Bartimaeus

I can't believe you forgot poor Fuyutsuki's name, . And also, I actually thought he was like the only one to get noticeably aged up - lord knows Misato didn't (I guess looking ridiculous in her current get-up is what we got instead?), but at least the English voice actress did a good job at sounding old and raspy. ...Because she wanted to sound old and raspy. Yes, because she wanted to, @majestic, and for no other reason - quit hating on my incredibly lovable English dub VAs*! *If you don't, I'll start watching Sakura in English just to spite you. ...And, well, obviously myself too, because that crap sucks. Oh, *that's* why I was more okay with the first one. Now it all makes sense! Yeah, that's fair. No, that's part of her charm! Asuka being Asuka is like the best part of this entire thing, even when it makes no sense! ¿Que?

Please do, I want to experience the disgust and annoyance all over again.

Yeah, it's actually pretty well setup, but still feels weird after having spent so much time with the alternative persona. It's been so long that my mind had jumped all the way around to it actually being Sakura's dead mom. Whoops. How's 3.33 going?

Cardcaptor Sakura:

No, I still plan on trying it. I want to feel the wrongness myself - especially because if I've learned anything from RoE, it's that it will make the original look even better in hindsight. It's just that there's about a 0% chance I'll watch more than a few of the first episodes and the couple that you said that were actually good. In the sense of them loving it, no, it didn't - said it was very well-made but just didn't hold any inherent appeal to them. Regardless, my aim of finally getting an answer on Sakura was fulfilled, which also means I can finally finish the second arc, . Yeah, I didn't really have...too much of a problem with that particular scene. It was a bit too indulgent for me, but at least it felt like there was some kind of purpose. Unlike everything with...Who-Know-Who. ...I should've listened to her in Japanese, maybe she would've been slightly less repulsive - even just her voice in the Amazon English dub is simply nails on a chalkboard for me. A better character and maybe I would've gotten used to it, but all of it together made for easy yet utter intolerance. It is kind of amazing how watching Evangelion's action scenes is completely unappealing AND makes my brain bleed, and then seeing something like that is like...well, it's obviously a bit more crude in terms of technique and style than something modern, but who cares when it works and doesn't give you an aneurysm? Looks like a dark and dingy proto-Utena almost, .

That's such an utterly ludicrous and ad hoc manner of "mattering", though, and feels like a Star Wars-level of absurd detail no-one in their right mind should ever care about. That could've been anyone, and the fact that it didn't matter at all in the original story (even though it should be literally the same there) makes it feel borderline revisionist to me. I vastly prefer an ambiguous or even no explanation over a bad explanation. In broad strokes, I guess the story's...fine, for the purpose of fulfilling the intended goal, but on a real level, it feels like one bit of arbitrary nonsense after the other made by someone that didn't know how to get their plot, characters, themes, and world to all tie into each other in a satisfying manner. And never mind the animation. ...So yeah, I found The End of Evangelion to be way more satisfying on pretty much every level, even if it was difficult to parse the details and more ambiguous. It also didn't literally make me feel physically sick like Rebuild did, so there is that too, . And that's all you needed to know. I think I can do without any more "BIG BROTHER!!"-ing or "Pegasus!"-ing it up in anime for the time being. Glad you enjoyed it more than RoE, though, . More Nadia: this is for @KP the meanie zucchini : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/uydiwp9cg2vwkbv/7dY7dua4yY.mp4 (note: slight choppiness in the frame rate is my video recorder's fault, not the show's)

Luckily, I have Alex Jones here to help explain Evangelion for me: Phew, at least I understand everything now. He had to call SEELE "Google", but that was just so he didn't trigger the psychic vampires sucking out his brains. Anyways, the gist of everything is that it's actually Gendo, not SEELE, that is turning the freaking frogs gay, so there you go.

This movie is unreasonably long, I'm only halfway through where I paused. Here I go again... The music in Rebuild is pretty weird. It started out almost entirely with music from the original show in the first film, but then I think transitioned to weird modern stuff during the second movie, and then entirely during the third. Presumably meant to signal a divergence...but it still feels weird. Almost none of the new stuff works all that well, but I guess it mostly doesn't detract either. Mostly - generic "epic" music isn't really my thing, and that's usually the weakest stuff in this. And now...some of the original show's music is creeping in towards the end again. "OH CRAP, SHE DID EXACTLY WHAT HE WANTED!" Boy, I'm getting deja vu here, feel like this has happened once...or twice...or a dozen times before. Sometimes get the feeling that everyone doing literally nothing would've averted all of this nonsense. My reaction to seeing Eva Imaginary: Let's not do CGI ever again, mmkay? Man, well, that was an absolute load of... What the heck was I supposed to get out of that? It was just one bit of nonsense after the other. Does any of that mean anything to anybody, besides the basic character stuff anyways (which is barely even a thing in Rebuild)? I'm sure it must, but man. The first half of this sort of reminded me of what I liked in the original Evangelion series and was pleasant enough (if a bit weird feeling), the second half of this was a CGI seizure-inducing action nightmare (although not as bad as the third, which was truly loathsome) while being punched in the mouth non-stop with endless nonsense that just...kind of happened. If nothing else, I think I got over my hatred of Shinji - rewatching the original show should be freaking awesome now. Any time Shinji might start to annoy me and I'll just be like "hey, at least he's not Mari". Please watch the following video and pretend it's about Mari (existing) instead of Joe Biden (becoming president): (P.S. Turns out...yeah, Mari didn't matter at all and could've easily not been here. Big surprise that someone you did absolutely nothing narrative or character-wise with didn't end up mattering character or narrative-wise. Wow! @majestic is gonna love this.) I give Rebuild a...4.5/10 as a whole. That's almost good*. 6/10 for the first movie, 5 for the second, 3.5 for the third, and...a 4.5 for the fourth, I guess. My headcanon is that none of this ever happened and that the series finished with The End of Evangelion. Thanks for coming to my metaphorical crucifixation at the hands of Hideakki Anno's Evangelion, I hope you (or rather we) all burn in hell...or at least get gooped and sucked up into Human Instrumentality. (e): Restructure of my post because I accidentally more or less repeated an entire few sentences.

No excuses! ...Okay, I guess excuses are alright, grumble grumble. Oh, also, one other thing: Kaworu more or less directly spoiled it at the end of 1.11. Said something about not letting bad things happen to Shinji again or "this time" or something like that. Felt way too meta, suspected from then on, especially as events diverged more and more in 2.22. Right to all of that. She feels even more pointless past 2.22, where you could literally remove her from every single scene and sequence and...make the slightest of modifications to the scenes and she wouldn't be missed even one iota. Where is the middle finger emoji at?

Man, do you know how many times I re-wrote and edited out her name in this little side-discussion about her because I kept remembering "wait, Majestic doesn't even know if she survived yet"? Good lord, give a guy a reaction emoji at the very least, my gosh! I didn't even notice that, to be honest - I guess I was already semi-consciously interpreting it that way because there's no way this could be considered to be simply a remake or "improvement" of the original. Had to be some kind of "alternative" telling. Mainly, it was the beginning and the end in that image that made me groan and laugh, . But seriously, she is the worst. You know what? She's worse than The End of the World. Yeah, there, I said it. What an ill-fitting, odious abomination from an entirely different universe to insert squarely straight into Evangelion. To have literally anyone else from the entire rest of the cast serve her "role" would have been grand. At the very least, The End of the World fit into their own little messed-up universe and was loathsome on a character level - Mari is revolting on even a meta-level. Gosh dang, I think I would've preferred even literally The End of the World to take her place. And every time I think Rebuild has shook her, there she appears again... It's slightly PTSD-inducing. No, I did get through the entire first episode.

Did @majestic say anything about Mari? I was looking for it...I thought it was only me who despised her with every fiber of my being. Interpretation on Mari that I found, : Non-edit: majestic just posted as I was about to post this and mentioned how much he despised Mari. (Also, SPOILER ALERT: She doesn't appear to matter even one microscopic bit...but I do still have the second half of this last movie to go. I'll read the rest of your post soon.) I didn't even notice that about her, but probably because I was closing my eyes and plugging my ears about every time she appeared on screen, the annoying and seemingly pointless fabrication that she is. If Hideaki Anno can re-make Evangelion, so can I, and Mari ain't gonna be in it, let me tell you! ...At least in my mind, . 4.0 stuff: Sometimes I wonder how much it cost to make The End of Evangelion vs. one of these movies. With how ungoshly long credits in big CGI movies are, you'd almost think it'd be more expensive at some point to make the CGI...

Ah, screw it, guess I'm gonna watch the rest of this. Was kinda hoping majestic was going to power through both 3 and 4 today to beat me (if you ain't first, you're last...and therefore the inverse if you ain't last, you're first, and lord knows I don't want to be first with this), but I just wanna get this over with. My other party that I watch shows with has never watched Evangelion, and they have tentatively opined that they want to watch NGE after we finish Nadia, so I should have an opportunity to re-watch Evangelion (and at a much more sane and digestible pace) in the coming months. ...That or Princess Tutu. I'm not sure which I'd prefer - two utterly dastardly shows sure to break the mind of any mortal, .

Don't think Asuka needs her butt to help her express contempt, but... Sometimes...actually, most of the time, less is more, methinks. I'll remember this particular shot for quite possibly the rest of my life - I most likely won't remember anything from Rebuild in a week or two, . The artistry is simply not there for me with Rebuild. (P.S. I was trying to avoid mentioning the character for majestic's sake, but KP mentioned her directly in the above post - it's not my fault!)

Ironically, that particular scene in End of Evangelion was framed way more tastefully and actually had some kind of purpose, as messed up as it was (and actually, it literally showed how screwed up both Shinji and the entire idea of violating an unwilling or unaware person in that manner were). Again, I repeat: framing matters. It's not always about what you show but rather how you show it - if you show a scene in such a way that it is incredibly jarring and takes me right out of the scene...like cutting down to just Kyoko's crotch in the middle of her having an emotional moment or cutting down to just Mami's chest in the middle of her explaining something important (Madoka), it's going to feel incredibly jarring and like it was put in there purely for the sake of fan service - not to mention, it completely deflates whatever is currently being said or whatever is occurring. Maybe I'm just not normalized to this crap...but at this point, I'm probably not ever going to be, especially since I always have such a viscerally negative reaction whenever I see it, . https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/6yjtzx6c5bd05f0/WA8qVy5AFy.mp4 So what do we have here? In short succession, we have a cut-down to her "fists" (but actually dead-centered and with a focus on her crotch), then another crotch shot because she inexplicably got up on the glass wall and the camera went to her lower half, then a butt shot as the shot reverses, then a ridiculous reverse power pose where she's towering Shinji, and then her crotch again from a creepy underside shot. I don't know...just, uh, all of that just doesn't really feel like it's justified by the scene in question and the conversation going on in between our two characters. Feels slightly out of place to me, to say the least. There are better ways to do this, especially for "serious", "prestige" anime and animation like this is supposed to be. (e): I'll be finishing this up today, I guess...

Here, I'm going to spoil you about something I put in my spoiler for 3.33, because I'm a dirty rotten person, but not really. Suffice to say, it doesn't get better. Framing of scenes matters, guys - most of the time, I gave the original a show a pass because at least there were usually plausible framing explanations (particularly because characters didn't then go and immediately explain the entire scene verbally immediately after in an a shockingly embarrassing display like you pointed out)...but zero forgiveness exists now in my heart after seeing [character] done dirty in the middle of her having a moment like that. See, even Mr. Rodgers is mad now. That's probably a good explanation as to why they were seemingly trying to melt my brain while I was trying to figure out why all of this felt so weird and wrong. This crap stinks, yo. The biggest enjoyment I've been getting out of this has been hearing Rei's and Asuka's VAs in their roles again.

It was a lot less sanity-draining than what usually goes on in this thread.

Uh. Er. Hm. Ah. Well. Ergh. That is... I guess, really, as I've said a number of times now, everything usually comes down to characters for me, and so long as the characters and how they're acting sit well with me, I'm usually A-OK. Everything else is usually just bonus. Assuming...assuming that they matter at all and don't feel like a complete cliff-note to everything else that's going on, that is. With Evangelion, I may not understand a danged bit of what's going on plot, theme, or action-wise all of the time, but at least the characters (in the ORIGINAL series that, is) made sense and sat well with me, and that's the lens through which I try to interpret events, and yeah, though it was frustrating, it at least mostly worked. There's a reason I gave NGE as a whole a 7.0 while Utena got a 5.5, so there's your answer. Now this Rebuild crap is an entirely different matter... (e): I was going to watch the final one, but it's 2 hours and a half. ...Yeeeaaah, I'm going to wait until tomorrow.

My gosh, Mari is so freaking incredibly grating, makes Shinji look downright pleasant in comparison. Could they have designed a more despicable character to add to Evangelion? ...Yes, they could've, easily (her name isn't End of the World, after all), but even so. 3.33 stuff:

Miyu: There's no room for any of the scenes to breathe or develop, of course, since everything's at a breakneck pace...but for what's there, I thought Asuka actually seemed *nicer* than she did in the original show...then again, I am watching the weird Amazon English dub, . I remember there being an internal discussion while making the English dub for the original show about "Child" vs. "Children", and apparently one of the translators was absolutely insisting that it *had* to be Children instead...but they were overruled because no, that's just dumb and doesn't work in English, . Yeah at the weird and inexplicable scenes. Of course, seeing how 2.22 ends, I then kinda understood a bit why everything feels so absurdly rushed... (e): Guess I'm going to watch Evangelion 3 now...

At best, it would've just been switched: the people who currently love and praise him now would utterly abhor and revile him if he were an equally loud-and-proud Muslim instead. I'm not sure if there would've been enough of an up-swell of support from the other side to have supported his notoriety this long, but I guess I don't know for sure. By all accounts, he's a fine enough human being...but gosh, I could do without ever hearing him tiredly mentioned again, particularly from friends and family. What I said was specifically in the context of his NFL career, which, well yeah, has kind of sucked. Some exciting 4th quarter finishes, sure, but that's about it. I thought I remembered hearing talk years back of teams wanting to try him out as a receiver on account of his athleticism, but he only wanted to be the guy at the time. A little late to be making a conversion at age 34 after many years out of football. At least the Jaguars got an absolute boatload of jersey sales out of it?

It's mostly a media-fueled issue. He sucks. He's always sucked. At no point during his NFL career has he not sucked. No biggie, there are a lot of players who suck who never have a word of hate directed their way. Nevertheless, in the late 2000s (and even for some time afterwards), there was such an absolute cacophony of Tebow-related insanity thanks to absolute garbage media outlets like ESPN. The incredibly punchable face along with being such an obnoxiously loud-and-proud Christian that has had his cultists constantly flock to him and whine and scream that he was never given a fair shot and that actually he's good doesn't help any matters. He himself...is not so bad personally from everything I've ever heard, but it's everything that's ever been around him publicly that drives so much hatred his way - much the same way I despise "the Vikings", what I really actually hate are most Vikings fans, but the two get conflated with one another over time...a similar mechanism exists with Tebow and his media presence, I think.

If they aren't currently romancing young children, then Pegasus is probably fine. Probably. (e):

Arion (1986). Hey look, another kind of cool but also kind of off-putting anime poster from the 80s. Arion is a young boy that lives with his blind mother, Demeter, tending to their sheep and gathering food and supplies and such. His good uncle Hades pays Demeter a visit to tell her of current events transpiring, and on his way out, tricks Arion into entering the Underworld and promises the restoration of his mother's sight if Arion, a fledgling Titan, is able to slay Zeus, who is currently embroiled in a war with Poseidon. Demeter pleads with Zeus to save Arion, but her pleas fall on deaf ears. I actually thought it was decent even if, uh, a bit messy narrative-wise and could've been a lot better character-wise. If nothing else, I thought it was a lot better and more fun than Isao Takahata's Horus, Prince of the Sun (1968). ...And I like Ancient Greek stuff, sue me.

Outside of some edge cases where you're min-maxing to build a very low-level character to specifically minimize a particular couple of stats in favor of another for the purpose of PVP (the lower level your character, the better for PVP), Pyromancer is most likely the ideal class base to start from for most any type of character - in addition to the other advantages I mentioned earlier, Pyromancer has about perfectly average stats all around to start with with the notable exception of being weak in divine power (i.e. Faith). And so there is probably one exception to this: I would use a Cleric if I were going for a min-maxed divine spellcaster. Knights and Sorcerers have the worst stat disadvantages compared to a Pyromancer (-6 and -4 respectively - the next worst is -2 for a Thief, and the rest are -1 with the exception of the Wanderer who is actually 0 but who has no angle for making a build over a Pyromancer besides MAYBE if you were going for an absolute pure caster and needed literally zero strength to use weapons while wanting Wanderer's higher Dexterity for cast speed). Pyromancer is really just the best outside of those edge-cases - it's not good design for that to be the case, but it is what it is. And to start out with the Pyromancy Flame is a powerful boon for making some early bosses and enemies a lot easier.

The only really "correct" class in Dark Souls is Pyromancer. Not only do you get immediate access to pyromancies (which unlike the other types of magics do not require stat-scaling and thus can be used with any character so long as you have a pyromancy flame), Pyromancer also objectively starts with the best stats combined with being level 1 (i.e. the most room to grow). Pyromancy is objectively the best class in DS1 - just as Royal is objectively the best in Demon's Souls. DS2 and DS3 would not make the same mistake of having a class that is objectively the best, thankfully. Not that the classes *particularly* matter (you will only be marginally set behind at worst by picking something else), but...it's less than ideal design to have a "favored" class baked in like that. And if you play magic-only instead of melee on your first playthrough, you're a right real toss-pot, .