majestic

Well, it was worth a try. Just finished the first of the Madoka movies, by the way. Rewatching is well worth the time spent on it, and the film version adds a certain gravitas to some of the scenes (by the way, while he isn't exactly hung up on spoilers, we still have one person left who wants to watch this eventually, so anything spoilerish into spoiler tags... ).

I think only @ArtistFormerlyKnownasKP and myself are watching JoJo's, and I'm close to the end of Battle Tendency now while I'm certain that KP's watched it at least twice by now. We're actually really all in this thread because we watched Sailor Moon together and more or less told (more like hinted at, but you know) to stop spamming the TV thread with it... I re-watched it, the others saw it for the first time. It's been a quarter of a century and I still had a blast with it. With some... exceptions. Then myself and KP watched Steven Universe on @Bartimaeus's recommendation, which was in part at least inspired by Sailor Moon as it was a huge influence on Rebecca Sugar. Among other anime of course, full of references as it is and all. That's everything in a nutshell. Except Madoka, which KP and IC also watched. If you're in the mood for something bubbly, happy and pink, check out the trailer: Assuming you aren't familiar with the franchise, anyway.

Lost my mouse just now. Not mouse in a pet sense, but input device. The scroll wheel, which I lived without happily before it was invented but now feels like I cannot do without, has struggled to perform its duty properly for a while. First scrolling up only worked half of the them. Then a third, then nothing. Yet, I still could live with that. Ten minutes ago scrolling down stopped working too, and that was the final nail in the coffin. It's officially dead now, after over a decade of good service. I ordered a replacement when the issues began, one that has the exact same dimensions, but higher accuracy. Turns out there are three factors that I haven't considered. First of all, the clicking sound of a new mouse is intense. Ugh. It will take months until the buttons are whittled down enough to stop sounding like a Cherry MX, much like it will take a while until it properly glides over my desk in the way the old one did, and the worst for last: The mouse has only half the weight of the old one. It's extremely uncomfortable. To give you a timeframe: The one before the one that just died still had a PS/2 connector (that one I fixed several times by using super glue to prop up a very worn out left mouse button), and the one before that still had a RS232 connector.

Marshall would be so happy now that someone finally wants his cheese. The actual reason for this post was that we, or more accurately, I, asked everyone who popped in here if they'd like to watch Sailor Moon with us, which was next to Steven Universe and JoJo's Bizarre adventure the dominating topic of the past... 65 or so pages. Almost everyone immediately left, only InsaneCommander stuck around. I think it's fair to say that he enjoyed it. You wouldn't happen to have watched it? I mean, it's 30 years old by now... Other recent topics were Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Attack No. 1, Goblin Slayer, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Castlevania.

Hi there, I hope you don't get scared off. The only one who stuck around after we made this thread our personal playground was InsaneCommander. I'm not sure why, it can't be the smell. There's no smell internet yet, right? Right... yes, no, there isn't. Mental note: Brush teeth before posting next time just in case. Anyway! Welcome to our little anime thread. We may not be many, but we sure post a lot. Would you care for some refreshments? Or maybe some gouda? Ahem. So! The others ran away so fast, need to change the approach to this. Hmm. But how? Oh, yes! Can we interest you in some anime? Hm. Pictures first, asking later. Yes, yes.

The advantage of watching something in my native dubbed version is that I can have it running in the background while doing menial tasks at work, what with being stuck at home anyway, so Attack No. 1 has been playing for a bit now. That's not something that works for Japanese originals with subs. The showrunners really treated the idea of playing volleyball like martial arts. Kozue and Midori are currently learning the "Falling Leaf" technique, which is a slow service ball that drops all momentum in mid flight. The girl teaching them is all properly mysterious about it, telling them that the key to learning it is "in their own hands", this might just as well be some kung fu or karate shenanigans. Only took 8 episodes for the magic balls to show up. Huh. I thought that took longer. edit: Found some old reference material, this show's ratings were insane when it first aired here. 44% in the target demographics of children aged 14 and lower. So far this has been mildly amusing and really feels a bit dated. I wonder if my original impression that this gets better when the girls age up a bit remains true. I sure hope so. Hmmm. edit 2: Amazon really puts a LOT of effort into bringing these old shows back to life. The outro even has the original TV station signation in it, they just bought the distribution rights and did nothing else. Probably didn't even transfer the original video material to digital on their own. Good job there Jeff.

I apologize for this joke in advance, and I'll spoiler it. You may only click if you promise to not hate me for it first!

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.