majestic

I guess it's no surprise that episode 32 is complete filler without even the barest manga connection, and yes, it definitely feels like it's very self-aware of just how stupid this entire season and the Pegasus plot is. I also got the feeling from Mamoru's reaction in the final Trio episodes when Fish-Eye asks him why he's bothering with Usagi. Yeah Mamoru, why do you bother with SuperS Usagi? Going over the power up episodes, the only one that felt complete and properly done - disregarding the repetitive nature of the plot points used - was Ami's. She meets a reflection of her past self in her father's lake painting, and gains power through acceptance. Plus, while it was less fun than usual, it was a nicely made serious episode, and Ami doing nerd stuff is appropriate enough (plus she'd be the only one able to afford copious amounts of time on the internet in '94, not to mention that notebook, rich bastards ). Rei's power up is so hidden in clues that it's almost a blink and you'll miss it thing when she's first being a hyprocrite, talking about how being a shrine maiden is about helping others with their dreams (all the while being a miko herself, with no indication that her dream is about helping others with their dreams), and if that's not Nakoto's dream then she should not at all bother being a miko. She gets her power up by giving Nakoto her dreams back, or rather, by making her believe in her dreams again. Like a proper miko. Minako and Makoto on the other hand... are missing a scene. It should not be Artemis that simply gives them their transformation pens back. The setup was already there, they were stuck in the plant and Minako could just apologize to Makoto in the face of their, well, death, and stuff. That would be simple and effective, Minako learns to apologize and maybe take the problems of others more seriously. Giving Mako-chan her power up there would still feel a bit rushed, but it's not entirely unworkable, maybe Minako could teach her something about accepting certain things (like she accepted Alan not loving her, i.e. Makoto being more at peace with herself, even though that was also resolved in S... but hey, maybe episode 20 wasn't as easily shrugged off as it was implied). As it stands, the execution is... not only not on point, but plain bad. Made worse by how easily this could have been a really great episode for both of them, the two don't interact with each other that often. What a wasted opportunity.

You're lucky that you're over the hump. The creepiest stuff is done, the Trio is gone and... you have like two somewhat funny if sometimes out of character episodes left (one would be funnier without the Pegasus implication) until the super serious mode kicks into overdrive. Which should tradiationally be the part you enjoy the least. Spoiler: That's definitely not going to change for SuperS. Unless you're just so glad it's over that you start liking the storyline.

SU:

Interesting, this is the part where I thought of the artwork in Day of the Tentacle. I have no idea if that is deliberate or not, or if I'm just imagining things. It's not any one character, but a combination of things. Probably a coincidence. Unlike all the other references.

Reminds me of a joke I might have already posted, but anyway. A mathematician, a physicist and an engineer are told that at the end of a hallway there is a large sack of money for them to collect, but they're only ever allowed to cross half the distance left towards the sack, then they have to stop, and begin again. The mathematician rightly realizes that he'll never get to the sack and doesn't try, the physicist conducts an experiment, finds out that he will never reach his goal and also quits. Meanwhile the engineer just walks up to the sack, takes it, comes back and says: "Sometimes, close enough is good enough!"

Your favorite three quarters Klingon also shows up, Alexander. Although... I don't think you mean him either.

Just had a good chuckle at my favorite dialogue (sort of) from Reboot. "Next you'll be telling me that you've seen the user." -- Bob "There is no user. That's just mass psychosis engineered by the Guardians." -- CGI Special Agent Fax Modem 😄 And with that I'll be off for the night, I guess. Should get some stuff done tomorrow today. Eh, and there's that ridiculous meeting. Ho-humm. edit: Oh, how could I forget? The end... "The web is out there." - CGI Special Agent Fax Modem

edit: Managed two 10 minute epsiodes in a day, plus one episode of Sailor Moon in the background while working. Sigh. Well, it's bound to get better, eventually...

I half expected a Dio meme in your spoiler tower there. I'll let you know shortly.

Steven Universe S01E30:

By the way, given KP's reaction to Pegasus and how uncomfortable it appears to be watching Sailor Moon SuperS with his fiancee, how high do you rate the chance that he'll just drop watching after episodes 30 and 31? In some ways they're the absolute low points of Pegasus' interaction with Chibi-Usa. 31 most of all.

Uhm, of course good sir! *quietly drops bruce-slash-sharpie.txt into the recycle bin* PallaPalla is serious business but she's nowhere close to pulling off a Telulu and ripping out the pure heart crystals of what looks like all of Tokyo.

Speaking of funnier things, I have some problems making that fanfiction you requested work. How bothered would you be if Bruce acts a little out of character?

I'm just really broken when it comes to social interactions. It's not the easiest topic to talk about (not even online in anonymity), but it does feel cathartic, every now and then.

Can't speak for IC, but that's not at all how that works for me. Or worked, to be honest, I haven't had a crush on a character in a long time. Pointless to try and put it into words, but generally, it was a very elevated feeling of attachment while watching something, not a butterflies in the stomach or an any actual feelings of nervousness when the show's up again. It's probably like a crush when you filter out any physical attraction or having the ability to interact. I'm not sure I can describe that any better. Doesn't really matter, in the end, I guess. 18 year old me would have strongly disagreed, but I'm a bit older now. Guess I learned that real people outside of your family aren't all just out to hurt you. Just most of them.

At that age I watched Peep! mostly. No need to record things, but we were always more liberal with sexuality on TV than the US. Was an interesting show with celebrities showing up to talk about relationships and sex. Hilarious host too, constantly fumbling words, ended up being the butt of a lot of jokes on spoofs.

Different things for different people, huh? The power fantasy part of Rommie was what I just took for granted. It makes sense in context, what with her being the avatar of a ship of the line, but her friendship with the crew, her sense of loneliness after they're left with only a handful of people manning the station and the fear she displays after seeing what happened to her fellow ships is what I really enjoyed about the character. But... don't bother looking at the other seasons. It's not worth it.

One of the characters on the crew calls her a walking heart attack (literal, actual dialogue here) because she's, well, attractive. Or at least, Beka (the pilot) thinks so. The engineer who built her body sure does so too, and that's the basis for all sorts of hijinks (one of the funnier ones is Rommie asking if he was wearing gloves when he made her body - it's less creepy and weird and much more lighthearted in context, although the implication remains there). The entire interaction was meant to highlight that she's not used to having an actual body and interacting with people, the ship itself - and the AI - is fairly new, or at least that's the assumption until Harper (the engineer) finds a backup of her personality hidden away, where a different captain was on a secret mission that did not end well and her entire personality was scrapped and rebuilt afterwards. This is about the time the actual "main" plot really begins - the one that really goes nowhere somehow. Like... everything. Man, f*cking Tribute. And no, while I would agree with Beka that Andromeda is pretty, that's not what makes Rommie so great. It's also why I mentioned fictional character, because I crushed hard on Rommie, not her. She plays a different character in Stargate SG-1, and there she's just the character she plays. I get what you mean. It's the same for me with cetain other genres. Not sci-fi or fantasy, but anything that's supposed to be funny, like sit- and romcoms. I'd never watch a sitcom without being prodded. It's also true for most western animation, had you not recommended Steven Universe I'd never have bothered after the first look at it... and BoJack Horseman I just watched because a friend badgered me into watching it.

Keiko? But... dunno, never cared much for her on either TNG or DS9. Fixed that admiral's name for you, by the way.

No, much to my everlasting shame I did not hate watch until season 5. I don't know if you remember, but I mentioned having a crush on a second fictional character... and that totally was Andromeda, not because she looks like a walking heart attack, although that's certainly part of it (at least once they stopped making Lexa Doig wear those ridiculous jelly boobs because this show is for nerds and nerds love BOOBIES, get it? Did I say f*ck you, Tribute Entertainment yet?). Her character and character arc pushes all the right buttons for me*. Seasons three and four are terrible (although they hired Bob Engels to write the show, but not even he could fix that mess), but I didn't care, much. No matter how awful this got, those were still the characters I loved. But... eh. You can only watch Sailor Moon SuperS for so long until it grinds you down. I mean, the episodes were fun in the same way Hercules is. That's a decent analogy. Tribute fired the creative team and made Kevin Sorbo executive producer and the show ended up being Hercules in Space where he got every woman of the week. Eh. It's fun in its own way, but it's not the show I started to love. Not by a long shot. I still love the first two seasons (albeit the latter half is already a little... let's call it ugh, but it still works, mostly). The most hilarious problemy part is when there's a clip show at some point in time later, and all the scenes from the prior episodes shown have so much better dialogue and characterization than the ones that aren't flashback it almost physically hurts watching. If you ever feel the need to watch this dumpster fire go ahead, just don't expect any of the small plot points that come up to have a resolution. There's a time travel plot early on, but it's actually quite interesting (and has a major moral dilemma to resolve for three of the characters). Like I said, the first season and a half might just be my most favorite live action show, warts and all. Even without having a crush on Rommie (terrible nickname). It's just that the show ends there, unresolved, and a totally new one begins (the final episode of season two simply declares part of the ongoing storyline as having been resolved off-screen). *I'll make a separate post for this, I think. I did? How did I undersell this. I said aliens made this, and even the Ancient Aliens guys agree with me! Also, yeah, REALLY awful on Tiger's-Eye's part there. "Well if you don't want, I'll just assault you." Yeah, great, now GTFO please. Poor Naru. Or rather, poor alien made approximation of Naru.

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).