majestic

For the same reason Utena has surfing elephants in the exploding curry episode. ^^

Ikuhara once said, when he was asked, that the scenes with the stopwatch reveal something fundamental about the nature of the anime's universe. In other words, they're totally not relevant and just there for fun, and the best explanation I've seen so far is that they're actually just number puns. In one of the episodes, Nanami has the watch and stops it at 7:73, or - when read out aloud in Janapese - na-na-mi.

That certainly looks interesting. The Scorpio story reminds me a bit too much of Japanese style societal pressure to just accept your fate and do the right thing. Not sure when I will get around to watching it for the time being. Too much to do already, plus work's a pretty bitch right now, stupid server thread keeps having exceptions for no reasons, so now we went for a full recompile on a running system, that's fun... (don't try this at home, dear readers, that only works if you have several layers to compile ) Speaking of Utena, do you have any idea yet what Miki and his stopwatch is supposed to mean (I don't, unless... maybe...)? I got a few fun takeaways from that. First, the name "SuperS" was conceived of before Sailor Moon S came up, because how else could the movie introduce Haruka and Michiru, and Naoko Takeuchi probably had the idea for Pegasus a while before. Or worse, she got it from that script? Who knows. The other thing is that he just dropped the romance because he wanted a show with girls as main characters to be about something else than boys. Sure they come up often, especially for Minako and Rei, but in the end, that's a pretty interesting stance for a Japanese director in the mid 90ies.

It sure doesn't stop. I didn't expect something like this so early in the show's run, but then... 12 episodes is almost a third through already. The shadowplay in this episode has the shadows leaving on a shadow UFO. That sure was something. I have a vague idea what, but no more. *headscratch*

Revolutionary Girl Utena, episode 11. That was depressing.

Here's a copy from the interview, it has some pretty hard Utena spoilers so not going to link. On what the SuperS movie could have been: Ikuhara on why Mamoru was all but written out of the show in the later seasons: Emphasis added by the editor, in both cases! Given the prevalence of Mamosagi in the manga and the focus on their miracle romance, it's no wonder he and Ms. Takeuchi didn't get along. Changing Rei was probably only a minor part of that. Sailor Moon is a partial self-insertion fic from Naoko Takeuchi where she (admittedly, even, I think - but that's taken by word of mouth from the fandumb) made up the relationship and the friends she wanted to have but didn't at that point in her life. Also, good to see that there never was any subtext intended for Sailor Moon. Take that, stupid Ami x Makoto shippers. Not that it wasn't totally clear from the start (almost) that homosexual relationships in Sailor Moon aren't subtexted. They're overt. Very much so. That's part of the charm... especially for something from the mid 90ies.

Yikes. Revolutionary Girl Utena, episode 10: By the way, when watching this, keep in mind that Ikuhara made Revolutionary Girl Utena out of a failed Sailor Moon movie special script, one that according to him should have had Haruka and Usagi riding a black and white Pegasus to the "End of the World", a location where Michiru was sleeping a magical sleep of some sort. The music that plays when Utena pulls the sword from Anthy reminds me a lot of certain parts of the Lexx soundtrack.

Since you seem to enjoy Nanami's shenanigans, these two should... be really great. Minor word of caution, episode 9 jumps from the well of goofy of the preceeding ones right down into the pool of surrealist imagery and metaphor. It's a really hard break when watched back to back, and you might want to... I don't know, make it so you can watch it when you're reasonably un-mushy depending on the overall schedule and all that. Very minor but spoiler nonetheless:

I see, then I have to up my game there, don't I? Heh. Which episode are you at now? Funny how I don't have to watch stuff at predetermined times. I used to, and it was fun in the sense that we were usually more than one person watching the same thing on regular TV, but nothing forces me to stick to a schedule. If Clear Card did not have that one episode where Meiling comes back from Hong Kong and stays over at Sakura's*, complete with some interactions between her, Sakura, Tomoyo, Chiharu and Naoko (who more or less has disappeared from the show, for some reason, she's only ever on screen when Sakura has cheerleading practice, which is like twice in 16 episodes so far - at least Rika is at a different school and has an "excuse" for not being around) then I'd even have to say that the second episode of the second season of Love Live! was better than any other Clear Card episode so far. That is... I think the most shocking thing of that entire mess. I figured I'd watch Love Live! to see how bad it can really get, and it actually ends up upstaging Clear Card. For all its problems, from the writers not being really able to deal with a nine piece cast (then again, that would be a tall order for anyone), to the bouts of cringy fanservice, to the terrible looking CGI dancing bits and the generally vapid, soulless look of the anime it's... entertaining and fun when its not cringy, and has more fun and entertainment than cringe, actually, so it really is a net positive. Clear Card, on the other hand, is a pretty fat zero so far. *Sakura rarely ever gets alone time with Meiling, but when she does, it's pure magic (not in the magic casting kind). It's a bit of a stretch that both suddenly get a major boost to their maturity level only to lose it once they stop being together alone, but it's magic nonetheless. You'll see once you hit episode 43.

I'm really curious how Utena will continue. From what I understood of the articles I've read, the first 13 episodes are their own character introduction and setup "arc" and afterwards the more or less only hinted at storyline should begin. I'm kind of expecting that the anime will begin to change in nature at that point, and I've been stalling here and there, or rather, preoccupied myself with other things. Like Love Live! where the third episode was the inevitable drop in quality compared to the superb second one. It had good parts, but part of the fanservice was suddenly back. Not much of a surprise given the two live performances in the episode, one by A-RISE and one by µ's. Out of which A-RISE was pretty cringy, in every way, from their costumes to the actual song: There was also some fun stuff about them talking to the A-RISE girls or making a mess of a public annoucement at school, but there also was a terrible scene where they talked about their costumes and how they need to have sexy dresses to get some attention. At least Umi and Eri flat out refused to entertain such nonsense, but yeah, they still got badgered into wearing the other costumes you can see in the video*. *sigh* In the end, Love Live! is what it is, and it has moments like these that are really annoying in an otherwise perhaps silly but decently entertaining enough show. *Although, to be fair, actual real life pop stars don't wear anything better either, do they. Still cringe. edit: Assemble Insert sounds like great 80ies trash. I might look into that.

Nanami is a bit too, uhm, much into her brotherly love for DIO, but otherwise a fun alpha b*tch at school. She's a fun character, but someone I'd totally hate in real life (obviously). Marked spoilers contain actual spoilers, so click at your own peril! Sans Violet being part of a commando unit (at that age) and having mechanical arms, not just grounded, but from what I've gathered fairly realistic, if exaggerated for effect, in its depiction of dealing with post war life from the point of view of affected civilians and traumatized combat veterans alike. I never saw combat (well, duh, I spent my nine months in the service stationed at home in a nation that has not been at war since WW2), but for some of the things happening I can pretty much vouch for myself, which is a whole other can of worms. Obviously everyone she meets and deals with that we see - as the show is fairly good at making it clear that there is a life for every character outside of what we see on the screen, so if course we only see what Violet does when it matters for her (character) journey - was negatively affected by the war on some level, but it never goes into edgelord grimdark territory. Terrible things happened to a lot of people and they're now all trying to make the best of it. It does have some very dark moments when dealing with survivor's guilt and coming to terms with the past but these moments are never there just to be edgy or dark for its own sake, unlike certain later seasons of Game of Thrones did. They all have their place. Speaking of DIO, one of the first things that happens is that we're shown that he's trying to fulfill his best friend's last wish for Violet, but that he's just as hapless as her in dealing with his new life (much less damaged, but also just as clueless), and doesn't know what he's doing, and it shows. Then there are the small things you only realize little by little, or at least only I did. The way Violet keeps rubbing her plush toy in her face starts making sense when you realize that she has no feeling in her arms any more. She can't touch things to make them "real", so she does the next best thing - putting them in her face and mouth (just like babies do).

That's a pretty big plot point, obviously... There are two OVAs and a film by the way. The first OVA called Surely, Someday You Will Understand "Love" should be watched after episode 4 to fill in the gaps for five. It's not necessary, but it fits wonderfully in there and beats watching it after the fact like I did. The second one goes after the final episode and is called Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll - both should be available on Netflix too, Netflix likes to call them "specials" so the first one's the shorter and the second one is feature length. Episodes seven and eight have no title on purpose, that should become pretty unerstandable once you get there. Eh, there's a movie after Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll. It clocks in at an impressive 140 minutes runtime, although I am uncertain how or if that can be watched in the US at the moment. It's been playing on and off at a small theatre that shows mostly art, indie and cult film classics here. Assuming you like it enough to watch everything.

You're right, we're way past that point. I'll go fix it.

Really, because by your explanations "the blacks" should not riot but instead accept their lot in life, and if they don't, then we send in the army to quell the uprising. Law and order. You think the French revolution would have worked out all right if the peasants just screamed at Versailles instead of brining torches and pitchforks to the party (figuratively spoken)? Well... You want to protect rich people's yacht money (which is what you mean when you talk about the economy) and then lament that the army can't crack down hard enough. Better watch out, unions and labor protests are really a problem when fishing for investors to make good use of the cheap black labour force. Send in the air support. Silly blacks should just work their asses off in mines, and if they protest, well, let's gun them down. Poor shareholders falsely framed for creating the very circumstances that lead to protests turned violent. No, really, I'm going to cry. Yeah, so property damage ranks higher on your list than human casualties. Why not just taser everyone. And that's just this page, never mind the others you've filled with your fascist postings. Face the music, you really like police oppression and a hard clamp down in the name of law and order, just as long as you get to vote for whoever is doing it... to the others (curiously enough, seems to be blacks). Hey, here's an idea, why don't you go work in a mine for a while? Or push pallets and packages in an Amazon warehouse. No?

Keyrock's talking about winning the four majors in the same year, not over the course of a carreer.

The second episode of the second Love Live! season begins with the girls going on a camping trip. At least they call it a camping trip, but they'll be staying at a holiday home of one of their members (whose parents aren't just rich doctors but own and operate their own private hospital). They get off the train and end up thinking they're missing something. Cut to Usagi Honoka sleeping on the train. Okay, so that was totally expected, entirely not original and is a really overdone joke, but... it still was really funny. If Clear Card would have tried to pull one of these I'd be groaning, but here it's fine. Look at that. I think I really like this more than Clear Card, even if Clear Card is objectively the better show of the two. Falling distance matters. CCS fell from the loftiest of mountains down to sea level, while this never went above it. edit: Honoka just called a ceiling fan "that thing you often see in rich people's homes", and I just lost it. This is way funnier than anything Clear Card had so far. edit 2: Well that was... a really, really, really good episode. Even Nico had something useful to contribute, and she's usually just the joke character that gets ignored all the time (everyone else thinks of her as their mascot).

Weren't you amongst the people who complained when China made sure the protests in Hong Kong could not escalate like that in 12 to 15 years by cracking down on them really hard right here and now? Just curious, really. Because your posts kind of leave the impression that fascist police states are fine just as long as they oppress black wage slaves instead of (somewhat) rich Chinese people. Surely that can't be it, can it?

Maybe I should get back to watching the first few episodes of Utena again. I'm only at episode nine anyway, so that wouldn't be too much of a commitment, however, no real surprise there. Revolutionary Girl Utena was the other maho shojo anime Rebecca Sugar was really into (according to an interview I've read). It's true that it is really heavy on the symbolism and metaphors. When it's not downright whacky, at least. Try as I might, I can't come up with anything that exploring curry, surfing elephants or boxing kangaroos can reasonably be interpreted as. edit: CLAMP is an all female writing group, so I'm kind of willing to assume in their favor that any shonen or seinen stuff made by them will not be too heavy on the fan service. However, I expect to be disappointed. Heh. Maybe these two will come through where Love Live! sort of failed.

Indeed that's the case, as Gromnir noted. Still seems strange to use the plural form of Man for anything. Strange that it even has a plural, but I can't really argue with dictionaries - or with Tolkien, who probably knew English better than any of us. Mea culpa, as it were. That is assuming Man and Men can't be used interchangeably and we're looking at actual plurals, not a case of weird English spelling, although I have no idea how you can look at a word for the entirety of all human beings and put that into a plural form, but since when does logic factor into English spelling? Hmm.

No, it's not a bad time, because... following from Madoka, I checked out other works by Yuki Kajiura who composed the soundtrack, and that lead me to Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle just when I was starting to watch an episode or two of Cardcaptor Sakura here and there. And indeed it does feature Sakura, Princess of the Clow Kingdom, and I think Shaoran is questing to get her lost memory back, or some such thing. This is, by the way, a CLAMP thing - many, if not most of their works are set in a shared universe of a sort. There's also something called xxxHolic that is related to Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, but with that name and, uhm, actually being shonen/seinen, I... am uncertain. Prior to watching Clear Card I would probably have given them the benefit of the doubt, but now, I don't know. I do plan on watching Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle eventually, so if that turns out good enough then sure. Who am I kidding, if that's a tie in that semi-related to CCS in the barest of ways by using shared characters, of course I'm going to watch it at some point. Sigh. Lt. Col. DIO is much nicer than the actual DIO, and he's not pretending to be a feminist like Utena's DIO does. But yeah, after watching JoJo's, that voice does become a distraction in whatever he is doing.

Clear Card... There's a two minute scene between Sakura and Rika with a new voice actor. She's doing a fine job, but it's... not really the same. This episode re-treads one of the not so great Clow Card episodes where the Sweet card caused problems while the girls were making cakes, and it's turning out to be a giant animated roll cake trying to eat Sakura this time. Yeah, while that does sound fun on paper, this is Clear Card, so it isn't. The episode confirmed that Momo, MTS #3's bunny pet, is actually really just like Kero (something the new intro spoiled four episodes ago, not that there was ever any doubt, because if there's one thing this anime can't do, is make something a mystery, and the old one knew that and didn't even try except for one or two episodes in the Sakura Card arc, which was quickly discared as a the terrible idea it was) - this isn't much of a spoiler, it's like in the first episode of Sakura Card, but I'll mark it nonetheless - except that she's not aware it's actually a being instead of a toy. Momo complains about having to be inanimate all the time, MTS #3's butler and Yukito-style crush thanks her for her service. This is... another thing. MTS #3's butler was modeled after Yukito, except he can into magic and uses it to creepily manipulate a 13 year old girl with a crush on him. Yukito is nice, but this guy probably only seems nice and he, just like Shaoran and MTS #2, seems to subscribe to the idea that you need to keep the dumb young girls in the dark. Honestly, what the hell, Clear Card. How is this written by the same writers? Not only is it not really original to create a similar - if not the same - set of characters for a third time, it's also creepier, dumberer, less fun, and is condecending to both main characters of the arc to boot. It's infuriating. Well, at least I only have five episodes left. I said before that I hope this won't end in a cliffhanger because it apparently is a bit open ended, but at this point I wouldn't really care if it did. That takes some doing, huh? I also think that this focus on Akiho and Sakura is really detrimental to the show. They're way too similar, actually, so similar that Meiling gets a good laugh out of learning that Sakura's and Akiho's last names are really similar (Kinomoto vs. Shinomoto) while pointing out that they're essentially the same character. Dear god, I hope that isn't the case. Please don't let Akiho be some mirror universe Sakura, or some crap like that. Also, writers, lampshading bad creative decisions can be fun, but here it's just shining a spotlight on something that is standing out already. I think I'll go spoil myself what's going to happen now, just in case this really is some time travel nonsense and Akiho is maybe Sakura's great grand niece from a different timeline. Ugh. edit - spoilered myself, spoiler alert!: edit 3: This really has all the hallmarks of something added 20 years later just to add something, or dare I say it, get some cash out of a long dormant IP. Honestly... Sonomi is raving mad about Sakura's father taking up all of Nadeshiko's time from the moment she turned 16 and old enough to marry, and then she suddenly spent enough time in the past with two hitherto unknown characters, who just happen to be a powerful magic users? Really? Have you been sniffing too much of George Lucas' prequel writing glue? Final edit, because time to sleep: The original anime was wonderful in its simplicity, and this just adds unnecessary layers of complexity and makes the mistake of trying to tell a convoluted story, apparently, for no good reason. Why? The original anime was about Sakura capturing cards and in the second arc, about ... The basic idea isn't that bad, actually. Just drop Akiho, Kaito and Momo from the show entirely and make it all about Sakura needing to learn how to control her growing magical powers. That could even serve as a metaphor for puberty, now that she's 13 or maybe even 14. Make Shaoran a support pillar for her instead of a douchewaffle, and have Kero do something else than sleep and eat all the time. *sigh*

Mostly, yes. 😫

Not on topic, but kind of relevant regardless: I'm finally done with this s... stuff. I was going to say stuff.

The thing that people supposedly have that makes them do things out of an inner drive, instead of as an reaction to external stimuli. I always though that's a fairy tale like Santa or the Easter Bunny.

Figures. Sigh. That's... what? Okay then, I just googled that, and what the hell, Lord of the Ring script?