majestic

Look, quoting works again. That narrows it down to, I guess, an issue on the prior page. Maybe I made the thread kaputt with my Madoka post.

One very quick reply before I'm off to sleep (4 am, again, and next week will be really fun at work too, so yay, I'll reply more extensively after some sleep). I have a really hard time answering the question. Did I enjoy the first two episodes? Yes and no. The first one was so-so, the second episode was decent, but everything before Kozue's future best friend forever Midori shows up is middling (this happens somewhat early, I think), and even then there are a couple of episode where the two have a rather unfriendly rivalry before they overcome their mutual antipathy and grow into being fast friends. This then really is when the anime picks up. Similar to initially watching Sailor Moon, I've started watching this one after Midori and Kozue became friends, and caught the beginning of the anime in a rerun. I was surprised and a little taken aback at how Midori treated Kozue initially. Fun fact: Tsutomu and Kozue are actually cousins... uhm, twice removed. In conclusion: It's worth watching, I suppose, for historical reasons, if nothing else. Attack No. 1 was a watershed moment in anime in Japan. It's fair to say that there'd be no Sailor Moon without this (Attack No. 1 is something of the origin of really popular shojo anime aimed at teenagers, rather than much younger girls) - even if Ms. Takeuchi read a different volleyball manga. While it first aired, it was one of the highest rated shows on Japanese TV - it even had an evenening prime time slot.

Both surprised and not surprised at the same time. Once the lethargy is over, do you think the character moments in the movie outweigh the plot holes? Because they are plentiful in this one. Enough for a Cinema Sins episode. Not that I watch their videos, I just know of them through Mike and Jay often complaining about them - as a stand-in for all these YouTube channels. 40 minutes ago I noticed that Attack No. 1 is on Amazon Prime Video. I have just finished the first two episodes, because I couldn't help myself. I loved watching this when it first aired and haven't seen it since, in spite of not really liking either volleyball or even sports anime. Similar to Sailor Moon in being a first in a genre, sort of, Attack No. 1 was pretty much the first sports shojo anime. It is from 1969 and it shows - both in the animation and the themes present in the anime, regarding late 60ies social dynamics at Japanese schools, the behaviour of the teachers and the coaches. There's also the issue that the first, say, 15 or so episodes have a really meandering start. The animation doesn't improve over time, at least, not as far as I remember, but we're talking about a 52 year old anime now that, like many of its contemporaries, had troubled production, insane time constraints and not much of a budget. There are many, many, many one star ratings on Amazon for this, citing violence as the primary reason for the low rating. Indeed, the anime comes with an age warning and a higher rating than usual for anime that was originally dubbed for our afternoon kid's entertainment programs - precisely because of the violence. There's no sugarcoating this, it's even directly present in the opening sequence: The coaches all pretty much emotionally and physically abuse their athletes, sometimes to the point of them being battered, bloody and unconscious, and unless I'm entirely mistaken Kozue Ayuhara (in our dub Mila Ayuhara, so, should Mila slip through somehow at some point, keep that in mind) does get a slap or two by her friend Tsutomu (there's a budding romance going on, but... see spoiler below), which is framed as it was: Normal in that day and age. Not that the girls are any better when they fight amongst each other. They do happily slap each other just as much as the coaches clobber them with balls, right from the start. If this is viewed through the lens of modern sensibility one would easily arrive at a one star rating too, on the other hand, all this did is show the reality of professional level sports training and the cruel competitiveness of Japanese schools in the late sixties. The matches themselves are, as usual for sports anime, not realistic. They start out okay-ish but become progressively worse the longer the show ran (it has 104 episodes, 101 of which aired here). The girls do have special moves at times that are magical in nature, and eventually Kozue and her team become world champions. Pretty much because she's perfected a volleyball strike that has the ball cut 90° corners in flight. She can also hit balls in a way so they become invisible, and one of the teams they play against in the world championship move so fast they become a blur. Here's a fun collection of what's going on: This is one part sports anime, and one part shojo. Unlike Sailor Moon, which is very comedic when it comes to the shojo parts, this isn't. It follows Kozue and her regular teenager problems, and the problems that come from her intense ambition to become, well... the world's best volleyball player. What really is like Sailor Moon on the other hand is that the sports anime part isn't really interesting. I mean, the games themselves aren't. Kozue's ambition driving everyone to its limits is interesting to see. The invisible balls that cut corners in flight aren't so much. Just look at that ridiculous collection above. Heh. It begins with her moving to Fujimi (from Tokyo, where she was a model student at an elite junior high school who does, however, not spend any effort on studying) at the age of 12 because the air in Fujimi is more conducive to her recuperating from a resperatory illness than Tokyo's smog ridden streets. Not knowing anyone, she befriends a group of outcasts that are bad students and have trouble with authority figures (the teachers, that is). She soon finds herself the target of viscious rumors and forming a volleyball team out of her little clique of troublemakers. She wants to win against the school's established team, and begins playing again. Spoiler (not that I think it's necessary, it's 52 years old and I don't even know if there's a way to watch it with subs, as far as I know there's no English dub): Mostly going from memory here. Parts might be exaggerated, others understated, but there's no hyperbole. At least, no intentional hyperbole. It's really that brutal, particularily for an anime aimed at pre to early teenage girls. Edit: I should note, maybe, that I was 11 when this first aired and I watched it. Right age group for a change, still the wrong gender, but there's also a shonen anime that I watched and liked, which I might also talk about soonish, about, well... uhm a teenage Robin Hood. It's much less ridiculous than it sounds, really. Or at least... I think it was. Hm.

That's too much Chibi-Chibi in one video, I think. I laughed a lot now, and I found her hijinks to be really hilarious when spread out in the episodes, but watching it all back to back is a little irritating, but that "fight" with the old rich guy where she tickles him into submission is gold. It also looks like almost every scene where Chibi-Chibi shows up was animated by the intern team, or there's something about the washed out DVD video that looks so much better than these higher resolution ones from the newer BR releases, even if that video is just a 480p on YouTube. Weird, weird.

Chibi, Chibi Chibi, CHIBI!

You're right, the quote function finally died in this thread. It's impossible to quote sections of your post and keep them in a spoiler area. Frustrating, but what can you do. I mean other than trying this with Edge of Chrome, neither of which I really want to do. So, let's do this differently:

This is a scene that happens very early in the manga. I think even the first chapter of the Dreams arc. Pegasus and Chibi-Usa fly above Tokyo and Pegasus shows her the dark place that the Dead Moon is creating. In the anime this is in the Albino Rhino episode. This scene is made so much worse because it's the first thing that happens in this episode, and it comes directly after Chibi-Usa turns back into a nine year old girl for Pegasus an episode earlier. It looks like it is her reward for making herself interesting to Pegasus again. And oh boy, that love song. Chibi-Usa can't be his first victim, no. He's way too good at this grooming business, from the easy and harmless beginnings at the dream lake down to the guilt tripping when she becomes curious, the threats of never being able to talk to her again if she tells someone else about him. Make no mistake, Pegasus picked up a filly or two... or a hundred... on his way to Earth! I think this is the worst sentence I ever wrote on a subject in Sailor Moon. What WERE they thinking? I wonder if it's at all possible to reach anyone involved with this season, like Ikuhara or Enkido, or maybe the writer of this episode, and ask if they still remember anything about making Sailor Moon SuperS and are willing to talk about it. I'd sure like to know if that was intentional or not. I'm hoping it was not. Because if so, then someone needs to be locked away before they do actual harm in real life. So, no, don't like Lars, never will.

Well, finished watching The End of Evangelion. That was more what I expected from the series proper ending in terms of being laden with metaphors and wrapping up plot threads, at least. It's interesting insofar as it does the same as the actual anime series ending, just differently. Not with a different outcome, just... differently. Regarding the final ending, that might just be the happiest choking someone scene in the history of entertainment, unless I'm completely wrong about what this was meant to express. Not sure if others will come back from Instrumentality / the weird metaphysical soup of life that everyone's floating in at the moment. Because if not, then these two broken characters that have only just learned to move on and accept themselves and each other will become our new Adam and Eve, and oh boy mankind, you're in for a world of trouble if that really is the case. At least it's not as ridiculous as the exploration of solipsism of the original ending because in this case it's your own perception that only creates a separate, discrete you, not your perception that creates everything - but it's still, and I apologize to people who might like this particular part of philosophy, this is such a mind bendingly ridiculous concept for me that I just can't take it seriously. More on this maybe later, not sure yet. I've already said a lot about it, and honestly... I positively hated everything with Lars in it before season five, almost everything that was about Onion, and disliked the hipster gang, by far and large. And that food war episode. It really didn't help that the interesting story and character bits ground to a dead stop for these kind of episodes. Sure, Steven Universe doesn't stoop as low as SuperS does by virtue of not having a pedophile horse romance or an allegorical rape gang (except for Jasper and her forced fusion with Lapis, which was really uncomfortable and I have no idea how they got that past Cartoon Network when they had to fight tooth and nail for the gem marriage), but especially from season three onwards, these episodes were just about as interesting as a SuperS one where only Chibi-Usa and Usagi show up. You're right about the 11 minute short form animation format helping in such a case. At least it's over quickly.

That's fair, and actually sadly quite true. Don't really have any explanation, other than her breaking down entirely after losing her friends and Mamoru. If I had to venture a guess, she only changes after Chibi-Chibi ("The Light of Hope") replaces her broken Star Seed. I'm pretty sure this has something to do with the manga arc putting Usagi under a long spell of PTSD and repression. From what I've read about it (no first hand experience yet) she spends the arc pretending whoever just died never existed, beginning with Mamoru. By the way, speaking of your earlier point about reading what haters and superfans of Steven Universe say about the show potentially putting people off, what do you think would anyone guess what Sailor Moon is - for the most part - after reading our discussions? Not sure what, but certainly not what it really is. I also ran into trouble trying to explain Sailor Moon to someone else recently. It's such a strange mix of things sometimes that... uhm. It's one part superhero magical girl anime, one part slice of life, one parts silly comedy, one part character development and the occasional sprinkling of super serious subject matter in a very open and progressive setting that feels so natural that you don't even notice how heavily it features feminist and LGBTQ ideas. edit: To clarify, what I mean by this is that it never feels like Sailor Moon is virtue signalling or including a token minority just for the sake of checking off a list. It's glorious in its simple perfection when it comes to these things - whether it's Kunzite and Zoisite, Haruka and Michiru, or Setsuna whose complexion is noticably darker than that of the others (Ms. Takeuchi intended her as part Romani), or the Three Lights who clearly are transgender (in the anime, that is), or in how it shows women and men to all have all sorts of jobs regardless of their traditional gender assignment in society. For Steven Universe, not very surprisingly, I'd have the same problem. It's Usagi and his friends saving the world. Technically. And technically, if someone were to watch it for this, it would maybe disappoint them. I have no idea. Feels like trying to explain The Big Lebowski to people who have never seen it. Yes, that final sequence vectored a bit too far into thematic exploration without clear indication of what's going on for Sailor Moon (incidentially, the scene would be sort of expected for NGE). On the one hand you have Usagi flying towards Chaos Galaxia who is trying to fight her off and failing, and on the other hand you have internal Galaxia seeing Usagi's light and reaching for it, accepting what Usagi says about the last fragment of hope that is left in her (which she removed with her Star Seed to save it for someone else) and the love for the world(s) that she used to fight for. Left unsaid was the change of heart insofar as that her reaching for Usagi's hand symbolizes her final rejection of what she, under CHAOS' influence (or under the influence of beleiving that she has to fight to define herself and what she does, depending on how you want to view it) said to Usagi earlier - pride in being a soldier, and how pathetic it is to not want to fight. On a more applicable level, because the intention is too unclear, this could also be read as a statement on toxic masculinity, which as a concept isn't directly linked to men, after all. There's no reason Haruka and Galaxia can't have toxic masculinity just because they're women. They clearly espouse problematic ideas usually associated with masculinity, but I've already talked about that in a post that's way too long anyway. It's not for a want of trying that Sailor Moon's finale falls a bit flat. The ideas were great, the execution wasn't so much. Speaking of long posts, I sub-divided the Madoka post above by adding additional spoiler tags. If you want to read it you should be good as long as you stay out of the sub-spoilers. Mostly. I mean, you already know it's a subversion and deconstruction of maho shojo tropes. It's the second (much shorter) part that goes deeply into spoilers. It's an exploration of the first episode and how incredibly economic the writers and animators were in setting everything up. I'm sorry, please send me a DMCA takedown notice or a request for royalties. Far be it for me to refuse credit twice for something when it is offered. Heh. *bows*

I fully plan on watching Steven Universe: Future soon, the problem right now is this weird thing called "work" that I have to do more often than usual these days, and that I'm a little burnt out on Steven, which isn't his fault. At least, not mostly his, because the first two episodes of Future were... yeah, not really there after that finale, and the movie. First things first, not sure what I did to deserve a credit in making you watch this. That was @Bartimaeus mostly. I just thought it was a really great show with some fantastic character building (except maybe for anything with early Lars and the Hipster McHipstergang) that was well worth discussing in detail. I'm not sure if the film is going to make me dislike Shinji, but at this point the comparison to Usagi falls completely apart anyway, so... back to the actual topic (I'll combine the rest of the talk about SU with the text below Bartimaeus' post).

Puella Magi Madoka Magica: How to ingeniously craft introduction scenes and making you care in record time. This one's been stuck in my head for a while, ever since I watched the first of the three Puella Magi Madoka Magica films after having seen the anime proper. It is really interesting to see how the first two episodes are set up and how incredibly different the scenes that play out are on a second watch. It's crafted so well that I'd argue for rewatching the first two or three episodes after having seen it all is very much worth the time investment. What makes this special isn't just the way it is made, but how little time the creators needed to spend on the characters to make the viewer care about them. Everything else that follows is spoilered because - surprise! - it contains spoilers. So take care if you want to watch it with an open mind. Time for a shameless attempt at getting a like from Shady: There will be no further audio written warning.

Sometimes anime directors hire amateur voice actors for their characters, so there are definitely some (not only pre-90ies) animes where people sound very different because they are, or rather, were hired to sound more natural. Miyazaki still does that, for instance in The Wind Rises, Jiro Horikoshi is voiced by Hideaki Anno. Whom you might recognize as director of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Definitely not professional Japanese voice talent. But the difference between anime voice acting and real life conversational Japanese goes way beyond what most (non-native) people could possibly imagine. Unlike, say, if you learned German from watching TV, you'd probably sound like a total dork if you picked up Japanese from watching anime, while "TV-German*" is essentially what you're taught when you attend a German as a foreign language course, even in Germany or any other German speaking country. *Well, there are differences between Standard German and the so called Theatre German, but they have the same origins - it's an artifical common denominator codified to be able to have one mutually intelligible spoken German language (in addition to a codified standard written version), which was understandably important for travelling acting troupes. It's also the reason why actors sound so different from people who are just being interviewed. There are of course similar examples for English, say, Scots or Glaswegian. Scots vaguely looks and sounds like (modern) English, but that's only because the languages have a shared ancestor. Take that hundredfold and there you go, different German dialects.

Minor spoilers, sort of, so only click if you really want:

It was a centerfold out of a relatively popular youth magazine that my cousin got regularily (his parents, unlike mine, could afford a subscription), so yes, that's really cheap quality paper and explains all the folds, but still, that doesn't explain why there's scotch tape on my Sailor Moon poster and my Turok 2 posters are framed. It's not like Turok 2 deserved framing, the first one was much better. Yes, Minako dealt pretty well with it, all in all. Out of the main cast, the worst was Makoto's if only for her utterly defeated expression while it happens (she also stays conscious and fights afterwards, being understandably mad as hell at Tiger's-Eye). Which makes not talking about it or dealing with it at all even worse, because clearly the animator had the good sense to show just how heartbreaking that was for her - even before all the pain and violation that followed. The overall worst scenes... We could also talk about whether or not that should be something Sailor Moon dealt with, but it was (still is?) a sad reality for teenage girls in 90ies Japan to be subjected to abuse in one way or the other, especially on public transportation ("chikan"). It got so bad that in certain places there are women only busses and subway trains. Insfoar I'd say the intention was good, I mean, Sailor Moon was already a vehicle for empowerment, so why not show girls that they don't have to suffer random strangers groping them and that they shouldn't get away with it? It's the execution that was terrible, for whatever reason, we're left with an assault allegory that goes nowhere and everyone pretends it never happened. That's the worst possible outcome. Even the first season did more in terms of transporting a message, what with its episodes about losing weight, or falling for sales, makeup, exploitative cruises or the myriad of other things that happened. I might have my favorites, but they all matter to me, of course. That episode was great from start to finish. From the weird daimon that didn't want to fight, to the way Minako looks like she wants to talk to Usagi about something but just wants her to carry half the dolls, to the insane cackle of hers after she gets attacked... hm. Maybe I should watch S again.

Horsey does kiss Chibi-Usa early in the manga, so that puts it out of "faint" immediately - but hey, maybe the writers had more sense this time around. On the other hand, maybe it's not that weird when the Helios reveal comes earlier. Or maybe they skip the horse part entirely. That would be something. By the way, I was looking for a document today, and incidentially came across this in one of my archive boxes for old stuff I don't want to throw away: Too bad it got damaged, and someone scotch taped on it. And that statement comes with you not having seen the two really awful scenes in the first two episodes that really drive home how terrible of an experience that was (unless you didn't skip them, but I think you did, after all you watched them after the season, I think... or in the middle, anyway, long after you started skipping scenes). The other scenes were a lot less, uhm, I don't want to say rapey because they always were, but the assault victims at least mercifully passed out in later scenes. Except for Minako, she just kicked their butts. But that was to be expected. It's even worse because they actively mentioned being targetted by the Death Busters as a terrible experience that Minako should really not try to go through just so she doesn't feel left out, and that was "only" a regular physical attack with some pain attached. It would have been better if they had just dropped the entire idea, but if it has to be in there, then for the love of god do something worthwhile with it. So it's the SyFy of animation. I'm still stuper salty that they cancelled Dark Matter and let Killjoys go on. DM hat the better ratings, better reviews, everything, but cost more to make. Good job. Don't you mean rose? That's because deep in your heart, you know you want to watch Sailor Moon with us. I have faith, faith in the fragment of interest that is still there, in your heart! Yeah, so quoting Usagi here doesn't make total sense, but anyway...

That's glorious, whatever it is... "God, can you go bomb an abortion clinic or something?" "When that wonderful president finishes stacking the Supreme Court we won't have to."

@ShadySands you kind of keep reading this thread and liking random things whenever I mention Star Trek. How about you take a break from watching bad YA stuff on Netflix and join us in watching Sailor Moon, which was made for... uhm, wait. Don't let that talk about rape gangs and horse pedophilia fool you, that's just a small part of it. Really! *cough*

25% for each ticket, but I guess what you actually want is the probability of not winning at all with 4 lottery tickets with a 1:4 chance, which is 0.75^4, so you have a roughly 31% (bit more) probability of having all four lottery draws come up as a bust. On average, you'd win at least once in 69 out of 100 tries when having four lottery tickets. The probability of winning with all four tickets in a row is 1 : 256 (1/4^4). That means for your attack scenario, you'd miss the first hit in 20% of all cases, and the second hit in 50% of all cases. In the end, your total probability of missing both attacks is 10% - seems logical enough, right? You miss 2 in 10 on your first try, and on average have a 50% chance of hiting the second one. Likewise the probabiltity for hitting with both attacks is only 40%. This assumes perfect random number generation, of course.

Funny you mention that. English accents don't bother me at all, but German ones often do, the further they move away from what I'm used to, the more uncomfortable they become to listen to, even if there are just slight traces of it, like with Usagi's first voice actress in the German dub.

Oi, Molly is bad. And Nephrite's civilian name is Max? It's almost as is if the first season finale and the filler arcs were planned a bit better than the others. That's a given for the filler arcs, obviously. I've also wondered why there's a filler arc particularily for R and Sailor Starts, and not S or SuperS, and the one reason I can come up with is because both Black Moon and Stars remove main characters right from the beginning. Which I initially thought was made just to spite the anime team, but now I'm convinced she did that to reduce the amount of work she has to do (or rather, the amount of characters she has to write dialogue for). It's not just shows. Stephen King, and his German equivalent Wolfgang Hohlbein both made successful careers out of writing fun to read books with mostly lousy or lackluster endings. The cluster just hugging itself was indeed a bit anticlimactic, but that's endemic to this type of situation, I think. Once you show all conventional means to be exhausted, all you can come up with is fantastic or improbable, and that's just hard to do in a satisfying manner. To be honest I didn't want to include any of the episode with the Trio where they go after one of our protagonists. Minako's episode was fun, Ami's had nice moments. Rei's was terrible, and Makoto... uhm, no, not talking about that. By now we already know that I thought it was a great episode for various reasons, but I can't into Makoto torture porn and I can't recommend an episode that is just cruel with no real point - this isn't Outer Limits, it's Sailor Moon. Maybe if they spent a couple of episodes dealing with their experiences, then it could have been worthwhile, but as it stands, the season even giving the Amazon Quartett a different way to check out dream mirrors, oh boy. Talk about making things worse in hindsight. Yeah, speaking of Helios... Uhm: Well, that's one way to say that it's two films about a nine year old girl falling in love with a winged unicorn who can't really decide between wanting her father or some hunky horse lovin'. I wonder if one of the two films will include the scene where she's watching her mother, wishing for an equally beautiful body so that the above mentioned father would finally find her sexually attractive. All that and more, coming to Netflix soon! Yaaaaaaaaaaaay. Spoiler: This is so bad. People are going to watch this on Netflix and will never again check out anything Sailor Moon related. Out of all possible things Sailor Moon to come to Netflix, this will easily be the worst. The WORST. Even if it turns out to be a good adaptation, has some good animation for a change (though I doubt that) or better writing, no matter what you do, even if you change half the storyline from the manga, at the end of the day it will be a little nine year old with pink hair pining after a horse. I, what, how, why. As if it wasn't bad enough to be ridiculed for liking Sailor Moon as a teenager because it's a girl show, soon you won't even be able to mention it because people will think it's some weird horse eroge anime. I've been checking out various anime "providers" if there's a fan-sub version of Sailor Moon Eternal to be found once per week or so. Looks like there still isn't, the scene really failed on this one. Not even one with low quality video and audio. At least I can stop trying. There's no point, I'll see it soon. I guess that means I can even watch it with the Viz voice cast, so that's... something, at least. Gotta look at the silver linings there.

Who knows, I mean, look at this hairdo, there's a little black criminal just waiting to burst out. /racism reference to the BLM discussion in the political thread It's pretty funny, but was also a major disservice to the anime, I'd say. Dub changes can be really interesting, I think we've talked about that before, there are films with Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill that were turned into comedies (they were always supposed to be funny or parodies, but not like that) in the German dubs, and they were hugely popular. There's a fun anecdote where one of the directors once said they had to reshoot a scene with a little stunt several times, and the one time the stunt landed properly the actor involved forgot his lines, and started to cry. Director supposedly asked why, and the actor said: After all these tries, now I forgot what I was supposed to say. And the director just went: "Don't worry, the Germans will fix this in the dub." To explain that a bit, these movies were actually shot without having any given original script and dialogue language. They always featured actors that only spoke either German, Italian, English or Spanish and often couldn't even talk to each other. So they just had stand-in dialogue, even the Italian "originals" were mostly dubbed. I have no idea how the films turned out to be this good, considering what a mess producing them must have been. It's another one of the manga holdovers that should have just been left out. The are suspicious of the newcomers in the manga up until they realize they are fellow Sailor Senshi too (and not of the bad kind). Like everything that happens as story beat in the manga, Sailor Stars carried that with them until the very end. There are two times the writers were able to make up their own storylines - the R and Sailor Stars filler arcs. The R filler arc has a one and a half episode resolution that wasn't bad, but not really anything special either, even though it was - and that is something I remember really clearly - the very thing that really got me into Sailor Moon back when it first aired. Back then I expected that a superhero show, even if it were all girls, would just burn down the tree and be done with it. But no, they just loved it away. In a way, while I really fell in love with the show again, the parts that I thought were the best kind of weren't any more, i.e. Hotaru's arc in S and the filler arc of R. The Stars filler arc was pretty good, yes, and not just because it followed SuperS. It was also written by the same two guys that made most of the final six episodes. It looks like every single season past the first one had the same problem at the end - being tethered to the source material and the writers doing what they possibly could do with it, with middling success. I wonder if there were contractual obligations to fulfill. I can see Toei demanding that every epsiode has a fight scene because studios are sometimes like that, but I don't see why they thought they'd need to stick with the manga storyline framework and try to make it work in every season past the first one. S and Stars deviated relatively much anyway, but the holdovers are still there and drag it down. Or maybe they were just scared of the bad rep because the changes didn't sit so well with Ms. Takeuchi. I think repeating the themes is there because it was, at least, supposed to be a show for kids and (early) teenagers. I'm not sure it was at any point past R, but that's a different topic. Season one's finale is objectively, and that means as objective as you can get, the best. It's the most concise, doesn't suffer from pacing issues, gives everyone something suitably impressive to do - even Ami, I mean, don't get me wrong, her defensive power was often the only reason they managed to get out of problematic situations, but making her do something important on her own that was still completely in character for her was pretty great - and has some much needed and major character development for Usagi. S had the Professor, but his storyline and the actual story ending wasn't part of any character examination or had themes, they were just a backdrop against which the philosophical conflinct between the Outer and the Inner Guardians played out. It made the season much stronger overall, but it left the finale without the same impact that the first or last season had. Sailor Stars feels like they tried to have a big, interesting ending with a much larger thematic exploration than usual, but it didn't work out so well due to pacing issues and the disjointed nature of them teleporting around hither and tither, and everyone dying on their own was in there to make a point about working together, but it felt so... forced and contrived. I really liked the final episode, so I'd agree and put it down as the second best ending of a season. As far as series endings go, this wasn't so bad. KP is right, a nice breather episode and better pacing before would have been good, but can't have everything. As far as crowning moments go, for longer running shows, I'm more than happy with endings that aren't completely terrible. There's no need for them to be the crowning achievement. It's great when it happens, but really rare anyway. SU spoilers: I remember we were talking about making top episode lists after being finished watching Sailor Moon, and then wondering how I would even come up with a top 5 episodes of SuperS. There are three episodes I can come up with that were good, for different reasons, and a few half-decent ones that wouldn't even be on a short list in any other season. There's the dentist episode, which was really fun and found something where Usagi and Chibi-Usa worked together in a non-obnoxious way that very much felt like a season one episode without forgoing characer development or adding inane amounts of fighting over Mamoru or anything else, and Ami's and Rei's power ups. The half decent ones would be either the maturity festival episode or the other power up episode, or maybe one of the first few. They're all not quite there. I know you have some problems with Minako being completely crappy to Makoto (why is it really always Makoto? ), but that could have been a nice episode. SuperS has also some funny episodes that would otherwise not be so bad, but simply being in SuperS made them horrible. Like the episode where the girls are trying to find out who Chibi-Usa's boyfriend is. That would have been much funnier without the albino rhino. That scene where Mamoru and Chibi-Usa are in the restaurant and everyone's creeping ever closer under cover was pretty nice. Kind of like that totally insane shot of everyone hiding behind the waitress with Rei looking for them.

That's so true, we can sit here and debate how bad the relationship between Mamoru and Usagi is or isn't, how it was intended, what was changed over from the source material and whatever else about it, but one thing is for sure: That final scene sure deserved to be done by someone else. It's even weirder because, while the character models are the same, the prior scene on the rooftop looks much better with its moody sunset lighting. I still remember the subtitles for the scene where the girls talk about how Usagi never told them anything, and Rei - in our subs - says: "I can't believe that she never said anything, I feel horrible!" and I just checked the dub, Rei is wondering why Usagi didn't confide in her sooner (not them, her specifically). Sure would be interesting to see what the original Japanese said, but from what I recall "That, ..." is a more common turn of phrase with different meanings based on inflection and context. Subs (and by extension, some dubs) sometimes really are an issue when they become too literal. "What am I not getting, Ami?" If that scene hadn't made me laugh the way it did I would complain about it. I mean, Rei outright tells her to tell Seiya she's not interested. Usagi can be airheaded and obtuse at times, but not like this. Haruka and Michiru should have wished for writers that wouldn't have needed their forced conflict to make the ending work. SU stuff: Regarding that why and how did Galaxia know Mamoru would have a Star Seed but not the others, I think that was supposed to be because he has Earth's Star Seed. Not entirely sure, it's just a plot point that wasn't really thought through... like so many of them. What did you think of the finale compared to other season endings? I'm disappointed, not even a single tree in this painting. Just TREE on the license plate doesn't cut it. Show ran just past midnight here. I used to stay up super late just to watch it when I was younger. Bob Ross is just awesome. So many episodes, and he makes the same "beating the devil out of the brush" joke every time and laughs about it.

Guilty as charged. Even when I'm doing a rewatch of something I like, I never skip bad episodes. Not even Move Along Home or Let He Who Is Without Sin... when rewatching DS9. I might leave the series lying around for a while before getting back to it, but skipping an episode? Dear god, no. Which is also why I'm not sure I can skip SuperS, should I ever watch Sailor Moon again. I might talk about it, but actually doing it? Uh, that's hard. Oh, don't mistake me posting half a ton about what she's saying as not being cool with it. I find it amusing. I also went over the phone call ten times and I'm still not sure what the second half of the conversation is supposed to be about. I even looked online for transcripts, but at best they say "unintelligible heavily accented German", it's just the German equivalent of having fun with Japanese Engrish (which was very funny in the Sailor Moon S episode with Mamoru's supposedly English older friend, who opened the conversation by saying HERRO or something like it).

It's the only thing available on Netflix where I watched NGE, so that's good to hear. I noticed that they also re-dubbed the German version of Neon Genesis Evangelion. That might have bothered me too if I had ever seen it with the original dub and tried the new one (I watched with subs now). Asuka has one more funny scene earlier where her stepmother called from Germany and she talked to her on the phone. Sounds like they stopped bothering to coach the VA on pronunciation or the EVA startup sequence worked better because it wasn't supposed to be a natural sounding conversation. I also doubt Asuka would say "Auf* Wiederhören!" ("until we hear from each other again" or more literally "upon rehearing**") to her stepmother before hanging up, even if she doesn't like her. That's a formal goodbye that you would use in a professional conversation at work or after talking to someone you don't know. It's the telephone call (or radio) equivalent of saying Auf Wiedersehen, which replaces sehen = to see by hören = to hear. *Auf is a preposition that is usually translated as at, upon, to or onto, depending on the context. If it's not used as preposition, it means up or on (mostly on). **technically im Wiederhören or beim Wiederhören would be the grammatical German progressive form, but German progressive expressions are so awkward that nobody really uses them (certainly not in speech, sometimes in writing - but for speech, if it is ever used at all, interestingly enough, a progressive form is used that is grammatically wrong... which is kind of hilarious when you think about it - precisely because the correct form is incredibly stilted and sounds wrong), and most of the time ongoing activities are expressed in a lexicalic manner and inferred from context, i.e. to say I have been working all day we'd usually not use "Ich war den ganzen Tag beim Arbeiten" but would say "I habe den ganzen Tag gearbeitet" - I have worked all day. Nevertheless, Wiederhören is what you would use to express an ongoing activity, hence the -ing. Well, no wonder Mark Twain once said that you can learn English in 30 hours, French in 30 days, and German in 30 years. I absolutely adore them, really. Especially if they leave plot points hanging that were somewhat interesting. Doubly so if they don't resolve anything. Bah.

More complaining and some spoilers for Stargate SG-1 ahead.. Still, I guess I'm going to watch EVANGELION DEATH (TRUE)² first, recap or no. That's the proper order of things. Yes, yes. But not today. Well, maybe today, but not now, anyway.