majestic

I'm fully expecting the spin-off called Sunshine!! to be only beach episodes or bikini/swimsuits competitions - ideally both! - with singing and dancing added. What else could it be with that name? Guess it'll be okay for the first season at least. Unless the boobery comes back in force.

Yeah, Minako does and feels a lot of things, but crying isn't what she usually does. Aye, that we did. But hey, there's every chance there'll be nothing about Crystal for a while now, and I'll try not to mention Eternal. Eh, I complain often and loudly enough about the things I did not like watching, so hey, feel free to whinge to your heart's content. Like Bob Picardo said on Voyager after Seven becomes irritated because he complains a lot about things he can't change: In my defense I was badgered into going to the theater for them. The second one was so bad it almost made me leave. It's the closest I got to walking out of a movie. The other moment was right after the beginning of Star Trek: Beyond, a film where I had to question Mike's sanity after the Half in the Bag for it. On the other hand, he called Star Trek '09 his guilty pleasure, so... guess nobody is perfect. I also watched another episode of Love Live! School Idol Project. A couple of random observations: The episode begins with a scene that appears as if Honoka wants to nibble on their songwriter's ear. The same girl that had her breasts grabbed last episode. She'd edging closer and closer and... With only a couple of days left until their first live act after the upcoming student orientation, Umi gets a hefty does of stage fright, and the other two help her find more confidence. Honoka tries her best, and that was nice to see. Kotori comes with their costumes and in what I only can assume to be a problem with the subtitles, Umi complains that the skirts on their costumes don't cover her knees, and that she'd rather sing in the school uniform. What? Hey... have you seen your school uniform? Compare: I'd rather sing in this, because... ...this skirt is too short. Yep. I know my eyesight is bad, so hey, Umi, maybe you need glasses too? Searching online for pictures of this show is beyond frustrating, and if you're not careful you're way too easily dipping into major Rule 34 content, these two will have to suffice. Anyway, with the stage fright out of the way, orientation day comes, and with it their first show. Curtains rise, and... The fanservice in this one, and it still is there, fits more neatly into the world, like in the first episode, but with less attention drawn to it. I wouldn't call it dignified by any means, but it wasn't as distracting as the last time, and nobody grabbed their own or someone else's breasts. Actually... that was a really good episode. It's a real pity about the presentation and the occasionally really stupid and distracting parts. There's... there's a decent show hidden underneath. At least, for now. It might all go down in flames soon, of course.

The scene just reminded me how Haruka's cup size changes depending on the shot or whether or not she wants to pass as a man. It was just as weird as the fanservice in the second episode of Love Live! Didn't want to make Minako cry, she has it hard enough in Eternal, what with the peeping tom(cat) she has at home. In Madoka, I've always thought the weird camera movements and angles and the shot composition was there to make the viewer feel a certain amount of alienation, and to give the anime an oppressive atmosphere, more than fanservice - with the exception of Mami's transformation sequence, the one in the movie even more so than the TV version. You only know the movie version, but it actually removed the nude part of Homura's tranformation and the final shot of Madoka and Homura together in space, well... in the TV version they both wore sparkles, in the blu ray not even that, and in the film actual clothes. However, I might be giving the animators more credit than they're due here. I've seen the new Transformers movies once, at least the first... three. The first three I definitely saw, the fourth one I think, but I'm not sure. That should tell you all that needs to be said about those dumpster fires, because my memory is usally quite good. Also, yes, I've seen the Lindsay Ellis videos, but as far as I remember from Transformers Megan Fox was always framed that way, regardless of what happened or what she did, which indeed undercut a lot of that - needless to say I fully agree with her, even if I generally don't share her enthusiasm for Transformers as a whole. That's one of the more inexplicable things of the second episode of Love Live!. In the first episode, Honoka rubbing her behind after falling down at least made sense in-universe. It was framed in a silly fanservice way, but at least it had a reason to be there. Could have changed the shot if you wanted, but hey, it wouldn't be what the anime was aiming for. But... the second episode, it's scenes like this: Yeah, nothing as sexy as tracksuits, huh? Interrupted for a handful of seconds. Like in this one, although that one is more "organic" then the others in the episode. Imagine Tiger's-Eye saying: ONE TWO - which is the exact amount of seconds this close-up lasts. She wiggles her right leg a bit in the animation. Just a wee little nudge. THREE! Erm, back to normal. I mean... normal for school girls in anime, anyway. Well so that's a leggy version where you can see the legs change shape and size depending on the camera angle - I mean, if I were a flat earther I'd explain that by angular size, but that clearly can't be all of it. The difference in distance in these two shots is not that large. I have no idea why it's like that. I don't care for scenes like this in one way or the other, usually (I dislike them here because they feel distracting and tacked on), but I have a hard time seeing how anyone who likes to watch anime for scenes like this to be entirely happy with how these shots are made. Content aside, they're not very well put together. *shrug* For whatever else it's worth: Watched some more Kill la Kill. It continues to be amazing. There's a live TV transmission of Ryuko fighting, and it shows the enemy and attack title cards live on TV. edit: Cheap move pulling a scene from Minako's flashback episode from the first season. That was a major bummer.

The second episode of Love Live! upped the fanservice moments by 200%. In other words, there was one instance of a focus shot on crossed legs, one shot of Kotori grabbing her breasts and one instance of the vice president of the student council grabbing a first year's boobs out of the blue and telling her they're aren't ripe yet. I swear Kotori's breats got larger during that scene than they were before and directly afterwards. Kind of like Sailor Boobanus' in Sailor Moon Eternal. These scenes are embedded in the most schizophrenic way possible, because most of this is just the three girls trying to get their group started and Honoka realizing that she might have bitten off more than she can chew, only to be interrupted for a second or two of really weird fanservice moments that are so out of place that they become distracting. They otherwise spend a good deal of the episode dressed in running clothes after realizing that they're not going to be able to sing and dance unless they do some cardio (which of course means running stairs up and down ). I'm kinda hoping, I guess, against all reason for the time being, that the random boob grabbing stays the worst thing that will happen. Honoka is a bit of an Usagi. Not very good at school, constantly stuffing her face with something, and constantly told by Umi that she'll get fat. Kotori came up with costume designs. The serious girl of the group, Umi, was a little put out by the skimpiness of the outfits. They also managed to badger the girl from the first episode into writing music for their lyrics, and found a band name through a suggestion box (µ's... as in... muse). All three resolve to go on a diet but almost instantly fail because Honoka's mother owns a store that sells traditional Japanese sweets. So... this is actually (mildly) funny at times, sort of interesting to watch at others, and total bullsh*t for two seconds every now and then. edit: To give you an idea about how weird that gets, Maki, the girl who wrote the song for them, is seen watching them run up and down the stairs near the shrine. She's a bit shy, then the other girl shows up, grabs her from behind, and then... proceeds to give her advice on how to help the other three in a totally earnest manner, as if nothing weird just had happened, while the shot goes back to Umi, Hotori and Honoka in running clothes. It's almost as if the writers made these scene as stupid as possible on purpose. Huh, maybe they did.

See, I wouldn't have known that there are two spin off anime series if you hadn't mentioned this having four seasons. So yay, more to watch! No, seriously, don't worry. I checked that out because I was curious, just like with Eden. I didn't jump into watching Overlord or Attack on Titan after all, so it's not just anime that's being talked about.

Yes, they should have. In all his time, the German team sure had the potential for more than one world championship that only came to be because the referee had a really bad day. But look at the bright side, unlike something drastically changes, them playing like that means they certainly won't win the tournament, and that's a win in my book.

Love Live! School Idol Project, episode1! So, yeah, obviously, my sometimes almost morbid curiosity got the better of me, and I just watched the first episode of Love Live! School Idol Project. I am uncertain where to begin. The animation is, when it's not "enhanced" by CGI, all right. Nothing to write home about, but not distracting or terrible either. The TV tropes blurb fairly accuratly sums up the first episode. Honoka hears that the school's closing down and immediately freaks out because she thinks she'll have to re-apply to a new high school, which with her implied academic prowess will not be easy. Luckily for her, the crisis is averted - the school will just not form a new first year and close after everyone else has graduated. With her grandmother and her mother having studied at the same school, she still resolves to try and found an idol club, because schools having famous idol groups are much more popular and attract more students. Well, whatever works for you, girl. The first episode already features two songs, one by A-RISE, the famour j-pop group that inspires Honoka, and one by herself. There's also a short one from a fellow student who also plays the piano. Wee, I guess she'll eventually rope her into joining. The j-pop songs in this are okay. I mean... actually, they're pretty decent, considering they didn't make me want to pierce my eardrums. Now that this is all out of the way, let's talk about the disappointing thing here, namely the fanservice! Yeah, so... actually, this is the most fanservice-y the first episode got, and it's pretty much the only scene where it is this blatant. It's also fairly short, which makes still shots appear worse than they are in motion. From the pictures I googled earlier today, I expected something more. This, so far, has been pretty harmless, outside of the suggestive dance numbers, but do I blame the anime for that? That's just truth in television (tm). So no, it actually gets a pass for that one. In this scene, Honuka is trying to dance like the idols she saw earlier in the episode, and she falls on her arse, obviously. The girls have, while by no means realistic, more average body types than I thought. Even Eli Ayase, who in the promotional material looks like your typical fanservice blonde girl with big breasts looks fairly normal in the regular animation. Promotional material: Actual animation: Most of the first epside looked more like this, actually. This even aces the Bechdel test, but with the characters its pretty much impossible not to. There are zero male characters in this, unless some are added later. Everyone at the school, even the madame director is... well, it's in her title already. So where does that leave us? Good questions. The music was fairly okay, for the time being, the CGI in the enhanced dance sequences is horrible, but what else could it be. The animation is otherwise okay, could be better, could also be worse. It is, just like parts of Violet Evergarden and Card Captor Sakura: Clear Card sometimes a bit too bright. Not sure why that is with modern animation, but it's... less of a problem here than in Clear Card. Honoka is the tried and true not very intelligent but cheerful and full of energy high school girl who apparently always manages to rope her friends into some shenanigans. Her two friends haven't been around much and haven't done much, one of them likes archery and was initially against the idea, but seeing Honoka actually putting some effort in convinces her. The voice acting so far has been decent, nothing over the top. Honoka took (still takes, I guess) some getting used to. A quick check of the Wikipedia page told me that they voice actors are also all accomplished singers, so that's nice going forward. I'm not sure what's more surprising here - the "lack" of fanservice (it is there, just not in the amount I expected or in the way I thought it would be), the fact that I don't hate this even though it's apparently about dancing and j-pop, or that I don't even regret trying it. Unlike, say, Sailor Moon Crystal. With the first of 26 episodes it's too early to tell, but if it stays like this, whether or not I'll actually end up liking this will depend on how the - gasp! - storyline unfolds, or rather, what they do with the premise, how much of it is really going to be singing and dancing, how much is going to be slice of life and how the character interactions are going to turn out. There's still a lot of potential for really awful fanservice - maybe a beach episode, a swimsuit competition, or some steamy romance between the girls (no boys in sight, after all), bigger boobs, or bigger boobs in bikinis, but so far this was part fun, part interesting and not at all terrible. I sure am uncertain if that premise will work for 26 episodes and a movie, but hey... I also didn't think Cardcaptor Sakura's low key storytelling and Tomoyo's adoration would work for 70 episodes, and it did. I'm looking forward to being wrong, I guess.

To quote TV tropes: The idea of becoming an overnight idol sensation is a bit ludicrous, but otherwise that doesn't sound like too bad a setup, and it apparently also contains a good deal of slice of life elements. On the other hand, it's seinen anime and it looks... well, it certainly looks the part. Probably, and unlike... the other stuff, it's really almost entirely aimed at children, from what I recall. Ah, maybe at a later point. If only for a historical view on Miyazaki and Takahata's earlier/earliest collaboration.

Yeah, they really should. Good old Heidi, I wonder if I should rewatch it at some point. I'm not sure how it would hold up compared to childhood memories. Hmm. <insert witty something about a river in Egypt> Also... Long Live!, hm, okay. I just read a plot blurb and wondered why you'd call that garbage out of hand, and then I saw a couple of pictures from the anime. So, yeah. How and in what way was Sailor Moon oversexualized again? I'm not sure if I'm too hard on it. It is definitely not as good as the old Sakura was, and coming from that wonderful second movie to Clear Card makes it an even harder contrast. It's doubly problematic, the animation is worse, obviously, the setup is less well integrated into the world (but that was true for the Sakura Card arc as well) and it amps Tomoyo up to 11 in terms of fawning over Sakura. It's still cute, but not as much (also because it looks worse). Everything is just less... well made than the original, and coming directly from watching the original, with no nostalgia to prop it up at all, that contrast just makes everything worse.

I guess I can finally stop feeling bad for making you interested in Madoka, seems like that turned out well enough in the end. Who said trauma has to be bad all the time, huh? xD The next step is starting to recognize simple words and phrases. I watched two more episodes of Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card. Either the animation is rotting my brain, or it got better after a few episodes. It's still a far cry from the simple but beautiful old anime, but at least it's no longer completely distracting. Alas, for the first of the two episodes I've seen, that also meant it was noticable that this was just less... well put together than the the old episodes. Everything is in place, all the actors are the same (except for poor Rika who was put on a bus because her original voice actress died), but it's just not as good. Hoe? The second episode however, was pretty good. Except for the glaring continuity errors. Which I still hope are intentional, because the last one before this one was kind of highlighted by the other characters. Eh well, it "only" took 8 episodes for them to make a decent one. If they keep this up, maybe there'll be a worthwhile one at the end of the run.

Hope you get better soon. 's something I've been thinking about on and off for a while now, just not abot Google. I have a Google account, of course, but I barely use it for anything. My primary mail address that I use for anything important is from a small, local youth community non profit organisation. It's been active for ages now and started out as a bulletin board service. I joined them way back in the olden days, where I arguably was still a part of the target demographic and Google wasn't even founded yet. There's still some discussion in the BBS part of the service. The somewhat cumbersome client software was replaced with an equally cumbersome web interface a while ago. I doubt that there are many youths left that partake. There are no membership fees, there are no adds, the spam filter's doing a fine job. In other words... I have no idea how they fund themselves, and I doubt the brand is worth enough - if anything at all - to have some other company take over operations in case they go kaputt. Guess I should really look into preparing an exit strategy, just in case. Hmmmm.

That's pretty much a no, but what other show really does. No eye lasers either. Much less OH MY GOD as well, and of course absolutely zero JOESTAR-SAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANs.

Eden, episode 4. Of course it comes down to a robot vs. robot showdown, with Sara and Zero each piloting a humongous mech. Because how else could this end? The end. The last ten minutes of this were actually great, but three and a half episodes of setup complete with the terrible animation this has is a tad too much to truly recommend this. It's not entirely bad, and there are some fun moments here and there. I'm not sure if I should note "not about an AI uprising" as a net positive when it's just the other post-apocalyptic goto option with humanity in cryo suspension riding out an environmental disaster. Scientist losing faith in humanity and trying to end it isn't exactly original either. Not that originality is truly needed if the pieces click together in a great way, which they just don't. It's okay for a one time viewing, and fairly short, but there are better ways to spend your time for sure - many worse ones too, on the other hand. With a bit more breathing room and some better animation, this could have been really nice. I'll just wait for you to reach the other anime, or second season, or whatever you can call a re-tooling of a cancelled show and decide then. It does sound fun, but at the moment I'd rather not start something with 161 episodes... if it ends up being bleh after the retooling, I'll OCD myself through 143 potentially terrible episodes. I can neither properly confirm or deny this. Not for a want of trying, but for a complete lack of a frame of reference to compare Violet Evergarden to. It definitely is more wistful and serious, but not all of it is bleak. It never came across as faux, but I'll freely admit to not being a good judge of this. Especially not in this case. Feels like it was made for me, to be honest. Hm, watching more of Satoshi Kon is also on my list... but that list grows ever longer, and I've watched nothing but anime recently. I think once everything dies down a little I'll go back to finishing Agents of SHIELD. Biggest thing I need to resist right now is the urge to jump into the 110 episodes of Legend of the Galactic Heroes, which looks like it's an animated Star Wars - and probably exactly everything that I want to watch. Violet Evergarden has 13 episodes, a shorter OVA, a feature film length OVA and a 140 minutes movie. It's shorter, I think. At least when compared to the 100+ episodes behemoths the other two in your list are.

Eden, episode 3: If this has any point at all the show only has like 22 minutes of runtime left to make it.

You should really read A Song of Ice and Fire because there's also this guy who forces his wife to <rude word indicating carnal relations> his dog and cuts off this other guys's good sized <word for male genital>, he's a badass too! *quietly strikes breaking his neck from his bucket list* I know, I know, oh, oh, oh, as Patchface would say. Not that it snows up for me, but... erm, I mean, I often do that. I even already brought examples in one of these thread incarnations, like Half-Life 2. Halo is something else, even if I wouldn't have played it back when it came out on the first XBox and not have liked it from the start (what a major disappointment that was after the initial trailers where it still was developed as a PC game, before Microsoft bought Bungee), I'd just dismiss it out of hand for all the fanboys raving about its multiplayer. Online multiplayer in a shooter, on a console. Sure. Now quietly go play somewhere else, peasant. I got lucky and read the books before stumbling into the online discourse... or rather, I read them before there was much discourse on them, it's hard to believe how long its really been. There's an uneven split in the fandom, on the one hand you have the people GRRM himself sadly elevated to "homo invictus fandumbus" (I'm pretty sure that's accurate latin ) by making them the co-authors of his world building book A World of Ice and Fire. They were completely obnoxious in this religious fanatic in possession of the one true truth sort of way before GRRM reached down and granted them a place as lorekeepers at his side. I don't even want to know how they are today. The have gathered most of the fandumb unto themselves and drove everyone who disagreed into exile. On the other hand you have a bunch of highly intelligent people in exile who refused to worship and grovel at the feet of Elio and Linda and wrote interesting and fun to read essays on a site that I used to lurk on, but has since become a little stale, with no new material put out for ten years now. And... and that's not even talking about the sort of people that HBO's adaptation brought into the mix. Then we do have a current oversaturation of grimdark settings that sort of tired to travel in the wake of Westeros' rise to mainstream popularity without knowing what made it so appealing in the first place. Even the showrunners didn't get it, when they started to make everything grimdark for the sake of being grimdark, hence the inclusion of rape everwhere. The books themselves play with certain fantasy tropes and subverts them where it makes sense, plays them a bit straighter where it is required. It bears remembering that we're talking about a book series that started in 1996. I've seen people call Martin's writing style pedestrian, but that's... well, I'm not really a good judge on writing style in general, unless it's ridiculous like with all the ascended fanfiction that's so popular now. It doesn't take a literary genious to figure out that After Passion is terribly written. He's good at worldbuilding and setup and payoff though. Even if you find yourself taken aback by a plot twist, you can go back and re-read the chapters before that and really begin to notice the little hints, the infamous Red Wedding being the most obvious of these (but certainly not the only ones). Oh, and by the way, this is the Violet Evergarden documentary I was talking about: If you want you can click through it a bit, it features a brief history of Kyoto Animation, references some other material that I actually might check out, has some clips to show how the animation looks in motion and is generally fairly interesting in showcasing how the studio works. Just in case you're still on the fence and haven't pushed it into the definite no pile yet. It's a hefty 48 minutes long though. It would probably be less of a time commitment to just try the first episode, but less than the first three episodes that it would take to give it a fair shake (in my not very humble opinion, the first two episode are extremely slow paced setup, and the third one has the first little payoff for Violet in it). Spoilers, obviously, but this doesn't... spoilers for this means even less than it does for other pieces of entertainment. It's way too low key and personal. Not that it isn't complex or subtle, nah, just... really just one instance where the journey really matters more than the destination. Also... Eden, episode 2: By the way, love the subtlety of the show. Look at Zero: I'm SO EVUL. EVUUUUUUUUUUUL! Yeah, so... oh boy, the only good thing I can say about this so far is... it's short, only having four episodes. Two to go. The robot speech patterns are fun though, and I admit I chuckled at them putting Sara into the charger when she was hungry. Robo partents being hapless was actually fairly fun, but that lasted for a handful of minutes until Sara aged up.

Believe it or not (which might be hard to do with my history of what I watched), but the inappropriateness is the main reason I never tried Ranma 1/2. Mostly because it was my nerd-colleagues that watched the anime back when I was in school who watched the anime just because of that. I don't mind content like that, but there's a certain amount of idiotic behaviour in my nerd community that I can't stand, and that was a major part of it. Anyway, I was really joking, and I meant what I said. CCS, I think, overall benefits from a slower pace when watching, and the first 30 or so epsiode you blew through in record time anyway. Which I understand, it's great. When I look back at binging Steven Universe, I don't feel like doing so made me lose something. If anything, it enhanced the experience because the filler-style episode "holes" went away faster, instead of lasting days or weeks. Cardcaptor Sakura, on the other hand, has a different focus. It's storyline is much simpler (but told in an equally great way), the whole setup is on a much different scale. I think, if I would have experienced the weekly release when it came out, I would appreciate it even more. Can't be sure, but that's what it feels like. Anyway, I watched the first episode of Eden. The backgrounds look good, but the movements are weird. Sara, the girl, ages up massively after the first 10 or so minutes by the way. She ends up looking like this really quickly: It's only marginally better, but hey... all the animation in this looks uncanny anway. The storyline seems to be a perfectly standard AI revolution. At least... humans are all gone from earth apparently, robots are still working at whatever tasks they were given and there's a cast of security robots trying to supress all knowledge of humans. The one thing I found mildly interesting was that there's apparently a sect of robots worshipping humans as their creators. They're persecuted by the security bots. There's also a counter on the sceen from time to time, counting down. I'm guessing that's humans left, but it went from reading 500 million to less than one million in the first episode. Doesn't look too good for them, if I'm right.

If that were the case, wouldn't you rather go for CoronaVac than Astra Zeneca then? Inactivated or attenuated virus vaccinations are the tried and true approach. Viral vector vaccinations have been around for a bit longer than mRNA ones, yes, but... not by that much, and were never used on a scale like this before either, at least when it comes to human use. *shrug*

Feel like driving the future?

Good thing I didn't watch the trailer but just jumped into the first episode, because that trailer is indeed awful, but I was using Kill la Kill as a point of reference for character design more than a recommendation. It's hilarious and (intentionally) overdone to the point of being satire, which you already said you don't really like. Spoilered just in case someone else wants to watch it. I have no idea about Ranma 1/2 (although I'll take that as a semi-recommendation for the first season then), but I'm sure if you keep this up then Tomoyo will stalk and drag you out to the dumpster if you keep her from being able to film Sakura for much longer. Have fun, assuming it's not for sad reasons, and related to summer holidays.

Not enough hate there to feed on. Speaking of hate watching, there's a new teaser trailer for Picard season 2 out now... Time travel, Q and more Jeri Ryan, they're really getting desperate here. This is going to suck so much, and I'll hate to watch it. JoJo really doesn't have any luck using planes, does he? I also lost it when they played Walk Like an Egyptian as the music for the closing credits. Laughed a good five minutes. Such an awesome idea. Wait a moment, that was totally unclear now that I re-read my post, Akira Fudo is the name of the titular Devilman Crybaby in, uhm, Devilman Crybaby. I wasn't talking about the anime film Akira, that one's a classic for a reason and something completely different from Devilman Crybaby. I saw Beauty and the Beast once in a theater, I think that was a school outing at the time. I don't really recall anything other than the plot and the characters involved. Invincible is still sitting at one watched episode at the moment, which means I'll eventually finish it, but apart from the actually somewhat unexpected twist at the end of the first episode it had nothing that made me want to continue to watch. Except for that voice cast, maybe, but that's not much. Plus it looks terrible. I know you said it gets better, but I'll probably only get back to this once I'm done with everything else. Including the live action Sailor Moon. Not everything modern looks like that though, I've been going through Kill la Kill at a slowish pace in the meantime, and while it also has uncanny CGI to "enhance" the rest of the animation, the character designs are certainly cartoony enough. I also tend to laugh like an idiot while watching it. It's a magical girl ecchi shonen anime, which at first glance makes it sound absolutely terrible, until... yeah until you realize it's not taking itself seriously and is making fun of animes like it that are actually meant to be taken seriously. Everything is so over the top it becomes absurd and absurdly funny through it. Best magical girl transformation scene ever, too: Yeah, just in case that wasn't obvious from what I posted about it, not entirely safe for work. Sure, Barbie doll anatomy in place, but it does have the world famous jiggly boobs.

Oh, and by the way, I finished watching the Violet Evergarden movie, obviously. Not sure I like that ending. For a moment it looked like it would be really, you know, subverting my expectations until it suddenly wasn't any more, and started playing things incredibly straight. Or in other words... I think the film just pulled a Miyazaki there at the end, and I'm not entirely certain if I'm happy or angry with that. It's a strange feeling of being both at the same time. Spoilers, potentially cascaded: I get why it ended the way it did. It's just like with the ending of Whisper of the Heart, I'm sitting here wondering if it didn't do injustice to an otherwise incredible piece of art. Also spoilers, so click at your own risk.

Join the dark side and start hate watching with me. Either pick SMC or Discovery, and down that dark path we'll find many things other will consider... unnatural. *cackles* No? Ah, well... Still hope Eternal bombed enough to put a can into the idea of adapting the last arc. I really don't want to see what they can come up with for Stars. edit: You were right about stands being weirder than any hamon. I though that hard to do, but wheeeeee, what the hell.

I... expected that would be the case. To be honest, I didn't like the faces that much either, but I've come to accept and maybe even like them. Actually, the character models and the way they express what the writers and animators were trying to convey were the biggest reason I originally put this into the "no" pile for a recommendation for you, although I think they're significantly better than the ones in Madoka. Looked a bit into the production of this (there's a nice making of on YouTube), and apparently the series director went to film school and was originally involved in live action films before transitioning to animation. I think that shows in the series with the visual storytelling, but especially in the feature film specials. Kyoto Animation apparently also took quite a risk in giving lead character design and key animation to two somewhat inexperienced employees (one of which moved directly from in-between animation to a key production role). Regardless of the use of some CGI in the shots, some of which is really noticable, like Violet's typewriter, the overall product, i.e. the animation when in motion, is pretty impressive, regardless of stylistic choices, even if I found the uncanny CGI'ed camera movements to be much more distracting than they should have been. edit: Rumor has it that the typwriters were CGI because the first Violet Evergarden commercial made for the light novel was animated by the series director, and it featured her and the typwriter, and it was a month's hard work to get that animated traditionally, so they just made them CGI for the show. Don't know if that's true, but that commercial was an awful lot of work back then. Talking about this, by the way: There's something else, too, I don't think this would work in a more traditional 80ies or 90ies anime style. I'm not going to call this realistic* by any means, I mean, Violet was a very young special forces commando that would put Chuck Norris in Delta Force to shame, but the artstyle and animation choices made for the show were very deliberate. Unless, of course, you'd blow an enormous amount of resources on the project to, as you said in the spoiler below, make it look more like Perfect Blue. The amount of time and money that already went into this is pretty impressive when you consider that Kyoto Animation makes it a point to pay their employees (and with them being actual employees, instead of self-employed contract hires) fairly and provide a decent work environment without the usual exploitation of young talent to shave as much off of production costs as possible. * And it's very much toned down in the adaptation. The original novel has Violet wielding a massive, ungainly axe with which she regularily rent entire enemy platoons asunder. Seriously, what a great idea to drop that nonsense from the anime adapation. ** Major series ending spoilers, so be sure you know what you do when you click here:

Watching the Violet Evergarden film right now. When this hits cinemas here, which it apparently will soon(tm) - after a two year delay thanks to the pandemic and the arson - I'm definitely going to the theater for this (assuming I can rope someone in to go with me). It still dips into the uncanny valley sometimes when the camera pans over clearly static backgrounds while trying to make it look like the scene has depth, but I'll take that. I still think the character models of earlier anime looked better, but... hey, I might have said I made my peace with how modern animation looked after the Madoka movies, but Whisper of the Heart gave lie to that statement. This might bring it back. Anyway, that's enough with the sceneshots of her for now. The film itself begins with a flash-foward to 50 years after the events of the anime. Mostly to justify some exposition given to viewers who haven't watched episodes. More maybe later.

Thanks for the concern, but my calves are okay. Sore muscle here is in my thigh, and it's not swollen, luckily. Probably caused by some wear from biking before going to bed. Thanks, it's already getting better.