So, I’m back from my trip. I tacked on a couple of extra days detouring to meet up with old friends and such, including a stopover at Dr. Heinous’ place. We amused ourselves by making fun of Godzilla vs. MechaGodzilla.
“Woman driver!”
“I want my own meson-beam tank”
“Tokyo on a not-so-rare Godzilla-filled day.”
Upon hearing the male lead ask the female lead about having kids, “Hey, the counter’s a flat spot — let’s breed!”
Unfortunately, Dr. Heinous made one comment that was so howlingly funny, we can’t remember what it was he said.
He has accused me of wanting to watch only light, fluffy anime. That is not entirely true. One of the shows I followed last season was Chaos;Head, which was a sci-fi psychological thriller. The ending was a bit too… um, exposition-filled, and Takeya went from uber-loser putz to super-badass faster than a drag racer doing a quarter-mile, but otherwise, not bad.
This season, I’m following Kurokami, which can only be described as dark and intense when it gets rolling. Nope. No fluffy here. It is perhaps not as brutal of a hammer to the ‘nads as the Vampire Twins arc from Black Lagoon is (my new standard by which I measure brutal and ugly in animé) — but it’s still not easy to watch a cute little girl get turned into street paste — to know it’s coming, and still be stunned at how vicious it is when it happens. Kurokami has got good fighting animations, a serious, if strange premise, and the female lead isn’t bad looking at all. As Wonderduck wrote about a first-episode battle, “you have no doubt that these two are trying to kill each other.” Ditto for the second episode’s battle. The bad guys are…well, they’re evil. No two ways about it.
Then there’s Druaga, which hasn’t been fluffy since about the 8th episode of the first season. Nope. No fluffy here. No fluffy. No ffffluuuffffffffy….. um. Excuse me. I, ah, I’m enjoying the show; I figured Fatina would hit on Jill on the rebound, and I was right. It’s good to see her being a bit more serious after Neeba broke her heart, but Jil’s still carrying the torch for Kaiya, after she and Neeba betrayed everyone. Looks like Melt and Coopa are going to rejoin the party next episode. I like Coopa, she’s just too much cute & put-upon competence in a small package.
No. Fluffy. Nope. No…. fluffy….. here……
I have no fluff. NO fluff. NO FLUFF!
“AAAAAAAAAAHHAHAHAHAHHGGGGGGGG! MUST HAVE FLUFFY! CUTE! STUPID! FANSERVICE!”
(Downloads Rosario + Vamprie Capu2 ep. 13 in desperation.)
Fluff. Fanservice. Must have fanservice….
(Watches said episode…)
“AAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!”
(Two hours later, shakily re-enters room; downloads and watches Akikkan! ep. 3. Shortly afterwards, commences drooling due to lack of functional braincells remaining.)
“Ayyyyyuuaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaggghhh……”
Ok, This is serious. Time to haul out the DVD’s.
Dr. Heinous loaned me another of the Tenchi stories, Ryo Ohki, the complete series. Um. Re: last episode: “WTF?” Why did they bother making it? The only outstanding questions after the previous episode were “How did Tenchi’s mother die?” and “Where did the strange girl come from.” To call the answers to those two questions lame is to insult the concept of lame. Then of course, there’s the cosmology of the sixth episode. Wait, I knew Sasami was unusual but I thought she was something else… Eh? Washu? Tenchi is what? Gyaaaaah!
Um. That really removes any possibility of there being a serious challenge to our heroes ever again right? I mean, come on,
I’m developing an all new respect for Tenchi Universe. Crap, this might send me all the way to Tenchi in Tokyo, it’s that bad. I definitely need to rewatch GXP. It makes this stuff look like weak sauce by an amateur. I mean, the whole “Noike is Tenchi’s fianceé, but not really” was a bad enough jerking of the chain, but it really looks like a lot of the stuff in the original is being made up and thrown in as they go along. Bah. Nabeshin rules!
Damn, I may have to go back and finish Neo-Ranga to get the taste of this crap out of my brain. I’m sure not going to be ordering anything new for a month or two, tempted though I am to give Nanoha a shot.
Dr. Heinous has been preaching the gospel of the Last Exile lately. I looked at the boxed set at Robert’s: ~$159 for the thinpack. I looked at download-to-own at Crunchyroll: ~$52.
I mean, fuck. I wouldn’t want to be Robert, right now. That’s not encouraging, watching the studios undercut your ass like that.
Funimation’s licensing of Last Exile should yield a more reasonably priced thinpak within a few months. Still must be a bitch for retailers stuck with the old Geneon stock; one thing I don’t miss about that company is their insanely-expensive-at-MSRP boxsets.
You’re right on the mark about the ending of Kurokami’s first episode; if I hadn’t known what was coming when I watched it last night, my incoherent swearing might have awakened everyone in the house. Easily the best show of the new season, though.
Yesh. They telegraph it all the way; even use the rule of threes. And it’s still a hammer. If I were Keita, I would probably be an incoherently babbling madman hiding under the couch by now.
Crunchyroll is hard-sub. Just thought I’d mention that.
The third “Tenchi Muyo: Ryo Ohki” OVA was produced ten years after the previous one. (The first episode with Noike is the first episode of that series.) And yeah, it sucks mightily. There was plenty of potential there for a good story, but they pissed it away.)
It isn’t all their fault, however. In story terms it happens before GXP, but it was actually made a year after, and part of the reason for it was to patch up the continuity between TM:RO and TM:GXP. They were stuck with having and explaining a bunch of things because they showed up in TM:GXP. I don’t know how much of that stuff in TM:GXP was Nabeshin winging it and how much he got authorized, but it tossed several pretty serious wrenches into the previous continuity and they had to be straightened out.
But it still could have been much better. Not one of the best, by any stretch. And they also didn’t perfectly match the TM:GXP continuity. According to TM:RO OVA3, the giant spherical battleship was destroyed, and Mihoshi’s brother was sentenced by his family to spend ten years as a lumberjack. TM:GXP supposedly happens a year later, and the battleship exists, and he’s back at GP HQ, working for his great aunt.
Anyway, yeah, GXP is a lot better than TM:RO OVA3.
Well, Misao could have been paroled early, since most of the nonsense was at his father’s instigation; and I don’t think the battleship was destroyed, just very heavily damaged. In the first iteration, it definitely isn’t destroyed; in the second, it’s not so much that it blows up as it fires the planet-killer beam accidentally. Given a year until GXP and then several months (or a year or two within GXP itself) there was plenty of time for repairs, or maybe even a rebuild.
Anyway Lady Seto said ahead of time that she was going to cover the repair cost by buying a planet from the ship’s owner.
I thought the oddest thing about the reset was that the Goddess Trio (for lack of a better name) allowed everyone in the gang to keep their memories. Presumably, they were the only ones to do so, but it subverts the trope. Nothing wrong with that; I just didn’t expect it.
Still, the biggest problem for me is that episode “Z” messes with the entire universe’s cosmology, and removes anything that could trouble the Third Dimension as a credible threat to the party.
Re: Crunchyroll — point. And lower quality for viewing too. But are softsubs and higher resolution worth $6 an episode?
But are softsubs and higher resolution worth $6 an episode?
Depends on the series, I think. If Strike Witches ever gets an R1 release, I’ll buy it again.
…and you’re right about the battleship. I forgot that in the reset it doesn’t get damaged.
It’s damaged; the opening scenes replay Ryo-ohki and Ryoko’s attack. In the original run, we just see them repeatedly smashing the Chobimaru, and everyone deciding to just leave them to it. In the reset, we see them attacking and the internal explosions, but then someone yells “it’s pointing straight at Earth!” The beam fires, and Tenchi intercepts it around Jupiter, triggering his alternate dimension trip that had originally been caused by Z’s attempt to kill him. In neither version do we actually see the Chobimaru destroyed.
Heh. As for the ‘reset’, perhaps they are kin to The Great Will of the MacroCosm?
Much better looking than Iz-chan.