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

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

17 minutes ago, majestic said:

That's going to be the season finale. The wind will hike up Komi's skirt, Tadano will get a nosebleed from seeing her pristine and white panties while either Dragon or Dog Girl will block Stalker Girl's view, leading to her having a heart attack or a stroke.

I'm pretty sure the season finale will be the group taking a trip to Morioh and getting caught in the crossfire between Wonder of U and Soft & Wet. Hopefully Stalker Girl still has the heart attack or stroke though.

[Gorth]

Did I mention I needed some lighthearted comedy for a bit?.... looks like I found something that has complete seasons. That time I got reincarnated as a slime.

Milim is quite the character...

 

[Sarex]

Ah, down the isekai hole you go. That one is good amongst the sea of other isekai's.

[uuuhhii]

usually took a few years to get tired of all the web novel nonsense

find all the houbunsha stuff far more relaxing

[majestic]

22 hours ago, Gorth said:

Did I mention I needed some lighthearted comedy for a bit?

You should look at Kill La Kill. It sure is lighthearted... sometimes. Among other things.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

22 hours ago, Gorth said:

Did I mention I needed some lighthearted comedy for a bit?.... looks like I found something that has complete seasons. That time I got reincarnated as a slime.

Milim is quite the character...

 

Nothing says lighthearted like the 90's Berserk anime.

[uuuhhii]

On 5/13/2022 at 8:41 AM, Gorth said:

Did I mention I needed some lighthearted comedy for a bit?.... looks like I found something that has complete seasons. That time I got reincarnated as a slime.

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Milim is quite the character...

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most of dragon tower are very good comedy

[Sarex]

Read this slice of life comedy about an alien getting adopted by a human, called Don't Destroy Humanity.

It's very sweet and I was kind of bummed out that it had such a short run. It's sometimes very strange what gets popular in Japan and what doesn't. Either way this wasn't anything unique, story wise, but I think it was still good regardless.

Edited May 14, 2022 by Sarex

[Bartimaeus]

Episodes 12 and 13 of Princess Tutu. It's over!

It's been a bit like the Grim Reaper hanging overhead for a couple of months now. Worst character award goes to Mytho, who started off as an utterly mindless pawn for the story and its themes while literally never deviating from being exactly that for the entire duration of the show; the best character award goes to his brother Fakir, who ironically started off as the very worst and a completely two-dimensional character at the start of the show and turned out to be the only character capable of character development and enjoyable dialogue with Ahiru by the end. Speaking of, on the whole Ahiru was fairly close behind him while Rue was in a similar situation to Mytho in their respective categories, and would somebody please ram a pike up Drosselmeyer's butt so I can never hear that "LET ME EXPLAIN THE STORY FOR YOU" show-interrupting exposition-dumping non-character piece of garbage ever again? No, now that you ask, it turns out that I will not be watching the second season. I did laugh at the end when Edel said she was a mindless puppet mimicking a human, because I couldn't help but be reminded of Quest 64 where the puppet helper lady in that game says the exact same thing right at the end of the game, and somehow that felt hilarious to me given how atrociously terrible story-telling Quest 64 had.

The best parts of this show were when characters actually talked to each other like normal characters (like Fakir and Ahiru started to over the last handful of episodes - a number of genuinely nice moments between those two that I really liked!), but it was sadly never near enough to offset the constant theme/plot babbling that would make my brain shutdown every time it happened. I don't think I will ever be able to accept a show that requires you to accept its themes as being more dominant than the other elements - everyone quickly starts to sound less like characters and more like artificial constructs trying to hammer in some message that I simply do not care about, and the more they do it, the more I am annoyed. I should care about Ahiru's part in the story, because I do like her, but her primary objective (the reason for her entire existence inside the story, really!) is to save and restore Mytho, and Mytho is proven over and over to be a non-thing that does not matter whatsoever, so it is incredibly difficult to care about that. Ahiru and Fakir working together was instantly so much more compelling because Fakir was an actual character I'd seen change and grow a little over the course of the show.

...Okay, now that I have all the mental violence about this show expelled from my mind, am I correct in assuming that season 2 is primarily about Rue and resolving her side of the story?

Edited May 15, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[majestic]

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

Episodes 12 and 13 of Princess Tutu. It's over!

  It ain't over until Drosselmeyer says it is over.

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

It's been a bit like the Grim Reaper hanging overhead for a couple of months now.

Feels a lot longer, was it really just a couple of months, not like a little over a year?

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

Worst character award goes to Mytho, who started off as an utterly mindless pawn for the story and its themes while literally never deviating from being exactly that for the entire duration of the show; the best character award goes to his brother Fakir, who ironically started off as the very worst and a completely two-dimensional character at the start of the show and turned out to be the only character capable of character development and enjoyable dialogue with Ahiru by the end.

With nobody else watching the series and you not continuing, there's no real need to hold back any spoilers, so I'll just not mark them. The reason why Ahiru and Fakir are the only two characters that feel like, well, actual characters in the story proper (Edel and Drosselmeyer exist outside of it, and Edel is an automaton designed to extend Drosselmeyer's reach within the story) is because they are and nobody else is, and that's fairly intentional, although the series doesn't actually tell you that until a decent ways into season two, which is unfair to anyone watching animes primarily for the characters. Mytho seems like a primary candiate for some character development, given his state of being utterly without desires of his own at the beginning of the series, and nothing ever happens until the very final episode of season two.

Mytho is a story element that might as well be a locked door or a golden apple, or more traditionally a sleeping princess waiting to be kissed awake by the prince. The same goes for the Raven, who doesn't really show up in the first season anyway.

The reason why Fakir is an actual character is because he's a distant relative of Drosselmeyer, he is part of the story, but a part of the story that can affect the story in ways outside of what the author wills. To be honest, that's one of the more clever things the anime does as a commentary on authorship, highlighting the way how sometimes characters can change the story written, because the writer(s) at some point might no longer feel that what they had planned fits their characters. Ahiru meanwhile is Drosselmeyer's chosen protagonist. He gives her free reign within a story constriction that is designed to hurt her, just because he enjoys tragic tales.

The second season has a scene that exemplifies what happens when someone else arrives at the town, a group of people arrive, come through the door, and some of them are turned into animals, with the kids asking: "Mom, have you always been an <animal type>?" - that is to say, once someone arrives, they're turned into window dressing for the story.

2 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Speaking of, on the whole Ahiru was fairly close behind him while Rue was in a similar situation to Mytho in their respective categories, and would somebody please ram a pike up Drosselmeyer's butt so I can never hear that "LET ME EXPLAIN THE STORY FOR YOU" show-interrupting exposition-dumping non-character piece of garbage ever again?

Drosselmeyer is already dead, because the villagers he lived with did not like his stories, and they punished him by chopping off his hands so he can no longer write. Turns out that didn't quite stop him. He simply went on to create a device that wrote the stories for him. Season two ends with that device being destroyed and the town being restored to a regular town, reconnecting it with the world at large.

Rue is the Raven's daughter, or at least she believes such to be the case. She's just a human child abducted by the Raven and raised as his own, although Raven does become increasingly annoyed at her inability to finish the tasks he gives her. The more Rue fails to do the impossible (i.e. she is tasked with moving ahead the story by the antagonist, while having no agency over the story at all), the more the Raven tells her how much of a failure she is, and that she's only human. Which she is, after all.

Rue ends up marrying Prince Mytho, by the way.

2 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

No, now that you ask, it turns out that I will not be watching the second season.

Oh my, but why not?

2 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

I did laugh at the end when Edel said she was a mindless puppet mimicking a human, because I couldn't help but be reminded of Quest 64 where the puppet helper lady in that game says the exact same thing right at the end of the game, and somehow that felt hilarious to me given how atrociously terrible story-telling Quest 64 had.

Hey, don't hate on Edel here. Poor Edel. She died in a fire to save a duck, and all she gets for it is what, disdain?

2 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

The best parts of this show were when characters actually talked to each other like normal characters (like Fakir and Ahiru started to over the last handful of episodes - a number of genuinely nice moments between those two that I really liked!), but it was sadly never near enough to offset the constant theme/plot babbling that would make my brain shutdown every time it happened. I don't think I will ever be able to accept a show that requires you to accept its themes as being more dominant than the other elements - everyone quickly starts to sound less like characters and more like artificial constructs trying to hammer in some message that I simply do not care about, and the more they do it, the more I am annoyed. I should care about Ahiru's part in the story, because I do like her, but her primary objective (the reason for her entire existence inside the story, really!) is to save and restore Mytho, and Mytho is proven over and over to be a non-thing that does not matter whatsoever, so it is incredibly difficult to care about that. Ahiru and Fakir working together was instantly so much more compelling because Fakir was an actual character I'd seen change and grow a little over the course of the show.

Not that I disagree with Ahiru and Fakir's interactions being the only truly enjoyable parts of the series and the way the rest of it can make anyone turn off. Like I stated before, even if you get all the displayed reference and themes, and that's extremely hard, if not impossible without reading up on them, the show itself never achieves a state where that would be interesting enough to truly appreciate it. As such it's a constant waffling between having nice moments and having moments that should be interesting, and sometimes are on their own, but never really are as a whole.

The sum total of the show is so much less than the promise of its individual parts. I already wrote a ten page post about that.

Just one question, if Mytho was not a character but simply a door that Ahiru would need to retrieve keys for to unlock, would that change anything? Obviously a door would not talk or try to interact with the other characters, but that's besides the point of the question. Would you be as angry at the Ring of Power in Lord of the Rings when it's not a real character? What difference does it make that Mytho the story construct can talk? Not trying to be contrarian here, it's just something that I actually thought about while watching this, because Mytho is annoying more than he's interesting, or anything else, really. I wonder though, why do we actually feel less bothered by story constructs when they're inanimate? What's the difference beween a door, a ring, a crystal, some holy sword or whatever else, and Mytho? Is there any? Should there be any? Mytho is the implement that makes Ahuri and Fakir grow close, in a similar way as the Ring tries to divide Sam and Frodo (and affects Gollum, of course), but it's a ring, even with a fraction of Sauron's essence in it and some devious intelligence in its will and doing, so why is it easier to accept a thing serving in such a role than it is to have an animate character doing that?

Ahiru's primary reason to be in the story is arguably simply to fail, not really to save Mytho. Drosselmeyer set her up to either follow through with her desires and return to being a duck, or being a human while being unable to find any true happiness in it. By the end of the series, she does not find a way out of this dilemma, by the way. Ahiru goes back to being a duck. Not because Drosselmeyer wanted it, but because she chose to.

2 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

...Okay, now that I have all the mental violence about this show expelled from my mind, am I correct in assuming that season 2 is primarily about Rue and resolving her side of the story?

Yes, more or less, but in reality it resolves the larger storyline, both in and out of universe. Mytho is restored, defeats the Raven, marries Rue, Ahiru goes back to being a duck because for the former to happen she has to give up the pendant that turns her into a duck (it's part of Mytho, a twist I'm sure nobody saw coming, what with the red gem in it). Fakir comes to terms with loving a duck and being a relative of Drosselmeyer, and once the story is over the animals go back to being real people, or animals, depending on what they were before.

The cat teacher is seen running around with his children - well, kittens, really - implying that he finally found someone to marry. Or maybe not, because cats don't really bond for life.

[Gorth]

Watched the first four episodes of That time etc. etc. slime

I didn't exactly start on a humorous note. I mean, the protagonist getting stabbed in the back and dying on the footpath, bleeding out was bad enough, but he died a virgin too

it all sounds and feels a bit like a video game. Our protagonist gets reborn as a slime in a different world. No idea (yet) how or why he ended up there. He also gets bestowed a number of abilities by a female voice in the background. Pain resistance, cold resistance and so on. He also gets the ability to perceive his surroundings and the ability to produce noises (so he can communicate, like speech). He wakes up in a cave and gorges himself on a number of things in the cave, accumulating a lot of magic along the way. Turns out the magic had a source, as he shares the cave with an imprisoned dragon. They become friends and slime guy helps the dragon to escape his prison (by "eating" him. One of his new abilities is a seemingly endless stomach where things can be both stored and analyzed and new capabilities gained, depending on the results of the analysis. You are what you eat i suppose?

The dragon and the slime give each other names, as names seems to be of particular importance (as show in later episodes). Slime guy is now Rimuru and the dragon Veldora. Rimuru ends up in a goblin village and helps the villagers survive an onslaught of dire wolves (by killing the pack leader) and ends up as the leader of both the goblin village and the dire wolves. Thinking it unwieldy having that many individuals around him with no name, he decides to name all the villages and also the lead dire wolf (the son of the now deceased pack leader).

When he wakes up the next day, all the goblins are now bigger and stronger (and the goblin girls a lot prettier). The dire wolves have all grown to considerably larger sizes. All because of the power of names (they have now all "leveled up"). The wolves gained new power collectively, inheriting the trait from their new lead wolf.

Rimuru takes the entire group of goblins and wolves to a dwarven realm, in search of artisans and craftsmen, who can teach his followers how to make clothes and build houses for themselves (because the goblin girls were a bit too scantily clad, the guys without proper weapons and armor and the hovels and huts they were living in offered little to no protection).

Using his new powerful abilities to mimic and replicate things, Rimuru makes new best friends with some of the dwarves by helping them meet a sword requisition by the local lord in time.

A running joke in episode 4 is Rimuru constantly fantasizing about elf girls, which are supposedly around in the city. Lets just his elf girl fantasies are... quite something

Anyway, he does end up getting "rewarded" in a tavern, hanging out with some elf girls, resting his slime body on/under some overhanging boobs.

[majestic]

I guess and then you just run into something that makes Princess Tutu look like high art and perfect storytelling, huh?

[Bartimaeus]

7 hours ago, majestic said:

Ahiru's primary reason to be in the story is arguably simply to fail, not really to save Mytho.

You're looking at it from the point of view of the story and what it has declared to be important and true, while I am looking at it from the point of view of the characters and what I've seen to be actually motivating Ahiru from the very beginning of the show - what she herself feels is important to her. With no Mytho, there is no Ahiru becoming a human or doing anything else in this story, because Mytho is the thing that she has staked her entire existence on. The problem is that while I know Mytho is important to her, as she tells me approximately a billion times over the course of the show, I still have as little understanding of why now as I did when I started the show, and that is just...not very compelling to me when it's the central character axis for Ahiru and practically the only thing that allows for this story to exist and move forward in the first place.

7 hours ago, majestic said:

Mytho seems like a primary candiate for some character development, given his state of being utterly without desires of his own at the beginning of the series, and nothing ever happens until the very final episode of season two.

In other words, he's basically Anthy from Utena, who was also the "thing" motivating all the other characters. At least those characters had other underlying psychological issues that the show spent time on, even if it did a less than satisfactory job of connecting all of it together...whereas in this show, it's "Mytho is important because he's important because he's important". Coincidentally (NOT!), Anthy was probably the biggest source of story and character frustration in Utena for me as well - I never really got to the point of truly understanding what it was motivating everyone else to jostle and fight for her from the point of view of the characters themselves, how their personal issues actually connected them to Anthy in a real sense...which made them fundamentally weak and unsatisfying characters.

7 hours ago, majestic said:

Feels a lot longer, was it really just a couple of months, not like a little over a year?

I meant since starting it in earnest.

7 hours ago, majestic said:

Drosselmeyer is already dead, because the villagers he lived with did not like his stories, and they punished him by chopping off his hands so he can no longer write.

Understandable, really, .

7 hours ago, majestic said:

Just one question, if Mytho was not a character but simply a door that Ahiru would need to retrieve keys for to unlock, would that change anything? Obviously a door would not talk or try to interact with the other characters, but that's besides the point of the question. Would you be as angry at the Ring of Power in Lord of the Rings when it's not a real character? What difference does it make that Mytho the story construct can talk? Not trying to be contrarian here, it's just something that I actually thought about while watching this, because Mytho is annoying more than he's interesting, or anything else, really. I wonder though, why do we actually feel less bothered by story constructs when they're inanimate? What's the difference beween a door, a ring, a crystal, some holy sword or whatever else, and Mytho? Is there any? Should there be any? Mytho is the implement that makes Ahuri and Fakir grow close, in a similar way as the Ring tries to divide Sam and Frodo (and affects Gollum, of course), but it's a ring, even with a fraction of Sauron's essence in it and some devious intelligence in its will and doing, so why is it easier to accept a thing serving in such a role than it is to have an animate character doing that?

In The Lord of the Rings, the Ring of Power provides motivation for our heroes to go on their adventure (both the initial one to Rivendell and the actual Fellowship quest after) because there is a clear and present promise of death to our characters and everyone/everything that they know if they are not successful in dealing with it, which they find out all too well on their way to Rivendell. It's not a terribly personal motivation at first (though there are other smaller motivations also helping drive along Frodo and Sam initially), but it does make sense for our characters to be invested in resolving that, and it also becomes more personal as the story goes on with how the Ring affects each of them.

So what is the equivalent for our characters in Princess Tutu? Mytho is life-and-death important to all of Ahiru, Fakir, and Rue because...um, well, Fakir decided he couldn't let the story continue for fear of what it might do to Mytho, and Rue and Ahiru love him. I guess those are fine as very quick and basic motivations...but the show never does anything more to explain or expand upon those motivations as far as I could tell. There seems to be no underlying cause for any of it, no connective tissue to pull these characters together. No, from beginning to end, it feels like the story is telling what the characters to feel, think and do instead of the characters organically driving what happens in the story, and so it effectively becomes the very worst main story bits of Sailor Moon - all the moments in that show where it feels like the characters aren't being their natural selves because the story demands that they be something else until the story is resolved, leading to all sorts of unnatural and arguably meaningless (yet conversely overly-grandiose!) dialogue and actions that don't feel connected to our characters personally. For the most part, you could just as well switch who is saying and doing what with any other character, or put entirely new characters in their place, and it would not really change how scenes go or how the story ends up getting resolved. I have trouble connecting to much (though not all) of the main story of Sailor Moon for that reason - very little of the Naoko Takeuchi-written main story material feels like it's driven by our characters, while the non-canon filler stuff ironically does a bit of a better job (seriously, the non-canon stuff even gives some meaningful motivation to the villains, like Nehellenia at the start of Sailor Stars, or the two aliens in the Magic Tree Arc of R, so that we can at least care a little about them as well, whereas the canon story...doesn't really try by and large).

It's also why the main story in Steven Universe works for me even when the plot itself is not always entirely well-told or constructed: everyone is individually and very personally motivated to feel and behave the way they do, the characters very keenly feel the effects of all the different things that have happened to each of them, and their experiences in trauma and just as friends together push them all to - in their own ways - love, trust, and depend upon each other. It all feels very personal and naturally character-driven while still allowing for the story to move forward with how it unfolds and impacts the characters (who also all have their own reasons to see the story get resolved!). Meanwhile, I've been sitting here throughout Princess Tutu wondering why the heck anyone feels or does anything that happens in this story, and I don't really feel like I ever got any kind of explanation. Whether it's a person or an object or a person-as-an-object, I just needed more than what Princess Tutu gave me. And yes in regards to the question of your previous post, .

7 hours ago, majestic said:

Fakir comes to terms with loving a duck

Okay, now this is actually a love story I can get behind.

Edited May 15, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[HoonDing]

23 hours ago, Sarex said:

Read this slice of life comedy about an alien getting adopted by a human, called Don't Destroy Humanity.

It's very sweet and I was kind of bummed out that it had such a short run. It's sometimes very strange what gets popular in Japan and what doesn't. Either way this wasn't anything unique, story wise, but I think it was still good regardless.

Are those b00bies or am I missing something

[InsaneCommander]

I'm with more free time now, so I'm gonna catch up with anime. Forgot where I wrote down the next ones I'll watch so I ended up starting Spy x Family.

 

This silly and funny anime is about a spy called Loid/Twilight that needs to get near an important politician. But the guy is very secretive and only shows up in his sons' school meetings. So now Twilight needs to pretend to have a family and get his child in the elite institution that is not for everyone. He adopts Anya, a 4 year old girl that loves spy stories and marries Yor, a public servant that is actually a damn good assassin and needs to have a partner to keep up appearances. None of them know about each other's true job. Oh, did I mention that Anya is a telepath and immediately finds out the truth about them? She gets excited about her father's mission, but what she really wants is to make sure it succeeds so that she can continue to have a family.

Btw, they talk about avoiding a war in what looks like a mid 20th century like world, the mysterious politician is the head of the nationalist party and he looks like this:

Yeah, definitely not Hitler.

 

[Sarex]

 It's a pretty silly and lighthearted comedy set in a bleak and dark world.

1 hour ago, HoonDing said:

Are those b00bies or am I missing something

Monsters obviously.

Edited May 15, 2022 by Sarex

[majestic]

On a completely different note, this video makes me want to watch Fist of the North Star.

Not going to do that, though, but eh... it's tempting, unless that's footage from some shorter OVA and not an anime series with 150 episodes.

Will post something more on the ongoing debates when I don't feel like keeling over. Maybe later, or tomorrow.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

7 hours ago, Gorth said:

Watched the first four episodes of That time etc. etc. slime

I didn't exactly start on a humorous note. I mean, the protagonist getting stabbed in the back and dying on the footpath, bleeding out was bad enough, but he died a virgin too

it all sounds and feels a bit like a video game. Our protagonist gets reborn as a slime in a different world. No idea (yet) how or why he ended up there. He also gets bestowed a number of abilities by a female voice in the background. Pain resistance, cold resistance and so on. He also gets the ability to perceive his surroundings and the ability to produce noises (so he can communicate, like speech). He wakes up in a cave and gorges himself on a number of things in the cave, accumulating a lot of magic along the way. Turns out the magic had a source, as he shares the cave with an imprisoned dragon. They become friends and slime guy helps the dragon to escape his prison (by "eating" him. One of his new abilities is a seemingly endless stomach where things can be both stored and analyzed and new capabilities gained, depending on the results of the analysis. You are what you eat i suppose?

The dragon and the slime give each other names, as names seems to be of particular importance (as show in later episodes). Slime guy is now Rimuru and the dragon Veldora. Rimuru ends up in a goblin village and helps the villagers survive an onslaught of dire wolves (by killing the pack leader) and ends up as the leader of both the goblin village and the dire wolves. Thinking it unwieldy having that many individuals around him with no name, he decides to name all the villages and also the lead dire wolf (the son of the now deceased pack leader).

When he wakes up the next day, all the goblins are now bigger and stronger (and the goblin girls a lot prettier). The dire wolves have all grown to considerably larger sizes. All because of the power of names (they have now all "leveled up"). The wolves gained new power collectively, inheriting the trait from their new lead wolf.

Rimuru takes the entire group of goblins and wolves to a dwarven realm, in search of artisans and craftsmen, who can teach his followers how to make clothes and build houses for themselves (because the goblin girls were a bit too scantily clad, the guys without proper weapons and armor and the hovels and huts they were living in offered little to no protection).

Using his new powerful abilities to mimic and replicate things, Rimuru makes new best friends with some of the dwarves by helping them meet a sword requisition by the local lord in time.

A running joke in episode 4 is Rimuru constantly fantasizing about elf girls, which are supposedly around in the city. Lets just his elf girl fantasies are... quite something

Anyway, he does end up getting "rewarded" in a tavern, hanging out with some elf girls, resting his slime body on/under some overhanging boobs.

 

1 hour ago, InsaneCommander said:

I'm with more free time now, so I'm gonna catch up with anime. Forgot where I wrote down the next ones I'll watch so I ended up starting Spy x Family.

 

This silly and funny anime is about a spy called Loid/Twilight that needs to get near an important politician. But the guy is very secretive and only shows up in his sons' school meetings. So now Twilight needs to pretend to have a family and get his child in the elite institution that is not for everyone. He adopts Anya, a 4 year old girl that loves spy stories and marries Yor, a public servant that is actually a damn good assassin and needs to have a partner to keep up appearances. None of them know about each other's true job. Oh, did I mention that Anya is a telepath and immediately finds out the truth about them? She gets excited about her father's mission, but what she really wants is to make sure it succeeds so that she can continue to have a family.

Btw, they talk about avoiding a war in what looks like a mid 20th century like world, the mysterious politician is the head of the nationalist party and he looks like this:

Yeah, definitely not Hitler.

 

That sounds really good, guess I'll add it to the increasing watch list behind the anime that sounds like a drug.

[majestic]

5 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

You're looking at it from the point of view of the story and what it has declared to be important and true, while I am looking at it from the point of view of the characters and what I've seen to be actually motivating Ahiru from the very beginning of the show - what she herself feels is important to her. With no Mytho, there is no Ahiru becoming a human or doing anything else in this story, because Mytho is the thing that she has staked her entire existence on. The problem is that while I know Mytho is important to her, as she tells me approximately a billion times over the course of the show, I still have as little understanding of why now as I did when I started the show, and that is just...not very compelling to me when it's the central character axis for Ahiru and practically the only thing that allows for this story to exist and move forward in the first place.

It's a mixture of hindsight and Princess Tutu being a story about a storyteller telling a story. Mytho is important to Ahiru because Drosselmeyer said so, and that's either fine/enough for someone watching the series or it isn't. In a detached way it's fine, in what I do prefer to watch, actually, it is not, but I don't need to tell you that, you feel the same way. Princess Tutu, unlike Revolutionary Girl Utena, doesn't really succeed with the meta aspects for me, so everything else also falls a bit by the wayside when lacking in character driven elements the way it does.

On the other hand, Ahiru is a duck. What motivates a duck? Who knows, maybe looking into Mytho's sad eyes is enough for a duck?

The differene between Princess Tutu and other animes where this argument applies is that Princess Tutu does nothing for me to really appreciate it. I didn't hate it, but I'd not go so far as to say I enjoyed it. Like I said before, it exists in a strange equillibrium where talking about the parts of the anime makes me feel like I should have liked it, but yet I didn't.

This is really in stark contrast to Magic User's Club, which I hated, but the good parts of Magic User's Club were leaps and bounds ahead of the good parts of Princess Tutu. Not that Magic User's Club has a meta level or deep storytelling, I just mentioned it because it has the same director and character designer. Which makes this all the more baffling.

5 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

In other words, he's basically Anthy from Utena, who was also the "thing" motivating all the other characters. At least those characters had other underlying psychological issues that the show spent time on, even if it did a less than satisfactory job of connecting all of it together...whereas in this show, it's "Mytho is important because he's important because he's important". Coincidentally (NOT!), Anthy was probably the biggest source of story and character frustration in Utena for me as well - I never really got to the point of truly understanding what it was motivating everyone else to jostle and fight for her from the point of view of the characters themselves, how their personal issues actually connected them to Anthy in a real sense...which made them fundamentally weak and unsatisfying characters.

I almost began this paragraph with "Anthy represents the deepest desires of the characters, a reflection of their weaknesses and what anchors them to the Academy (limbo), the very thing they need to let go, actually, in order to be free, much like Utena did when she finally realized she wanted to save Anthy for her own selfish reasons, and not because out of any desire to help her. Hence the show ending when Anthy was let go. This applies even and especially to her brother."

Good thing I didn't, though, because I'd sound like I'd have my own head up my butt something fierce, huh?  

I'm generally okay with characters having only a metaphorical or allegorical role and acting as mirrors or reflections. I'd rather have something else, but it's not the same level of dealbreaker. That is, assuming for a moment, that something interesting is done with them. Utena qualified, particularily after the film. Princess Tutu's characters that serve this purpose, i.e. Rue, Mytho and the one-off side characters designed to make Ahiru learn something about herself? No, those didn't work so well. I like Rue because of season two, and I... am who I am, and that doesn't mean she was a great character.

5 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

So what is the equivalent for our characters in Princess Tutu? Mytho is life-and-death important to all of Ahiru, Fakir, and Rue because...um, well, Fakir decided he couldn't let the story continue for fear of what it might do to Mytho, and Rue and Ahiru love him. I guess those are fine as very quick and basic motivations...but the show never does anything more to explain or expand upon those motivations as far as I could tell.

It eventually does for Fakir, but it's strange. In the second season, we learn that Fakir is a relative of Drosselmeyer, and what make the villagers kill him also applies to Fakir. The stories he writes come true, after a fashion, and he accidentially killed his parents that way. Ahiru helps him overcome his misgivings about using his powers again, but then the show goes way off the rails and introduces a secret society hell bent on stopping everything related to Drosselmeyer, and that includes Fakir, even with his noble intentions.

Rue is torn between her desire for Mytho and her desire to please her father. Nothing of that is worked out well enough to make the second season worthwhile if someone already hated the first. At the core, though, is something I mentioned early on, I think: Princess Tutu is a fairy tale. How many fairy tales are there where the characters have any but the most basic motivations? Snow White is poisoned over envy. Rumplestiltskin wants the king's daughter because... well, no idea. Beause he wants payment for his work, I guess.

Now, and here's the real thing, I guess, did Princess Tutu have to be a series with 26 episodes? No, not really. A 90 minutes movie would have been enough, and would have been a much improved and tighter experience, I think.

5 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

No, from beginning to end, it feels like the story is telling what the characters to feel, think and do instead of the characters organically driving what happens in the story,

Well, it doesn't just feel like it, it is so. What Drosselmeyer spins as a tale (in a more literal fashion that one might think) becomes reality, and he's very overt about that too in his little narrations, adding corrections whenever he feels like the story isn't progressing the way he thinks it should. Although I'm not sure when exactly that comes out, might be something in season two. The pacing and story structure of Princess Tutu isn't good, and the plot idea arguably doesn't make for a very convincing series, especially not when it looks like it is character driven but isn't.

5 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

For the most part, you could just as well switch who is saying and doing what with any other character, or put entirely new characters in their place, and it would not really change how scenes go or how the story ends up getting resolved. I have trouble connecting to much (though not all) of the main story of Sailor Moon for that reason - very little of the Naoko Takeuchi-written main story material feels like it's driven by our characters, while the non-canon filler stuff ironically does a bit of a better job (seriously, the non-canon stuff even gives some meaningful motivation to the villains, like Nehellenia at the start of Sailor Stars, or the two aliens in the Magic Tree Arc of R, so that we can at least care a little about them as well, whereas the canon story...doesn't really try by and large).

There's no real character development beyond the introductions of everyone in the first few chapters until the Dream arc (SuperS/Eternal) in the manga, and what is in dream feels like a bad copy of what Sailor Moon S did. The villains in the manga are more like the monsters of a regular Sailor Moon episode. Nary a point in giving those meaningful backstories. They're just there for Usagi to kill because she's awesome. Love, friendship and justice. AND MURDER DEATH KILL.

5 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

It's also why the main story in Steven Universe works for me even when the plot itself is not always entirely well-told or constructed: everyone is individually and very personally motivated to feel and behave the way they do, the characters very keenly feel the effects of all the different things that have happened to each of them, and their experiences in trauma and just as friends together push them all to - in their own ways - love, trust, and depend upon each other. It all feels very personal and naturally character-driven while still allowing for the story to move forward with how it unfolds and impacts the characters (who also all have their own reasons to see the story get resolved!). Meanwhile, I've been sitting here throughout Princess Tutu wondering why the heck anyone feels or does anything that happens in this story, and I don't really feel like I ever got any kind of explanation. Whether it's a person or an object or a person-as-an-object, I just needed more than what Princess Tutu gave me. And yes in regards to the question of your previous post, .

Hey, maybe we'll get our Steven Sakura: Moon Stories eventually. It's just not going to be from Ikuko Ito or Junichi Sato.

Anyway, not that I haven't wondered about that before, but how the hell did Sailor Moon work out so well, when nobody on the creative team except for the writers of Stars (who participated in other good projects, like The Vision of Escaflowne) made anything on a similar level, like before or afterwards? Not even Ms. Takeuchi, where pretty much everyone agrees that Sailor Moon was her best manga (oh god).

Edited May 15, 2022 by majestic

[Amentep]

16 hours ago, majestic said:

On a completely different note, this video makes me want to watch Fist of the North Star.

Not going to do that, though, but eh... it's tempting, unless that's footage from some shorter OVA and not an anime series with 150 episodes.

Will post something more on the ongoing debates when I don't feel like keeling over. Maybe later, or tomorrow.

I can confirm its not the original tv series or the original movie; animation isn't right for either (since the original movie was re-edited from the tv series).  

My guess is that it is footage from 2005's Shin Kyūseishu Densetsu Hokuto no Ken / Fist of the North Star: The Legends of the True Savior (3 films, 2 OVAs).  I've never seen these films (not sure if it got released in the US), so can't be 100% sure, but the animation in the posted video looks like the footage I've seen.  

[Bartimaeus]

From what I can determine, it's very likely the 2006 film "Shin Kyuuseishu Densetsu Hokuto no Ken Raou-den Jun'ai no Shou". I once tried the 1986 film, and that's all I have to say about that.

Princess Tutu: I didn't hate it either, but it was certainly highly frustrating and not exactly to my taste. Closer than most other anime, sure, but not enough that it felt like a good time. I regret watching the entire first season given that it clearly wasn't working for me, but not too terribly.

19 hours ago, majestic said:

Good thing I didn't, though, because I'd sound like I'd have my own head up my butt something fierce, huh?  

I'm generally okay with characters having only a metaphorical or allegorical role and acting as mirrors or reflections. I'd rather have something else, but it's not the same level of dealbreaker. That is, assuming for a moment, that something interesting is done with them. Utena qualified, particularily after the film. Princess Tutu's characters that serve this purpose, i.e. Rue, Mytho and the one-off side characters designed to make Ahiru learn something about herself? No, those didn't work so well. I like Rue because of season two, and I... am who I am, and that doesn't mean she was a great character.

I don't have an issue with that explanation, it just doesn't shift the needle for me - I require my characters to be justified through them being characters, not through abstract plot and theme stuff. It's just how it is, . At the very least, that needs to be the case for the important characters that the viewer spends a lot of time with. I'm not offended by Edel's role in the story, after all, seeing as she only appears in the show for probably a grand total of 5 minutes of its run-time.

20 hours ago, majestic said:

Princess Tutu is a fairy tale. How many fairy tales are there where the characters have any but the most basic motivations? Snow White is poisoned over envy. Rumplestiltskin wants the king's daughter because... well, no idea. Beause he wants payment for his work, I guess.

I guess the difference is that it's a show where they easily could have done a lot more with the run-time it was given - Disney's Sleeping Beauty is an hour and fifteen minutes, this was close to 4 and a half hours. Yet going from a show to a shorter movie conversely would've probably just made for a Madoka situation for me, where the tighter focus on the elements I don't like necessitated by the shorter run time strip it entirely of the things that I did like. On the other hand, it would've been over a lot sooner.

20 hours ago, majestic said:

Anyway, not that I haven't wondered about that before, but how the hell did Sailor Moon work out so well, when nobody on the creative team except for the writers of Stars (who participated in other good projects, like The Vision of Escaflowne) made anything on a similar level, like before or afterwards? Not even Ms. Takeuchi, where pretty much everyone agrees that Sailor Moon was her best manga (oh god).

They had a highly specialized skill-set of adapting bad material when given the creative license to just make up whatever they wanted to fill in the blanks between the main story parts. Too specific a set of circumstances for it to apply to other shows, .

[majestic]

9 hours ago, Amentep said:

I can confirm its not the original tv series or the original movie; animation isn't right for either (since the original movie was re-edited from the tv series).  

My guess is that it is footage from 2005's Shin Kyūseishu Densetsu Hokuto no Ken / Fist of the North Star: The Legends of the True Savior (3 films, 2 OVAs).  I've never seen these films (not sure if it got released in the US), so can't be 100% sure, but the animation in the posted video looks like the footage I've seen.  

 

3 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

From what I can determine, it's very likely the 2006 film "Shin Kyuuseishu Densetsu Hokuto no Ken Raou-den Jun'ai no Shou". I once tried the 1986 film, and that's all I have to say about that.

Wikipedia told me that the Fist of the North Star: The Legends of the True Savior series does indeed have a Yuki Kajiura sound track, and therefore it has to be one of those. The 2006 offering seems to be the most likely one indeed, so thanks. 106 minutes is fairly long for an animated film I'm probably... not... like, not... I want to say not going to like, but it's far more likely that it'll be like pulling teeth. Except that is sort of moot anyway, considering that there's no way I can watch it right now anyway.

In a way I could understand, I mean. Whatever am I going to do with a raw Japanese source? That's like several years away, at least. Sigh.

Hm, decisions, decisions.

3 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

I don't have an issue with that explanation, it just doesn't shift the needle for me - I require my characters to be justified through them being characters, not through abstract plot and theme stuff. It's just how it is, . At the very least, that needs to be the case for the important characters that the viewer spends a lot of time with. I'm not offended by Edel's role in the story, after all, seeing as she only appears in the show for probably a grand total of 5 minutes of its run-time.

Edel is the true hero of the story anyway and she comes back in season two. In... a manner of speaking.

Bleh, too tired and strung out to write anything meaningful. Will reply later.

Edited May 16, 2022 by majestic

[Bartimaeus]

10 minutes ago, majestic said:

Hm, decisions, decisions.

I went ahead and decided to track down the singer on VGMDB, and the song in question is on this soundtrack. Issue is, this soundtrack is for both the 2006 and 2007 films. The fact that it's the very last track of the album makes me think it's actually in the 2007 film, but I don't know for sure, especially because what I had previously seen suggested it was on the 2006 film instead.

There are a couple of entries to this franchise:

[majestic]

20 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

I went ahead and decided to track down the singer on VGMDB, and the song in question is on this soundtrack. Issue is, this soundtrack is for both the 2006 and 2007 films. The fact that it's the very last track of the album makes me think it's actually in the 2007 film, but I don't know for sure, especially because what I had previously seen suggested it was on the 2006 film instead.

The Japanese version isn't used in the movies at all, but rather the same song in a fictional language, so that still could be either. Placement at the end suggests a bonus track of a sort. Yuki Kajiura does that sometimes. Madoka has a case like that too with Mami's theme song having two separate versions for their live performances, although Credens Justitiam and Mirai are more different than the sound track version of Where The Lights Are and the Japanese version - makes sense, they were written for different groups* from the same instrumental theme.

20 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

There are a couple of entries to this franchise:

Spoiler

Yeah, I had to pick a complete collection pack just for the Legend of the True Saviour series. Seems like overkill, but it's not like there's much choice out there. For something with hundreds of episodes and movies and what not, it's not that easy to watch. Is a little silly, but the scene with them sitting on a burnt out tank while the intro is playing just... dunno. Makes me want to watch it. So much for not walking into a minefield with eyes open, right?

*FictionJunction and Kalafina are both Yuki Kajiura's projects (Kalafina was disbanded), and of the three vocalists of Kalafina, two are part of FictionJunction anyway. "Different" groups might not mean a whole lot in that case, but different enough.

Edited May 16, 2022 by majestic

[Bartimaeus]

2 minutes ago, majestic said:

The Japanese version isn't used in the movies at all, but rather the same song in a fictional language, so that still could be either. Placement at the end suggests a bonus track of a sort. Yuki Kajiura does that sometimes. Madoka has a case like that too with Mami's theme song having two separate versions for their live performances, although Credens Justitiam and Mirai are more different than the sound track version of Where The Lights Are and the Japanese version - makes sense, they were written for different groups* from the same instrumental theme.

You're right - the non-Japanese version is also halfway through the album, and if that's the version used for the film, it's probably the 2006 film.

3 minutes ago, majestic said:

Yeah, I had to pick a complete collection pack just for the Legend of the True Saviour series. Seems like overkill, but it's not like there's much choice out there. For something with hundreds of episodes and movies and what not, it's not that easy to watch. Is a little silly, but the scene with them sitting on a burnt out tank while the intro is playing just... dunno. Makes me want to watch it. So much for not walking into a minefield with eyes open, right?

Good luck, .