majestic

Cardcaptor Sakura, Sakura card arc, episode 4. I never expected this in this anime. Never. @Bartimaeus CLAMP made a whole lot of things from a wide variety of genres, and there are a good deal of anime adaptations, but I don't know how many of them were also written by CLAMP like Cardcaptor Sakura. I'm planning to check out Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle at least, because it was made by Bee Train and has a Yuki Kajiura soundtrack. Critics panned it for it's slow pacing and teenager focused romantic plot parts, which... honestly, both things don't sound that negative to me, even if it is apparently about an alternate reality Shaoran and Sakura. Ms. Kajiura at the very least most likely made a killer soundtrack.

Random observations about Sakura card arc, Episode 3 (well, 49 overall). English subtitles on Netflix refer to Shaoran as "Li" just like the girls call him ("Li-kun"). Begs the question why they do that, actually. He's been around for a while now, they could move to a first name basis there, really. But they're much better than the German ones.

Could be, but her mother is nothing but kind, and not scary. Maybe she had an experience with a bad spirit at some point. Or maybe not, either way, it's fine and fun. I guess they're not going to be the same subtitles, because subtitles have the same weird licensing issues as films and TV shows - and they're often from separate companies. It's entirely possible to have a BR of a film with a certain set of subtitles that simply aren't available on any given streaming service because the streaming service did not or could not license the subs. It's baffling. Honestly if there's a film on a streaming service I have access to that doesn't have the subtitles I want, I strap on my peg leg and hook, grow a mean beard (okay with all the barber shops more closed than open in the past months, that one has become more permanent ), drink grog and listen to the best parts of the Deadfire soundtrack, the sea shanties, without feeling one bit bad about it. However, I will know for sure once Shaoran is addressed by first name. He didn't appear in the second episode after I switched. The biggest problem with the German subtitles is that they feel machine generated - translated from out of context of the show. With the subs for the first arc, while they could have used an editing pass (so many instances of Sakrua, that spell checking did not work at all, if there ever was one), they at least read like whoever wrote them watched the episodes, and didn't just translate an excel sheet full of Japanese with no context. I hope the English ones are better. They were for the end of the episode, but there wasn't that much dialogue any more.

Kādokyaputā Sakura: The Gathering, a new CCG by CLAMP and NHK. Cardcaptor Sakura certainly isn't what I expected it to be at all when I began watching. It was part of a Sailor Moon review on YouTube that I watched for one of the longer posts about Sailor Stars that I made that suggested Revolutionary Girl Utena and Puella Magi Madoka Magica as a differen take/deconstruction* of the Magical Girl genre and Cardcaptor Sakura as a straight variant. I expected something more like Sailor Moon, what I got was different but equally great - and (in?)arguably much better constructed. *I also saw a very angry video by a literary theorist who spent almost half an hour telling everyone that clicked on the clickbaity title of the video - like me - that what is colloquially known as a deconstruction is called a subversion, because deconstructionist reading in literary theory happens purely within the work itself, not in relation to prior works. I was just once again reminded of how much of a waste of time certain philosophical debates really are. You should really cleanse that spark of weeabooism in your ear there. Go watch the first episode of JoJo's Bizarre adventure, that should reset your ears. No, just kidding. It's true though and I said that before, but Sakura's performance really grew on me when combined with her animation. Ami, Mima and Shinjuka are a class of their own, of course, but there's just something special about the combination that makes Sakura stand out so much for me. Speaking of Sakura and the Rainbow of Memories, the car ride is a perfect example of what I mean: I have this much homework! I loved that scene, really... and the entire episode. I don't think there is an episode without Tomoyo. At least she was in every episode so far, I think. I'm actually not sure because I've watched way too many episodes in such a short time that it's all rather one fuzzy mishmash of episodes. That was the first episode that I made a longer post for... I really like the Sakura is afraid of spooky things running gag. It makes no sense since she knows more about magic than anyone else except Shaoran and Kero, but it's great. Minor spoiler: Yes, there really are a huge number of little things that make this great. It was a pretty big moment for her, being able to feel the aura of a card. That was the first time, I think. Before that there was only Shaoran that could do that, and Kero. It's one of her growing moments as magic user, but yes, it seemed a bit overly dramatic. I wonder who the girl in the sailor fuku was at the end there. That seems familiar, somehow... If you don't then the writers did something wrong. She's supposed to be intolerable and annoying - at least at first. Character spoilers: And now... Cardcaptor Sakura: Sakura card arc, episodes one and two. The first two epsiodes, the opening of the new arc did a few things that were fun, and a few that left me wondering. Overall the two episodes weren't nearly as strong as the prior ones, but in all fairness, neither was the opening of the Clow card arc. Spoilers ahead. The one thing that is super, super, super, incredibly and super super SUPER annoying is that the subtitles for the second arc were written by someone else. The first set was credited by Netflix to a Veronika Ritter and were often riddled with typoes and some grammatical errors, but at least they were decently written. This arc has subs credited to one Sophiana Collins (I think that was the name, not 100% certain), and guessing by the name, the reason why they're so bad is because they're either machine translated from English to German or Ms. Collins translated from one foreign language to another. Luckily I was able to solve that by switching the subs to English, where they are at least... making sense and use the appropriate pronouns. It's not nice to refer to Toya as "it" there, subtitles. Even if he is annoying every now and then. One of the things in the German subtitles that made me switch was having to spend a bit of time to figure out what Kero meant by saying snow hare.

That's perfectly fine. With the new arc coming up I doubt there's much to write up in the next couple of episodes anyway. Perhaps a new character or two, and some other cards, I mean... I have no idea how they're going to continue this. There aren't that many episodes in the first season that are truly worth talking about in detail. That doesn't mean they're not great, far from it - it's just that they're well crafted, perfectly simple stories and interactions that are great to watch. It's baffling how well this all works in its apparent simplicity while still having the same level of care and quality in scriptwriting and direction that you'd expect from something much more serious and expensive. That's pretty much the difference between making things up as you go and having a, while not completely finished by the time the anime was made, at least a well plotted out and fairly well crafted manga to base things on. Sailor Moon's absolutely strong points are the result of them having to put the storyline on a backburner combined with the ridiculous scope of the story itself, it's always the doom of the Earth or at the end even the galaxy or universe. Cardcaptor Sakura is, comparatively, well grounded and low key, and it works massively in its favor, and it takes care to set everything up properly. That might make things apparently obvious for adult audiences, but who cares? In the end, this is an anime where you're watching Sakura "fight" a tree that grows out of her basement, with her absurdely rich friend helping to clean the house afterwards, and it's just glorious to see unfold. It's a tree. It might threaten her house, and that's bad, but that's pretty much it. Take any plot of the day from Sailor Moon, and the enemies succeeding would have spelled the end of existence. At least in the first two seasons, the others wisely toned down the stakes of a single enemy win (thus allowing Eudial to be less than a constant failure). It didn't help SuperS any, but that's something else entirely. The first arc had a really strong run overall. I'm actually kind of... loathe to begin the second arc. I hope they can keep the quality up. Only a handful of episodes after a streak of absolutely brilliant ones that I can remember not... finding great. Just decent or good. Will be curious to see what you think (that's episodes 28 to 30, FWIW).

Cardcaptor Sakura: Clow Card arc finale. There's three episodes - 44, 45 and 46. The show comes full circle. Arc ending spoilers ahead, obviously. Venture forth at your own discretion. That's probably a good choice.

Would you recommend Rising of Shield Hero, overall? Not like I'll be getting around to watching it soon. Utena, Kill la Kill and Cardcaptor Sakura are going to occupy me for a while yet, then there's JoJo's and Steven Universe Future to finish.

Cardcaptor Sakura, episode 43. ...

Sakura is supposedly a lot like Nadeshiko. Spoiler for episode 16: Personally I don't see it based on the picture of her, but eh, it's okay. That's true. A lot of the show feels like it was carefully put together. The Twin Bells shop showing up when it makes sense is one of these details. The girls don't go to the mall to buy toys or such items or use any other throwaway shop. The go to Twin Bells, and Sakura and Tomoyo talk to the shop owner every now and then, and when they ask something that seemingly makes no sense to the shopowner she helps them anyway. In some other show they'd probably barge into the mall and ask something and the shopowner answers anyway, or is randomly helpful for no real reason. edit: It does have some ups and downs, and some questionable choices when it comes to the age of certain characters, but the level of care that went into making this sure shows. Apparently they even got the old team together for Clear Card, so while that might look bad, there's still a chance it might actually be good in spite of the looks. It's creeping into dubs, Usagi and Chibi-Usa yell Mamo-chan in the Sailor Moon Eternal trailer, and I think the German dub of Madoka has honorifics in it too (which makes it even weirder because we have our own honorifics, even if they're more limited than Japanese ones). Now if there's any non-Japanese animated show with Japanese characters written by non-Japanese writers who tack on honorifics because it's set there without any real idea how to use them... probably. I don't know any off-hand. Slight spoilers: I already forgot that thing with the lockbox... Slightly spoilerish thing:

Episode preview for CCS 43 spoiler: Talk about 42:

CCS #41

My best guess yes, that's because he's Chinese. Xiaolong looks like it could be Pinyin (without the accents) for the sounds that Shaoran (or Syaoran) are supposed to represent in Japanese Romaji. The fun part here is, it's wrong. Because in both Pinyin and the much less ridiculous but Western (and therefore not used) Wade-Giles romanization sha would be the correct romanization. So either way, it's about as wrong as you can get, and if that's official it's even worse. Compare the way Shaoran is pronounced in the anime with the samples from the Chinese Pronunciation wiki: https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/pronunciation/Sha https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/pronunciation/Xia Never mind long: https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/pronunciation/Long Or lang, because hey, it's Shaoran after all... https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/pronunciation/Lang Both don't swallow the g, even if it's less noticable. Never mind that Sakura just calls him Li-kun anyway. Watching Sailor Moon broke me. Depending on who wrote the episode, the charactes would change the honorifics used to address regular characters, especially in Sailor Stars, and it became so bad something snapped and I stopped being bothered by everyone calling Taiki Taiki-san in one episode and Taiki-kun in the next. I'm pretty sure I complained about that while watching Sailor Stars. I stopped being bothered by them... the only real thing of importance is noticing when characters are not using honorifics. Like, hey, Toya when he's talking to Yukito. I wonder why that might be. It would probably be more interesting if that Osakan dialect Kero is talking with wouldn't be completely lost on me, or if it had some details or background that is related to the show but would otherwise have no place in it. But it's mostly looking at outfits, or items that came up in the show anyway. It's the pplace where the target audience of Cardcaptor Sakura shows the most. Somehow I doubt it will. BFFs for life.

There are two Cardcaptor Sakura movies, and the first one is according to what I've read supposed to be watched between episodes 35 and 36. So I missed that already. CCS episode #40

Hating on D1ck the birthday boy, what has this world come to?

I have a broken blood vessel in my right eye, so I'm currently doing my best Kyubey impression. Do you think I should go and ask 8th grade girls to make contracts with me?

Warner Brothers is producing a new movie, in which Superman is black. Black Superman will be referred to as the Man of Steal.

There's some early weirdness going on (including some conflicting information about when and where exactly Sakura's mother and father met). I think the flower rain in this episode stays even after the card is captured, but in later episodes anything summoned by cards disappears, which sometimes isn't much better in terms of how confusing that must be for the residents of Tomoeda, without ever being mentioned of course. Well, that's one hell of a difference. Maybe in another life - or when I finally upgrade my gear - I'll have enough disk space. Until then, streaming it is for space reasons. Same reason I stopped getting actual blu rays, or real books. I've used Netflix with several different smart devices, ranging from BR players to tablets to TVs, and some of them can't fully fill up the progress bars, even if you fast forward through all the credits. Certain Amazon Video clients on TVs have the same issue, or even worse, while they can continue from an episode or film you've left off, doing so doesn't complete the progress bar of the episode, making it impossible to resume on some other device without manually switching the episodes (after making sure that progress bar is completed, of course!). It's frustrating. They also dropped the Leave it to Kero-Chan! segment now. Could have done that earlier. It was never really interesting but my brain forced me to watch it anyway.

Life choices, then, or was that an accident?

They often do have interesting entries - just never when they win. I get why Ruslana won, of course: Who doesn't like carefully crafted songs that appeal to every voting block equally, combined with Xena in a fur coat? (That would be me! ) Now, at the risk of offending people: There's 2016's political pity win... Yeah, thanks, but no thanks. I get the message, I get why it won, but hey, isn't there a rule about this having to be completely apolitical? Ukraine always gets a pass (Lasha is bad, mmkay!). As much as I liked Verka Serduchka's performance, if that's "Lasha Tumbai" in the lyrics then I'm a purple ****atoo. Still, this year's entry was pretty good: Surprised it came in 2nd in the popular vote. Certainly not undeserved.

There was a four months hiatus between CCS episode 35 and 36. Sakura is now in 5th grade, and we have a new intro I don't like that much and a new outro that's... mesmerizing. Not so sure about the song, but there's something about the combination that just makes me not fast forward through it. Speaking of fast forwarding:

What else would it be called? It is a dub. It's not like animated characters can speak on their own. Entire episodes missing is quite an understatement, I just had a look at the episode list, the US version dropped 31 out of the 70 episodes entirely and rearranged the broadcast order something fierce. It begins with Shaoran showing up. Uhm... yeah, so they attempted to make this show about Shaoran and removed all the hinted at homosexuality. I'm curious if Shaoran and Meilin having an arranged marriage while being cousins was left in. Probably aired in Alabama? It's not really necessary either, many of the episodes simply don't have anything that warrants extensive posting, which isn't a verdict on their quality at all. There are exceptions, the fourth episode was one like that for me, because nothing happened, it's just a tree that grows, and a large part of the episode is spent on Sakura cleaning the house, but it was still great to watch. I'm not sure, apart from mentioning how adorable the show is or how different the action is from Sailor Moon. The first extensive post was the episode where she doesn't capture any cards. It's weird for me, in some ways. I like mystery and prophecy stuff, but I more often than not hate how it is resolved. The road to disappointments is paved with fun setups, after all. While I hope that CCS doesn't pull any silly resolutions to the storyline, it's not really as if that would matter all too much for me. Heh. Not an actual quote from the show, obviously. Unless Kero says something like that in the later episodes. Pictures spoilered to make the post more concise. I really like the way the show looks, even if that is low key for the most part. It fits with the stakes of most cards too.

Hahahaha. Yeah, but for a space ship built with no real clue the Sailor Moon anime turned out pretty fly...ing. Nope, that joke is bad. Like the animation of the Clear Card arc? Maybe, or maybe not, I just watched 5 episodes in one go. CCS episode #31 to #35, random observerations: I find myself actually interested in how this is going to end, funny considering that 10 episodes ago this arc didn't even have any hit of a storyline beyond "cards are missing, capture them". That they are. It's great, regardless. I'm having an absolute blast watching this, even if I still can't figure out why exactly, other than finding everything and everyone adorable - that's true, but not much of a reason, and I'm not sure if that's enough of a reason for 35 episodes now. I mean the mystery setup and ominous prophecy stuff is something that immediately gets me interested in whatever I watch (in Agents of Shield, that was a simple namedrop in an early episode, a character called "The Clairvoyant" - instantly sold, thanks, shut up and take my money Marvel!), but it wasn't there for the longest of times.

Had a fun discussion with a friend today, regarding yesterday's Eurovision Song Contest finale. He never watches it, while I do. Every year, for as long as I can remember (except for last year, obviously). He doesn't get it, most of the acts are usually bad, it's by far and large ridiculous and a waste of time, with it taking up the entire Saturday night. He's not wrong. In addition to that, my own tastes in music are severely limited to a very specific set of music styles and genres, for various reasons, the most significant of which is actual physical discomfort caused by certain types of music, however that's mostly related to vocalists. Yet, it's a once in a year fun way to step out of my comfort zone, and every now and then something remarkable shows up. Like 2009's Urban Symphony (not using the offical ESC channel, I think that one's region locked to EBU member countries): I'm not sure where else I would be able to stumble upon some Estonian electropop/classic crossover folk music, even if Urban Symphony was short lived and Sandra Nurmsalu stopped performing after giving birth to a daugther in 2010. And of course every now and then there's something utterly ridiculous that's just fun. Sometimes the ridiculous act even wins... Sometimes it works against the artists to have to sing live, but the message wins regardless... like in 1998, when Israel sent Dana International in spite of protest by orthodox Jews: Yeah, that sounds much better on the single: You go girl. Hard to imagine that it's been 23 years. Yikes, time flies.

The guy in the picture you tried to link earlier. He's sometimes spelled Syaoran or even Shaolan in Romaji. There are wiki pages and entries for both Meiling Li and Meilin Li. I'm going by what my subtitles say, so... it's Shaoran and Meilin, not Syaoran and Meiling. One of the biggest misgivings - or let's say, one of the things I expected to be a lot different (not knowing anything about Cardcaptor Sakura I was half-afraid that it would end up her playing a magical collectible card game against others in tournaments) - about the setup was not having an idea what the hell they were going to do with the idea of her capturing cards, but it does work. That's about the only thing I can say. I never though it would, but it... works. The last three episodes I've seen were a bit less interesting, but so far many of them were strong enough, and I don't recall a really bad episode yet. The cards are also varied and fun, most of the time. At the moment I'm hoping that the "downturn" (to be taken with a grain of salt, the episodes where still decent to good, just nowhere near the prior ones) in quality isn't because the show's setup is beginning to wear thin. Episode 30 tried something interesting, but I wish this wouldn't have involved a new character after 30 epsides, that felt a little tacked on - the other episodes rarely feature one-off characters in any meaningful way - there are some, now and then, but it's nowhere near Sailor Moon level. The character interactions so far weren't as strong* as they were in Sailor Moon, but that's not entirely unexpected - they're also different. I mean, they're there, but I really doubt we'll be getting episodes about the meaning of life, self-actualization and how being a magical girl can mess up your hobbies or goals in life, or one of the cast obsessively trying to get herself targeted by a card. Maybe in the terrible looking Clear Card arc. *Maybe strong is the wrong word. When they're good, they're really good, they're just age appropriate.

CCS #28 - #30