Anime and Manga - I respect the first human to have eaten a mushroom

[Sarex]

Who here actively reads manga?

[Amentep]

22 minutes ago, Sarex said:

Who here actively reads manga?

I'm currently reading Glepnir by Sun Takeda and any of the collections of Junji Ito's work.

I have the first trade of Berserk by Miura on my 'to read' list.  I'm probably going to pick-up Umezu's Orochi that Viz is reprinting since I liked (?) Drifting Classroom.

 

[Sarex]

13 minutes ago, Amentep said:

I'm currently reading Glepnir by Sun Takeda and any of the collections of Junji Ito's work.

I have the first trade of Berserk by Miura on my 'to read' list.  I'm probably going to pick-up Umezu's Orochi that Viz is reprinting since I liked (?) Drifting Classroom.

How do you like Glepnir so far?

[Amentep]

Just now, Sarex said:

How do you like Glepnir so far?

I'm enjoying it.  Its definitely pretty 'out there' at times, but I like the characters and I'm very curious about how the central mysteries are going to play out.

[Sarex]

4 minutes ago, Amentep said:

I'm enjoying it.  Its definitely pretty 'out there' at times, but I like the characters and I'm very curious about how the central mysteries are going to play out.

Have you ever heard of Fire Punch or Chainsaw Man? They are a little (much) more 'out there', but are pretty interesting and engaging.

[Amentep]

1 minute ago, Sarex said:

Have you ever heard of Fire Punch or Chainsaw Man? They are a little (much) more 'out there', but are pretty interesting and engaging.

Haven't heard of Fire Punch, but have heard only good things about Chainsaw Man. 

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

Gurren Lagann. It reminds me of Kill La Kill in terms of tone and fan service. It's fun enough.

1 hour ago, Sarex said:

Who here actively reads manga?

I haven't read it in a while, but I do read manga sometimes.

38 minutes ago, Sarex said:

Have you ever heard of Fire Punch or Chainsaw Man?

Is that the one where a guy who could regenerate got attacked by fire and now burns eternally? If so, I've heard very good things but haven't read it yet.

[Gorth]

Finished episode 15 of Ergo Proxy... a few episodes of bizarre musings over existentialism and an episode, I suspect was an info dump of sorts. The Nightmare Quiz show. Without introduction, Vincent, Re-l and their diminutive sidekick, the cogito infected autoreiv "Pino" (which I suspect is some kind of reference to Pinocchio) are in the middle of a jeopardy show. If they win by scoring enough points, the quiz show host die, if they don't get enough points, the contestants die. Most of the questions are trivia type questions, but every now and then, a relevant question gets sneaked in, like how many Proxies exists and the correct answer is 300. In an exciting finale, Vincent just manages to beat the score before the time is out (and the quiz show host gets killed, after 20+ successful shows)

It ends as abruptly as it began and next episode picks up where the story left them, currently stranded in the wasteland on their way to Mosk, as the wind has died down. For all their tech, their vessel is wind powered and the dead calm leaves the little group in the middle of nowhere. Probably my favourite episode so far, as it's almost like a text book examination of the psychology behind the group mechanics. Pino, the autoreiv is acting like her original programming, like a slightly unruly 8 year old girl, Re-l tries to figure out more about Vincent, which is now known to be a Proxy, even if he doesn't seem to be aware of it or remember it himself. She complains about leaving the toilet seat up is how he asserts his manliness and pushing him off their vessel and watching him fall results in a note in her book "Vincent is left handed" because of the way he braced for his fall. Probable the first time during the show so far I laughed out loud

Oh yeah, Re-l insist that her 3 minutes of water rationing for hair washing is not good enough and she wants 2 minutes of Vincents, because he's got short hair and can wash his much faster

The whole episode is just so well put together, how they get stressed and get on each others nerves. Some definitely more than others. In the end, the wind suddenly starts picking up again and they are on their way.

There is definitely something fishy about this otherwise nice Vincent guy!....

Vincent in his Proxy form...

 

Re-l's head is just about to explode, trying to work out the mysteries of what the Proxies are and why they exist

 

Edit: Re-l was originally accompanied by "Iggy", her entourage (which is the term used for personal aide type autoreiv's as far as I could work out) when setting out searching for Vincents trail in the wasteland. But he was infected and developed personality disorders, like both having a crush on his master and wanting to dispose of her. He ended up in... a non functional state.

[Sarex]

50 minutes ago, Amentep said:

Haven't heard of Fire Punch, but have heard only good things about Chainsaw Man. 

It's the mangakas previous work. Chainsaw Man is him dialing down on the weird to be more mainstream.

22 minutes ago, KP wants Blue Velvet said:

Gurren Lagann. It reminds me of Kill La Kill in terms of tone and fan service. It's fun enough.

It only gets better. Takes a little to ramp up.

23 minutes ago, KP wants Blue Velvet said:

I haven't read it in a while, but I do read manga sometimes.

It's the superior medium.

23 minutes ago, KP wants Blue Velvet said:

Is that the one where a guy who could regenerate got attacked by fire and now burns eternally? If so, I've heard very good things but haven't read it yet.

Yes. You should, if only for the experience. Chainsaw Man will get an anime so you can consume it like that.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

4 minutes ago, Sarex said:

It's the superior medium.

15 minutes ago, Sarex said:

It only gets better. Takes a little to ramp up.

I left off at the start of the episode where they encounter what I think is a cult. They made the girl cover up.

15 minutes ago, Sarex said:

Yes

I wanted to check that out but never made the time. After I read JoJolion I'll give it a go.

[Amentep]

Old thread:

 

[Sarex]

If someone wants to get in on something new to follow along on a weekly basis, this one is great too. From one of the assistants of Tatsuki Fujimoto (creator of Fire Punch)

https://mangaplus.shueisha.co.jp/viewer/1009921

[majestic]

Lady Asuka, Episode 19: More interactions, an attempted murder and a 43 year old guy kissing the hand of a 12 year old girl, which I presume is code for 18th century molestation*. Technically her mother pawned the 12 year old off for a political marriage but… overall the episode was also better than the first 17. Running naked through a sea of nettles is more fun than the first 17 episodes, so being a bit better is perhaps not saying as much as it appears to.

*

Spoiler

Guy drags the girl into a darkened room, says that she should not worry and he's "just" going to "kiss her hand" and that she will "like it" and that she'll be his soon anyway. He kisses her hand, then leaves. Next scene has the girl obsessively washing her hand and later throwing herself off a clock tower. I'm pretty sure that was a rape metaphor, the imageary fits with a lot of accounts I've read and heard about.

 

Edited April 11, 2022 by majestic

[Bartimaeus]

4 hours ago, majestic said:

I've thought about this. I think that's the same reason why the first two seasons of Nanoha were so well received vs. StrikerS, while I would consider StrikerS to be the apex of the series - the complaints by watchers about it mirror those of The Vision of Escaflowne, like trying to cram a storyline barely enough for 13 episodes into a 26 episode anime, and it hence feeling slow. I don't entirely get it, because neither The Vision of Escaflowne nor StrikerS ever felt slow for me, but then again, neither did Sailor Moon (outside of SuperS), and oh boy do people complain about the filler and the storyline not advancing.

I'm all about that journey, and the journey sure is a lot sweeter when you take a little time to have nice character moments, flesh everything out, and just give everybody some room to breathe rather than rush full speed through a plot. All those nice little Hitomi + Merle moments and such woulda never happened otherwise. Ironically, as you said, the show was actually a bit too fast from that perspective, but knowing that...one, this was originally supposed to be a full-on shonen, and two, they lost 13 episodes after the story had been finalized and had to rush to try to make it work, both sure make it easier to forgive, particularly since...you know, the show is still pretty great, . 

4 hours ago, majestic said:

Like flying fortresses, a shounen deuteragonist, the show steadily but ever increasingly losing touch with being grounded near the end? Yeah, there's a number of things that would bother me in a different anime, and some silliness that I'd make overy long complain-posts out of for other series. I caught an episode of Voyager on TV the other day, and while I used to think that Voyager is the least consistend and worst of the old Star Trek shows (prior to Enterprise, at least - not counting all the nuTrek), the episode was about some technobabble and Voyager punching a hole into a quantum singularity's event horizon.

Yes...or the sheer amount of times that silly emperor repeated himself about his ridiculous perfect future and being able or not able to see it or whatever... We have a very limited run-time here, we don't need you to spend a minute of every episode giving us extremely vague updates about what you can or cannot see, okay? Stuff that would annoy me if the show didn't have a bunch of other things that I like going for it...but like you/Jay said - when something's working for you, it's working, and never mind the details.

4 hours ago, majestic said:

Has anyone ever complained about Evangelion being tediously slow? Because I feel like that has roughly the same pace, except it has a little more* action maybe.

Good question, I'm really not sure. HoonDing had a whole rant about how Hitomi was unbearably ugly. Maybe it's less "the show is tediously slow" and more "the show is tediously slow...given that I do not much like or care about the characters and their interactions". Why one does/doesn't like or care about any given character can be pretty complicated - visual appeal is certainly one factor, although how it applies in all of its different facets from one person to the next, especially in regards to an inherently artistic medium like animation, is very difficult to pin down. I'm certainly no exception in that I'm drawn to certain art styles and character types/styles a lot more than others*, so I get it. I mean, I don't really get how one can look at Twelve Kingdoms and somehow think literally any single element of it looks more visually appealing on any level than Escaflowne, but I at least get it in the sense that I understand that some people clearly prefer that over Escaflowne for equally arbitrary preferences as my own, .

Legitimately one of the best parts of Wings of Honneamise for me was Manna mean-mugging everything and everyone the entire film. That's a pretty bizarre and arbitrary thing to enjoy on a visual level, but for some reason, I really did - I genuinely got great delight out of it, and it'll be something I remember for some time. For a whole lot of other people (well, particularly men/boys), it's all about women's chests and such instead...meanwhile, @Amentep and I had a whole discussion about how that was the most horrifying and unnecessary part of the film. Some of us pretty clearly speak in different film language from one another, even if we all happen to be able to use English to try to convey the specific film language that we use and prefer, .

*Seriously, trying to use your generic male gaze sex appeal has pretty much the complete opposite intended effect 99% of the time for me - I'll almost always hate and be grossed out by it, and there's a high probability of it greatly taking away from what I'm watching. Some love it for reasons I'll never be able to get, while others are somehow able to just pay it little heed and enjoy the rest of whatever they're watching without hardly thinking about it. Alas, not I.

Edited April 11, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[majestic]

22 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

I'm all about that journey, and the journey sure is a lot sweeter when you take a little time to have nice character moments, flesh everything out, and just give everybody some room to breathe rather than rush full speed through a plot. All those nice little Hitomi + Merle moments and such woulda never happened otherwise. Ironically, as you said, the show was actually a bit too fast from that perspective, but knowing that...one, this was originally supposed to be a full-on shonen, and two, they lost 13 episodes after the story had been finalized and had to rush to try to make it work, both sure make it easier to forgive, particularly since...you know, the show is still pretty great, . 

It's also probably related to the impression of the first few episodes, before Allen, Hitomi and Van arrive at the capital everyone's pretty busy being on the run and not dying. Understandably so, but afterwards the character elements got a bit more time to breathe. I'm guessing that's the point where it lost the shounen crowd, unless they turned off the first episode because why am I watching a girl and her attempts to run 100m in less than 13 seconds?

The show's pretty great, yeah. It has to be with everything it got away with.

22 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Yes...or the sheer amount of times that silly emperor repeated himself about his ridiculous perfect future and being able or not able to see it or whatever... We have a very limited run-time here, we don't need you to spend a minute of every episode giving us extremely vague updates about what you can or cannot see, okay? Stuff that would annoy me if the show didn't have a bunch of other things that I like going for it...but like you/Jay said - when something's working for you, it's working, and never mind the details.

Well, hey, the emperor must stick to some tropes, at least. Always saying the same thing isn't that uncommon for villains. Don't fail me again, Jadeite!

22 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Good question, I'm really not sure.

There's maybe something else, I don't think it's possible for the most vocal part of the fanbase to complain about NGE in some manner, because it's a classic you just have to like to be part of the crowd. The insane success of the more fast paced and somewhat more straightforward Rebuild speaks volumes, but who knows how long that's going to last, or perhaps I haven't looked properly. There must be some people who watched Rebuild and then went for the classic and said something like: What's with the boring talking, where's the LARGE SCALE CGI MADNESS?

22 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

HoonDing had a whole rant about how Hitomi was unbearably ugly. Maybe it's less "the show is tediously slow" and more "the show is tediously slow...given that I do not much like or care about the characters and their interactions". Why one does/doesn't like or care about any given character can be pretty complicated - visual appeal is certainly one factor, although how it applies in all of its different facets from one person to the next, especially in regards to an inherently artistic medium like animation, is very difficult to pin down. I'm certainly no exception in that I'm drawn to certain art styles and character types/styles a lot more than others*, so I get it. I mean, I don't really get how one can look at Twelve Kingdoms and somehow think literally any single element of it looks more visually appealing on any level than Escaflowne, but I at least get it in the sense that I understand that some people clearly prefer that over Escaflowne for equally arbitrary preferences as my own, .

I'm not going to pretend to be able to look past visual misgivings, all in all, because there are instances where I can't, but Girls' Last Tour was fairly eye opening. I never thought I'd be able to like that based on how it looks, but here I am. One of the good things that came out of this thread is that I successfully branched out of my comfort zone a little. Kinda agree with The Vision of Escaflowne over the looks of Twelve Kingdoms. Escaflowne has a relatively strange mix of character art and sometimes combines elements from different eras in a way that I can at least understand if it's not exactly liked.

Particularily compared with the looks of other mid 90ies shows.

23 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Legitimately one of the best parts of Wings of Honneamise for me was Manna mean-mugging everything and everyone the entire film. That's a pretty bizarre and arbitrary thing to enjoy on a visual level, but for some reason, I really did - I genuinely got great delight out of it, and it'll be something I remember for some time. For a whole lot of other people (well, particularly men/boys), it's all about women's chests and such instead...meanwhile, @Amentep and I had a whole discussion about how that was the most horrifying and unnecessary part of the film. Some of us pretty clearly speak in different film language from one another, even if we all happen to be able to use English to try to convey the specific film language that we use and prefer, .

I still need to finish that film, but the first thiry minutes left me rather unimpressed - with the film, not with the visuals, so I still can't contribute anything to the (attempted?) rape scene discussion. The one thing I really get is how the little things sometimes are all that's needed for enjoyment, but that happens more often in music for me than in film or TV shows, but even there. Heck, I watched two full seasons of Kevin Sorbo ruining Andromeda not just because any OCD issue forced me to, but beause the memories of the characters I used to like made not hate watching the series. Up to a certain point, at least. Nowadays on rewatches, oh dear...

23 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

*Seriously, trying to use your generic male gaze sex appeal has pretty much the complete opposite intended effect 99% of the time for me - I'll almost always hate and be grossed out by it, and there's a high probability of it greatly taking away from what I'm watching. Some love it for reasons I'll never be able to get, while others are somehow able to just pay it little heed and enjoy the rest of whatever they're watching without hardly thinking about it. Alas, not I.

It's one area where I am more forgiving - or perhaps less... or sometimes not bothered at all - when it comes to live action over animation, and video games. Way back when I refused to play the original Tomb Raider games because everyone was talking about Lara Croft's triangular, ginormous pixel cleavage and hot pants. The only Tomb Raider game I've played so far was the first of the remakes that was free on Steam a while back. Lara has regular sized assets in this one, but overall while I wouldn't have minded paying money for the game, it's been just as well that it was free.

The difference is, in reality, yes, you still have male gaze shots - regardless of the gender of the characters involved, because oh boy, Andromeda sure made use of Kevin Sorbo's and Keith Hamilton Cobb's phsysique at the time... actually... I think initially, the two were more used for shirtless workout scenes than the girls on the crew were part of fanservice, Lexa Doig's jelly boobs aside - but outside of plastic surgery, nobody created the characters involved just for that.

Lara was designed from the ground up to appeal to mouthbreathers to increase sales. I'm pretty sure the games were good outside of having tank controls, but seriously... also, when playing MMOs, I can't count how often I've heard that the only reason people play female characters is because "if I'm going to stare at an ass for hours, it should at least be a pretty female one", like what? Yeah, I don't want to play with you guys.

Still, I'm probably not the best person to judge this.

Spoiler

Remember when I once said that I had a bit of a crush on Andromeda, the character? At the time Lexa Doig also got a role on Stargate SG1, and I was looking forward to see more of her. The funny thing is, up unilt that point I thought I had a crush on Lexa Doig the actress, not Andromeda the character, but her appearances on SG1 taught me a rather different lesson when I noticed that I didn't care at all for Dr. Lam, her problems with her family on the show or anything at all.

So yeah, however this attraction stuff is working for other people, it's not for me, so what do I know.

All I know is that video game and anime fanservice bother me more than live action fanservice, even though the real life one is probably worse for everyone involved - they're real people often put in demeaning positions, like Megan Fox...

 

[Bartimaeus]

On 4/12/2022 at 4:30 PM, majestic said:

Well, hey, the emperor must stick to some tropes, at least. Always saying the same thing isn't that uncommon for villains. Don't fail me again, Jadeite!

Queen Beryl is literally what I thought of every time it happened. Yeah, you just keep spinning your Life Day orb while doin' absolutely nothing of use, queenie...

On 4/12/2022 at 4:30 PM, majestic said:

There's maybe something else, I don't think it's possible for the most vocal part of the fanbase to complain about NGE in some manner, because it's a classic you just have to like to be part of the crowd. The insane success of the more fast paced and somewhat more straightforward Rebuild speaks volumes, but who knows how long that's going to last, or perhaps I haven't looked properly. There must be some people who watched Rebuild and then went for the classic and said something like: What's with the boring talking, where's the LARGE SCALE CGI MADNESS?

It's difficult for me to even imagine anybody who didn't watch the original show starting with and somehow enjoying the films for them to be able to go back and check out the show. I guess you might be right in regards to the popularity/"you have to watch and like this" factor, though.

On 4/12/2022 at 4:30 PM, majestic said:

It's one area where I am more forgiving - or perhaps less... or sometimes not bothered at all - when it comes to live action over animation, and video games. Way back when I refused to play the original Tomb Raider games because everyone was talking about Lara Croft's triangular, ginormous pixel cleavage and hot pants. The only Tomb Raider game I've played so far was the first of the remakes that was free on Steam a while back. Lara has regular sized assets in this one, but overall while I wouldn't have minded paying money for the game, it's been just as well that it was free.

The difference is, in reality, yes, you still have male gaze shots - regardless of the gender of the characters involved, because oh boy, Andromeda sure made use of Kevin Sorbo's and Keith Hamilton Cobb's phsysique at the time... actually... I think initially, the two were more used for shirtless workout scenes than the girls on the crew were part of fanservice, Lexa Doig's jelly boobs aside - but outside of plastic surgery, nobody created the characters involved just for that.

Lara was designed from the ground up to appeal to mouthbreathers to increase sales. I'm pretty sure the games were good outside of having tank controls, but seriously... also, when playing MMOs, I can't count how often I've heard that the only reason people play female characters is because "if I'm going to stare at an ass for hours, it should at least be a pretty female one", like what? Yeah, I don't want to play with you guys.

Live-action is also different because...well, how often do you see shots in live-action shows where the camera zooms in or cuts away to just a character's chest or butt? In anime shows, it's not a totally irregular occurrence, and it's really freaking disruptive, particularly when it lingers for several seconds at a time and particularly when there's no in-show justification for it. Sure, it might happen in certain types of lower budget movies that I've never seen (...as well as Transformers, where it really is just as bad or even worse than any anime), but shows that actually aired on television? A live-action show with "fan service" might have a lady wearing a ridiculous and overly sexualized outfit, but if the scene at least keeps trucking along like it should... A momentary glimpse of unitard during a fight in Sailor Moon versus mashed potatoes Miranda and her barf-worthy butt being inexplicably placed directly in front of the camera in the middle of an important conversation in Mass Effect 2 feels like all the difference in the world. I still don't love the former, but at least it's not getting my face caved in with a sledgehammer like the latter. There are different levels to these things, and anime has a history of casually going to an extreme that I remain very uncomfortable with.

I must admit, I've never known exactly how to feel about that sentiment regarding MMOs and female characters - obviously, the troglodyte way in which it is expressed is pretty reprehensible, but then I have to consider the case of my own self. I always play as a female character in games where you have to design your own character. Why? I usually don't even design my character: in games like Dark Souls, I always go with one of the available presets while just changing the hair style/color, and that's it. If there isn't a preset to choose from, I either sit there and agonize or I just straight up uninstall the game. I don't "sit there and agonize" because I'm going back and forth on what I want, or because I'm testing out stuff. No sir, I so utterly loathe making those kinds of decisions entirely that it inhibits me from doing anything at all, because nothing about the visual or creative design of a character really comes to me naturally and I don't have any kind of idea of what I even want, so I don't even know where or how to start. So why always female if I don't even really care what my character looks like? I'm not entirely sure. I know I was mad when I played Dark Souls 2 and they got rid of the particular passive character voice (grunts/yells/screams/yelps) that I used for DS1...and I was happy when they actually brought back that voice for DS3. On some level, I feel more comfortable playing (or identifying with?) a girl than I do a guy, but I don't understand the specifics...though it's certainly not because "I want to look at a girl's butt the entire game", I can tell you that.

On 4/12/2022 at 4:30 PM, majestic said:

I'm not going to pretend to be able to look past visual misgivings, all in all, because there are instances where I can't, but Girls' Last Tour was fairly eye opening. I never thought I'd be able to like that based on how it looks, but here I am. One of the good things that came out of this thread is that I successfully branched out of my comfort zone a little. Kinda agree with The Vision of Escaflowne over the looks of Twelve Kingdoms. Escaflowne has a relatively strange mix of character art and sometimes combines elements from different eras in a way that I can at least understand if it's not exactly liked.

My biggest issue with the look of Escaflowne is the generic-ish anime fantasy aesthetic, particularly in relation to Gaea and its characters. Obviously, I made my peace with it to some degree, but boy, there were some scenes where I would pause it and be like "...how can I like this when I've immediately spurned so many other anime fantasy shows?" purely because of the way the show looked, . Funnily, HoonDing said Hitomi was unbearably ugly, but it was actually pretty much everyone else that this problem applied to for me because she and the other Earth characters had a little bit of a different style going on in comparison to the Gaea world/characters.

Edited April 13, 2022 by Bartimaeus
some hindenberg-level sentence structure errors needed correcting

[majestic]

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

It's difficult for me to even imagine anybody who didn't watch the original show starting with and somehow enjoying the films for them to be able to go back and check out the show. I guess you might be right in regards to the popularity/"you have to watch and like this" factor, though.

I often feel this is a factor, more often among critics than the audience, but the audience is guilty of that no less. Games, books, movies, TV shows, it pretty much happens everywhere. It might also be a wrong impression, of course, because I often happen across entertainment that is rated highly and I wonder how that ever could have gotten the praise it did. I know my particular tastes are a little out there at times (or maybe often), and for some things I can at least understand their popularity in some way, for others, ah, no.

It's a cheap and recent example I already talked about, but given with how well received Discovery is by professional critics, I really get the impression that there's just nobody who wants to be seen throwing in with the reactionary crowd just because they don't like a badly written and terribly directed show.

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

Live-action is also different because...well, how often do you see shots in live-action shows where the camera zooms in or cuts away to just a character's chest or butt? In anime shows, it's not a totally irregular occurrence, and it's really freaking disruptive, particularly when it lingers for several seconds at a time. Sure, it might happen in certain types of lower budget movies (...as well as Transformers, where it really is just as bad or even worse than any anime), but shows that actually aired on television?

Transformers is a really good example because the scenes with the focus on Megan Fox just "being sexy" stand out as much as the random dips into fanservice in some animes (hello Nanoha). Films and TV shows are generally more honest, if there's a whole lot of that sleaze in the film or in the show, it's marketed as such, and I guess when you turn on a late night movie called Bikini Jones and the Temple of Eros (no really, that's an actual Indiana Jones, ahm, erotica knockoff that exists) you know what you're getting. In a way that makes hentai films more honest than, again, say, Nanoha, which has probably the most extreme creepout "what the hell is happening now?" ecchi scene of all time.

Well, and on TV there's always to option to pick a channel that doesn't have that type of content anyway. Plus, unlike with anime series, there's barely ever any chance that these movies would interest me from a thematical or plot standpoint - they usually have neither. With anime, as it so recently happened even as I watched the Tamayura OVA which is only 4 episodes of 15 minutes each, the scenes are sometimes even in material where it makes no sense and sometimes they're not - and I'm trying to be objective here - looking like the target audience would like these shots because they're badly made, out of place and not in any way visually enticing. Or maybe I'm wrong about that, who knows.

I haven't posted anything about Tamayura yet, but hey, why not use the occasion. There's not much to say about it anyway, it's about four girls, nothing happens - which was the point why I tried it, by far and large - which isn't the problem. The voice direction is terrible (and keep in mind I'm so much more forgiving about this particular point than you are ), it sometimes looks like K-On! without the elements that made K-On! work for me in spite of the looks and it sometimes sounds like it too, mostly becaus the main character is voiced by Azusa from K-On!.

There are random shots of the girls' legs all over the place, which also looks like an element taken from K-On!, but whereas K-On! did that for a reason, here it looks like misplaced and confusing fanservice that kind of isn't. It's baffling, and I have no idea how the hell Mr. Sato managed to direct the first one and a half seasons of my most favorite anime series of all time. Honestly, if I hadn't watched Utena I would have said that it all came down to having Ikuhara on the team, but hell, I mean, Utena... wasn't really problem free, was it?

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

A live-action show with "fan service" might have a lady wearing a ridiculous and overly sexualized outfit, but if the scene at least keeps trucking along like it should... A momentary glimpse of unitard during a fight in Sailor Moon versus mashed potatoes Miranda and her barf-worthy butt being inexplicably placed directly in front of the camera in the middle of an important conversation in Mass Effect 2 feels like all the difference in the world. I still don't love the former, but at least it's not having my face caved in with a sledgehammer like the latter. There are different levels to these things, and anime has a history of casually going to an extreme that I remain very uncomfortable with.

Hey, Miranda was made to be genetically perfect, so of course the camera magically focuses on her butt. It's phsysically impossible otherwise. Eh, okay, this is a joke from How I Met Your Mother.

Anyway, about Miranda, yeah, don't ask me, I'm the wrong person to talk to. But yeah, Sailor Moon's occasional forays into showing girl's underwear is at least alwas framed properly. Maybe except for that SuperS episode that has Ami hanging off a trapeze for absolutely no reason other than to show us a nice upskirt shot of her. But that's SuperS, and SuperS is just all out terrible, and it has the circus girls, but well, that's circus outfits, so I'm not sure if I should blame them for it. The designs ARE from Naoko Takeuchi after all.

Where were we? Oh, right Mass Effect 2, that was weird, but that game also has really, really weird fanboys. Someone here once posted that Tali must have good genes because she has such a big thigh gap. I think that was the same dolt who kept posting that BioWare made women in their games with male skulls for some nefarious "turn everyone into trans-f*g" SJW secret agenda, or something.

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

I usually don't even design my character: in games like Dark Souls, I always go with one of the available presets while just changing the hair style/color, and that's it.

I usually press "random" and then "next", assuming there is a "random" button. I might press it twice if I feel adventurous, but that's pretty much it. I usually don't play female characters unless they're the default, but I really don't care either way.

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

I don't "sit there and agonize" because I'm going back and forth on what I want, or because I'm testing out stuff. Nope, I straight up loathe making those kinds of decisions entirely and it inhibits me from doing anything at all, because nothing about the visual or creative design of a character really comes to me naturally and I don't have any kind of idea of what I even want, so I don't even know where to start.

Oh, don't I know that feeling. In SW:ToR there was this huge content patch that barely had any content in it. For me, I mean. In reality, it was a patch to introduce player housing and you could - in theory - spend hours upon hours setting up your home just the way you want it, and then invite other people. The only thing I used it for was to put a shop droid in a corner and my bank/storage access next to it. Finished it off with a trading terminal and every now and then the occasional trophy from a nightmare difficulty raid.

All I got out of that patch was a separate teleportation button, because you could go to your home from anywhere in the galaxy, instantly, and then head to where you want next. It was a convenient place to go to instead of the regular fleet hub that suffered from the game's poor performance and net code. Every now and then I looked at other guild member's homes and felt a little pang of jealousy, I mean, the rooms were really decorated prettily and all that, but for me? Yeah, no. It had a checkpoint list of all decorations found, so it was something to obsess over, but that's really all it was.

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

So why always female if I don't even really care what my character looks like? I'm not entirely sure. I know I was mad when I played Dark Souls 2 and they got rid of the particular character voice that I used for DS1...and I was happy when they brought back the DS1 voice that I used for DS3. On some level, I feel more comfortable playing (or identifying with?) a girl than I do a guy, but I don't understand the specifics...though it's certainly not "because I want to look at a girl's butt the entire game", I can tell you that.

I get that. I don't identify with my character very well either way, that's not something I get from creating it. I often see people post about how they don't like fixed protagonist games, and I'm like, yeah, who cares. It's what happens in the game that makes or breaks my immersion, not whether I can play Billy Jean Someone and make sure her lips are a lighter shade of red and she has long, jet-black hair.

Picking portraits is pretty much the same. Most of my Baldur's Gate characters were that fighter portrait with the bald head. Why? Because it was like the first, or one of the first ones, anyway. *shrug*

If playing a girl when given the option works better for you, then hey, just do it. I generally pick male characters when given the chance for exactly the same reason. Although... I also couldn't tell you why. I don't think it really matters though.

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

My biggest issue with the look of Escaflowne is the generic-ish anime fantasy aesthetic, particularly in relation to Gaea and its characters. Obviously, I made my peace with it to some degree, but boy, there were some scenes where I would pause it and be like "...how can I like this when I've immediately spurned so many other anime fantasy shows?" purely because of the way the show looked, .

Heh, I don't have anything against generic fantasy settings, at least not usually, other than them feeling a little tired, but I think Gaia/Gaea was helped by having typical elements and atypical elements. If it had elves or dwarves, that would have been pretty... bad. Show went from me posting about it after the first episode(s) wondering "what is wrong with me, why don't I hate this?" to "why is this so good?" in the span of like, the first 8 or 9, episodes.

It then turned out to make an episode that's basically about Hitomi going back to a day before she came to Gaea one of the best episodes in the show, and a really good episode overall in the history of all episodes, based on a premise that's a little tired already too. Still not sure how it managed to do that, but I'll take it.

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

Funnily, HoonDing said Hitomi was unbearably ugly, but it was actually pretty much everyone else that this problem applied to for me because she and the other Earth characters had a little bit of a different style going on in comparison to the Gaea world/characters.

They did a pretty good job at making the characters from Earth look a bit different, not counting any of the animal-themed people of course. Allen was probably the most distracting, because he really looks like Touga with blonde hair, but with the release dates, it's probably better to say that Touga looks like Allen. I didn't find any of the characters inherently unappealing, but they're not my favorite designs either.

As much as NGE's characters had some in-built fanservice, I do like how the show looked from start to finish. It also still has the distinction of producing scenes that were clearly meant as fanservice and yet still had a narrative or thematic function, even when it was Asuka.

 

Edited April 13, 2022 by majestic

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

32 minutes ago, majestic said:

Someone here once posted that Tali must have good genes because she has such a big thigh gap

 

 

[Gorth]

Getting close to the end of Ergo Proxy (at least I think so, episode 22 out of 23)

 

I did manage to get lost a few times in the last handful episodes. Let's just say things got a bit too abstract at times and went over my head

 

But from what I could gather, Vincent/Ergo Proxy was in love with another Proxy, Monad Proxy, but killed her. For some reason (part of what went over my head), Proxies always feel compelled to fight to the death when meeting (that sure makes for some interesting relationships). To protect himself from going mad, Vincent ended up with multiple personality disorders and "Vincent" is a manifestation of that. The little group did make it to Mosk, just to find an old nuke crater, as it was destroyed by Romdeau, after the latter had invaded and absconded with something. It's on the return to Romdeau, things sort of starts to get explained.

 

Ergo Proxy btw. is the founder of the Dome (apparently all the 30 or so domes were founded by a Proxy), created in some distant past together with a handful of followers. He's effectively a god to the citizens and the administration. In this case, the god that abandoned his people and wandered off as Vincent the immigrant. Ergo Proxy kills the administrator and leaves again, effectively dooming the dome (bad pun) to extinction. The administration is what controls the artificial womb, that replenishes the population as well as manages the day to day business of running the dome. At this point, groups of human militias and gangs are running amok through the dome, killing all autoreivs (Entourages) they can find, cogito infected or not in what can best be described as creative brutality.

(leaving out 4/5 of what is happening and trying to focus on the very core stuff going on, including the visit to Smile Town where some of the exposition comes from)

Ergo Proxy (aka "Vincent")

A world is coming to an end...

 

Edit: Two different trailers, just to show the difference between original voice acting and english dubbed version (as usual, I prefer original voice acting with subs)

 

 

 

[HoonDing]

Was Monad the one with the wings?

iirc the reason Vincent wanted to bang goth girl was that she was genetically engineered with Monad DNA or something.

[Bartimaeus]

19 hours ago, majestic said:

Where were we? Oh, right Mass Effect 2, that was weird, but that game also has really, really weird fanboys. Someone here once posted that Tali must have good genes because she has such a big thigh gap. I think that was the same dolt who kept posting that BioWare made women in their games with male skulls for some nefarious "turn everyone into trans-f*g" SJW secret agenda, or something.

 

19 hours ago, majestic said:

It's a cheap and recent example I already talked about, but given with how well received Discovery is by professional critics, I really get the impression that there's just nobody who wants to be seen throwing in with the reactionary crowd just because they don't like a badly written and terribly directed show.

I guess I wouldn't want to be lumped in with the pro-hate reactionaries either, I suppose. Thing is, I feel like you could just...cover different shows if you actually don't like it, . Maybe that's what the critics who have any sense do, leaving just the people who actually like the show to review it and thus giving a falsely positive aggregate impression.

19 hours ago, majestic said:

Transformers is a really good example because the scenes with the focus on Megan Fox just "being sexy" stand out as much as the random dips into fanservice in some animes (hello Nanoha). Films and TV shows are generally more honest, if there's a whole lot of that sleaze in the film or in the show, it's marketed as such, and I guess when you turn on a late night movie called Bikini Jones and the Temple of Eros (no really, that's an actual Indiana Jones, ahm, erotica knockoff that exists) you know what you're getting. In a way that makes hentai films more honest than, again, say, Nanoha, which has probably the most extreme creepout "what the hell is happening now?" ecchi scene of all time.

Well, and on TV there's always to option to pick a channel that doesn't have that type of content anyway. Plus, unlike with anime series, there's barely ever any chance that these movies would interest me from a thematical or plot standpoint - they usually have neither. With anime, as it so recently happened even as I watched the Tamayura OVA which is only 4 episodes of 15 minutes each, the scenes are sometimes even in material where it makes no sense and sometimes they're not - and I'm trying to be objective here - looking like the target audience would like these shots because they're badly made, out of place and not in any way visually enticing. Or maybe I'm wrong about that, who knows.

Utena + Tamayura

Yep, it's pretty easy to tell what you're getting into, and if you want to watch sleaze or smut, fine, whatever. With anime, it's hardly ever clear where the line will be when you're getting into a show, and you can go from "it's perfectly clean" to "this is filth" with the drop of a hat. There just isn't a strong or transparent delineation like there is with most other mediums.

At least Utena didn't have fan service...I think. Does Nanami turning into a literal cow count as fan service? Also, you say "4 episode OVA", but there's also the two twelve episode sequels and the movie...

19 hours ago, majestic said:

Picking portraits is pretty much the same. Most of my Baldur's Gate characters were that fighter portrait with the bald head. Why? Because it was like the first, or one of the first ones, anyway. *shrug*

I do better with something like that, because a portrait essentially the equivalent of a "preset" for a game like Baldur's Gate, and I have a better idea of what I want to be represented by when given a very finite amount of choices. Although the specific example of Baldur's Gate is not great, particularly BG2, whose portraits were pretty universally terrible. Stop using professional models for character designs, BioWare - the results have been very bad. But if decoration of something is ever left up to me, you can bet it's going to be incredibly spartan, .

Edited April 14, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[ShadySands]

2 hours ago, HoonDing said:

Was Monad the one with the wings?

iirc the reason Vincent wanted to bang goth girl was that she was genetically engineered with Monad DNA or something.

IIRC 

Spoiler

There are 3 Monads

1. the original who goes comatose when she helps erase Ergo Proxy's memories or something (it's been years since I've seen it) and become Vincent.
2. Re-l is a partial clone made from Monad and DNA from the leader guy (Donov, maybe?).
3. Real, who is a full clone and is the one that flies away to her death at the end.

I'm probably missing a lot or possibly even completely wrong because it's been like 15 years since I watched it.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

Gurren Lagann. It's pretty shounen stuff, but I'm enjoying it for what it is.

2 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

I do better with something like that, because a portrait essentially the equivalent of a "preset" for a game like Baldur's Gate, and I have a better idea of what I want to be represented by when given a very finite amount of choices. Although the specific example of Baldur's Gate is not great, particularly BG2, whose portraits were pretty universally terrible. Stop using professional models for character designs, BioWare - the results have been very bad. But if decoration of something is ever left up to me, you can bet it's going to be incredibly spartan, .

BG2 portraits are bad. I think I used a mod, PaintBG or something, that had consistent style.

When it comes to creating characters in (c)RPGs, I usually come up with a concept and see if I can make it fit the game mechanically then go into aesthetics. I'll usually use a preset as a base and then go from there.

[Bartimaeus]

It's kind of the exact opposite way around for me in terms of creating characters - I determine what my character will look like first, and then I can see what roles it looks like they could fulfill and choose from there.

Escaflowne: The Movie. First five minutes was Van inexplicably dropping out of the sky onto a ship and violently murdering everyone on board in unironic shonen action fashion. The next five minutes then cut to Hitomi and her "best friend" Yukari talking. The scene culminates in Yukari finding the suicide note Hitomi wrote, which she reads against Hitomi's wishes because Hitomi wasn't actually ready to give it to her yet, and then Yukari subsequently mocks Hitomi for it. Oh yeah, this is gonna be good.

Spoiler

It is not good. It's an abridged, more shonen-y retelling of Escaflowne. Everyone looks very strange. It's very doubleplusungood. Why did they make this? Super mega ultra mondo recommended to @majestic. I look forward to your Dr. Phil seizures.

Although I should note I'm only fifteen minutes in as of writing this. Theoretically, it has a chance to turn everything around.

Uh, that's Princess Millerna, and this is the angle they decided to hold on for several seconds. I changed my mind, it does not have a chance to turn everything around. This is doggie doodoo peepee poopoo. It's actually almost hilarious because of how terrible of a mockery it is of the show - almost.

(e): Wow, that was not good. I...don't even know what to say, so I will let Picard do it for me instead.

 

Edited April 14, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[Sarex]

2 hours ago, KP wants Blue Velvet said:

Gurren Lagann. It's pretty shounen stuff, but I'm enjoying it for what it is.

What episode are you up to?

2 hours ago, KP wants Blue Velvet said:

BG2 portraits are bad. I think I used a mod, PaintBG or something, that had consistent style.

IWD 2 portraits was were it's at. I still use them to this day.