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For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to
join us.
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join us.
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Then, for what I've read around, the story of the dub of Z was...let's go with "conflicted", to say the least.
Which pretty much shaped my interests from that point.
Love romance? Check. Hence my interest in shoujou.
Mecha and sci fi? Check. I love sci fi.
Psychological attacks? Check. Interested in psychological drama.
BIG FUCK OFF BEAAAAMMMMSSSSSSS CHECK CHECK CHECK CHECK CHECK
yeah same this and geocities pages, and fuckin' gachapon sticker machines at the mall that had Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon and Pokemon stickers, with designs I had never seen for the DB characters from Cell, Buu and GT. Hell even regular Super Saiyan Goku since this was before someone rescued the license from Ocean and finished the damn Freeza arc.
Which I just realize is a lot of anime with 'S' in the title for a night we've been calling AniMenagerie S.
We text chat in Discord while watching stuff, and it's a lot of fun. Come check it out if you can.
Monday nights is the main night with the dubbed stuff, and the new season of that will be starting on January 31st. Until then we're finishing up season 2 of Bakarina and watching some random oavs and movies.
I'm glad someone noticed.
Sandāboruto Fantajī: Sword Seekers wasn't a random choice either!
(this is a movie for the longrunning puppet TV show pili fantasy that thunderbolt fantasy is sort of a spinoff from, by the same production company)
I don't know if the manga was like that back at the start and I just forgot, or if it's something the anime changed.
I am a big fan of the manga, though. However, I admittedly have a weak spot for the 'gyaru with a heart of gold' trope, and Marin is top three at that (along with Anjou-san and Manbagi).
When they decide to get The Beast plot moving, it's said that he is hated for being in the arena and beating people up "too much"? Until the "data degrades"? No insight on what exactly this is supposed to mean is EVER provided. Why can the fighting mechanics of the U network let the character models degrade? What happens when they do? This is the entire basis of The Beast being feared, misunderstood, and even hated and they spend ZERO time on it. It's also unclear what the mechanics of forcing a fight into what is presumably a paid event space is. If this is possible, wouldn't trolls do it all the time as a matter of course? Basically, zero thought was put into the logic of the setting of U.
Justin and his group desire to provide "order", which makes a certain amount of sense since apparently there aren't actually community rules or moderators? The developer of U (The Light) states that the system is fine as is without any work on their end, which... okay that's pretty realistic from a social network, but very very stupid as a plot driver. Another absolutely unhinged concept that the movie totally breezes by. Justin has the doxing beam (and looks so much like a Mega Man X style character model I found it extremely distracting), and everyone just thinks this is... fine? At one point, he's captured Bell and says to her, "Have you ever wondered why I have this power?" Yes, I thought, why do you have system level access, that's a good question. Let's hear the answer. He... doesn't tell her. Despite bringing it up! And we never find out!! Then at the end, he doxes Bell, but everyone understands it to be something she did to herself (despite it happening in a vortex of crowded programs, how did they correctly see what happened?). She sings as Suzu instead of Bell, and everyone is very impressed. Then Justin's sponsors abandon him... for some reason? It's not clear what he was sponsored to DO and why carrying out his threat to dox Bell made them dislike him suddenly. We never get any sense of who Justin really was in real life, despite that being the main theme of the entire movie, and he learns nothing and experiences no growth, but he also doesn't have a villain burn out. Bell just fires his laser, then his sponsors ditch him and... that's it.
The Beast is said to have "bruises" all over his back, but... they're clearly a texture on his cape? We don't really see his physical back, ever. It's such a bizarre treatment of such an important aspect to the character. His CLOTHING is bruised, but he's also a computer character model, so you can take that as part of his body, but wouldn't the impact have been MUCH greater if it was his actual BODY??
The specifics of The Beast having a castle... in a maze of some kind... protected by fairy AIs is just... it's nothing. The movie is like "this may as well be a thing, eh?" I guess he... bought stuff using winnings from the Arena? Sure, why not. But then you remember that the movie made a point of saying real money earnings could be a way to trace somebody (why would that information be traceable, wtf) in Bell's case. But not in The Beast's case. Why? Shut up, that's why. There's also that part where Bell leaves The Beast's castle and is flying away, stealthily (why?), and then Justin's group catches her. They immediately KNOW that she must have found The Beast's homebase (why?) because this is... an area known to contain it (how does that work?). And then they take her to an interrogation area and she what... can't log out? This whole bit is like Sword Art Online or .hack, except somehow with not even 1% of the work put in to make the setting coherent.
Both Suzu's love interest Shinobu and the adult choir she sings with have figured out she is Bell... somehow. Neither of these deductions are explained one iota. You could say, "they recognized her singing voice," but... how exactly? The entire plot of the movie is that she's been incapable of singing publicly for YEARS. Doing so ALONE is so traumatizing she vomits at the start of the movie, clearly she hasn't been singing clearly for these people to hear since her mother died. And her voice would sound entirely different from any child singing they would have heard, she's a teenager now. It's really deflating for the "Bell is a secret kept expertly from everyone" plotline when... everyone she knows instantly correctly deducts that it's her?
The climax of the movie being preventing child abuse is just... severely out of left field. The thematic connection of "helping a stranger" between what happened to her mom and what she has to do at the ending is just not enough, at all. Especially because... she's not helping a stranger! She has a relationship of sorts with the Beast by the time she races to try to help him. So the ONE thing that would make it a thing... is not a thing. When the climactic scene of this part happens, I was just silently musing, "What MOVIE is this now???" It's also immensely upsetting that all these adults who have an awareness of what's happening just put her on the train and wish her luck with the PHYSICALLY VIOLENT adult man she's off to confront. Sure, that'll go great! And then he just... gets surprised by this strange young teenager and peaces out? It's not good, at all.
Like Last Night at Soho, this was a movie by one of my favorite directors/teams that I went and saw completely on faith, but it just didn't do it for me, for the first time. Hopefully they'll hit closer to the mark of what I like next time, shrug.
Anjou is like the description above btw. Except less restraint and less interesting.
"Doujima-Kun won't be disturbed" has the same sort of "girl teases guy" idea except that the guy is completely unflustered the whole time which makes for a nice change when she just bounces right off him. It's completed, but I guess other than the guy's character it felt pretty generic. Fun enough that I read it all, though.
"Hokkaido Gals / Dosanku Gyaru Are Super Cute" started off okay but has recently gone down the path of "which girl" which is a bit of a shame because it was better without that bit of plot. It does have a bunch of interesting facts about Hokkaido in there, though (and it's interesting recognising some of the place names from Golden Kamuy)
"Fuufuu Ijou, Koibito Minman" ('More than a married couple, but not lovers'), uggghhh, it is dumb. While it started off with 'guy and gal who is out of his league', the progress of that part was very predictable, and it also went towards 'which girl' almost immediately and I wish I didn't want to know what happens in the end because it is very unclear why either of the "which girls" likes the main character in the first place because he is a Big Dud more than usual. Ugh.
Then you'll probably like bisque too!
The other two are exactly what I expected. I'm glad the few that have no clue what Symphogear's about seemed to enjoy it.
Here's a fairly typical example of the anime's monster ladies:
In contrast, here's the manga counterpart:
This is one of many reasons I constantly go to bat for the original series, especially over the manga. It adds so much more charm to everything.
Tomoe is a non-character in the manga, just a generic villain leader.
The anime goes full HAM and lets him run wild:
Crystal is faithful to the manga, meaning he's utterly boring.
D-, would not play twister with.
Let's start with the original manga not holding up that well these days, and then Toei gave the whole thing to a bunch of dinguses that were used to just cranking out PreCure seasons every year, so the usual cheap animation and bad CGI are rampant. Then there's the idea of removing a lot of the humor that the manga did had in the name of being more "mature" (Read: Sandblasting a lot of the personalities of the cast).
By the third season they realized that they made a mistake, so they gave it to Chiaki Kon, famously known as the director of Higurashi, aka someone who had actual skill at the craft, but it was too little too late. They did released a two part movie covering Super S, but that was pretty much it.
I hope they stop there, I don't think I could take them trying to ruin Stars like they did S.
Crystal S3 was a valiant effort, but it was still clearly hamstrung by the manga and being slavishly faithful to the source material.
Also, the original show has fantastic music, something that's another huge step down in Crystal.
Top shelf violin.
Almost certainly the volcano/tsunami evacuation stuff. I know that a number (but not all) of Kuroitsu's broadcasts were canceled yesterday (HTB, Hokkaido's wasn't). The simulcast agreements are generally with the TV stations (well, more specifically, simulcasters used to be pretty much owned by the stations), not the anime producers, so that's likely why.
This is bimboification.
And is a shame, because Moon Pride, the Crystal OP, slaps:
The designs becoming much more memorable was a lucky side effect/product of the skill of the anime staff
Tho I guess it would be more comparable to DB Kai and I will always prefer the OG animation, just had more feeling behind it
I think it's because the manga doesn't do the MOTW thing.
Super was just a poorly animated and tedious slog until like the second half of the future Trunks arc and onwards.
I could see it working as, like, an Utena deconstruction, but there was no way the show was going to get away with that. Doing a straight adaptation, especially with that bland art style, was the worst choice they could have made.
A lot of the monsters in the show are given tons of character, especially in S's pilot, when Tomoe's VERY FIRST DAIMOHN utterly destroys the entire team, including Tuxedo Mask, without breaking a sweat.
"YOUR FORTUNE IS VERY BAD!"
The first episode of the anime premiered three months after the first chapter of the manga.
So personally I see them as 2 works in conversation with each other, and the differences in tone and direction to be rather intentional, as well as them going after slightly separate but mostly overlapping audiences