Anime - coasting on emotion rollers

[majestic]

This topic sure is going places.

Sure he's got a point. Still, whenever I'm at McD's or anything like it, the little fry bits that are at the bottom of the paper bag are always my favorite. They're crunchy but usually not burnt black.

I just realized that you only have like the video game con episode with Ami's horrible custome, Minako's focus episode and the last nice interaction episode before the storyline kicks off left. It'll be over really soon.

I'm not sure how, but we really need to rope someone else into watching Sailor Moon. Any takers?

edit:

Fun fact, I never understood why people watch reaction videos on YouTube, but this thread is essentially a reaction "text" for Sailor Moon, and it's been an absolute blast reading your thoughts. Heh. Guess I understand that now.

edit 2: Watching bits and pieces of the video con episode I realized that the costume isn't that bad, just that its skirt is super short and there's an extended shot of Ami's underwear. Sigh.

Edited April 19, 2021 by majestic

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

Wedge fries are death. And I hate to admit it, but KP probably has a point - in the real world, those "bits" that have been sitting in the fryer all day are very likely to be burnt fossils instead of the idealized version Steven always gets. Give me some good shoestring fries.

You are coming around to enlightenment.

I prefer thin fries and hash browns to thick fries like wedges or chunky fried potatoes. The latter is too much like a baked potato with a crispy outside, which isn't too good to eat by itself or with just a sauce. They can work covered in stuff or in like a burrito (bowl), but at that point you're not really eating fries.

17 minutes ago, majestic said:

This topic sure is going places.

Sure he's got a point. Still, whenever I'm at McD's or anything like it, the little fry bits that are at the bottom of the paper bag are always my favorite. They're crunchy but usually not burnt black.

I just realized that you only have like the video game con episode with Ami's horrible custome, Minako's focus episode and the last nice interaction episode before the storyline kicks off left. It'll be over really soon.

I'm not sure how, but we really need to rope someone else into watching Sailor Moon. Any takers?

Imagine having those sit around for at least a few hours then get fried again. That's The Bits.

Oh, and in Dorohedoro the villain loves mushrooms so that was on topic.

I dunno who else would want to watch Sailor Moon. Hurlsnot has kids, maybe we can convince him it's a wholesome show for them to watch. He would probably wouldn't want them watching Super S though.

[majestic]

10 minutes ago, ArtistFormerlyKnownasKP said:

I dunno who else would want to watch Sailor Moon. Hurlsnot has kids, maybe we can convince him it's a wholesome show for them to watch. He would probably wouldn't want them watching Super S though.

It by far and large is. We don't have to tell him about SuperS, that might put him off.

edit:

Wouldn't eat wedges on their own. Or fries for that matter. Or anything that's only potatoes. Except baked potatoes with a nice sauce. Hmmm. We used to make those in my parent's wood stove when we were kids. There are also streetfood stands in winter time offering these. Usually. Not this year. Meh.

Edited April 19, 2021 by majestic

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

1 minute ago, majestic said:

It by far and large is. We don't have to tell him about SuperS, that might put him off.

I don't want to inadvertantly expose kids to a pedophile horse though.

Regarding reaction videos, I have no idea why people watch those beyond bad taste. This thread is different because yall aren't colossal dip****s like youtubers (almost) unfailingly are. Additionally there's dialogue between people here, which significantly changes it from YouTube dip****s.

I think watching IC go into JoJo blind will be ****ing hilarious. Then again it is very difficult to prepare someone for

[Bartimaeus]

  

1 hour ago, majestic said:

Sure he's got a point. Still, whenever I'm at McD's or anything like it, the little fry bits that are at the bottom of the paper bag are always my favorite. They're crunchy but usually not burnt black.

That would be the ideal...but there's probably a reason actual real life places only give you a tiny amount of them, as opposed to Steven getting entire bags/trays of them. My impression was that "the bits" at Frymans is the leftover crud that actually gets stuck in the friar itself that they would normally clean out at the end of the day, whereas at a fast food place like McDonalds, they seem more like tiny chunks of fries that get especially well cooked as a result of that size.

It is a little sad that our Sailor Moon group watch is finally coming to an end. Heh: I started like a month before you, majestic, maybe like a couple before KP, and like 3-4 before InsaneCommander...and I'll be the last to finish. I also have three specials left - "Ami's First Love", "Make Up! Sailor Guardians", and the "SuperS Special". I'm a little afeared of what awaits me in the SuperS Special.

Well, how interesting 'reactions' are often part the content and part the individuals reacting. If all our reactions were completely brainless or even outright obnoxious, it wouldn't be nearly as fun, . I don't want to read 99% of the SU fanbase's reactions to anything SU...

(actual SU spoiler meant for majestic)

Spoiler

...if I happen across even one more pathetic plea for Mystery Girl to return, who was SO OBVIOUSLY A COMPLETE THROWAWAY CHARACTER, I might just blow my brains out - or even worse, someone theorizing that L and Steven might eventually be a thing SHUDDER

...but I can listen to something like Lindsay Ellis' thoughts for hours on something I don't even care the slightest about. So yeah, depends on the people, .

Edited April 19, 2021 by Bartimaeus

[majestic]

1 minute ago, ArtistFormerlyKnownasKP said:

  Hide contents

I think watching IC go into JoJo blind will be ****ing hilarious. Then again it is very difficult to prepare someone for

 

 

Spoiler

You know, I guessed von Stroheim not being dead for no other reason than that it would be totally whacky to have him come back, and then you mentioned a cyborg, and that sealed the deal. It's hilarious.

 

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

15 minutes ago, majestic said:

 

  Reveal hidden contents

You know, I guessed von Stroheim not being dead for no other reason than that it would be totally whacky to have him come back, and then you mentioned a cyborg, and that sealed the deal. It's hilarious.

 

The return of Rudolph von Stroheim as a cyborg Nazi with a pelvic thrust powered machine gun is as normal as Battle Tendency gets. Then Stardust Crusaders swaps hamon for STANDO POWAH and goes on an even wilder ride.

[majestic]

  

56 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

That would be the ideal...but there's probably a reason actual real life places only give you a tiny amount of them, as opposed to Steven getting entire bags/trays of them. My impression was that "the bits" at Frymans is the leftover crud that actually gets stuck in the friar itself that they would normally clean out at the end of the day, whereas at a fast food place like McDonalds, they seem more like tiny chunks of fries that get especially well cooked as a result of that size.

Sure thing, I wasn't entirely serious when I posted that, outside of actually liking the small bits from McD's more than their regular sized fries. That Steven's bits would be really terrible in real life is something else. Most of his food would probably be.

56 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

It is a little sad that our Sailor Moon group watch is finally coming to an end. Heh: I started like a month before you, majestic, maybe like a couple before KP, and like 3-4 before InsaneCommander...and I'll be the last to finish. I also have three specials left - "Ami's First Love", "Make Up! Sailor Guardians", and the "SuperS Special". I'm a little afeared of what awaits me in the SuperS Special.

Yeah, fittingly, IC's speed was the most... insane. He even blew through SuperS as if it wasn't terrible and sucks out all your motivation to watch. I never thought I would have this much fun revisiting Sailor Moon, even with SuperS factored in.

Not trying to rain on your parade here, but Ami's First Love is also a special that ran concurrently with the SuperS movie. But there's no Pegasus.

Wholeheartedly agee about the group coming to an end being sad. I'm sure there will be something else to watch and talk about, but... Sailor Moon was a pretty fun topic to discuss. Plus that anime will always be special for me of course.

56 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

(actual SU spoiler meant for majestic)

  Hide contents

...if I happen across even one more pathetic plea for Mystery Girl to return, who was SO OBVIOUSLY A COMPLETE THROWAWAY CHARACTER, I might just blow my brains out - or even worse, someone theorizing that L and Steven might eventually be a thing SHUDDER

...but I can listen to someone like Lindsay Ellis' thoughts for hours on something I don't even care the slightest about. So yeah, depends on the people, .

That's because Lindsay's a professional and knows what she's talking about. It's for the same reason I watch RLM's videos, but almost no other reviewers. They're all so full of... manure, and the more popular they become the worse it gets. I mean I get a laugh out of How It Should Have Ended or Honest Trailers for sure, but when I think of the people Lindsay Ellis used to make content with (or for) - Channel Awesome, dear god... there's a Nostalgia Critic episode where he talks to his reproduction organ which forces him to watch Sailor Moon because he's pretending to be 14 again and turned on by the transformation scenes. Ha ha, such funny.

It's the same for video games, the only guy whose videos I watch is Joseph Anderson. Well, and the speedrun documentaries by Summoning Salt, but that's something else entirely.

SU spoilers:

Spoiler

But Pearl got MYSTERY GIRL'S number. The point of the episode was not to show Pearl learning how to communicate with humans, but to set up a romance with one! Lapis and Steven I'm not even going to comment on. I love Lapis, and it's great that she's living with Peridot and slowly getting over the insanity in her life. The episode where Peridot bubbles the monster in the kindergarten and it appears back home over Lapis' head? That was one of the best, most heartwarming scenes in the show.

 

Edited April 20, 2021 by majestic

[InsaneCommander]

14 minutes ago, majestic said:

Yeah, fittingly, IC's speed was the most... insane. He even blew through SuperS as if it wasn't terrible and sucks out all your motivation to watch. I never thought I would have this much fun revisiting Sailor Moon, even with SuperS factored in.

I just wanted to get over with it.

[majestic]

Just now, InsaneCommander said:

I just wanted to get over with it.

SuperS or the show as a whole?

[InsaneCommander]

 

Just now, majestic said:

SuperS or the show as a whole?

SuperS. And I remembered that somebody mentioned in this thread that the creeps wouldn't stay for too long. That helped a lot.

Edited April 20, 2021 by InsaneCommander

[InsaneCommander]

Castlevania Season 1:

This is in the very beginning, so it is not a spoiler:

Spoiler

Less than 10 minutes in and I'm almost rooting for Dracula. If that really happened though, it would change with the monsters carrying dead babies in their mouths a little later in the first episode.

And the Darwin Awards go to... the people of Wallachia! Or at least those who ignored Dracula's warning and even threw a celebration of Lisa's execution.

The demon teaches the Bishop about decency: "Your life's work makes Him puke."

Edit: This is better than I expected. I'm glad the other seasons are longer.

 

Edited April 20, 2021 by InsaneCommander

[majestic]

What do you mean you're not rooting for Dracula?

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

I was disappointed by season 1 because I was expecting getting to watch Dracula raze Wallachia. Instead it was arguably a prequel to the real 1st season, but fun regardless.

SU. Garnet reveals one of her powers to Steven and he loses his mind.

[Bartimaeus]

tbf futurevision would probably make me lose my mind too, that would be terrifying seeing so many possibilities of death all around you. Especially for a weak human - we legitimately are capable of dying from incredibly small things every day. Garnet, on the other hand? Not much around that can kill her, and she's way more equipped to navigate past the few possibilities that pop up.

5 hours ago, majestic said:

Sure thing, I wasn't entirely serious when I posted that, outside of actually liking the small bits from McD's more than their regular sized fries. That Steven's bits would be really terrible in real life is something else. Most of his food would probably be.

I kinda...almost want fish stew pizza, until I actually really look at it.

there is so much wrong with this

5 hours ago, majestic said:

Wholeheartedly agee about the group coming to an end being sad. I'm sure there will be something else to watch and talk about, but... Sailor Moon was a pretty fun topic to discuss. Plus that anime will always be special for me of course.

It's further sad for especially me, because I'm...just not really an anime person, try as I might. I wish I weren't so...picky about stuff like this sometimes. There's just this very small range of anime 'styles' (more than just the art - tone, tropes, dialogue, character design/expressions/voices, etc.) that I can wrap my head around, and Sailor Moon just happened to be one of the very few that hit my brain right and made me legitimately want to give it a shot. I'm still gonna try to roll with Madoka because one, it's incredibly short; and two, the visuals, as I recall you mentioning way back when, are deliberately a bit antithetical to the content, and well, I've played Doki Doki Literature Club which does the same thing and very much enjoyed it even with the most ridiculously anime of visuals, so I gotta at least give it a chance. ...Also, it's short, .

Sailor Moon will always be special to me as well - never as much as it could be for you, of course, but to be delighted with and fall in love with an entire ensemble of characters, even in such an incredibly silly show like Sailor Moon, is such a rare occurrence for me, it's automatically special.

SU:

Spoiler

Man, you don't have any idea how many times I heard other people demand that Mystery Girl come back, while somehow completely ignoring that the character was deliberately a ~95% rip-off of RQ that didn't even get a VOICE - that should immediately tell you that that character will not matter if the show's not even going to let them speak. Not to mention that she was obviously fulfilling a function for the growth of another main character...read the freaking room, guys.

Yeah, that was a really sweet moment. Still kind of sad that her story didn't get resolved properly, though, especially with the lead-up to it (that forlorn humming of hers will always be etched into my brain, particularly given what it then segues into with PD - hell of a double whammy there).

 

[majestic]

15 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

t's further sad for especially me, because I'm...just not really an anime person, try as I might. I wish I weren't so...picky about stuff like this sometimes. There's just this very small range of anime 'styles' (more than just the art - tone, tropes, dialogue, character design/expressions/voices, etc.) that I can wrap my head around, and Sailor Moon just happened to be one of the very few that hit my brain right and made me legitimately want to give it a shot.

I'm hard pressed to come up with any anime I've watched that could compare to Sailor Moon, and certainly not when it comes to the combination of art style, tone and tropes. Not very surprising either. When it came out it was something new born out of old genres. There's been plenty of super sentai anime and magical girl stuff, but a combination of the two that transcended the limitations of either genre and that doesn't happen too often. In the end, even though really popular entertainment is often overrated, in this particular case there's a reason why many fans attribute liking anime at all to having seen Sailor Moon.

When I watch German clips of Sailor Moon, the YT commenters often state "This was the first anime I watched!" which is patently 100% untrue unless it was literally the first animated show you've seen on TV in Germany. The others usually don't follow such a distinctly anime animation style (even if Sailor Moon itself looks different, what with the budget and all), but were animes regardless.

I'm not entirely sure where Cardcaptor Sakura is going (if anywhere at all). There's an early episode where she's stuck at home on a Sunday because she traded household chores with her brother, and like two thirds of the episode are spent on Sakura cleaning with the help of her friend, and the monster of the week is a completely non-threatening tree that just happens to grow out of the basement.

That does sound boring, for some reason it isn't. It's completely adorable. The issue here is... the English dub is... oh boy. Bad. So bad.

Then there's revolutionary girl Utena on which, as you already know, a lot of people invovled with Sailor Moon worked on. But that's decidedly less fun. There are still fun scenes, but it's made to make you think, not roll on the floor laughing or having your brain melt by way of fremdschämen (great German word for what you call second hand embarrassment, literally "foreign shame" i.e. the shame you feel when someone else does or experiences something incredibly embarrassing).

Said it before, it bears repeating I guess, I know what you mean. If you had shown me screencaps of Steven Universe I wouldn't have watched it without an endorsement.

15 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

I'm still gonna try to roll with Madoka because one, it's incredibly short; and two, the visuals, as I recall you mentioning way back when, are deliberately a bit antithetical to the content, and well, I've played Doki Doki Literature Club which does the same thing and very much enjoyed it even with the most ridiculously anime of visuals, so I gotta at least give it a chance. ...Also, it's short, .

Madoka proper - that is, the show made movies, is a total of four hours, i.e. 12 episodes with a net runtime of roughly 20 minutes each. The third movie came later (haven't seen it yet). The visuals, yes, initially at least, everything about the first two episodes (almost) is meant to set up this typical magica girl anime setting. Except for the one fight scene that is there where Mami scares off a bunch of, uhm, magical things.

That look like this:
 

Spoiler

 

These little buggers are called Anthony. Not that the name ever comes up in the anime itself.

 

If nothing else, Madoka has a great antagonist that's being consistently voted into the top 10 anime villains of all time - and that's from a show that came out in 2011. It's also one of the few times - if not the only - where the antaganoist is both the most vile thing imaginable but completely free of malice or even evil intent (the actions arguably are, the intent, however, isn't). 

15 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Sailor Moon will always be special to me as well - never as much as it could be for you, of course, but to be delighted with and fall in love with an entire ensemble of characters, even in such an incredibly silly show like Sailor Moon, is such a rare occurrence for me, it's automatically special.

Indeed, that's fine. It's pretty much all any entertainment can hope for if consumed outside of formative times. 's the nature of things. Obviously I agree. Even the supporting cast is usually great, unless they're (ab)used by the writers to carry the idiot ball for some forced conflict. Yes, looking at you Haruka.

The most amazing thing is how the writers were able to occasionally make this both silly and meaningful at the same time. Hmmm. Time to watch episode 192 again.

Edited April 20, 2021 by majestic

[Bartimaeus]

I actually just re-watched 190, and was kind of marveling that they had such a serious episode that was also legitimately good. Sailor Moon has struggled its entire run with the more serious episodes, and it seems like they actually finally figured out how to make them more interesting and compelling in this final season. That or it's just because Sailor Stars is infinitely better than SuperS so even the story episodes are megatons better - I suppose that's a possibility too, . ...But no, really. Although apparently the last handful of episodes to end the series sucks(?), so that'll kind of diminish the achievement a little, but up until then, they had it down. Really, the only thing this season is missing is better and more meaningful individual character moments like S had - that aren't Usagi, that is. She is fantastic in pretty much every way in Sailor Stars, but the ideal would've been more of a team effort, I think. If it had also had that, this could've legitimately claimed to have been the best season...that, and if they had done the animation right, .

46 minutes ago, majestic said:

When I watch German clips of Sailor Moon, the YT commenters often state "This was the first anime I watched!" which is patently 100% untrue unless it was literally the first animated show you've seen on TV in Germany. The others usually don't follow such a distinctly anime animation style (even if Sailor Moon itself looks different, what with the budget and all), but were animes regardless.

Maybe there's a distinction between "watched" and "saw" here? You're translating from German, so I don't have any clue at all if it applies, but when I hear somebody say they "watched" a show, it carries the connotation they watched all of it or at least a significant stretch of it - no such connotation with "saw". The first anime I ever saw was...probably The Flying House or Superbook from old VHSes my mom recorded when she a kid/young teen (her mom and her were big into VHS recordings). My mom wasn't allowed to watch much when she was a kid (ultra-fundamentalist upbringing), but she was allowed to watch that sweet, sweet 80s Christian anime yo.

46 minutes ago, majestic said:

Then there's revolutionary girl Utena on which, as you already know, a lot of people invovled with Sailor Moon worked on. But that's decidedly less fun. There are still fun scenes, but it's made to make you think, not roll on the floor laughing or having your brain melt by way of fremdschämen (great German word for what you call second hand embarrassment, literally "foreign shame" i.e. the shame you feel when someone else does or experiences something incredibly embarrassing).

Yeah, I've got that one queued up for some time in the future. It seems weird and bizarre enough that maybe I enjoy it, even if the animation is very off-putting. Plus...yep, you guessed it - it's short! So we'll see, . And yeah, Sailor Moon can be pretty good at that fremdschamen thing...

I, uh, don't think I can ever get into Cardcaptor. There's a certain level of uncomfortableness I can cross into in the hopes of finding something I'll like...but I think Cardcaptor Sakura is sadly quite a bit beyond that, .

Edited April 20, 2021 by Bartimaeus

[InsaneCommander]

Forget Dracula. Now I'm rooting for Carmilla.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

I don't like comparing shows tbh. Too often it reminds me of comicbook fanbois arguing over which fictional character could beat the other, instead of just enjoying them for what they are. I also hate rankings and ratings, like what the **** does 84% actually mean? 16% of the show is garbage?

In terms of anime the ones that had the biggest impact (not necessarily because of quality or present enjoyment) on me are Digimon s3, Berserk (90s), Evangelion, JoJo, Devilman Crybaby, and now Sailor Moon. They're all very different in all respects and comparing them wouldn't get me anywhere, like maybe you could compare Digimon to Sailor Moon as children's anime....but they're too different and go completely different places to be a real comparison. Even along genres you get significantly different beats and styles that makes comparison really get in the way of enjoyment imo.

I watched a lot of SU. I still prefer Garnet, but Amethyst's background story really made me like her more. And Lil' Butler is really dumb so it should fit in with most real sitcoms.

[Bartimaeus]

2 hours ago, ArtistFormerlyKnownasKP said:

I don't like comparing shows tbh. Too often it reminds me of comicbook fanbois arguing over which fictional character could beat the other, instead of just enjoying them for what they are. I also hate rankings and ratings, like what the **** does 84% actually mean? 16% of the show is garbage?

In terms of anime the ones that had the biggest impact (not necessarily because of quality or present enjoyment) on me are Digimon s3, Berserk (90s), Evangelion, JoJo, Devilman Crybaby, and now Sailor Moon. They're all very different in all respects and comparing them wouldn't get me anywhere, like maybe you could compare Digimon to Sailor Moon as children's anime....but they're too different and go completely different places to be a real comparison. Even along genres you get significantly different beats and styles that makes comparison really get in the way of enjoyment imo.

I watched a lot of SU. I still prefer Garnet, but Amethyst's background story really made me like her more. And Lil' Butler is really dumb so it should fit in with most real sitcoms.

I don't rate shows*, but I do rate just about every single movie I watch. It's more about keeping track of what I've watched, relating how I felt about them to other things I've seen and how I rated those, not really any attempt at objectively measuring them. Also, people who rate stuff in increments of anything but 5% or 10% (e.g. 84%) are literal psychopaths that should be put down.

*Somewhat because I don't have a platform to do it on, somewhat because shows are much more difficult to encapsulate and rate compared to a 1-3 hour movie.

Yeah, Amethyst is thankfully more interesting and fun than just being the irreverent slob she initially appeared to be, .

Edited April 21, 2021 by Bartimaeus

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

8 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

I don't rate shows*, but I do rate just about every single movie I watch. It's more about keeping track of what I've watched, relating how I felt about them to other things I've seen and how I rated those, not really any attempt at objectively measuring them.

I have problems translating my enjoyment to a ratio. I can talk about how I enjoyed something but quantifying it like 90% is beyond me. Maybe I'm just a weirdo.

S1 of SU. Power outages, giant hands, and joyrides. It is a very silly and fun show that manages to feel sweet. Of the main group I'd say Garnet is the most consistently funny but Pearl's insane moments are the best. Favorite supporting character is Ronaldo.

[Bartimaeus]

Actually, I had trouble figuring out how I wanted to rate stuff until I had a large enough sample size that it made relative comparisons actually make sense to me. It was only when I had at least over a hundred different ratings that I started feeling more comfortable with how I was rating stuff. A single 90% for one of my all-time favorite movies has practically zero meaning (even to me, the one rating!) without the context of a hundred other titles that I like somewhere between a little less and a lot less sitting underneath it. Even now, my ratings for stuff that is below 80% (80% means "great" and requires that it be a favorite of mine to receive a rating that high - it's a special cutoff for me, I don't hand out >=80%s very often), a lot of stuff really could wiggle up or down 5% if I start overthinking them which tells you it's by no mean an objective measure...but everything's relatively where it should be now and gives a sort of model of what I like and what I don't like.

Congratulations on finishing S1, and glad you like it. It'll be somewhat of a return to normalcy for a bit to start S2 (something to keep in mind with the show is that Cartoon Network obligated SU to have a certain number of "no meaningful dependency upon the main plot because we don't want to confuse the KEEDS with too much of that PLOT stuff" episodes each season - it's a lot less in seasons past 1, thankfully, but they're still there and some of them are absolutely the least interesting out of their respective seasons).

Also, something that is objective: Birdmom is the best.

Spoiler

 

 

 

Edited April 21, 2021 by Bartimaeus

[majestic]

13 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

I actually just re-watched 190, and was kind of marveling that they had such a serious episode that was also legitimately good. Sailor Moon has struggled its entire run with the more serious episodes, and it seems like they actually finally figured out how to make them more interesting and compelling in this final season. That or it's just because Sailor Stars is infinitely better than SuperS so even the story episodes are megatons better - I suppose that's a possibility too, . ...But no, really. Although apparently the last handful of episodes to end the series sucks(?), so that'll kind of diminish the achievement a little, but up until then, they had it down. Really, the only thing this season is missing is better and more meaningful individual character moments like S had - that aren't Usagi, that is. She is fantastic in pretty much every way in Sailor Stars, but the ideal would've been more of a team effort, I think. If it had also had that, this could've legitimately claimed to have been the best season...that, and if they had done the animation right, .

I wonder if that has anything to do with the manga only having 10 issues instead of the 13 or 14 that Naoko Takeuchi usually did. Maybe they thought they'd be getting more episodes, because it's strange that only Minako got an episode where she is the clear focus that also deals with her ongoing problems of being a school girl, wanting to be an idol and having to save the world. Ami spending time with the professor who found a comet wasn't a very good focus piece (and not a great episode either - not bad, just not great).

It's also possible that the writers didn't really know what to do with the girls and therefore only gave Minako a S-Style episode. I'm almost glad they just made Makoto be nervous on TV, which makes sense for her, and didn't use her as punching bag or have her yell at people that have done nothing wrong.

The last handful of episodes... KP hated them for reasons I don't entirely understand yet, because I'm like six episodes into NGE now, and while Shinji is a little whingy at times, so far he hasn't really been grating or problematic. The largest issue is pacing. There's only enough content in the final six episodes for maybe three. So there's some downtime in between the action, and then everything is crammed into the final episode. It would really have been nice to have an episode or two after the final confrontation, like in S.

And finally the animation, well, there are bits and pieces that look pretty good, and others are consistently bad. Haruka for instance, I don't think there's any shot of her where she doesn't look like a bug eyed alien. I think almost the entire animation team left Toei after SuperS (Ikuko Ito certianly did, as well as any animators that left to do Revolutionary Girl Utena), so they probably hastily slapped a team together.

18 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Maybe there's a distinction between "watched" and "saw" here? You're translating from German, so I don't have any clue at all if it applies, but when I hear somebody say they "watched" a show, it carries the connotation they watched all of it or at least a significant stretch of it - no such connotation with "saw". The first anime I ever saw was...probably The Flying House or Superbook from old VHSes my mom recorded when she a kid/young teen (her mom and her were big into VHS recordings). My mom wasn't allowed to watch much when she was a kid (ultra-fundamentalist upbringing), but she was allowed to watch that sweet, sweet 80s Christian anime yo.

I'd have to go back and check the comments, but it's possible. It's just that there's a lot of animated TV on air here that's anime without looking like modern era anime. There's the obvious stuff, of course, like Naruto, Pokemon, Dragonball or the two football shows that I never really liked. One of the biggest staples of German children's TV ever since the 70ies is Maya the Bee. It's so ubiquitous you could easily claim that anyone who grew up with German TV watched that show in one form or the other. Long before Sailor Moon. I was more thinking that they don't know any better because anime equals funny Japanese names and big eyes.

I'm pretty sure The Flying House ran here too, but I've never seen much of it. I got lucky and was left alone to watch what I wanted. Within reason, of course, I didn't see Nightmare on Elm Street befor 13 or so.

18 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Yeah, I've got that one queued up for some time in the future. It seems weird and bizarre enough that maybe I enjoy it, even if the animation is very off-putting. Plus...yep, you guessed it - it's short! So we'll see, . And yeah, Sailor Moon can be pretty good at that fremdschamen thing...

I, uh, don't think I can ever get into Cardcaptor. There's a certain level of uncomfortableness I can cross into in the hopes of finding something I'll like...but I think Cardcaptor Sakura is sadly quite a bit beyond that, .

Utena... the character designs really do take some getting used to.

Concerning Cardcaptor Sakura, I understand that. It does look the way it does and the English dub is terrible.

[InsaneCommander]

Castlevania S2 and S3 episodes 1 and 2:
 

Spoiler

 

I'm enjoying the series, but the resolution of S2 seemed very abrupt. Several episodes with the heroes stuck in a library and the vampires scheming (or maybe only Carmilla, since the others, including Godbrand, don't seem very bright. And then they go to the castle and kill Dracula relatively quickly.

Also, he was too depressed. Come on, where is the evil bastard from the games?

Surprisingly, Carmilla and Hector survived S2. But maybe her brains didn't, since she didn't need to treat him that bad on her way home. He doesn't seem to be much mature or smart, so I imagine Lenore can pretend (or be) a charming nice girl and get him to do what they want without much effort.

Good to know not everyone is stupid and people understand that the Church screwed things up when they burned Lisa. But those monks seem to have taken it in an extreme way.

 

 

[majestic]

Rewatched Sailor Moon episode 192.
 

Spoiler

 

The tone of it all is also more serious than usual. Minako isn't goofing around much... but she gets to sing.

Dear reader, I hope you didn't expect an essay when you clicked on this spoiler. Maybe later.