Fate Stay/Night, one more time

It’s been a hot, boring summer. I quit playing Rift; just lost interest in it. Got back into Magic: the Money Gathering Pit again. (Well, WOTC gathers it, anyway), but I play no better than I ever did; still just a scrub. Yeah, really feel great when I sit down next to one of the store’s top players for a draft, and he goes, “Damn, I’m next to you? You don’t know what the hell you’re doing.” (Hint for the future: I knew well enough to figure out what color you were playing and start hate drafting against you.) So, that store’s air conditioning sucked and I quit going there anyway. Update 9/4: They’ve done a couple of things to mitigate the heat and I’m pushing the limit on late arrival to avoid the heat. It’s helping

Haven’t been doing much computer gaming on the weekend with Dr. Heinous. This last weekend he was off to help the Stainless Steel Brat move into her college dorm. Sigh, I guess that means we’ve only got two years left before civilization is in real trouble.

So, I’ve basically stopped watching any of the series out there this season. Well, I did catch up on Sacred Seven, but it’s not because it’s any good, it’s just that I was bored and it was the least inoffensive thing I could queue up. Downloaded a couple of movies, including Redline, which falls into the “terribly cliché, but kinda fun anyway” bucket, and Ghost in the Shell SAC: Solid State Society, which falls into the “Cool but weird” bucket until it unloads a bunch of “WTF?” with the identity of the final villain. It’s utterly stupid, and puts the writers in the corner for any future stories. How can the Major operate in the net again, if there’s the danger that her subconscious might spawn another one of those?

I’ve even been watching some AMV’s and trying (failing) to download Ladies vs. Butlers. But mostly, I’ve been watching the Fate Stay/Night TV series again. And two things continue to impress me about it. First, it’s a testament to how deep and detailed the original story was, that I can watch it for the third time, and still notice things I didn’t see before. Second, whomever was responsible for Studio Deen animating this show should be pilloried on a short stake. It’s the kind of story that deserves top-notch animation — KyoAni or Production I.G.’s A-game. Studio Deen has since produced works with some competence, but this was before they learned how to draw. (Render. Whatever.) It’s really painful watching Rin morph off character every time her face is not shown from the front, or her hair isn’t tied up in the same way. And bad CG dragon is bad CG dragon, no matter how you look at it. It was even worse than I remembered.

Among the things I noticed was the “Diary of Rider”, which was an extra on the third(?) DVD. Kinda cute. I also noticed I need to buy an updated DVD player program, WMV sucks, and I can’t find my code to activate my old copy of WINDVD6.

One of the things I saw bothered me though. (Well, a lot of things I saw bothered me, but I’ll quit whining about the animation.) During the fight at the school between Saber/Shirou and Rider/Shinji, Rider stabbed Shirou with her spike, and instead of piercing his skin, the tip broke off. Now we later learn why this happened — Shirou has an item that makes him regenerate, and bestows invulnerability, but the problem is, it wasn’t consistent. Several times in the series, before and after this incident, he’s hit and almost killed — by Berserker for one, and Lancer stabbed him — fatally — more than once. (He got better.) So was Rider just weak? No, a few days before, Rider’s spikes penetrated his arm just fine. And Gilgamesh just messed him up.

So why? I just don’t have an explanation.

Oh well, don’t have much else to talk about for now, so I’ll just let it go with the only logical explanation. “Rin is mai waifu.”

That is all.