majestic

I've pretty much done a complete 180 on Lwaxana Troi. I despised her and everything she was in. And then... I don't know exactly what happened, but she grew on me sometime in DS9, and after eventually rewatching TNG I found that I didn't mind her as much as I did. That episode with her having telepathy problems where she runs around thininking Picard has filthy thoughts about her cracks me up every time (Manhunt, second season, I think). She's still in an awful lot of bad episodes, don't get me wrong. She just became a lot less annoying. Erp, like Chibi-Usa...

On the topic of having that one perfect show that seems made for me, wow, that's a tough one. I've seen a lot, both live action and animation. The closest I got to enjoying virtually every episode was with Sailor Moon and, not very surprisingly, X-Files. Sailor Moon has SuperS of course and X-Files has the later seasons without David Duchovny, that, while having really great episodes in there, are suffering from not really being X-Files. That's the sort of thing that happens when your show lives almost entirely off the atmosphere and character chemistry. But they don't feel like they were made just for me. There's only one show that felt that way and it's fate was... terrible. They replaced the creative team halfway through season two and it all went to hell in a handbasket from there. I mentioned it once or twice because I'm a total Stan (okay can we use something else, I don't like Eminem, there, I said it... at least Stan had Dido, who I could listen to for hours, in spite of not really liking the music she makes - I played Life for Rent on repeat in 2003). What's interesting is that the show had, also kind of like Sailor Moon, a complete zero budget. It looks ridiculous. Especially the first few episodes. But it has everything I love. A cast of whacky characters that are just the right mix of tropey, real and relatable, actors that feel like they were born for the role they were playing (including one Kevin Sorbo, regardless of what I may think of his nutjob world view, I love him in this). It explores some nice concepts and has absolutely loveable character interactions* and a mystery plot that was just beginning to unfurl properly by the time Tribune Entertainment shat all over it. *There's one that kind of harkens back to my love of shojo anime, I guess. The ensemble has three women, one of which is a manic pixie fairy / cloud cuckoolander with a secret agenda, then the pilot with a tragic family background of living on the street and having a drug-runner who died as father and... well, the ship's AI avatar (by now it should be clear that I'm talking of course about Andromeda) who at this point has just gotten a new robot body. The other two women play dress up with her, and she doesn't really get why. She's just female because humans respond better to female voices, and she let's the other two treat her as mannequin because it helps crew morale. Everything she does is simply in service of the crew, it's what she was made for. Beka (the pilot) then says (paraphrased, can't find anything worth a damn on YouTube these days): "So let me get this straight, the reason you're looking like a walking heart attack is for our benefit?" to which Andromeda responds: "Andromeda was a Phoenician princess, and since no one knows how the ancient Phoenicians looked, I made an approximation based on..." and Trance (the pixie) says: "She thinks you're pretty." Andromeda is more confused than ever at this point and Beka asks her if that's just the first face she came up with, and she says she went through several hundred thousand iterations. Beka cuts her off with a "I knew it!". Cue end of scene. Random, fun scene with nothing really happening except some character building and the crew becoming friends. A bit like Sailor Moon, only in space. Also has copious amounts of stock footage and not even enough budgets for proper CGI fight scenes. Often they just use a tactical display with little triangles designating fighter craft and missiles. Actually that's pretty cool, like Homeworld's tactical overview. Gives the scenes a nice atmosphere, looks good and was cheap. Genius move, really. edit: There's also a scene later in the show where the three meet up again to just chat, or how Andromeda calls it at this point: For girl talk. Beka shows off that she has a nano-bot augmentation with which she can change her hair color at will and Andromeda just does the same (she's a robot, after all). edit 2: What a great display of her growing as a character. Man. Why did they think this needed more action and less "brainy" plots? F*ck you Tribute! Eh, ok. That's enough from me. The problem is, as much as I love this, I can't recommend it to anyone. It's really too bad this ended on a cliffhanger in the middle of season 2... (at least in my head canon).

I've mentioned it once or twice, but the first two assault scenes are really... the worst. The first one because the entire spiel of Tiger's-Eye hits really close to the mark of how these things tend to happen in real life (less magical wallet stealing of course), and the second one because the writers and animators felt it was a good idea to have Reika beg Tiger's-Eye to stop violating her. Which you probably didn't see, assuming you've skipped ahead like usual. Or will not see, if you're still watching. I don't recall any title card yelling for SuperS at all, so I don't know. Seems weird.

Look at the stock footage in the first two episode, it looks (and is) incomplete, also... the first two episodes aren't bad, actually. They just have a good deal of creepy in them. Did you notice that you've managed to pass KP? Technically not because you're lacking 4 episodes, but still an episode ahead in spite of staring weeks later. Trying to get this over with quickly? Man, I wish I had more time to watch SU and JoJo's. Ah, well. Maybe I'll rewatch Stars with you guys to compare impressions. Didn't write them down by episode after all. Couldn't stop myself from streaming the 8th episode of Sailor Stars (the second of the season storyline).

That's odd, because the separate link works for me, it doesn't work when viewed through the forum software (Firefox by the way, might be some browser issue involved too). I'm not sure, I think Luna and Artemis are in the episode too, and they look even worse than the girls here, but I couldn't find any image of them. It's really hilarious. So let's just make a picture. Luckily I know where to stream episodes... *cough* I mean... it'll have a stupid play button in the freeze frame because there's no way to pause without the player UI showing up on this, uhm, special site, but hey, it works for demonstraiton purposes. If you think the girls are bad, they got off easy. Look at the poor cats.

That's from the Sailor Moon SuperS special, which I have not seen so far. It's not the SuperS movie, anyway. I don't know what's up with linking the Sailor Moon wiki images. The original is larger, you can see by clicking on it and then using the link to go directly to the wiki image. Or click on the non-embedded link. https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/sailormoon/images/4/4e/218123.jpg

Whelp, you sure weren't lying. Watched episode 29. Okay I keep saying how weird that episode of SuperS looked. Have a picture: No, this is really from the episode, not from some fanart tumblr. Was more thinking of Elisabeth Bathory, but that works too.

I added an edit there, not sure if you read it. But yes, next to Queen Beryl and Death Phantom, Nehelania looks like the villain of the century. But that feels a bit like ancient Confucian wisdom. Even old shirts look new if you put them next to older shirts!

edit: No, it's not just that. As far as season endings are concerned, this is one of the stronger offerings. It's better paced than Sailor Stars, which might the the strongest ending in terms of thematic exploration, and it's better set up than R where Wiseman turns out to be Death Phantom out of nowhere. It's not as good as the ending of S (the Professor and Hotaru were way more interesting, and Pharao 90 was sufficiently alien as far as weird deep space creatures go) or as... what's the word I'm looking for here, tight (no wonder, that was a mere two episodes, but was very well plotted out, all the other endings feel meandering in contrast) as the ending of the first season, but compared to Metalia and Beryl, Nehelenia is a veritable horn of plenty in terms of motivation and characterization. I feel like a broken record, but for me she's being dragged down a bit by making her so obviously inspired by the fairy tales I grew up with. Your experience might differ, but it's really the same with the SuperS movie.

Yes. I mean, Usagi does, by way of her transformation pen. First season, episode... 42, I think. Minako's backstory in London. One of the episodes that were dropped by DiC because, dunno. Too tragic? I don't know how the English subs on Hulu are, but if you want mean Rei you really need to watch the German dub (eh, and, ideally understand it too). She isn't just mean to Usagi in that one, she's really insulting, like all the time.

Seems like almost all the problems here could be solved by removing SuperS from Sailor Moon canon. Although, even in SuperS, I think the relationship between Usagi and Rei can be interpreted as Rei seeing her like her little sister, one that is occassionally annoying and that she fights with, but she still loves very much. More than any other of her friends: Usagi is the family she never really had outside of her grandfather. The original Japanese version supports this by Rei never using any honorifics when addressing Usagi. She just calls her Usagi. Always, not just when she wants to insult her, and Rei is clearly not Usagi's superior or teacher either (and even those tend to use -san, or -kun), and no other situation applies where the dropping of the honorific would be appropriate (they're all quite polite when it comes to honorifics, even Usagi, who is otherwise very Anti-Japanese in her behavior, like blowing her nose in public or eating in the hallway at school, she keeps addressing Tuxedo Kamen as Tuxedo Kamen-sama even after she finds out who Chibi-Usa is). Very hard spoilers for Stars:

Minor Spoiler: No real spoilers, just mostly spoilered for KP's benefit.

By the way, fun fact, since you called Hotaru Sailor Satan in the past, there are actually manga issues where her translated name really was Sailor Satan, because the Romaji for Saturn is actually... Sērā Satān. That's the sort of thing when you use a phonetic alphabet to approximate the English pronunciation in Katakana and then translate it back without paying attention. Also, fully agree on what you said about that Minako/Makoto epsiode. edit: I'd say Venus Love and Beatuy Shock is a great contender for the best Inner Senshi attack. Can't quite keep up with World Shaking and Dead Scream, but it's close. edit 2: Now that you've seen the new attacks and transformations, you can watch the SuperS movie at any point. It's completely separated from the continuity. It doesn't fit in anywhere.

Have you completely given up being creeped out by Pedosus or did you fast forward through Chibi-Usa's buttwiggling?

I'll leave the answer in the form of the memes we had that were actually modified forum code for back at Black Isle: I miss using memes with simple tags. This one was [BISIMG]No[/BISIMG], I think... Come to think of it, were they even called memes back then? Ah, this thread is making me ride the nostalgia train, thinking back to old friends, posters we've lost (both in real life and online contacts), funny things that happened. I remember back when I was an Interplay moderator, posters like Gromnir, Gfted or Amentep might remember too, when the Fallout section posters were accusing the moderator team of being Nazis, so we all ended up using photographs of actual high ranking Nazis as avatars for a while. Guess if the moderators here did that they'd find themselves replaced over night. I still have that picture of Hermann Göring I used somewhere on my external backup hard disk(s). The only rule was that nobody was allowed to use a picture of Adolf. Well, that's enough of me being off-topic now.

I don't use those either. YouTube comments, Facebook comments, Twitter, all that stuff, I mostly don't even look at it (beyond what's being linked in this forum, and sometimes YT comments under Sailor Moon videos). Joining a Discord server is as far as I'm willing to go, but also really only because I already had a Discord user because we switched from Team Speak to Discord for raiding purposes. If I had to name my most favorite Sailor Moon episodes of all time then most - if not all of them - would probably come from S. Certainly none from SuperS (as funny as that dentist episode is). There are couple of things for Minako to do in Sailor Stars that you might like. She's the only one getting a focus episode worth a damn in the final season (Rei gets a couple of really nice things to do that show just how much she really cares, which is great). Plus this was one of the funniest sequences in all of Sailor Moon for me: That Ami episode is one of the manga chapters in Dreams, adapted to work within SuperS (in the manga Fish-Eye attacks her). These chapters are the first time ever beyond their introduction episodes that the girls get any sort of extended character development in the manga. If Crystal had been any smarter it could have adapted them and moved them to somewhere earlier. Even in the old anime I think it's the first time we get some more information on her family and about her father, beyond "I live with my mother and she's a doctor" - but that's probably because Naoko Takeuchi didn't come up with the idea earlier. Heh. In my "defense*" it was for an Ashford City (it was one of the forums we Interplay people migrated to after Interplay shut down, next to this one and Winterwind, but Winterwind and AC are gone by now) fan fiction contest that the other guys badgered me into writing a short story for, so I figured I might as well take it to the logical extreme and attempt to do the worst possible fan fiction possible. *I don't really think I need to defend myself here, anyway, hence the quotes. It was a fun thing to do, to be honest, particularily because I decided to pair off the forum admin with the most homophobic southern gentleman poster on the board at the time.

Ah, okay, then I stumbled across an interview on YouTube with very similar content by virtue of a happy accident. Heh. Guess I could go look for the extras of course, at some point. Came pretty much out of nowhere this season, right? It's really too bad that Makoto and Minako get the short end of the stick in theirs, but you'll see that when you come across that episode.

Not sure it was the same of course, there's a ton of interviews with each of them. One from what's probably every anime convention since 2014, there's Q&A panels, group interviews with all of them, single interviews and... they're all often about the same thing. Do you still remember which interviews they were? Was that a series on the VAs, or from a single convention, or just random videos you came across? Anyway, you can notice that they're really into voicing these characters, and that, at least for Amanda Miller, it was more than just a job. I mentioned that before in other threads, but I have a friend who is pretty active in the Star Wars fan community, and with LucasArts prior and Disney now in particular never saying no to free marketing, they're doing a lot of things you'd expect would be done by professional promoters. The Star Wars section at sci-fi conventions? Yep. That's all fans. At least in Europe. Where was I going with this? Oh, right, voice acting. While doing conventions he ran across all sorts of people, including one David Warner. They talked to him about various things, including the terrible Wing Commander movie, his work on Star Trek and about him voicing Irenicus in Baldur's Gate 2. Turns out he doesn't know anything about the character he voiced. He took a contract, showed up, gave it his best, but in reality he "just" read the lines he was given in the way the director told him to. He figured out the character would be some sort of villain based on what he was saying, but that's all. He also said he's glad that unlike other actors of his age who weren't as prudent with their finances as he was still have to take on contracts to make money while he just does what he wants to do by now. No names mentioned directly, of course. Granted that's probably a little different when you're doing a lot more lines when you redub a 200 episode show, but anyway, I'm guessing for most of them it's just a job. As for others, huh, I expect Jennifer Hale to have no idea in just how many games she showed up so far, or even remember most of it. Or any of it. Like Malcom McDowell who said he can't remember being on the set for like 80% of the movies he was in, not because they were all drunk or coked out all the time, but by sheer volume. Didn't that turn out rambly and off-topic. Huh. Anyway, TL;DR: I think it's pretty unique that the VAs for the Viz dub got to voice characters they loved and have an attachment to beyond "I did this to earn my living."

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

Strange, huh? It's just two episodes with a little more background information and an almost change of heart in Tiger's-Eye treatment of Makoto and suddenly what by all means should be a group of irredeemable bastards can be seen in a slightly different light. They're transformed predators, so no wonder they're predatorial. They're given a job that they can't possibly succeed at through no fault of their own and have absolutely no agency in their life, and the rest of the Dead Moon don't even extend them the courtesy of telling them that they're not truly human. Instead they're left to wonder why they have no beautiful dreams of their own - and Zirconia lies to their face, because they were transformed without Pegasus, so how and why would they need Pegasus to stay transformed? While I didn't really like the two story episodes where Usagi is nice to Fish-Eye (I hated them a lot less than KP did, by the looks of it), the three slowly coming to terms with realizing that their lives are essentially over, nor did their lives ever matter because they're not truly real anyway, does have a tragic element. The episode you have or haven't seen by now (not sure) has Fish-Eye begging Tiger's-Eye to use the last of their transformative magic to save Usagi's life, to which he agrees. If Pegasus had not shown up to turn the puppets into real boys then the tragedy of their existence paired with their ultimate loss in making at least one thing right (i.e. healing Usagi) might have been an acceptable, beautiful ending to what otherwise was a horrible waste of a story setup that by the looks of it got mired in rewrites and retooling. Because the entire dream rape plot is so out of sync with the bubbly, and otherwise at times really childish, dreamlike feel to the rest of the season that it would take a schizophrenic moron to come up with it, and the story development of the season is credited to the same person who made otherwise top rated S episodes (like your Minako favorites): Yoji Enokido. The S episode where the talismans appear is the top rated episode of Sailor Moon on IMDB even (the Japanese original entry, not the DiC dub entry) at a 9,3. Not that user ratings on IMDB say much, Iron Sky has a lame 6.something there last time I checked and deserves an 8+, but still. I'd say this season was planned to be a lot more serious than it turned out, parts were rewritten, things from the pre-production pushed back and forth. Ah, well... here's to hoping you like Stars better.

No, this was their introduction episode all right, you only see them in shadows in the one before. I hinted at it before, but that circus act was more or less directly from the manga. So, no surprise it wasn't that fun. I think it's two episodes until PallaPalla gets something to do, if you don't find that wacky enough than the villains in this season are completely unsalvagable for you. That would be okay. I was just glad to be rid of the creeps in one way or the other, so I might have... wait, I posted that already. Might have overrated the coming episodes based on no creeps and almost on Pegasus. edit: Spoiler! edit: I watched that Amanda Miller interview you mentioned. Or at least one with similar questions asked. Heh. Funny how people always say the same when it comes to Makoto, they liked her because "you can be feminine and still kick ass" - you go Makoto. Also had a hearty laugh at the interviewer asking about the differences in voice acting for the classic anime and Crystal, and Amanda Miller does her best, as she says, to not sound "dumb" when in reality she seems like she doesn't want to go and say the show's crap.

Still, how do you like the four girls? Wasn't the best episode, but that's a more or less direct manga story adaptation, so how could it be.

There's no episode with Michiru falling, or them being locked together. It's just a display of dominance on the part of Haruka. To scare Usagi off. Does that make it better?

No need to put this into spoilers. Yes, it was. For nothing. And they all get to watch Pegasus groom Chibi-Usa by the dream lake. Mako-chan suffered for that. What a way to make an episode worse in hindsight, huh?