majestic

Sure, like nothing about this first episode was creepy as hell, not sure what I was talking about there. I don't know how well it would work without the first two seasons, but there's a pretty big time skip in between and most exposition in early StrikerS flows pretty organically. The series falls apart in the final five episodes when they either ran out of time or lost track of what they wanted to do and turned the villain into a Bond level numpty in both exposition and behaviour, but until then that was actually a pretty decent watch. The fanservice is just plain bad instead of eye-gougingly bad because they had the common sense to, you know, no longer use nine year olds for most of it. Like, if you want to check out the early seasons and have misgivings about loli-scenes just leave out episode 5 of the first season. It's also a lot slower paced and not as much about awesome battles as the Wikipedia entry makes it look.

Well, for that, I have to bring out an old friend...

Suddenly, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS doesn't seem so bad, huh?

I was serious with the suggestion though. It's hard to find something as well written as the first two CCS seasons. Might not be your cup of tea, but the craftsmanship that went into the series is almost immaculate. The third season/second story arc wasn't as strong, but still pretty good.

12 issues with each between 150 and 200 pages, apparently. I am uncertain if that is a commitment I want to make right now. Plus a prologue issue with another 180 pages. Yay...

Watch Card Captor Sakura on Netflix, thank me later.

The actual term for the genre is ero guro (エログロ) from shortened from erotic grotesque to erogro and mangled through Japanese pronunciation. Guro is just shorthand, but often mistaken to mean gore (but that would be goru, not guro). Guro as a word is part of a phenomenon where vaguely English sounding terms appear in other languages that are however not of English origin, or have vastly different meanings. Since I'm working from home today, I had to put "Home Office" in my calendar so people know I'm not at the office. Sounds like it might be a term taken from English, but hey, it's not. Just like Handy for mobile phone, or a couple of other things. Well, lesson over. Well, in that case, I stand corrected. I'll just read the manga and re-asses then, but the anime part never gave off the feeling of being an NGE wannabe, outside of messed up people controlling starfish alien entities with half a will of their own. Well, putting it that way...

Not at all, I don't understand how you got that impression.

The nitpicker in me wants to point out that Narutaru isn't guro, just because it contains violence and nudity (none of which is in any way erotic, very, very far from it). Hence anything that character says about it can be dismissed out of hand. Being less nice about it, it's probably someone who enjoyed Rebuild. That seems like a reasonable assessment.

Narutaru, the anime is... incomplete. The adaptation only covers half the manga, apparently. Whether nobody watched that psyched out series or if the creators had misgivings about adapting the rest of the material which is apparently even worse than: is up in the air, as there are no real official statements from what I could see. I guess I have to read the manga (and deal with stupid fan translations, while there was a complete run of the manga in German it is simply not easily available, and the English version got canned after issue #6 of 12, which contains the above scene) if I want to know what will happen, on the other hand, I've already read that the ending of the manga is similar to what happens during The End of Evangelion, except Narutaru's ending is supposedly depressing (as opposed to the uplifting way that TEoE ended ). Browsed through the first issues, it's incredible how faithful the anime adaptation is. Too bad it's such low quality animation, the sound effects really enhanced the atmosphere. I also read that in France, the manga was marketed as shounen for a bit because the publisher thought it would be a fun school hijinks story with a cute little monster pet. Yeah. Guess how well that went.

Well, Australia's genius loci has been trying to kill you guys off through dangerous wildlife for a while now. Call that an adaptation of means, if you will. You better get out of that alien hellscape while you can.

Narutaru: This is sure going places. Well, I'm going to have a field day when the metaphorical school shooting starts in the aftermath of this particular fun episode. edit:

It helps to bear in mind that one of the ruling parties at the time was the FPÖ, a party that officially signed a treaty of "cooperation and friendship" with United Russia (which they recently declared to be null and void, for whatever reason, I can't quite figure it out... ). That being said, to borrow something a poster here used to say all the time: "Don't look at me, I voted for the other guy." I can't stand the ÖVP and I never once bought into the Kurz hype, and there are plenty of posts from me where I express my rather low opinion of the party, so I'm probably not the best person to ask what the appeal of that Trump in a slim-fit suit was.

Unhealthy takeout day at work: Productivity projection after consumption: uncertain, but tending towards zero. Needless to say, I sorta feel, uhm, sick. Just in case anyone's wondering what the item on the right side really is, that's deep fried chicken with bacon on top of a massive amount of cheese fries. Not sure why that is under 'sides' on the menu, but... I feel like I'm going to explode. In more ways than one.

Well, at least the potential sentences are appropriate. We jailed a former Russian spy for like three years. Good job.

The classic. The moon's full, Shiina is out on her creepy ass Patrick flying around, when a witch shows up and says hi. Can't have a full moon without witches or werewolves, right? I'm not even going to try to comment on the imagery here.

Not giving Amentep an earful, but I'm not going to take to Twatter to twatter out a reply, so he gets it here. Actually that semi cohesive pseudo-essay began as a one liner nitpicking about R not beginning with Chibi-Usa falling from the sky until I realized that she could potentially be watching the series with an episode guide that leaves out the filler, and everthing else just followed from there. Might as well just go and watch Crystal to have your brain melted like that. I said it before, I can see getting a head start with the series by just watching episodes 1, 8, 10 and 13, but even that is questionable. Sure, it drops Usagi's most annoying early moments, but it also removes a few episodes that were just plain fun (like those completely mad furry glowy-eyed pet things). But dropping all the good episodes in favor of getting to BRACK RADY early? Yeah, count me out. I'd rather watch Makoto tidy up Motoki's room and cook for Ali. Luckily, I am only aware of Scrappy Doo by pop-cultural osmosis. Scooby Doo did air every now and then, but never the episodes with Scrappy, and I am certainly not going to subject myself to them just to figure out just how wrong the comparison really is. I'll take your word for it. It sure is a curious position to be in, understanding both sides of an argument by personal experience. Chibi-Usa occupies a Schrödinger's space in my brain as I remember loathing her inclusion in the series (never mind hating her character), and actually enjoying her presence.

First of all, the obligatory and necessary nitpick: Sailor Moon R begins with the Doom Tree filler arc, not with Chibi-Usa appearing. I hope this doesn't mean that this Erica Henderson character is following some episode guide that recommends dropping the filler episodes. Such things are great for animes like Bleach where there's filler arcs in the filler arcs to pad out filler seasons that are generally of much lower quality than episodes based on the manga because the manga writer is better than the show's writers. For Sailor Moon, that is not the case: not watching the Doom Tree arc will make you miss out on some of the funniest episodes in the series, not to mention some of the most heartwarming scenes. Worse yet: skipping the Sailor Stars filler arc would make one miss out on the only well written story arc of the entire anime. It's not a coincidence that both filler arcs are significantly better in terms of storytelling than the rest of the anime for the simple reason of not being shackled to the confused mess the source material is, which by all accounts has become popular in spite of being a mess (and the reprints of the mangas contain a quasi-apology by the writer for the mess that it is, so this isn't just some generic internet hate). However that has happened will remain an eternal mystery to me. Now, as for Chibi-Usa: I can say from personal experience that one's reaction to Chibi-Usa is also colored by life experiences and maturity. The first time I watched the anime, which was way back when it first aired, I hated Chibi-Usa with a passion, at least while she was around in R, which is to say, well, the entire time after she shows up. When she eventually comes back in the next season, she is a character that gets enough agency to be interesting even if you didn't like her initially. The second time around I wondered why I reacted as badly to her presence. She's a child, and her interactions with Usagi show how much of a child Usagi still is too - which makes sense, with her being 14 at the time. Chibi-Usa acts in a (often incredibly) stupid manner all the time, but that is because she's a child running from a traumatic experience. More specifically, she's Usagi's child, after all, and it only makes sense for her to take after her mother. She eventually becomes the foil used to highlight Usagi's own character development, but she's a disruptive and foreign element that can feel out of place, and if it does, then that is quite bad for one's enjoyment of the series, especially when her actions threaten the characters you've come to love simply because she does not trust them, even though they clearly can be trusted (and it is obvious to literally everyone, even children, that Chibi-Usa is the child of Mamoru and Usagi, so stop being stupid Chibi-Usa and understand that, why don't you?). Chibi-Usa is fine, outside of everything that happens in Sailor Moon SuperS, and the less is said about that, the better. Arguably it is an inverse case of her appearance in R, the greater one's life experience and maturity are, the creepier the contents of Sailor Moon SuperS become. Superficially, her romance with a horse can be seen as, well, romantic, and going by YouTube comments from clips, it often is. One can also see the Amazon Trio's acts of looking at the dreams of their victims as exactly that. Or, well, one can see it for what it is. A season long metaphor for sexual assault and pedophilia, because that horse 'befriends' Chibi-Usa in much the same way a pedophile would groom a little girl, and the less is said about the Amazon Trio's actions the better. SuperS is basically what one gets as a studio when you ask your writers to revert the natural changes to your characters that happen over time back to their more or less super childish season one predispositions even when they don't want to and it makes no sense to do so. Since there are more people aware of Harry Potter these days, I suppose, one can use Harry as an example, imagine what would have happened if Warner Brothers had asked the filmmakers to go back to making films similar to the first Harry Potter movie - after HP & the Goblet of Fire. Granted, the result could not have been much worse than Order of the Phoenix, but let's not let that ruin the metaphor. Little wonder that almost the entire creative team was replaced for the final season. I still remember groaning so hard when Chibi-Usa shows up out of the blue after only a few episodes in S, but the way she integrates into the team and the series is much better in the third season. Like 25 years later it was so much easier to see this as intentional and making sense than it was back then. It's obvious for the viewers who Chibi-Usa is and that she should just tell everything to her parents, but it's not that obvious to her. Eh.

Is the Unicorn of War one of the skins Abeloth wears?

That was the general idea.

No, but there is a powerful witch here. She is called Abeloth, and we need @Hurlshort's daugther to defeat her. He should bring her to us. Bring her to the forum. Yes.

We all are.

I also considered the first three episodes of Book of Boba Fett to be great and much better than the stuff with the Mandalorian - basic pattern analysis says that means I should enjoy Obi-Wan Kenobi. The epitaph of a wasted billion dollars.

Okay, that convinced me to watch Obi-Wan Kenobi.