majestic

I'll get to Nadia eventually, I'm just not sure when. I meant any new works from Anno from now on, not any old ones of them. He did work on Sailor Moon with Ikuhara. That doesn't show up in his credits, and he wasn't paid for it (according to the interview with Ikuhara), he apparently just wanted some original character artwork for his contributions. Guy was a huge Sailor Moon nerd. Or still is. Anno was the key animator on the Uranus and Neptune transformation sequences and Sailor Moon episode 103 (the first episode where Sailor Chibi-Moon shows up). Wow, that was so inexplicable. Usagi turns from hysterical and jealous of Chibi-Usa to super friendly with her after Mamoru proves to be a god twixt the sheets. That must have been a pretty good night, to have such an effect. Seems so awkward to use that particular stereotype in a 2014 adaptation of an older manga. Really, why not just... not include it. Assuming it even is in the manga like that, but it probably is. Everything else that was baffling was too. Lexx is pretty fun though, although it's live action sci-fi in the end. It also has terrible CGI too, but more of an excuse, it's from 1996 and was the pioneer show for new techniques to combine CGI with live action shots. As such it looks like it had a shoestring budget, but it allegedly cost 13 million dollars. Silly me, how could I forget. Thanks for setting that straight. So, about that third Puella Magi Madoka Magica movie, are you planning to watch that now, or was Rebuild not quite that bad? I watched the opening sequence with Mari singing and having an extended, completely pointless action scene. Shinji, Asuka and Rei #whatever are currently walking through I wasteland, where I paused because it's really late and time to try and sleep a bit.

I didn't, not really. I just wanted to express my incredulity there, or disdain for all of it, or... hell if I know. I also should really do an editing and proofreading pass before pressing submit reply, some of those sentences are really weird, but I was in a bit of a rush to get the post done. Grannyragi was easier to make fun of, but it really was English VA Shinji that caused me to abort, or rather, all of his alone time with Misato. Misato was my favorite character in the original show, and much of that was Usagi's performance as her seiyuu. I thought it kind of hilarious that she would have an English VA that sounded like an older woman, just like Usagi did in the original dub of Sailor Moon, but really, between Megumi Ogata and Spencer Whatshisface, sorry Shinji, I'd rather you sound like a girl than that. No, that was because it was the closest to the show and all the cracks weren't as readily obvious when you haven't watched the original series three months ago. Not making sense is the name of the game here. Asuka goes from wanting to belt Shinji to dragging him away, trying to rescue him right after he almost destroyed the world. Again. With no setup. Nothing. That started out as a joke after Kaworu's alternate timeline/quantum reality/time loop sort of comment at the end of Evangelion 1.11, because Lexx employed the same concept with the Time Prophet who forsaw the fall of His Divine Shadow, a cruel tyrant ruling over the League of 20.000 planets from the central government planet called the Cluster. However, the more I saw of Evangelion 2.22 and 3.33, the more I started noticing actual parallels, and my original plan, to mirror but invert the Red Letter Media Star Wars: Holiday Special Half in the Bag episodes, fell apart. You know, they started out talking about everything but the Holiday Special, and only got to it in the second episode. I thought it would be fun to start talking about 2.22 and mixing in Lexx stuff and end this with a complete post about nothing but Lexx istead of dealing with what was clearly shaping up to be insanity and a complete waste of time in the form of Evangelion: Thrice Upon A Time. Then... well, then 3.33 happened, and Misato suddenly commands a battle ship designed to kill Gods that looks an awful lot like the Lexx, and KP and Sarex started talking about the anti-universe, which is also a huge part of the Lexx setting. In Lexx, there's the Universe of Light, and the Dark Zone. His Divine Shadow rules over the Universe of Light, and in order to escape, Lexx and her crew travel to the Dark Zone and have the silliest adventures there. After the end of the miniseries and in the first season of the regular TV show they even go and cause a new big bang to rebirth the universe. Anyway, Lexx has a council of disembodied brains (some of them are eaten over the course of the show, both by cluster lizards and a cannibal character), an aggressive female character telling the obstinate, mostly useless and cowardly Stanley Tweedle to man up at every opportunity, and she's trying to win the affections of someone who can't give them, although they are not the same characters. There's Kai, the stoic character who only does what he's told to do. He has an excuse, he's pretty dead, being only a reanimated corpse. Technically not that different from Rei. It has really terrible dialogue (on purpose) and is making fun of itself. Yes, actual dialogue from the miniseries. Tim Curry plays a character called "Poetman" who sums up my feelings while watching Rebuild of Evangelion perfectly: Then there are the times when the show has dialogue that is about as impenetrable as the one in Evangelion: Kai is sometimes such a Rei: And sometimes he just goes off the rails: Anyway, enough quotes for now. Back to some more talk about 3.33: The basic idea, to have a 14 year time skip and pull Shinji out of stasis where he was kept isn't so bad. The film begins with a seizure inducing cacophony of light flashes and CGI madness that looks curiously terrible compared to most other CGI animation where Asuka and Mami Mari risk their lives to abduct Shinji. Instead of then using Shinji as a fish out of water character to explain what happened in the past 14 years in an organic manner everyone starts treating him like his father treated him for his entire life. He reacts as Shinji must. He can't help being Shinji at this point, and while 14 years, a seventh extinction event having happened and fighting NERV can certainly change people, Misato plays the hard assed commander that she never really was, only this time for real. She has no time to explain anything to Shinji, wich causes him to run away when Rei offers him the opportunity. Misato has a moment of being herself by not remote detonating him, and then is gone from the film until the very end. Afterwards nothing happens, except Kaworu and Shinji using music to synchronize because for <no real reason> they need to control a Pacific Rim Jäger mech two seat EVA. Meanwhile Gendoh of course has set everything up for Shinji to cause the Fourth Impact, off screen of course, crossing Kaworu's plans, whatever they were because screw setting things up. Kaworu figures out that that Gendoh did - something - to mess up his plans, and implores Shinji to stop what he's doing, but he's doing it regardless and then wonders why it doesn't work as promised. Because why not. Guess Asuka is right when she calls Shinji an idiot all the time. Kaworu spews random nonsense about turning into the thirteenth Angel, such a terrible fate for the first angel, Misato rushes in from her pause to kick some ass, Asuka sacrifices her beloved Unit-02 to make <unexplained new EVA> go kerblammo, then Gendoh turns off Seele, which... wait, what, how does he do that, and if he's always been secretly working behind SEELE's back, why hasn't he turned them off much earlier? Kaworu once again kills himself to prevent the new impact. Shinji, Asuka and Rei land somewhere, and Asuka starts dragging Shinji away, in a display of... absolutely unwarranted care (?) for someone she just wanted to beat up earlier in the movie. Apparently she and Misato understood off-screen that they really screwed up by treating Shinji the way they did. Or not. Because why should anything be set up before. Just do it! <insert Shia LeBeouf meme here>. Sometime before that Mari tells Rei that her former self was more fun to be around. Mari is beginning more and more to remind me of Lt. Tyler from Stargate SG-1. In Stargate SG-1, the SG teams always have four members. When SG-1 suddenly comes back talking about a fifth member and their team leader still being stuck under fire, calling him Lt. Tyler and behaving as if he was always part of their team, everyone else is pretty weirded out. Tyler turns out to be an alien who can telepathically alter memories to make other sentient species think he's a friend when they've never met before. It's their defense mechanism. Mari is someone like that too. An alien from the outside who inserted herself into the story so she's not hunted down and killed by some other alien species. Yes, I'm pretty sure that the theory that this is just one giant trolling middle-finger to the NGE fandom is the best explanation there is. It has to be Anno trolling, or else he just wants to cash in on NGE by expending the least amount of effort possible. Either one works for me, and good for you Mr. Anno, good for you. Just don't expect me to watch anything you do from now on, ever again. Oh, right, I forgot that Mari told Shinji to start enjoying life. Dear lord Mari, dear lord, I'm sure that set him straight now. Shinji, just get laid, that will solve everything. It certainly did for Marion in Natsu e no Tobira. Anyway, with the film actively ruining my idea of making a Lexx post next, the only thing that's left now is getting it over with.

Yay, I finished it. EVANGELION 3.33: THE GIGA SHADOW AWAKENS. Almost. Where to begin? Perhaps with the one positive point. Unlike the other two, this felt - structurally, at least - like a movie, instead of the hot mess you get when you cram 24 episodes worth of content into two 105 minute films. Freed from the shackles of serialized storytelling in a 25 minute format, the movie then does... absolutely nothing with it. The pacing is still a mess, going from nigh-unfollowable fast paced, chaotic action to an absolute dead crawl that feels like half an hour (it probably is), only to culminate in another "hey almost" sort of Near Third/Third/Fourth/Final Impact where a whole lot of things that were never set up suddenly pay off. Okay, so the film begins with Zev/Xev "Mari" Bellringer and Asukai rescuing Stanley "Shinji" Tweedle, because only Stanley has the key to the Lexx, which makes him an annoying, yet sadly necessary member of the crew. For those who don't know, and I presume for a bit that's all of you seeing the lack of comments from the last time I made these posts, here are the characters involved: Zev, or Xev? I think I'll let you pick whom you like more. The problem with Zev is that she's the only female character on Lexx, aside from the ship herself, so she gets to do all the fanservice on her own. And that's actually - quite literally - her sole reason to exist. She's more agressive like Asuka, but eh... in that case we need to turn Asuka into a creepy undead assassin. That doesn't work, but neither does this film! I can already hear you go "NANI?" at this, but bear with me. Zev, or Xev - and for the love of god never google Xev Bellringer because that apparently is not only a character name in Lexx but also a porn star name that tracks much higher on google search results than an obscure German/Canadian sci-fi show from the late 90ies, and I just found that out the hard way looking for that second image. Why are there two? Well Eva Habermann eventually got fed up playing the fanservice girl and they replaced her with Xenia Seeberg. Zev gets absorbed/eaten by Lyekka after her death. Lyekka is a sentient plant consuming humans or whatever comes into her clutches by invading their minds and becoming something desirable. Anyway, to get the crew to allow her to stay on, she consumes Zev and transforms her into Xev. Yay! Zev's entire raison d'etre really is fanservice. That's because her character was designed to be this way. Originally an undesirable woman on a remote planet, she disrespected her arranged husband after he said he doesn't want her, by punching him in the face. The clergy can't have that, so she is sentenced to being transformed into a sex slave, a procedure involving physical alteration into a desirable woman with extremely heightened libido as well as mental programming making her obedient (well, madly in love to the point of doing anything) to whoever she first encounters. Except in Zev's case it goes wrong, she is not only transformed into Fanservice-Girl, she's also fused with a bit of cluster lizard DNA (terrible creatures who enjoy eating human flesh), and the mental programming is actually transferred to 7-90, a robot head. 7-90 spends the rest of his life pining after Zev, but can of course not do anything, being a robot. Well, only a robot head. Zev is reall into Kai, but Kai has a small wrinkle. Or rather, a not very hard wrinkle, because he's undead and with no blood circulation has a hard time getting it ha...rd. Wow. And you know what? That sentence isn't nearly as bad as this film was. Kai Well, he'd fit right into any anime, huh? He's the last of the Brunnen-G, a reminder that His Divine Shadow kept as reanimated corpse to mock the prophecy that the Brunnen-G will be his downfall. It's a pity, really, beacuse... nowhere in the prophecy it was stated that the last Brunnen-G needs to be a alive to kill His Shadow. That's what you get for mocking, Shadow! The Divine Predecessors (aka SEELE): The brains of previous Divine Shadow hosts serve as a council for His Divine Shadow, at least until they're loaded onto the Lexx and Stanley, Zev and Kai abscond with it. Finally, this is Stanley Tweedle, Guard 4th class: Stanley was once part of a group of rebels, but ran afoul of a group of Nigerian Princes promising him rescue. They ended up extracting secret rebel plans from him, plans that His Divine Shadow used to almost annihilate the Heretic movement. He since spends his time doing as little as possible as the lowest ranked Guard in the Cluster administration. Life turns from bad to worse for him after annoying a superior officer and is condemned to organ donation. The clerk tells him that he'll probably lose an eye, a kidney and an arm. When he doesn't show up, that sentence turns to complete dismemberment. Running for his life he accidentially manages to get the key to the Lexx, the most POWERFUL DESTRUCTIVE FORCE IN THE TWO UNIVERSES. He's also a real Shinji, and he's got the supreme hots for Zev. Too bad for him that Zev doesn't want him, although he's literally for most of the time the only fully functional male within lightyears and she suffers extremely under her increased sex drive. And the entire reason for this long assed post about an old TV show with terrible production values and bad acting, the quintessential b-movie version of a sci-fi show that I can very much recommend to anyone who enjoys a heavy dose of self-irony, bad production values, hot fanservice, ridiculous dialogue and incredible world design. Plus, slight spoiler, His Divine Shadow is played by none other than Malcom McDowell in the final episode of the miniseries (sometimes called the first season). That means @KP the meanie zucchini I guess, unless he already watched it. This is the LEXX: The Lexx kills both a God in the miniseries and is powerful enough to obliterate planets. And she really looks an awful lot like the "Wunder", which is German for wonder, in case you don't know that from all the Nazi Wunderwaffen anyway. The Lexx is bioengineered and alive, by the way, so every now and then she just stops to eat... something. In the Cluster, she's fed with the remains of the dismembered, and there are a lot of executions by dismemberment going on. Wait, did you want to talk about Evangelion 3.33? Right, sorry. What a mess. I need to let that one sink in some more before I even attempt to seriously make a post out of it. What the hell, Mr. Anno? At first this began as annotated for the hard of thinking version of NGE, now it's gone completely off the rails, with a 14 year time skip, characters who have learned NOTHING in those 14 years, incuding how to talk to Shinji so he doesn't run off immediately and does the one thing he should not because god damned Misato how f*cking dumb can you be, talking to Shinji like that? Same goes for you Asuka, although you really never had your head screwed on straight, so someone should probably make sure she doesn't interact with Shinji for a while. Guys, really. Oh, and being an EVA pilot makes you immortal, gg, that's why Mari is still around from pre-impact times. Sure, why not. Why... not. Or is everyone actually immortal, because nobody from NERV really looks like they've aged. Not even decrepit close to death old Gendoh right hand guy whose name I should probably recall but for some reason can't, right now. Yui's former professor. Well, here's to the positive thing. Two and a half more hours, and I'll never have to see that again. Time to rewatch Lexx.

I started watching it when I posted I'm off to watch it, but I still have 15 minutes left. Shinji is about to do what his father wants him to do even though Kawuro figured out something's wrong. I stopped there, took a nap, watched a Deep Space Nine episode and... yeah, trying to do everything to not go back. Had a good hearty laugh when Misato launched the Lexx. I made that comparison based on the cyclical time loop or alternate reality nonsense introduced by Kaworu's babbling in the first movie and meant it as a joke, and then that happens... but I'm going to post more on it anyway.

Well... pretty boy sure knows how to make an entrance, right? "Cards created by Clow. There is one wishing to become your master. A girl chosen by Cerberus the Selector. Her name is Sakura. To see if she is truly worthy of being our master. I, Yue the Judge, will now conduct the Final Judgment." -- Yue I'm bishōnen to the core, you guys. Just look at me! I sometimes wondered if everone being totally into his timid, wallflowery and slighty stupid looking civilian identity is a comment on bishōnen characters, but that seems really out of place for Cardcaptor Sakura. It doesn't really comment, it just demonstrates. Story talk:

In other words, my initial impression: Was correct. It really is Anno trolling everyone.

Well, I'm both looking and not looking forward to that. Good, good. It's time to finally find out who Yue really is. Heh. A pity about them not enjoying it enough to continue though. I guess I can understand that. One some, uhm, "objective" level. Really. No, I don't. How can you not love watching Sakura clean house and battle a tree. It's so adorable. My biggest problem with the scene, apart from reusing it to draw parallels that could have been shown much better - and were shown much better in the past - was the reuse of the tired old comedy trope where Misato picks up her beer can only to reveal that something's still censoring the nudity. It was mildly funny (if totally expected) for Shinji, but for Asuka it doesn't even make sense in the framing of the rest of the film, or the first one, or what makes Asuka's breasts so much different from Rei's? I really don't get it, but I'm also the wrong person for this kind of "comedy", which almost always falls flat for me, unless it's the silly shadow play in Men in Tights, while that is a different setup, it's similar, and a riot in general. Funny, I love that movie, but only in the dub. The German dub is so much funnier than the original. It seems like a rather clear basis for the stylistic elements of Ms. Takeuchi's work, and for Utena as well. I don't know enough about it, to be honest, to say that for sure, but I'd be surprised if she and some other parts of the Sailor Moon creative team didn't at least have Natsu e no tobira as inspiration, manga or OVA. It also looks different from many other 80ies anime and OVA I've seen. I'll be off to subject myself to Evangelion 3.33 now.

Well, here's to one last hurrah of an air of authority on the matter, I guess. I should stand by what I say more often, really, and just mark the thread as read without actually reading it. Ah, well, here goes nothing: That's easy to explain, because the "several prominent medical researchers" are akin to the 0.1% of climatologists who deny climate change, and the 0.1% of physicists who are still trying to find the aether. The difference is that while the anti-relativity crowd doesn't get any false equivalency media time*, the fringe science groups for climate change and vaccines do, for some reason, helped by a good deal of lobbying by some very powerful and wealthy individuals (there's an actual conspiracy for you, although it's really just out in the open) and trolling on social media. Take Byram Bridle, for instance, a "prominent" Canadian immunologist who thinks that the vaccines are poison because the spike protein is cytotoxic, and he's citing an actually old Japanese study where it was shown that rats and mice reacted badly to having an insane amount of mRNA injected. Much, much more than what's in a human approved dose. He also said he "fought" to be allowed to read the study, while it's really just publicly available, albeit written in Japanese. The guy was all the rage a while ago on Russia Today and a host of anti-vaxxer YouTube channels and other alternative health and medicine media outlets. The rats have been injected with much higher dosages of the Pfizer vaccine that humans would get. The vaccines themselves, by design, cause inflammation (= cells that build the spike protein after having the mRNA introduced through vector viruses or lipid nanoparticles are eventually disposed of by the body's immune response), it seems logical enough that severely overdosing it causes problems. If that didn't happen, the vaccines wouldn't work. This is, by the way, the study Dr. Bridle had to "fight over" to get access to (maybe he meant he had trouble finding a Japanese translator, because clicking on that link sure isn't anything you need to fight over), and this is the EMA approval document for the Pfizer vaccine. The study is talked about on page 48 to 50. Just so you know this isn't made up. And no, I'm neither a medical reseracher nor can I read Japanese, I got the two links through five minutes of googling around a bit. You'd think news outlets letting the guy talk would fact check with even greater care, but who does that in this day and age. Ain't nobody got time to do things that don't generate ad revenue - or fit the desired narrative. However, don't go and claim you present an argument, you just - by your own admission - pick something up on the news and post it here, and most of the time it's just that. Still no sign of Israel actually stopping the third doses. In fact, Israel just approved the booster shot for younger people, first for everyone aged 50 or older, and recently 40 or older. My Moderna shot came with an list of ingredients that I had to read through first to look for known allergies. <imagine HK47's voice here> Mocking tone: People don't think you're a flat earther doing your own research for nothing, it's because you keep repeating the same pattern of any flat earther who does his own "research", and assuming for the moment that you're really just relaying what the news tell you, it's time to look for a different news channel than Russia Today or some other radio station, because that one really has it in for any vaccine that isn't Sputnik V. I wonder why that is though. All of this isn't to say that Big Pharma isn't an actual problem - it is, often, and for hundres of millions of people worldwide. You just need to look at the insulin prices in the US, or the attempts to price gouge HIV treatments, side effects that show up due to insufficient testing, and any number of such occurances. Vaccines, however, aren't. Sick people generate much more income for Big Pharma than innoculated ones, and it really takes some mental twisting to come up with the idea that vaccines are supposed to make you sick, contain microchips or are used for population control, which bit by bit I wish they were actually really made for. *Although in this day and age, it looks more and more like it's not about false equivalency any more but about generating as many clicks and viewership as possible to sell some more ads. It really is unlikely that anyone here was involved in any Covid-19 research, but what does that matter? It's not necessary to understand - at least in basic principle - how an mRNA or vector vaccine works, and there are a ton of helpful people who take the complex subject matter and try to make it accessible to people. They often have YouTube channels or are sometimes on TV too (though not often enough), but are really often the punching bags of conspiracy nutjobs, anti-vaxxers and flat earthers. The German RKI for instance has a YouTube presence that explains how what and why the vaccines work as they do, how coronaviruses infect cells, and a bunch of other things. It's not perfect, but they're really helpful and use props to visualize what's going on. Like this one: The only problem is, obviously, they're German. The guy has a PhD in microbiology by the way (appeal to authority, kek) and probably drives a nice Porsche financed by Big Pharma, Bill Gates, Soros or whoever else is at fault for the plandemic. Where's Alex Jones when you need him? There's no way he's doing these for the benefit of people and to help them understand. Nah.

I overexaggerated for effect. Marion is 15, so he's uninteresting for the real Pedosus anyway. I mean, there's video evidence that Pedosus doesn't like Chibi-Usa's 16 or 17 year old version, while he's really into her while she's nine, but when taken in a modern context, Natsu e no tobira it is really inappropriate in both the (mostly implied) age difference and the very questionable consent (at best) given, Sarah is really forceful in her persuit, in the beginning, the first time they meet she kisses Marion without consent - well at least he's not asleep when it happens, RIGHT, MAMORU? - and then later it really gets worse. To the OVA's credit, everything about is is inrecredibly artistic. The soundtrack is perfectly fitting, the backgrounds vary from simple and elegant to detailed and dreamlike, and the character designs really seem to be the origin for later works of the 90ies, with its more angular features than the usually more rounded ones of the era. It was more enjoyable than RoE simply for that alone. This was, by the way, the YT suggestion: You really need to turn off the sound, because Mr. Narrator is one more case of people who should not narrate videos, but he also thinks it looks incredibly French, so at least he's not a complete nicompoop. You can look at the first minute. The OVA contains a drawing of Zeus' affair with Leda (here's some greek mythology for you ) later on, and I think it is also in this video (that means bare breasts, just in case, so NSFW eventually if you watch it in full, but why would you). I mean, really, look at that first minute of the video and tell me that doesn't look at least enticing, especially when you've just seen that opening shot of Evangelion 3.33 with the singing Mari and Eyepatch!Asuka in their CGI spaceships. That it turned out to fall a "little" flat and misses the mark of its animation promise by a good deal wasn't exactly something easily predicted. I did read a plot blurb, but it just mentioned an affair. After a while I thought he'd start a little Romeo and Juliet style teenage forbidden love affair with the mayor's daugther. But no, not really. Yeah. At least it didn't spawn a thousand different spin-offs to follow. I think I'll just finish Princess Tutu now, that didn't turn out to be what I hoped for either, but at least it's good. Oh, it also really demonstrates that Ikuko Itoh likes these sort of characters looking at underwear joke, like the one where the four girls in Sailor Moon are stuck in that narrow alley. Because there's a really small character (in body size, not age) in the second season that walks underneath Ahiru's skirt and starts looking for her duck tail while she's a girl, and it startles her so much she turns back into a duck. Princess Tutu is also a great contrast to Rebuild of Evangelion in terms of framing. There are certain times when characters in Princess Tutu, are drawn with a certain amount of sexual appeal, but it always serves a narrative purpose, and isn't there because Ms. Itoh thought the fans would appreciate Mari complaining about squeezed boobies in her ill-fitting plugsuit. Funny, as much as I complained about showing both Shinji and Asuka running out of the bathroom naked because they're startled by Pen² (because it's far too unnecessarily direct in immediately drawing parallels between the two, compared to the original show), at least the two scenes made senes from a narrative point of view. If only the others were as well done. Speaking of Rebuild of Evangelion, it has the same feeling that Clear Card did. Made by all the same people with all the same assets, but it's just wrong and doesn't work. Except it is worse for Clear Card still, because I would rate the original Cardcaptor Sakura a good deal higher than the original Neon Genesis Evangelion, even though that comparison is only truly there for demonstration purposes. The two animes have nothing in common, other than having terrible follow ups made way later. Still, I never thought I could use NGE as an example of why staying away from Clear Card is a good idea. I'd still like to get validation for my point of view, obviously, but I think I just killed every chance that you'll ever try Clear Card. Not-a-spoiler:

Yeah, and he got his ass handed to him by a Mini-Jotaro. Didn't get any further than that though, because Evangelion. Well, and the marriage thing.

Okay, I just had an @Bartimaeus moment. Well, "just" implies an immediacy that is not there, the moment I had two three (it took me actually one to write this post!) hours ago, however its outcome just ended. Instead of watching Evangelion 3.33 while doing my cardio, I randomly scrolled through my YouTube suggestions and stumbled upon something that... kind of caught my eye. The most ridiculous part is that it is actually Love Live!'s fault - Japanese name similarities seem are hard to deal with for YouTube. In one of the later seasons or spin-off seasons of Love Live! featuring different characters from the first anime, there is a song called Natsu e no tobira: Now, for sanity's sake, I would suggest to not actually listen to that. By eye-catching, I don't mean the girls' beach outfits, although they were probably made for just that. No. Natsu e no tobira also happens to be the name of a 60 minute anime OVA from 1981, an an early film work from Madhouse, which at the time still cooperated with Toei. Madhouse is a studio I don't think needs any introduction. It is a 70ies manga adaptation, looking like this: That, by the way, is the OVA's protagonist, Marion, who in spite of his name and looks is just a really pretty boy. Or so at least was the suggestions of the opening animation. But never mind that for now. What I mean is, I looked at that, and figured I need to see it. I had no real idea what I was walking into, and boy oh boy, I cannot catch a break at the moment. I don't mean that the OVA was bad by that. In fact, it looks rather distinct, and it is set at a school in France, at an indeterminatable time when coal fuelled trains still roamed the countryside. The character designs, at least for Marion and later Sarah, immediately reminded me of something else. Of course Marion and everyone else don't look like the opening animation as seen in the animated gif would suggest once the opening is over. He then looks like this: If you find this to have some very striking resemblance to the Sailor Moon manga, then that is not a coincidence, because apparently Naoko Takeuchi used stylistic elements from 70ies mangas to come up with the looks for her characters. That seems fairly evident when you look at them side by side: Long hair nonwithstanding, anyway. This is pretty boy Marion's manga version, in case it isn't exactly obvious. People these days need lots of exposition. And now, with knowing that this probably served as an inspirational basis for Sailor V and/or Sailor Moon, what do you think could this possibly be about? Yes, of course. Inappropriate romances. The core of the OVA, and apparently the manga, is an affair between Marion and Sarah, the wife of Count Cluny. You see, while she has a rich husband and all that, he seems to travel extensively often, and he's either her age or a little older, and deep down, Sarah is really into young boys. And she likes feeling them up when she has a chance, without consent. I mean... I'll put that one in spoiler tags because it contains Marion's bare butt, it's not exactly NSFW but let's not risk anything: Sarah proves to be relentless enough and eventually manages to seduce Marion. Cue entirely too long but incredibly artistic scenes of their affair. I have to say, regardless of what this really is about, it looks fantastic. It's set in France, like I mentioned before, and it looks the part too. While it's entirely from Japan, it does have a certain French flair. You know, in the same way French movies look, uhm, French - the common film language, set design, artistry, equipment used, and so on. When you turn on your TV and catch a French film, you can almost immediately tell it is one - this is similar, only animated (same goes for me being able to tell when what I am watching is German, and therefore almost automatically bad... probably not bad, but for all the reasons I like French films, I dislike most German films). Back to the plot overview, well, next to them are four more tragic figures. Marion's friends, Jacques, Lind and Claude, and Ledania, the local mayor's daughter. Ledania: I wonder what that profile reminds me of... Claude and Marion: Oh, now I do. That looks a bit Utena, doesn't it? Or rather the other way around. This is Lind: No silly caption this time, except he does look a bit like the two faced bastard he turns out to be. And finally, the somewhat less sophisticated country boy, Jacques: He goes about town and carves LEDANIA into every tree he finds. Guess that counts as romantic. Spoilers from here on out: I honestly don't know what to make of it. It is a tragic lovestory between several characters, one which is really inappropriate, but always pretty artistic in its animation, art style and background design. Is it good? Well that's the thing. It was an hour that did not bore me, but it was also not very interesting. Hard to judge. It's probably better than the 5/10 on imdb suggests it would be, but it's not truly a classic either. It does feel aged in many respects, but that is well mitigated by it being set in a still aristocratic France in the days of yore where Counts still ruled, uhm, counties and gentlement settled their differences with pistol duels. What I can tell you is, however, it wasn't what I hoped for. Eh. I have to admit that at least the affair isn't entirely framed as something positive. Marion initially thinks it is, but he comes to a much different conclusion by the end indeed.

Pornareffu, his wee wee tiny.

Boy do I have fun things to look forward to then.

Well, there's only one answer to that:

In my defense, I was stuck at my brother's wedding today, and only came home recently and started to post. End of the World was fairly effective, I mean, not really within the storyline beacuse the storyline was nothing but a comment on metaphysics with artistic inclusions that you somehow were supposed to filter out, and some ludicrousness relating mostly to Nanami and her episodes. He was a pretty despicable character, and that was pretty good. Mari on the other hand, so far, was nothing. She was just there, looked out of place in terms of character design and behaviour and had fanservice in each scene. At least she got a new suit from somewhere (don't ask where) that fit her boobies. Good thing she was also cable to launch Unit-02 on her own, and unleash it from its shackles. With, like, no setup. Nothing. Nothing she did in that film would have been necessary if Asuka could have just piloted Unit-02 and they would have developed any other character to the point where he could be the poor guy to try the Angel corrupted Unit-03. If you want to change it up use Kensuke, not Toji. Done! *sigh* Ah, okay. You mentioned you thought it wasn't bad, so I guess that's as good as it can get with the first episode.

Don't eyeball me!

Well, look at your Mari explanation picture confirming the multiple realities/parallel timeline thing. Yay, I guess.

Guys, spoiling that this is about Asuka, really, I already read @Bartimaeus' posts and the spoilers too. Maybe I should have mentioned that earlier. There comes a point in time when I start not giving any flying f...art about spoilers any more, and Rebuild of Evangelion passed that in the first 15 or 20 minutes of the first movie, and I don't mind spoilers nearly as much as most people. Feel free to discuss anything you want. If you put it in spoiler tags, I'll simply read them anyway. Evangelion 2.22: I WORSHIP HIS SHADOW May you find mercy in my shadow. I shall reign eternal over the Cluster! The breakneck pace at which this movie has been progressing dictated that we skip an assload of Angels and go directly to Zeruel near the end, who (which?) interestingly enough simply ingests Rei (which Armisael does in the original series, sort of). In case you don't remember exactly, Zeruel is the battle where Unit-01 should ingest the S² Engine and where Shinji gets absorbed into the EVA. Rei only semi-fuses with Armisael before she blows him away. Well, and herself. To protect her son. Here's it is the opposite and the same, but all with only Zeruel. Whatever, really. Shinji goes from "I don't want to do this any more" to "please let me back into my EVA" with barely a minute to think about, and taking Asuka out of the picture and removing her entire self-doubt arc makes the scenes so much less impactful. Also, did any of you care for Ms. Anime Schoolgirl? I, uhm, mean Mari McWhatsherface. Hello, my name is Mari, and I air-dropped into Neon Genesis Evangelion from an entirely different anime, I like to sniff Shinji and have my butt in focus of utterly weird shots. How out of place can a character be? I'm guessing she'll have a better or actually a role at all in 3.33, but so far, what the hell. She's really only there to sniff Shinji and pilot Unit-02 because some dumbass thought it would be a good idea to have Asuka be hurt in the failed activation of Unit-03. Obligatory Love Live! part of the post: Do some push-ups now, Honoka! Does that remind you of some other picture I posted in this thread? I'm so unsure... You know, Love Live! turned out to be a treasure trove of YouTube videos of varying quality that all have one in common: They're simply amazing. Whether it is a real life µ's group that apparently can fill entire venues with their "music" to A-RISE cosplayers engaging the audience with their "dancing" and and horrible lip sync. I generally find it unfair to judge Japan based on what we often get shown as "What the hell, Japan!" like the used panty vending machines (that no longer exist and never truly were widespread) or the TV show "Orgasm Wars" (don't look it up if you don't know what it is), which only ran on a pay-per-view porn channel, or the insanity of Takeshi's castle, but anime fandom sometimes makes it really, really hard not to... just judge. Ludicrous, that is. Just ludicrous. And yeah, I mean the audience, not the cosplayers. They're just doing their job. I also watched the first three minutes of 3.33 before calling it quits until I'll go doing my ergometer rounds again, but are we doing the inexplicable Gainax thingy again? How original. Well, Kaworu more or less referred to this being some sort of parallel universe, cyclical timeline or something of the sort in each of the scenes he was in (including his scenes at the end of 1.11). Hey maybe the Time Prophet will show up and tell us that the last Brunnen-G will the the downfall of His Divine Shadow. Time as you know had a beginning and time has an end and then time begins again. As we shall each live our lives again exactly as before, I have been gifted to see into the old cycles of time. Not very clearly mind you, but I have learned that in the future-past the Brunnen-G, the great victor in the war against the insect civilisation, shall be destroyed at the hand of His Shadow. But after His Shadow leaves the Cluster they will be destroyed at the hands of the Brunnen-G. This has happened before and it will happen again. Princess Tutu is much more readily digestible than Neon Genesis Evangelion is on a first viewing. Besides, you've already gone through the first episode. Or did you abort that immediately after the opening story narration? I almost did. Not a spoiler:

Zoraptor already answered, but: With these side effects being so rare - and that includes the blood clotting issue with the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccine - they're statistically unlikely to show up in studies, expedited or not. The regular, non-emergency approved vaccinations with longer study times usually feature study groups of a lot less people, where you would be even less likely to find statistical outliers. The testing of these vaccines was immense and on a scale never seen before. Because there was enough funding, and to prevent another Pandremix. Because that vaccine* had a side effect in the form or narcolepsy with an incidence of like 1 in 32000, which was not found during human testing due to smaller test groups. That's pretty much one of the reasons why the covid-19 vaccine test groups contained upwards of 40.000 people. Even if they had done tests on groups of enough of a size to find the blood clotting and myocarditis issue, the vaccines would have been approved and declared safe for use regardless (they're still used, after all...). It might have prevented a few deaths in the case of the blood clotting because of increased checking after receiving the shot, but that's about it. It really is a no-brainer when comparing the incidence rates of side effects with the mortality rate of contracting covid-19, never mind any of the deaths that are indirectly caused by having your medical care system collapse on you. Even now there is a statistically significant increase in mortality rates during lockdowns not related to covid-19 because of the delayed treatments for other diseases (or people not going to the doctors for treatment). Not to mention that mycarditis is a side effect that you can get from contracting any number of respiratory diseases, even when they're only having mild or no symptoms, and that usually stops absolutely no one from going to work with a cold. Most over the counter pain medication has serious side effects in the same range of likeliness, and they're sold... well, over the counter. Make it a vaccine and suddenly it becomes a problem for the same people who think nothing of buying an aspirin. *Actually, there are studies showing that contracting swine flu leads probably to increased amounts of narcolepsy. There's a direct link the to the vaccine insofar as it was the antibodies that caused narcolepsy in affected individuals - there's a chance they would have gotten it from contracting the disease just as well.

Indeed! I'm a little further into Evangelion 2.22. I have to take back some of the things I've said, I was nowhere near halfway through - that I am now, and it quickly deteriorated. It does feel like it has less direct exposition through dialogue than the first one, but it's gotten worse, actually, and the pacing of the movie made it necessary to invent something silly like the Vatican Treaty. Does Asuka piloting EVA-03 mean that her entirey arc of self-doubt is going to be replaced with Shinji dummy plugging her to... to what, then? Death? Losing an arm? Nothing? The angel just activated where I paused watching for the time being. Anyway, this is really not going to well. The Vatican Treaty is needed to explain why Asuka needs to get into Unit-03 because you can't use any of the other characters because they're so underdeveloped noboy would care if Toji lost an arm. Or died, as was the original plan (which was, from what I've read, one of the few instances of studio interference with the original NGE). For fun I decided to look up the Vatican Treaty on EvaGeeks, and what do you know: Sure, speculate on, guys. It's a narrative band aid to get Asuka into Unit-03 because with a total of three minutes of screen time so far, nobody is going to give one flying f*ck (pardon the language) about Toji if he were to pilot that thing, that's all there is to it. Then there are all the scenes of... fanservice. In part they were also around in the original series, but they had meaning beyond looking at Asuka or Misato (or Rei). Instead we get an extended version of Asuka sleeping next to Shinji where they actually talk for no reason some more exposition. Sure, the scene where Asuka is wearing Misato's shirt where here breasts spill out because it's too big for her could have been drawn differently in the original series, but it was also there to show us that Asuka is trying to get a sort of attention and validation from Shinji that he's currently incapable of giving her, and using means that he neither understands (granted, so didn't most of the audience, I'd guess) nor cares for (using the shirt to imply availibility, I mean - misinterpreting Shinji's reactions and all that). Here we get a scene where she's cooking to show off her rivalry with Rei over the affection of Shinji, and she's wearing a bra and an apron. Why? Who knows. Then Misato comes in and neatly EXPLAINS THE GOD DAMNED SCENE, because unless you're hit over the head with it, you're not going to get it, right? RIGHT? Sigh. "Don't you think this suit is a little too revealing?" Yeah, I think so too, Asuka. More on this when I continue. Which might be tomorrow evening, or maybe a little earlier to get this over with. And because it's become sort of customary, HORY SH1T, OH NO, look at this: Honestly, what the hell? OH MY GOD, look at that audience. I don't even...

I get the impression you really did not like Akio. By the way, I've been meaning to ask this, between NGE and Utena, which one made less sense? I'd like to think it was Utena, but it's hard to gauge.

I'd vote for making an ass of yourself on TikTok like the kids.

Me too. I was kind of hoping someone here knows something about Rachel. Extremist was fine from what he told me, just busy with physical therapy and some residual pain, things like that are to be expected obviously. Then Interplay died and that was that. Hm, unless you forgot he probably didn't tell everyone about the accident. Eh, I guess that's fine, it's been 18 or so years now anyway. Extremist was the first person to reply to my first post back on the BiS boards, and it was not a friendly one. I had a problem with Baldur's Gate 2's map screen crashing on me due to note overload, and he assumed I was cheesing with Yoshimo's infamous dual class infinite trap bug (which I did not even know about, at the time) and thought he should straighten me out, in his wonderfully straightforward manner.

You're right, of course, he had a formulated theory, and actual proof in the form of successful experiments to test predictions came later. It's the prime example of how science doesn't work like the conspiracy nutjobs think it does, which was the point I was going for. I mean, sure, you'll always have scientists who refuse to accept that their favorite theory turned out wrong, but we're all subject to human failings. You still get people looking for the aether in this day and age, it's just become more fun to be an anti-vaxxer than tilting with windmills named relativity, apparently. edit: Changed the original post to reflect that.

I wonder how Rachel is doing these days, I mean... assuming nothing terrible happened, she did quit because she got severely ill. While we were always friendly with each other and helped out posters in the tech support forum with their damaged Baldur's Gate 2 save games, that was about the extent of our interactions, so I really don't know. Extremist disappeared after a near fatal car crash, came back a bit later and we talked a little, but he quit for good afterwards too.