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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.
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'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
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C7ClRcJuRqe/?igsh=MWQ5cnRob2N0NTJpMg==
i'd wear/watch it
I am enjoying it a lot even if it does that boxing anime thing of "My opponent is much better than me so I'm gonna block with my face until they eventually get tired" that I dislike.
But I will say they at least try to sell it well.
I'm actually amazed the manga is still going. Especially since
(late manga spoilers)
Witch Watch is, once again, having a ton of fun with not just lampshading the tropes it's using, but having the characters explicitly name them and be confused about why they're happening and it is just a ton of fun. (and also, this time, it seems like we might be getting back to the overall main plot for a change):
@Lanz I read this whole rant at this level of emotion, which, fair.
In the opening before the movie showed in the theater, the Fathom events package includes an interview with the director. He said, "I want to make a movie that will make fans everywhere happy, that's been our goal for this movie this whole time."
(skip to 2 minutes, changing the code broke the link on Vanilla)
More Seed Gundam Freedom stuff
Kira was revealed to be "the Ultimate Coordinator" by the end of Seed, but Freedom forgot all about this, basically. The only (possible?) reference to it is the bad guys calling him a "failure" which is frankly baffling. He's been the most successful combatant in human history, entering the most important battles of their era, two wars running, surviving all of them, and taking almost no lives in the process, while defeating entire armies, near single-handedly. Oh yeah dude, sounds like a huge failure, as opposed to your accomplishments of... literally nothing, so far. There's this drama of "A Peace Ambassador like Lacus Clyne will want nothing to do with a FILTHY warrior like you, in peacetime." Which, dude you're thinking of Relena Peacecraft, maybe. But also, she deeply had the hots for soldiers, so not even her. Lacus is a supplier of some of the deadliest weapons in the setting. She never suggests avoiding battle, just doing battle in a cooler, more broken way. When Durandal tries to have her killed in Destiny, she is fully prepared, like Jack Bauer prepared, to fight back with extreme prejudice. And also... you, the person insulting Kira about this, also think of yourself as a cool soldier guy, so what are you even talking about?? I guess the version of Lacus in this movie may theoretically have been swayed, but then in the finale she turns out to be hornier for Kira (and also violence) than we could have ever anticipated.
Regarding the evil loli villain, Aura Maha Khyber... I don't know. I guess they thought it would be marketable to have an evil small woman for the movie, but I don't recall her being a point of promotion in any way. She's barely a character, just a sneering racist who orders atrocities until her plans come to ruin and she screams and explodes. Basically a super depreciated version of Endless Waltz' Mariemaia Barton.
Lacus is completely credulous about Kira becoming a war criminal in the false flag battle.
"Huh, Kira never commits war crimes at home..." And really does go for "Stop him by any means necessary," instead of "disable his MS by shooting his weapon and then his head, like he does to everyone else, in every battle." Like most problems in the movie, this is directly caused by the heroes acting like high schoolers, who refuse to communicate and say what they're thinking, even though they acted more adult-like when they WERE teenagers. Kira goes from getting bad vibes from the Black Knights (one of them literally sends him a psychic message to go fuck off and die which he... ignores??) to directly seeing them up to no good. He decides to tell his team and allies... nothing about this, as you do. Not even a general, "Watch Your Back in any battle we're in with them," type idea. The Dream Team, everybody.
Getting back to Athrun, they realize for the final fight they need a counter to the enemy reading their moves from their minds and countering them, effortlessly. So they decide on a two part plan. Part 1, run remote controls through his MS, letting Cagalli fly it remotely. This is already insane for several reasons. While Coordinators and specifically lovers have been shown to have a strong psychic connection by this point in the series, there was nothing suggesting you could get a lagless wi-fi connection to perform tasks for them, at least not that I can remember. But also importantly... Cagalli is a dogshit pilot! She's terrible and has won basically NO fights that matter, and these guys are supposed to be better-than-Coordinator super Aces with impossible reflexes and the highest quality machines you can imagine. Anyway, ignoring those important points, Part 2 of the plan is for Athrun to concentrate solely on something distracting for the fight to mess up the opponents when they go for the mind read. So naturally Athrun reviews his spank bank of his GF/situationship Cagalli. Athrun's total list of thoughts in the final battle:
And somehow this works, which suggests that without mind tricks and the best MS' of all time, the Black Knights don't rate in any context, which is just sad for presumably the final antagonists of the series.
The Lacus and Kira teamup attack at the end of the movie is just straight up Darling in the Franxx. Seed was always a horny show to some extent, but this was really beyond the pale. It's also kind of funny that all of the antagonists were BUTCHERED after all this effort to merely disarm and stop the plans of antagonists prior to this. Lacus even gives a pep talk to her attempted rapist's wanna-be lover, and then kills both of them immediately afterwards. Just a relentlessly ridiculous movie.