a sword king in a fantasy world)
Id have to think more for anime tho.
ORV video
I'm just reading through this and am onto the first volume of "the second section" of it, and whoa, you're not kidding, they both need to Chill Out A Lot, it is just exhausting at this point. The non-dumb-misunderstanding plots are still cute, and they do seem to generally speaking resolve the "XYZ happened and I assumed the worst" sort of thing quickly, but boy howdy they should just calm down a bit.
Everyone listen to this poster
DO NOT BE LIKE US
DO NOT BE LIKE US
WHY IS THAT
IS SHE FROM ORK, LIKE MORK MINDY PLANET ORK?
HOW DID THIS MOVIE TAKE TWENTY YEARS TO WRITE AND PRODUCE
TWENTY YEARS
TWENTY. YEARS.
WHY DOES IT SEEM ALL OF KIRA’S, ADMITTEDLY PAPER THIN, CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT HAS DISAPPEARED AND RETURNED HIM TO THE AGGRESSIVE NEGGING WEIRDO WHO DUNKED ON SAI WHILE GETTING GASLIT BY FLAY. LIKE IS THAT JUST A SWITCH IN HIS HEAD?
WHY IS THERE TWO NEAR BACK TO BACK FANSERVICE GAGS IN THE MIDDLE OF WATCHING PEOPLE BE BURNT ALIVE AND EARTH BE RENT ASUNDER BY NUCLEAR HELLFIRE
WHY DID THEY SPLIT THE SEED EQUIVALENT OF PAPTIMUS SCIROCCO INTO TWO CHARACTERS, MAKING THE GENIUS PLANNER AND POLITICAL ARCHITECT DESTINY’S DURANDAL AND ALL THE PSYCHIC SEX PEST PARTS INTO THIS MOVIE’S FUCKER
WHY IS THIS MOVIE JUST LOOSELY STRINGING IDEAS TOGETHER REGARDLESS OF ESTABLISHED DEVELOPMENT, WHILE BOLTING THEM TO RETREADS OF SUPERFICIAL REPRESENTATIONS OF PREVIOUS SEED CONFLICTS
WHY DO CHARACTERS FREQUENTLY MAKE FACES LIKE A CONFUSED BIRD?
WHY DOES THE MOVIE JUST SPEND ITS TIME SHOUTING ITS THEMES INSTEAD OF WORKING THEM ORGANICALLY INTO THE WORK
WHY IS THIS MOVIE, JEDDY
WHY IS THIS MOVIE?
I'd forgotten about that one, it's the only mentioned one I've seen. It was great whenever the spider was on screen. Otherwise it was a "where's Poochy?" situation.
I'll check out some of the others when I get a chance. Already added a few to HiDive/CR watchlists.
---
Today's chapter of the Spy x Family manga:
The Wind Hashira telling Zenitsu to shut up and knocking him out...a lot of fans must be envious.
Agreed. People shouldn't forget about Bocchi!
Truly, truly a Wife Guy
Please be excited for the compliation movies hitting north america later this year probably.
Steam
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i'd wear/watch it