#Definitely not because I tryharded for the second scene | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

e-adlirez · 10 months

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I saw in your post you said that Nicky saves Violet more than Colette, which scenes are those? (Sorry it's been a while since I've read the books haha)

cracks knuckles Let's see :D

I actually dunno if Nicky saves Violet more, but Nicky definitely doesn't get as much credit for them as Colette does, which is weird. Give the Australian dumbass the praise she deserves >:[

Aight, let's do this tally style because I'm a tryhard. I'm definitely gonna do a full version where I discuss every single time Violet's almost died from an unfortunate nat1, sooooo

First time our nat1 holder requires help is when she rolls at nat1 in whatever-the-hell-not-falling-under-a-spell-falls-under-as-a-skill-check, and she's almost pulled in by lake fairies and their lake. Prolly did a nat20 in perception, but a nat1 in the uh the not-falling-under-a-spell stat.

Colette saves her from this one, so

Colette - 1 Nicky - 0

Second time kinda is when Violet and Nicky are paired together in Secret of the Snow, and Nicky helps Vi climb down a taaalllll ledge. Like reaaaallllllyyyy tall. Vi didn't roll any nat1s here, it's just a cute moment where Nicky is helping Vi through her acrophobia, and we love the two for it.

Let's consider this a 0.5

Colette - 1 Nicky - 0.5

From Cloud Castle onwards we get a transition in the mood of the series, from "traveling in a weird world full of weird creatures that also has a bit of beauty in them" to "haha fairy go weeeeee". Cloud Castle isn't the most atrocious of this particular instance because it does tie in cloud-related mythology, and it's the first instance of this whole fairy spam thing happening. Anyway, Violet and Nicky are separated for the big parts of this book so we're just gonna skip on over to Treasure of the Sea.

Treasure of the Sea is Violet's first catastrophic nat1. Yes, even worse than almost getting siren-ed. Picture this: there's this cursed Mariana Trench thing that magically pulls down anyone who does the stupid thing and looks into it. A magical wise character is on the other side, so not crossing it is not an option, thus this thing is the magical equivalent of trying to balance on a beam/tightrope without looking down, in the perspective of someone who has no experience in such. Oh yeah and you're swimming across, so it's more like uh... trying to keep your head facing up while swimming. Dem their necks are gonna be sore--

They make Violet's looking down so dramatic for some reason? I mean I get it, but at the same time I don't? She was like "yeah I feel like I need to look but I know I can't,,,, I CAN'T RESIST I'M LOOKING DOWN" "VIOLET NOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"

I dunno? It just feels strangely worded? Written? I dunno, either way, Colette somehow resists the magic force of an abyss that literally no one in all of Aquamarina has been able to resist and pulls Vi up to the surface before she can be cursed and turned into a magic fish or something. Musta been the adrenaline, or Colette herself not being pulled down that made this a smidgeon easier. Dang that arm strength to lift all those shopping bags and violin training has been doing wonders for the both of them, somehow they didn't let go of each other-- /hj

OH YEAH AND NICKY SAVES VIOLET'S SUDDENLY DUM ASS FROM TOUCHING A PUFFERFISH AFTER AN INT CHECK NAT1, PAULINA DID YOU STEAL VI'S BRAINCELL AGAIN CAN YOU GIVE IT BACK PLEASE--

Colette - 2 Nicky - 1.5

Now we have Land of the Flowers, probably Violet's worst streak in the book series by far. Woman gets not one, not two, but THREE nat1s in it, each one worse than the last. Colette saves her from two out of three of them, that being the temporary amnesia flowers and almost-falling-twenty-feet-off-magical-stairs.

(Pictures' quality might not be as good because I'd been using drive PDFs this whole time and Land of Flowers doesn't have a PDF in the folder I'm using sooooo)

Unfortunately, despite Nicky being beside Vi in the illustration, it was Colette who saved her.

Colette - 4 Nicky - 1.5

She does have two nat1s in Crystal Fairies, but Will saves her from one while Paulina technically saves her from the other. As you can see this woman is forgetting her RNGesus incense and RNGesus is losing his patience about it more and more.

OKAY Star Fairies! There's only one nat1 Vi has in this one, and Nicky saves her from it. Probably my favorite save because this particular save is goated :D

Colette - 4 Nicky - 2.5

Finally, Magic of the Mirror. There's technically one where Nicky saves the girls from accidentally walking into lava, but technically she was at the front of the group, and anyone else would've done the same if they were in her shoes

Colette - 4 Nicky - 3

Then there's the scene where the girls have to listen to siren queen Esmeralda's song without falling under the spell, and Vi doesn't fare well in these particular trials, as we know. The problem is, as you can see here we don't know which among the girls specifically kept her from breaking from the group. It was more of a team effort thing.

So what is to be done? Should I just give both Nicky and Colette a point here? Orrrrrrr

Nicky and Paulina are closest to Violet in this scene that happens almost immediately after the trial, so point goes to Nicky :3 Am I grasping? Maaayyybbeeee

Colette - 4 Nicky - 4

And that's it! Turns out they kinda tied! Technically tho if you counted the minor occasions where Nicky helped the violin child as full points instead of half points, she would win 5 - 4. I rest my case :D

Oh yeah these aren't even all the nat1s Vi has had in the series. These are only the ones that either Colette or Nicky saved her from.

#thea stilton #thea sisters #questions with e

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lovetheangelshadow · 2 years

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N’Pressions: Obi Wan Episode 1 &2

Disney has released another installment to the Star Wars film franchise with the limited series of Obi-Wan Kenobi that seemed to be met with both skepticism and excitement. Honestly this is perfectly understandable considering how divided the fans have become even when compared to the time the prequels and Clone Wars series came out initially; though I feel its gotten a bit more toxic all around in the past few years. And I totally get the perspective from both sides of the table; even if I’ve grown pretty tired about it-but that is another time.

The setting for Obi-Wan takes place 10 years after Episode 3. Jedi Hunters or Inquisitors have taken up stakes in Tatooine due to rumors of Jedi activity in the area and is where we get introduced to our main antagonist Rava-a hunter with clear ambitions of personal glory and some kind of obsession with finding Obi Wan. She seems to possess a combination of both strategy and impatience -usurping her superior’s authority on several occasions to do her own thing. Meanwhile; Obi Wan is working at what appears to be a meat packing facility for scraps and keeping kind of a stalkerish eye on Luke. He’s also give given up on the ways of the Force; seemingly cutting his connection off and having buried his lightsaber. The B plot of the first episode revolves around a 10 year old Leia who is shown to be wise beyond her age; but is also stubborn, has no filter, and gets easily distracted. She does end up getting kidnapped by pirates to be used as bait for Obi Wan. I have to give her actress definite credit because it could have been sooooooo easily to make her come off as this holier than though princess that we would have to suffer for several episodes. You can definitely see both Carrie Fisher’s mannerisms in her delivery which I like. Also that cousin-I don’t know if it’ll ever be answered but I wouldn’t be he was related to Hux in some manner. I dunno-I just get that impression and its amusing…even if I am very likely wrong.

I’ll admit I don’t think the first episode is too strong a start mostly because of it’s repetitiveness Obi Wan works at the meat place-someone asks him for help-he says the Jedi are gone and stuff with the Inquisitors. I get what they’re trying to do as showing Obi Wan as this completely broken man who is just going trough the motions at this point which is understandable but I feel like a lot of it could fit better into a half hour episode. I do like how both Owen and Also there are points where the camera tends to shake around a bit especially during dialogue scenes that kinda takes me out of the moment at times.

The second episode is where things get a lot more interesting. Obi Wan has answered the call to heroism to rescue Leia and is on the planet Dakar to find her. Without his connection to the force he has to use other means to get information. We also do kinda see shades of his old self kind of slipping through when he gives coins to a begging Clone Trooper and calls out the actions of a charlatan who is pretending to be a Jedi to extort money off people who are desperate to escape. So we know that the Obi Wan from pre Episode Three isn’t completely gone and we might see more of that as the show progresses. Of course him following the trail turns out to be trap set by Rava. Luckily Obi Wan is able to escape with Leia unto the town streets. The rest of the episode plays more like a cat and mouse game as the duo have to deal with both bounty hunters and the Inquisition on their trail to try and escape the planet. This episode feels like a big step up from the first as there is now a clear plot set up going forward though it still has a couple small issues of both pacing and continuity. While it is still too early in the series to make a call-I am not too impressed with Rava as a villain. I get they’re trying to build her up as this clever and ambitious threat though so far she comes off a bit more of a tryhard. Again-it is way too soon to make a call. Say what you will about the Last Jedi-at least that was built up over the course of the film and was in part due to his own hubris.

Speaking of-this does feel like a soft do over of Last Jedi. A Jedi of prominent reputation having given up due to trauma and being forced back into the battle. Time will tell just how much of that is true since I’ve learned not to create expectations (looking at you TRI). This could go strong in the first half and then meander the second. Well we shall just have to see no? I am Noctina Noir; we take to the sky.

#star wars #star wars obi wan #obi wan series #obi wan star wars

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trulycertain · 3 years

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fic writer interview

Tagged by @skogrr Thank you very much! It's a while since I've done one of these, and I've missed them.

Name: Tru/"Oi you" Fandoms (that I write for): Dragon Age, mostly. Still the fandom of my heart. Mass Effect, Deus Ex... uh, accidentally GreedFall? I don't know how or when that happened. Two-shot: Hmm... The actual last two-shot I wrote was Terms & Conditions, a very silly Dorian/Inquisitor modern AU where Gal is the guy Dorian hires to stop his late father's house falling apart. Recently? I suspect that's going to be Driftwood, which can stand on its own as a sort of weird post-canon first-meeting AU, but is trying to tempt me to continue it. (Vasco ends up going looking for Tír Fradí, which has disappeared - and finds it. He also finds De Sardet as a highly avoidant tree god of the island, post-Bad Ending, who transformed against her will. And he ends up falling in love with her anyway.) Weird tree gods! Pining by literal pine! An eventual happy ending! More grumpy commentary by Vasco!

Most popular multi-chapter: Either An Unquenchable Flame or Distraction, probably - both juggernaut pairings, the former close to the game's release and the latter with some fancy forbidden romance, so not so surprising. But surprisingly, Prague, 10:42 PM has done really well, considering it's for a small fandom (Deus Ex) and a rarepair age/rank-difference pairing that I thought would be a one-off experiment? I get it, guys. I like sad repressed stoics too.

Actual worst part of writing: Editing - which can be fun, but that "over and over" stage when you're about to post, especially in a longfic if you fear you've lost the spirit of the thing and the character voices and you can't see the wood for the trees. And when I have to remove a whole scene which Jenga-unbalances the fic, and then I have to redux from the top. Basically, most things to do with pacing. How you choose your titles: I like double-meanings and one word titles. If that fails: quote from a song. If that fails: quote from poetry, but very rarely. Do you outline: Only a little. A bulletpointed list of events or noted-down major lines of dialogue, that's usually it.

Ideas I probably won’t get around to but wouldn’t it be nice: Uh... oh god. I blame so many people for some of these.

Post-Destroy ending where John is attempting to build a shed on Rannoch because that's the kind of thing retired people do, right? and Tali is far better at it than him, and it's just... disgusting fluff.

Actually, just reduxing the early John/Tali stuff with a bit more nuance and a stronger style.

Eva and Kaidan, and their mutually wary first meeting. ("Wow, that's a lot of pomade." "Wow, that's a lot of death-glare.")

AU where Gal and Dorian never met in DAI, and after everything went down, Gal tried to fade into the shadows and leave. He ended up working in Tevinter as an occasional informant/odd-jobs guy the way he was pre-Inquisition. He ends up being a gardener for a bitter, wry magister who seems to hate the entire Magisterium, has recently lost his father to political scheming and murder, and wants to take down the entirety of the remaining Venatori with one staff and maybe his teeth if he has to (hi, Dorian). But first, Dorian's going to drink his own body weight in whiskey and be a recluse for a while and start thinking about time magic again. Gal is trying to keep his head down and should definitely not be falling in love with said magister. Who's someday going to end up at one of the more southerly ports, come across a statue of the great Inquisitor, and go, Oh.

Stuff on Jensen's PT and rebuilding himself post-augs. More of Proprioception, basically.

Mer-AU where Marie De Sardet is still a diplomat attempting to make new connections, just not a human one, and it's a disaster. An awkward disaster. Highlights include her being framed as the beast trying to drown their best captain; her attempting to wobble about on brand-new legs and Vasco's coat while everyone assumes the dear captain has had a few too many; her asking Vasco if his "fascinating markings" glow; them getting into a duel, and her (fondly) getting punted off the side of the ship going "Woo-hoo." OK, I wrote a bit of that, but only a 1k doodle I'll probably never return to.

Non-Naut court AU where Marie gets promised to Bastien D'Arcy, because he's a bit of a layabout but he's also rich, popular at court, and amenable to bribe - [cough] suggestion, and the D'Arcys have prominent trading links with the Alliance. Instead she falls for his far less of a social butterfly, tired, worried-numbers-guy brother Léandre, who's pretty damn uncomfortable around Nauts because he's well aware he nearly got sold to them and he is not the favourite.

Straight-up role-reversal AU (another thing where I've put down 1k that I'll probably never return to), where Marie's Naut name is Paz, and she's a fed-up second-mate who's tired of noble idiots and feels a little strange and conflicted about her mark (and has context for it, because they make frequent crossings to Tír Fradí). Also a little more jaded, without the love of her mother, and not nearly as much of a tryhard as Vasco in canon; she ended up here because she had nowhere else to go and the Nauts were like "Ooh, free kid," and she's well aware. She gets stuck escorting the D'Arcy brothers to Tír Fradí for their new venture and is not looking forward to it. Except one of them is intensely bright and wry and keeps asking questions about the ship and noticing shit he is definitely not meant to notice, and they keep ending up in strange conversations, even if he seems really, really wary and uncomfortable about Nauts.

Some vague stuff about Vasco's thoughts on Jonas and that whole side quest, considering he's also a sea-given and implies sea-given take some shit in the Nauts, and also how damn difficult it must be watching a sea-given's parents endeavour to get their kid back when he knows full well his didn't do that for him.

Actually, just more Vasco POV in general, even though he's damn hard to nail down. I've written much pining for him from Marie's perspective, and I'd like to try things from the opposite. This guy's idea of wooing someone perfectly normally is to panic and then recite Baroque poetry. You know he's sappy as hell in the privacy of his own head, even if he's trying not to be.

Jean and Síora having the "I'm a sad healer who just lost my mother and I'm trying so hard not to crumble under the weight of assisting the leader" mutual talk way too late at night around the campfire and maybe him crying on her shoulder a little, with mutual kindness and the beginnings of attraction, and her finally getting past his jokey-smug facade to understand him.

More stuff about Jean's past in general, and how he wanted to be a doctor before he was dragged away from it by looking after Constantin and being nobility.

Síora and Eseld and the ways they changed over the years; something like an exploration of grief and growing her own will and the ways they very differently view the renaigse. Also maybe more about the en ol menawi magic, if I can worldbuild well enough?

I'd also love to do a GreedFall soulmark AU - it's generally not my kind of trope, I'm not into biological determinism type tropes - just because names and aliases and assumed identities are such a mess in GreedFall and it's a repeated plot point. That said, I feel like it's been done so beautifully in this fandom before that I wouldn't have much to add.

Callouts @ me: So. Many. Commas. So much over-explaining everything. If they get out of the car, your readers do not need a five-page manual of "and then he undid his seatbelt and leaned over to grasp the door handle, and then pulled it, and then stepped a foot out before he almost thought better of it - but no, he was going to get out of this car. The other foot joined the first, and he nearly banged his head on the doorframe."

Best writing traits: People say I have a head for finding small-but-important moments. I'm also told I write likeable protags. People have more than once said my writing makes them feel safe or makes them smile, and I really couldn't ask for more than that. I'll take those.

Spicy tangential opinion: I don't think I have any, really? Oh god, that makes me sound so very boring. Oh! Um. There should be more tree body horror in fandom. And body horror in general. *thumbsup*

No pressure tagging: @artemis-crimson, @eridanidreams,@rainypixel, @aphreal42.

#tru talks #memes #long post

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deltaengineering · 3 years

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What remains of Fall Anime 2020

You might have noticed that I haven’t been keeping up with my season impressions, mostly (but not exclusively) because it’s really boring to come up with new ways to say “it’s isekai, which means it’s garbage for stupids”. So here’s what I ended up finishing, in ascending order of goodinosity.

Hypnosis Mic -Division Rap Battle- Rhyme Anima

Ostentatious rap battles in an insanely stupid universe are very fun. The thing is that this doesn’t want to be a good anime, it wants to sell us on these characters, and the characters are pretty terrible on account of all of them being one-word gimmicks. So, let’s give them three rounds of introductions and have them solve lame, generic crimes for 8 episodes instead of setting up the rivalries that everyone suddenly has later, when the show gets good - because it does start delivering towards the end, and becomes really all I wanted. So I can’t even say I’m disappointed, but the first half of the show is almost entirely worthless. 4/10

Assault Lily Bouquet

I don’t want to be the guy that’s all “I’m mad at this show not catering to what I want”, but I do have to say that Salt Bucket is much better at being a goofy, lighthearted yuri comedy than it is at action (though there are a few choice cuts) and at having an engaging storyline. This is again just an ad for some game or other, so it’s no surprise it has about two dozen characters too many, but it also has quite a lot of superfluous plot - so much so that I suspect it was initially planned to be twice as long. Apart from that, it’s cool and all that some Gainax old hand got to make his own Gunbuster-like, but it’s just not very good at that and all I wanted was Kaede antics and bath scenes, of which 1 per episode is clearly too few. 5/10

The King's Avatar 2

King’s Avatar got a sequel and overall I have to say, I kinda like it more than the first season even though it looks much less ambitious and even the character designs were changed towards the bland. But I honestly don’t care much about the esports aspect of this and much of S2, especially in the back half, is more about schemes and social engineering - as close to an Eve Online anime as we’re ever going to get, I guess. It’s still very chinajank (why the hell does every episode come with a redundant chibi summary of itself, etc), and while I can’t call that “good” it does remind me of a time when I wasn’t filled with useless knowledge of anime tropes and was just enjoying the weirdness. Also, Ye God’s antics is as close to “looking for anime with OP MC” as I’m comfortable with getting. 6/10

Heaven Official's Blessing

Now how about some Chinimation that isn’t very janky? I only became aware of Heaven Official’s Blessing when it suddenly rocketed to the top of the MAL charts, so I gave it a looksie and oh boy. The first few episodes of this show are flat out gorgeous, quite funny and very very gay. So I was ready to agree with MAL for once, except it then launches into an arc that mostly consists of our dudes sitting in a dark pit telling each other stories that aren’t very interesting and seem barely related to the setup. Yeah, the back half of this just isn’t very good at all. And the subs are hot garbage. Still, the beginning is so impressive that I would recommend this show despite the middling rating it’s about to get. 6/10

Ochikobore Fruit Tart

You know the problem that these 5girls4koma stories have, where one of the characters is an annoying pervert, yeah? Well, in Fruit Tart every character is that character, and they’re rather cultured as well. Yes, it’s often of questionable taste and it has a terminal case of 4koma storytelling but dammit if I didn’t enjoy it. It certainly helps that this show’s greatest asset by far is Broko and it seems to be aware of this, because there’s a lot of Broko material. It would have probably have gotten a 6 but the last episode is just so... maximum Fruit Tart. I’m down for some trash if it’s as well made as this, and I do like my kiraralikes spicy, so thumbs up over here. YMM definitely V on this one. 7/10

Majo no Tabitabi

Speaking of things that are hard to recommend despite me liking them a lot, Elaina here challenges the very notion of what a TV show even is supposed to be. I assume most people tune in every week expecting to get something roughly similar. Not so with this one, you could get everything from slice of life antics to Higurashi-style gore, or reasonably deep character study to pervert comedy. I would say that the only unifying thread is the presence of Elaina, who is a very fun character, but there’s an episode she’s not in, so there you go. But I’m a connoisseur of the weird and I also have to say that I enjoyed every episode in its own way. Also, each episode stays remarkably consistent by itself, and in the end it wraps it all up with a sort of neat “life is like a box of chocolates” thematic bow, which isn’t earthshatteringly profound but hey, it’s there. Just don’t go in with expectations, especially not expectations based on the first episode. 7/10

Love Live! Nijigasaki

It’s Love Live. Good old reliable Love Live. Really not much to say about this one, any discussion of what makes this different from previous iterations is going to end up in minutiae only people who already watched this could possibly care about. I do have to say that while the musical numbers are as good as Sunshine’s were towards the end and there’s also a lot more of them, “looking budget deficient outside the CG” is the one thing I didn’t expect from something that’s ostensibly a Sunrise premium product. So boo on that one, apart from that it’s idols (an anagram of solid). 7/10

Garupa Pico Oomori

The chibi SD shorts based off Bang Dream are still better than the main show. Even if S3 was actually quite good, this is just the best thing you can do with 30+ characters that aren’t that deep. Garupa Pico specializes in absurd humor setpieces that at points is better at being Pop Team Epic than Pop Team Epic itself was. Take that, memelords. 7/10

Fire Force S2

Fire Force is just weird, man, and it’s sort of great. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a property of this magnitude show this much of the ol idgaf spirit. How about an episode where the A plot is the most evenhanded exploration of religion i’ve seen in anime, and the B plot is about blowing up a tryhard edgelord by exposing him to panties? How about a subplot where Batman and Thor infiltrate the vatican to kill the pope, only for that to lead into a gay rape backstory, only for that to be resolved by dank weed and dismemberment? It really is quite a thing, as they say. Now, Fire Force certainly delivers hard at points, but it’s also very scattershot, even if S2 is somewhat more consistent than S1. The weakest parts are unsurprisingly still the ones where it’s remembering its fighting shounen template, and that’s not only because I don’t like that, it’s also because it’s particularly and consistently bad at scheduling these huge, simultaneous multifight setpieces it often crescendoes with. But hey, at least these tend to look super cool. In short, Fire Force is a land of contrasts and still the only fighting shounen I give a damn about. 7/10

IDOLiSH7 Second Beat

Did you know that I think Idolshi7 is the best one of all of these huge-ass commercial idol franchises? Yeah, I think it’s better than Love Live, and as of Fall 2020 also the better looking one because Troyca still delivers where Sunrise apparently can’t. I guess still don’t like the music much, thankfully there isn’t a lot of that. It also still specializes in gigantic drama, and to its credit S2 is now much better at either getting to the point or at least making it silly and fun. You show that door who’s boss, Sou. Still fantastic Tsumugis all over the place as well, in fact I think I like all the characters now. Even Banri gets his big moment in this season! Yeah, this stuff is pretty cool. 8/10

Adachi and Shimamura

So here’s the AOTS, and it’s the lovechild of Bloom Into You and Tsuki ga Kirei. While it definitely isn’t as good as either of these two, because it lacks the “about more than just teenagers being hyperbolic about a crush” part from Bloom and the part where it has an actual ending from TgK, it carves out its own niche with its loopy, almost stoned tone that’s full of side weirdos and yuri hyperspace. It’s also uniquely focused, with a tiny core cast and even Shimamura doesn’t really matter all that much. This is all about Adachi, and thankfully Adachi is amazing. Amazingly awkward, that is. It’s very cute. So yeah, this is a bit too lacking in substance to aspire to classic status, but it’s a great time nonetheless. 8/10

#anime #review #fall2020 #Hypnosis Mic -Division Rap Battle- Rhyme Anima #Assault Lily Bouquet #The King's Avatar #Heaven Official's Blessing #Ochikobore Fruit Tart #Majo no Tabitabi #Love Live! Nijigasaki #Garupa Pico Oomori #Fire Force S2 #IDOLiSH7 #Adachi to Shimamura

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mysticalmusicwhispers · 3 years

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HELLO... i am back

yes aditya gets a treat because otherwise indus is going to murder him and then transfer him far far away and never unground him ever and we can't do that to a baby. also i hope no actual murder of chickens occur in their plot thing but it could also be something Worse so Yikes!

i wish yao didn't know what a hickey is but. welp he would. actually this makes me propose a situation (nsfw-ish? implied nsfw?): nyo china buys encyclopedias for yao to read and one very old one has a section with a full diagram of sexual intercourse. it isn't porn, it's those diagrams where the skin is missing and serves as a view into the organs of the human body but just in a... position. so 8 year old yao reads all about sex and goes to nyo china being like "hey so sex is for making babies right? so if i want children i have to have sex right? there's no opting out of it?" and nyo china is like fuck it the kid might as well get his sex ed + introduction to adoption stuff now since he knows about it already. then the next day a teacher has a badly hidden hickey and yao is trying to figure out how the fuck that happened before he remembers that certain animals bite each other during sex and asks nyo china about it.. and then boom. (the encyclopedia part was unfortunately inspired by irl events 😔)

but anyway imagine yao mistranslating the code.. and being like "wtf why do you want to BITE people" and india + iran being like ??? and then they get an unfortunate sex ed that night (baby! yao's mildly inaccurate version: "sometimes weirdos like biting each other during sex many animals do this as well and this is called a hickey. sex is this thing that adults do for fun and sometimes to reproduce. but you should only bite other people and have sex with them if all of you are interested and not just because you want a baby, because there are other ways of getting one. if they try to have sex with you or bite you or touch you in Bad Touch areas you should -" "kill them? and get an adult later?" "yeah exactly" "how do you know this tho??") then yao probably tries to find the sex encyclopedia to bring to school to show india and iran but nyo china threw it out because it was 20 years out of date and said that pluto was a planet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

also YES MISS VIETNAM DESTROY THE PROPERTY OF THE RICH... CUT HIM DOWN TO SIZE imagine getting 2 entire ass houses at 18 lol and there was actually a person who was going to get a mercedes in my class. apparently his parents were buying 2 and wanted him to pick the one with the colour he liked more as a gift at 18 and keep the other for themselves. he asked us which colour Mercedes was better, someone accused him of being a braggart, and then there was so much drama... i am glad i am no longer in that class. rich people.

also yeah miss vietnam is definitely one of those nice but strict teachers!! she'll definitely be kind to everyone but she won't tolerate bullshit and god knows yao is full of it. but also imagine vietnam teaching india's class and then yao pouting to india about the assignment he got a b on (a slight improvement from the c) only to be met with "what? she's so nice and smart lol you're just an asshole i kind of want to make friends with her tbh" and yao's like How Dare You Backstab Me Like This? but yes she really forces him to Think instead of just letting him be and that's very good for him!! and she gets an intellectual outlet too :D

also yeah like linh is going to struggle.. how do you write "he's a complete asshole but tolerable and intellectually fun after a while" in a GOOD manner?? this rec letter will probably be full of phrases like "a spirited personality given to debate" or something

This is also a late reply :’)

I wasn’t really thinking about anything specific for the plot; I was really just trying to find a word that was slightly similar to hickey and decided on a dead chicken lmao. But honestly, it would probably be something like “I’m going to bring a (dead) chicken to class for show and tell and you two need to act horrified and cause a ruckus because it would be fun and it would scare the other kids :)”. (this is probably bullying, so in an effort to make them slightly better kids, an alternative plot is that a stray cat has been coming to their school and in order to make friends with it, they feed it a whole-ass dead chicken Nyo China got from the butchers and was planning to cook for dinner. The teachers are horrified and confiscate Yao’s backpack for fear of germs and salmonella.)

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OH MY GOD nyo China, miss, please, he’s young. But the encyclopedia reading is so accurate o-o small and independent Yao + voracious reader + lots and lots of books about Everything + nyo China’s hands-off “it’s never too early to know” caretaking/parenting strategy = what other things has he been exposed to... (let’s face it he’s probably said the F-word or insulted someone in Mandarin without meaning to, but came off as a disrespectful little chaos ball) BUT THE BADLY HIDDEN HICKEY and the ANIMALS BITING EACH OTHER salk;fsdl;ksdjl way to unconsciously roast your teacher lmao. I love nyo China’s no-nonsense way of approaching Strange Questions Asked by Eight Year Olds but I do not know how to feel about her very direct answers 😭 Also, I am very sorry for your personal loss 😔.

Scene 3 is 100/10 canon now. “weirdos who bite each other during sex” Yao thinks hickeys are weird, and good for him. Also the little summary!! Of course Yao pass on everything he knows to India and Iran... at least it’s not a fucked up version of sex-ed, even if it may have some small inaccuracies. rip outdated encyclopedia. Also “ ‘kill them? And get an adult later?’ ‘yeah exactly’” GOOD nyo china thank you for doing at least one thing correctly

also your class is crazy??? A MERCEDES oh my god... how do his parents love him so much? My parents probably wouldn’t even trust me with a second hand from 2005 lmao. Also, wtf rich kid, why would you be crowdsourcing opinions for YOUR car? (ngl I kinda think he was bragging too 😂, but drama? Do all these people have nothing else to do besides gossip smh)

Vietnam has a blacklist of Confirmed Assholes she needs to keep an eye on and Yao got on the list in the first few days after being very tryhard and simultaneously arrogant, so he just assumes she’s naturally mean because he never saw the other side of her. But then he starts hearing reviews from his friends who all say she’s their favorite teacher so far and he’s all like “????? Excuse you???” Also yes go get her friendship Aditya hopefully it will mellow you out a little as well “A spirited personality given to debate” YES YES YES! That sounds like such a nice phrase but it’s just code for “loves to argue with me and that’s cool I guess”. The recommendation makes Yao glow (to admissions) despite how much Vietnam thinks it’s bad and also how much bs-ing she thought she did. Admissions officers think Yao’s amazing and contributes greatly to the classroom environment and Vietnam is like “yeah, in a way, as long as you don’t mind someone who thinks every word you say is somehow wrong and will fight you to prove it lol. just take him, I’m trying to get rid of him”

Since there’s essays involved I’m assuming she teaches either history or literature? Kinda on the fence because I feel like she’d be good at giving a no-nonsense version of history filled with interesting details and prompts that make you think (and also hosts monthly debates on controversial issues), but I also want Yao to be as un-confident as possible in his abilities in her class, and I feel like he would be less comfortable/sure of his answers and thoughts in a lit class than a history one. I’m not sure though

#the ancients elementary #musings #luyous #aph china #side note i love how we're literally penpaling over the internet. both of us take a few days to process the ask and then respond and i find #it hilarious and amazing. thanks bones lol <3 :)#to process the ask/reply*#also you have no idea how much i was laughing reading this so thank you for that too 😂#hws china #aph vietnam #hws vietnam #hetalia #hws #aph #nyo china #fem china #headcanon musings #ask musings #answered

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zghostreviews · 4 years

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Hellsing Ultimate (2012)

Well, I’m finally back with another review guys! It’s been a while! Back at it with another Hellsing review, but this time with the adaption that follows much closer to the manga.

As summarized in the review of the original, Hellsing is a british occult organization that specializes with the extermination of feral/rogue vampires that cause trouble for people. The story follows 3 protagonists, Sir Integra Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing, the head of the Hellsing organization and master of Alucard, Seras Victoria, who is a newly made vampire that was turned by Alucard, and Alucard the vampire made to exterminate those that stand in his and his master’s way.

I watched this anime 2-3 years after it came out, and rewatched it all again via Toonami on [Adult Swim]. I became much more obsessed than I was before with Hellsing after this.

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The show overall is honestly 9/10. Would be a 10/10 if they had an anime opening, specifically the one they used in the 2001 adaption.

The episodes are all an hour long at most for all 10 episodes, and surprisingly at kept all of my attention, despite my attention literally being that of a goldfish’s, as seen by the fact that I started watching One Piece 7-8+ years ago and am just now getting to episode 302.

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Music: 8/10 It was pretty epic and really set the tone, still wish the anime had an opening tho.

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Story: 8/10 This storyline was pretty cool, had me on the edge of my seat, kinda wish that they didn’t force in comedic moments, imo it felt kinda tryhard and displaced most of the time. Also wish that I didn’t have to watch Seras being molested as “comedic” tones by some zombie-like people and by that creepy looking vamp guy a minute before Alucard actually decided to do something. I know that the author of Hellsing was a hentai artist in the 90s, but cmon.....you didn’t have to show all that, I don’t even think the 2001 did any of the molesty shit even to THAT extent. These scenes lasted for like 20 to 30 seconds while the 2001 molest scenes were not even close to that long. With how long that scene was my grandparents could’ve walked during any of those seconds and I would have the worst time trying to explain that shit while also running the risk of being kicked out or being called homophobic slurs every single day of my life until I was old enough to leave. Anyways I also didn’t like Pip either, dude was a fucking creep, plus he was the protag in one of the author’s 90s hentai series so.... :\\

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Characters: Overall 8/10

Integra: 10/10 I am gay and I like a woman that can easily dominate me with just her voice alone. Am I considered a milf hunter if I have a streak of thinking that older anti hero/evil women are hot? ‘cause I think that Integra even at 52 years of age can get it ngl.

Seras: 8/10 She cute but can easily kill with no problem if she goes completely ape shit. ngl I kinda liked feral Seras tho, something in me definitely awakened at the sight of her and Integra.

Alucard:5/10 I was really annoyed that the series gave him the most screen time tbh. He’s kind of an asshole and overrated imo, tho this could be just because I’m not straight so I don’t see the appeal that others had in him whatsoever.

Walter: 7/10 ngl it hurted when he went to the n*zi side near the end of the series and then he fucking died. He was the real mvp and also a wise old guy.

Pip: 1/10 Didn’t like him whatsoever, didn’t find him funny whatsoever. He was just a plot device anyways and was also used for dumb het romance for Seras to have motivation to go ape shit and yeet Zorin’s face out of existence.

Can’t rate the Millenium characters since this would be a Stroheim from Jojo situation where you like them but at the same time they’re willingly a n*zi so.....

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Dub or Sub???

Dub for sure with this one as well, just like the 2001 adaption. As said in the 2001 review, the voices just fit MUCH better here unlike the Japanese VAs.

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Ending: imo it was pretty good. It made since that Integra didn’t end up having an heir, not only because of the sheer lesbian energy she radiates, but because it would seem somewhat OOC for her to do that. It makes total since that Integra would just let the Hellsing oraganization die with her. Don’t know how the manga ended tho since I still have to read it.

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Anyways, that’s all for now! Peace!

#anime #review #Ghost Reviews #hellsing #hellsing ultimate #molestation mention

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slothcritic · 5 years

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Dragon Ball Z Abridged - Episode 5 Review

Weird yet creative cutaways with strong overarching momentum.

Vegeta: Kills Bugs Dead opens with Goku finally reaching the end of Snake Way and the end of his journey to reach King Kai. The "nice job, jackass" as Goku literally craters into the planet sets the tone for this character in a big way. We're also treated to the incredible hijinks of Vegeta and Nappa.

[Title Sequence]

The pit-stop at Arlia at least receives a well-fitted and rather hilarious incarnation in this series. Even though the episode alternates its focus between King Kai and Arlia, I'm going to talk at length about Arlia first, and then move onto the King Kai segments.

I'm already going into this scene with some personal bias, as the "stronger guy playing along with the weaker guy because it'd be funny" trope is one of my favorites. And here we have exactly this. Vegeta and Nappa allow themselves to be captured and thrown in jail by the Arlians, where they meet an assortment of varied bug characters.

"Don't drop the soap" seems a little outdated for the modern style of TFS, as I feel they've leaned away from really older, cruder, less PC subject matters like calling someone retarded or insinuating prison rape, etc, but it fits Nappa's character completely as someone who is childish, crass, annoying for the sake of being annoying, and kind of a jerk. TFS has at least acknowledged the idea of possibly re-dubbing Season 1 with better equipment and perhaps a more refined script, and I dearly hope they keep this line unedited simply for the sake of nailing Nappa’s character identity.

After very nearly becoming a prison bitch, Vegeta decides he's had enough and promptly kabooms his way out of prison, landing smack-dab in the middle of a coliseum with the king of Arlia and his queen.

Nappa's blunt manner of introducing himself with simply "Hi." will never age.

It’s noteworthy that scene is also the first moment we get a good look at Vegeta as a character. Nappa was firmly established as the goofball from the start, but Vegeta's portrayal has more depth to it than could be conveyed in one-liners. Most of which is just sass, smug pride, and anger, but still.

It's also made clear very quickly that despite their bantering idiocy and gruff talk that they're not just for show, as Nappa no-diff's the thirteen elite Arlian guards with a massive shock wave that we later see level a city.

The king and queen are then more or less blackmailed into fucking. Nappa's eager fascination during this whole scene, the descriptions, visual edits and sound design are... Well, there's no other way to put it, it's fucked up. And it is hilarious! These are some very creative takes and decisions that were made entirely for internal experience of the show itself rather than as a parody of something else. Nappa even takes a photograph of it and sends it to Vegeta, since he's abstained from watching.

The comedic jabs don't stop there either, as Nappa tries to adopt the Arlian Rancor, but just like the kid who can't sit still, Nappa ends up breaking everything he plays with. Just as Vegeta is about to kill the king, rocks begin flying around the coliseum.

"What are you doing?"

Vegeta smirks. "I'm about to rock you, like a hurricane." And then boom, he hurls a rock into the king and kills him. Let's put a pin in that brick joke for later.

The long flashback scene doesn't play any music, which feels like a weird editing misstep after a series of home runs. They leave the planet as heroes, and Nappa sets Vegeta up for another predictable bit of mood whiplash, where Vegeta obliterates the entire planet. This is a huge escalation in power scale compared to everything else we have seen thus far. But then, this is Dragon Ball Z. We've already reached “destroying planets” at only the fifth episode, and everyone knows that it only goes well past 11 on the dial from here on out.

Granted, there is controversy in the official version about whether or not this would’ve been possible for Saiyan Saga Vegeta, considering Arlia is not canon, but I will not be considering that simply because DBZA contains no filler. Everything shown in the flagship series (not counting movies, DBZA Kai, or other shorts) is presented as being canon to DBZA. Also, Vegeta and Nappa are shown standing outside of their pods... in the vacuum of space. Series veterans will understand the massive can of worms this opens. I'm looking at you, Battle of Gods.

Once everyone, including the people that they JUST SAVED from a tyrannical king, have been reduced to space dust, Nappa closes off this scene nicely.

Now that we've discussed Arlia, let's focus on King Kai's role in the episode.

He explains to Goku that the planet has high gravity due to it's small size. Gregory from off-screen pipes up that this doesn't make any sense. I suppose "higher planet density" wasn't considered when writing the script - or perhaps it was, and they just decided that the easy answer wasn't the funniest one. Maybe “there’s an incredibly powerful pirate trapped in the core of the planet, which is why the gravity is so strong" was deemed better for a parody.

Honestly, I agree. Bojack works as an in-the-know reference, and is also fleshed out enough within the show that a newcomer would understand what's being discussed.

At the time of this review, the Bojack Abridged movie has not yet been released, but this is easily one of the longest brick jokes in all of DBZA, since Episode 5 was released in 2008 and it is my expectation that Bojack Abridged will be released within the year, leaving in its wake an 11 year old callback.

When King Kai asks Goku why he had been sought out, Goku explains that the Saiyans are coming to Earth and he requires training. Excellent fade-in and musical choice for Goku's uncharacteristically serious speech to King Kai.

Of course, it gets cut off at the peak swell with King Kai's indifferent "sure", leaving Goku gobsmacked.

In this series, King Kai's indifference and easy acceptance of Goku is attributed to the mind-numbing loneliness of only having a monkey and a grasshopper (cricket, sorry) to talk to for the last 500 years. Goku agrees, as he couldn't imagine anything more boring.

Major flash-forward to Namek. Just this scene being here at all is a major instance of a sequence break. But it is the introduction of another exceptionally interesting character in the series.

In terms of placement, this works as a long-term cutaway gag and reminiscent humor but not much else. We're still about half a season away from even considering Namek within the story, and the Saiyans haven't even arrived on Earth yet. The decision to slide this segment into the middle of this episode leaves some serious questions in my mind. But at face value, it's not that bad.

We're treated to a solid ten seconds of just staring at a massive fat green alien while birds chirp in the background. We hear a fish go "plonk!" in the water, and Lord Guru calls for someone named Nail, who looks a lot like Piccolo, to approach him.

"I saw a fish. That was all, you can go back outside now."

Definitely reinforces the point of boring. And while Nail is lamenting how boring his job is, Lord Guru tells him that he saw a bird and then promptly instructs him to "kick its ass."

But we’re not Nail, are we? We’re the viewer, and for some reason in the human mind, segments of extremely boring content usually pique our interest even more, because we have it drilled into our psyche that something is going to happen to break the tension sooner or later. That notion, the idea of slowly leaning closer to the monitor during the ten long seconds of a single still image, both conveys the boring tone of Namek, but also leaves the reader waiting in anticipation long enough for these dull scenes to just fade from their perspective and only latch onto the climatic moment. In this case, Guru commanding his apparent servant/bodyguard to assault a fish.

Not to overstate the obvious, but if it’s not the viewer’s own sense of tension and curiosity, it’s the pure absurdism and characterization of Guru that carries this scene. Disregarding source material, the design of Guru is meant to make him look old, wise and compassionate. Making him a lazy, annoying, verbally violent fatass is a near-infinite cash cow of writing material. It’s very difficult for me to judge this scene unbiased, knowing what comes next, but I imagine this would be a tryhard non-sequitur at worst, or promising potential for the future at best, with regards to this scene on its own, within the context of this episode and nothing more.

This episode also saw the genesis of perhaps not the first, but one of the most popular jokes in all of DBZA: Piccolo just jobbing the shit out of Gohan. DODGE! The scenes chosen and the delivery are outstanding compliments to this cheesy, simplistic joke. At this point I feel it's important to address that my editorial reflections or descriptions of these skits are relative to the context of these episodes. Even with the best of what this episode has to offer, we're still in peak 2008 internet humor era. The use of the word "outstanding" here will not carry a similar significance should I use it to describe a later episode.

Also the most random cutaway in all of DBZA, full-stop, is the brief look into the Hall of Justice, as Superman, Batman and Aquaman debate how they will stop the approaching Saiyans. This is humorous only in its absurdity, but less-endearingly than Guru was. Even if this scene makes zero sense, and relies upon an almost lower form of comedy than slapstick, Aquaman's voice is still just Krillin's voice. At least Superman and Batman sound different than the main cast. I'm really tempted to dislike this more, but the lackadaisical attitude and context of the whole scene definitely draws your eye more than a lot of the sensible but base-line plot progression of the story. I don't know if it belongs. To me, this scene just screams out that TFS is flinging spaghetti wildly at the wall, any and everything that might be funny, and while some of it sticks for one reason or another, (Jadoshin as Solid Snake, Antics on Arlia, even Guru's abrupt cameo) some of it flops. If anything, this show builds upon the corpses of its failures, and learns what works and what doesn't work surprisingly quickly.

Conclusion

Bizarre, but I liked it. Nothing in this episode that's bad is memorable. I might criticize the Namek cutaway for being out of place, but after letting this review sit for a few days, I just remember Goku saying "Man, nothing could be more boring than that!" and the immediate cut to Namek, and Nail pleading for the love of his sanity for something to happen. I might criticize the Justice League cutaway for being wildly out of the place, but I just remember "WHAAAAAALES!"

The meat of the episode was also decent, as it establishes Goku training under King Kai, and Piccolo's continued training of Gohan, the origin of DODGE! and the realization that Gohan can transform into an Ozaru. And you can nod your head and say that these may be necessary to the story all day, but they're also presented with... let's call it a clumsy grace. It's not bad, but it's miles away from official dub quality. This is in essence what the benchmark or gold standard was for early abridging back in 2008. The quality that TFS will continue to evolve the series into simply defies all logic or explanation, and in comparison makes these episodes look downright crude.

But let's face it, if Episode 1 began with a person lying on the ground and shot in both kneecaps, Episode 5 shows that same person at least hobbling down the street to the hospital.

It might not look pretty on the whole, and some of the dialogue might be clunky, but it seems like a lot of the flaws in this episode are simply caused by being products of their time.

Whether we're looking at Namek or The Hall of Justice, even the most outlandish oddities of this episode have still made me laugh. That's really the end of it.

Score: 75

Passing Thoughts

"I hope something exciting happens around here soon. I don't care what it is." - Ominous!

"You're surrounded by my thirteen elite *KABOOM* ...dead guards."

"SUMMON THE RANCOR!"

#slothcritic #DBZ #Dragon Ball Z Abridged #TFS #teamfourstar

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crazygaysex · 2 years

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really fucking sucks having my room right next to the kitchen having to hear my roommates pregame all fucking night definitely about to take 2 benadryl and fuck right off anyways. writing this all out for fun to distract myself god i hope they leave soon jesus fucking christ the demons have a chainsaw to my neck and they turn me to a puddle in the daytime

i think its true probably maybe some fans are harsher to shiv because she is a woman but i think one of the reasons i cant stand her most the time isnt because she’s a woman, it is because she projects this image of herself as a feminist and is all righteous about her politics which is also why i dont like ewan. kendall is similar but because his is more just because he is so out of touch.

roman is by far my favorite sibling, he is one of my favorite types of characters which is an impish asshole who is really so so transparent and pathetic i just adore his character, not as a person just think he is much more fun to watch. it’s probably common for peoople to find people who are straightforward about the ways they’re a piece of shit more likable than people who try to convince everyone or themselves otherwise. i tend to like the amoral careless assholes probably because i relate to them more as a transparent person in a general sense.

connor’s second cause he’s harmless fun. he’s not explored as much as the other characters psychologically but still has a hidden depth to him despite being one of the characters mainly contributing comic relief. i dont have a whole lot to say interesting about him right now though

shiv would come in second to last. sarah snook is so amazing. her character is also so nuanced and her performance is so nuanced and real and you get such a strong conception of her as a person despite how closed off she is. i’ve never cried for the charatcers watching this show (i cry easily most the time with things im a fucking sap) because although i sort of sympathize since they are all so fucking miserable and traumatized (mainly the kids, and also you feel bad for tom watching him constantly disrespected and gaslit and abused by shiv) i dont empathize with them like i dont feel bad for them that theyre miserable. i just kind of recognize that they’re truly miserable pathetic people born into a situation where they have no chance of real meaningful human connection and it doesn’t go much further than that.

i got surprised when recently i mean granted i was in a pretty vulnerable state but in some scene in that period where shiv starts getting continuously jerked around by logan, the look of utter humiliation and hurt barely veiled on her face as he completely withdraws and just completely degrades his own daughter got me with a lump in my throat. i think it was when he has rhea fuck her over and berates her and she just looks so confused and hurt and vulnerable. like even though she missteps and embarrasses herself and talks out of her ass like a pompous idiot without his help and despite that i really cant stand shiv most of the time cause of how arrogant and self-righteous and manipulative and abusive she is, the vulnerability sarah portrayed in her in that moment is the only time i ever wanted to cry watching this stupid show on like my eighth time through.

i cant stand kendall because i dont really enjoy his character from an entertainment value standpoint, he is so miserable and pathetic and lacking in self awareness in a way that is not fun for me most of the time, the most fun he ever was was when he was on meth singing lion king and then his whole FAMILY THERAPY and how he read logan For Filth in the kitchen there. season 2 kendall is slightly more sympathetic and since he’s so subdued and depressing at least you dont have to watch him be such a lame tryhard and embarrass himself constantly. season 3 kendall is fully unbearable and just nauseating to me i dont like him at all. this isn’t to say he isnt a well written nuanced character cause he certainly is i just dont like anything about him really

i cant stand shiv because she is a few degrees more self aware--which is definitely required of her if she wants a fighting chance a hundred times more than it’s required of kendall because she is a woman--and more of a snake whereas kendall is just a confused pathetic sadsack stumbling around into walls who actually tries to convince himself he’s a feminist icon to make himself feel better rather than virtue signal because he is so completely lost in himself and his dad that he is fully out of touch with reality. romans great though. possibly one of the more self aware ones of the siblings. he’s reprehensible but at least he doesnt waste time and make me roll my eyes by acting like he has any principles. i just think he’s so fun i cant think of a time he’s on screen that i dont enjoy kieran culkin fucks

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fairymascot · 6 years

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Personally, BTS just cemented how much of S1 I had problems with. Chloe as a deep voiced baby butch in men's hand-me-downs came off as way more genuine than Chloe dressed like a punk model from a European fashion mag. Which I mean I'd argue is more a result of how intrinsically male S1 was, but thats neither here nor there. Plus, even with the clear time crunch in the back half of Ep3 and the tacky af 10 seconds after the credits, BTS had a shockingly solid story structure all things considered.

hi, anon! thanks for the message. i didn’t mean to write this much in response, but i guess i’m in a chatty mood today, so oh well! here ya go.

yeah, on the whole bts gave chloe a lot of new traits that instantly became ingrained into my perception of her, even the few that override her lis1 traits. the fantastic thing about it, though, is that most of them don’t. i love that she’s into poetry, d&d and science – they all tie believably into her geeky childhood spent with max and william, and are unexpectedly harmonious with her destructive and brash personality. chloe price loves science… for blowing up shit, and sabotaging her enemies! chloe plays d&d…. by strong-arming and threatening her way through the campaign!

it makes sense in the context of her lis1 characterization – because we know she was dopy enough to play pirates and superheroes with max, and because we know in the reality where william survived she got straight a’s in class, but at the same time they’re things i doubt the original writers would’ve come up with on their own. it turns her into a very rarely seen kind of character – ‘rebel punk’ and ‘geek’ are usually on the opposite ends of the character archetype spectrum, and i think it’s awesome how deck9 blended them together. that’s what i mean when i say i’m glad bts is fanfiction: it gives us the kind of unique spin on the characters that’s obviously born from the hearts of fans who spend a long freakin’ time thinking about them, and coming up with little details to fill in the parts we don’t see in canon. it’s like scrolling through tumblr and seeing a ten-paragraph headcanon post. you don’t come up with shit like that unless you’re passionate about the source material, and it’s often stuff the original creators would’ve never even thought of.

and yes– i absolutely love that chloe’s a dirty gritty baby butch who wears hoodies with holes in them and cut-up jumpers from when she was in middle school (if you look at this concept art). i love that even though she’d like to be cool and smooth she’s an absolute disaster who can’t handle small talk with a pretty girl – which, again, definitely has its roots in her tryhard attempts at flirting with max, but elevated to a much higher degree. and it makes sense, given that she’s young and awestruck by rachel in a way she wouldn’t be with her childhood friend, not to mention still figuring out her sexuality, and generally stupid as hell.

i definitely have a harder time buying chloe’s ‘hipster girl monthly’ presentation in light of bts (that femme as-fuck lingerie? the nail polish? please), but i don’t fault dontnod for that. first of all, she was obviously designed to contrast max, who’s mousy, plain, and doesn’t stand out. playing from max’s point of view, you’re supposed to be kinda awestruck by chloe – like, wow! she’s so cool! she’s got so much style and flair! and when playing bts from chloe’s point of view, you’re supposed to be awestruck by rachel, which is why her first appearance is in that totally badass, if not slightly over-the-top punk getup. so that contrast between ‘plain player character’ and ‘dazzling love interest’ is ultimately retained between games. deck9 also created the pretty blatant implication that rachel was a big style influence for chloe even early on, what with her lending her clothes, and the tragically-scrapped scene where she was the one dyeing chloe’s hair for her. so that evolution makes sense, too.

secondly, independent of male influence, the fact of the matter is that fictional characters will always have a coat of glamor encasing them. as consumers of media, we don’t want to see real-life humans like us: we want a more idealized version, even for characters that are supposedly realistic and down-to-earth like the cast of lis. did you ever see that one robert pattinson quote, where he talks about how in twilight they put this wire in the collar of his jacket, so they could bend it to be just the right kind of frumpled? people made fun of it (and it does sound ridiculous!), but in truth, the overwhelming majority of fiction is like that.

chloe in bts is glamorized, too– it’s why the cut audio with taylor tells you she looks raggedy and poor, but her clothes fit just perfect with no visible holes or stains in them. it’s why she can wear a beanie from the glove compartment of a truck in a junkyard and not get comments about her body odor, or quickly discover an infestation of lice in her hair. it’s why when she’s ‘forced’ to wear her dad’s old clothes, she looks like a lesbian style icon instead of, you know, an awkward teen in old oversized shirts. i mean, look at that denim jacket. what dad wears all these badass pins and patches on his clothes? please.

in short: i’m definitely with you in that that bts has added a lot of wonderful things to chloe’s character, and a lot that makes her feel far more organic and relatable to me as a lesbian. but i see it as bts adding onto the canon, rather than lis1 retroactively detracting from it. let’s be fair, yeah?

#askbox #text #meta #my rambles #life is strange #before the storm #the dynamics between lis1 and bts as an original work ft a derivative one are just super fascinating to me #i could go on about this shit all day #Anonymous

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geckcellent · 6 years

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tagged by @habenaria-radiata an i’ve been sleeping on this for like 2 days bc iT LOOKS SO FUN 8′| but haven’t been on pc til now. ty 4 tag !! answers are below the cut.

1. rean/jusis (sen no kiseki) 2. inaho/slaine (aldnoah zero) 3. naoya/abel (desu1) 4. hibiki/yamato (desu2) 5. johan/judai (ygo gx) 6. nanashi/hallelujah (smt iv:a) 7. jomy/blue (terra e) 8. protag/arata (digimon cyber sleuth) 9. abel/atsuro (desu1) 10. karma/nagisa (assclass)

All questions for copy+paste:

1. Do you remember the episode/scene/chapter that you first started shipping 6?

2. Have you ever read a fanfic about 2?

3. Has a picture of 4 ever been your screensaver/profile picture/tumblr screensaver?

4. If 7 were to suddenly break up today, what would your reaction be?

5. Why is 1 so important?

6. Is 9 a funny ship or a serious ship?

7. Out of all the ships listed, which ship has the most chemistry?

8. Out of all your ships listed, which ship has the strongest bond?

9. How many times have your read/played/watched 10’s fandom?

10. Which ship has lasted the longest?

11. How many times, if ever, has 6 broken up?

12. If the world was suddenly thrust into a zombie apocalypse, which ship would make it out alive, 2 or 8?

13. Did 7 ever have to hide their relationship for any reason?

14. Is 4 still together?

15. Is 10 canon?

16. If all 10 ships were put into a couple’s Hunger Games, which couple would win?

17. Has anybody ever tried to sabotage 5’s ship?

18. Which ship would you defend to the death and beyond?

19. Do you spend hours a day going through 3’s tumblr page?

20. If an evil witch descended from the sky and told you that you had to pick one of the ten ships to break up forever or else she’d break them all forever, which ship would you sink?

no obligation ofc but! tagging @neutralend, @jusis-albarea, @moments-minutes-more + cien/king/azu/lightful whose urls i fORGET BC I’D FORGET MY HEAD SOMEWHERE IF IT WAS PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE TO PUT IT DOWN

1. Do you remember the episode/scene/chapter that you first started shipping 6? LITERALLY LIKE THE SECOND JUSIS WALKED ON SCREEN 2 SECONDS INTO SEN 1 AND CALLED THEM ALL DUMB HOES 😂😂

2. Have you ever read a fanfic about 2? bitch i'm like pretty sure i've read the entire ao3 tag. not that that takes long tho //rarefandom blues

3. Has a picture of 4 ever been your screensaver/profile picture/tumblr screensaver? UHH. on my psp like years ago, when i was a baby geck i stored all my ~pg-13~ pics on my psp bc my dad was always remote monitoring stuff on my desktop acct sO YEAH i had a rotating background pic of various low res kazunao on cycle

4. If 7 were to suddenly break up today, what would your reaction be? HEY OP, THAT SURE IS IRONIC, FUCK YOU

5. Why is 1 so important? LISTEN WITHOUT THEIR VERY GAY ~BOND~ JUSIS WOULDA STILL BEEn an asshole tryhard """perfect noble""" and rean woulda been 4eva alone bc honestly..,,, ... .. ,,, , if they hadn't had a superstrong bond then the plot would've crashed and burned like midway through sen 2 as well tbh

6. Is 9 a funny ship or a serious ship? why are you calling me out like this?????? >:T is a serious ship but they're pretty funny funky compared to kazunao (thinking emoji)

7. Out of all the ships listed, which ship has the most chemistry? THAT'S TOUGH BC LIKE I FIRMLY BELIEVE ALL THESE SHIPS WOULD DIE/WALK THROUGH FIRE/EAT A LIVE BULLET ANT FOR THEIR PARTNER but uhh if i had to pick i'd say karma/nagisa just bc of how amazing of a team they are in canon. least chemistry though?? DEFINITELY inaho/slaine, they make it work with a lotta dedication and grease and also by being more stubborn than god tbh

8. Out of all your ships listed, which ship has the strongest bond? honestly op this is like breaking into my house and taking my dog and cat hostage and saying only one of them can survive wtf !! iii think strongest bond is either inasure once all issues have been started working through, or hibiyama at basically any point post-sept route though.

9. How many times have you read/played/watched 10's fandom? all the way through?? like 3 times, once the anime and twice the manga aaand then i read bits of the manga piecemeal from time to time.

10. Which ship has lasted the longest? WELL LET'S SEE UHH my immediate urge was to say hibiyama for having 2 whole lives together (+1 4eva alone pining cycle for yamato) but honestly 2 ain't got nothin on kazunao for lifetimes spent statistically LMAOOOO. but also like rean/jusis is going strong 4 games now and H O NEST they only get gayer every game !! err if this meant ship longevity relevant to shipper then johan/judai is the 1st ship i fought my homophobic parents over as a baby geck and honestly there was no turning back,

11. How many times, if ever, has 6 broken up? I'M GOING TO SCREAM I THINK BECAUSE THEY DID ONCE. IN CANON. IT WAS VERY MESSY THERE WAS A LOT OF DEATH INVOLVED AND HONESTLY I LOVE IV:A BUT HOLY FUCK

12. If the world was was suddenly thrust into a zombie apocalypse, which ship would make it out alive, 2 or 8? Huh that's tough actually. abel is basically god and atsuro's a smart techie so they're a superpower team, but canon already ran inasure within like a millimeter of their lives and both of them are extremely competent AND dogged af so?? i think they both would. but also like any survival/gauntlet-type question is immediately biased towards abel so i rule he should be disqualified tbh

13. Did 7 ever have to hide their relationship for any reason? first of all there are no secrets on a ship full of closely bonded telepaths and second of all no. no. no. blue is the GAYEST fucko i have literally ever seen grace the screen. bitch's hobby is gazing intently into jomy's eyes and flying around with him while one or both are naked. LISTEN,

14. Is 4 still together? yeah and they will be til death do they part

15. Is 10 canon? honestly???? no relationships are ever confirmed except the teacher related ones but if you have eyes and a brain even if it's vestigal then yeah, canon.

16. If all 10 ships were put into a couple’s Hunger Games, which couple would win? going with my earlier ruling to DQ abel "god is my bitch" minegishi related ships, it'd either be inasure or karma/nagisa, the former being extremely adaptable tactically and the latter being literally unmatched in the kind of situation hunger games death gauntlets take place in. counting abel in though, everyone rallies together probably behind johan/judai who have this naruto-like infectiously enthusiastic leadership, bust outta the game and beat up the sponsors.

17. Has anybody ever tried to sabotage 5's ship? OH GOD AND HOW LMFAO, lookin at you yubel. but uhh we got some very gay scenes outta it and also hot bondage not-johan and it resolved nicely so we good o/

18. Which ship would you defend to the death and beyond? listen op i'm looking you directly beady eyes to beady eyes and telling you to put my cat and dog down and back away slowly hhh. all of them. all. of them

19. Do you spend hours a day going through 3's tumblr page? not anymore, there's just not much new content production for them

20. If an evil witch descended from the sky and told you that you had to pick one of the ten ships to break up forever or else she’d break them all forever, which ship would you sink? OP TURN ON YOUR LOCATION I JUST WANNA TALK ! !! ..jokes aside if i HAD to break one of them it would be jomy/blue bc honestly an amicable breakup for them would still be miles kinder than canon (PENSIVE x99)

#ship meme #rambling

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ruzhansky · 7 years

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i pray this will never end, i have my heart open wide

This report is not going to cover my teams, spreads and so on, as it was in 2015. I even don’t know if I should call it a ‘report’, I just want to slop down some thoughts about 2017. Have a nice read.

Why did I return to vgc? I DONT KNOW. As you might remember, I was a tryharder in 2015, but Nats loss and Autumn Series event loss completely broke me. 2016 season wasn’t a thing I’d like to try out (especially with the 2015 wounds) and I got some serious mental health problems in 2016. New pokemon game was a thing that could possibly make my days a bit brighter, and yea, I liked the game, the tapus, the ultra beasts and I became curious about the new format. The first russian tournament was announced to be held in late December, but I was busy with exams prep and haven’t even completed the main story. Though the tournament was tempting. I tested my first ideas on PS which included Instruct spam xd, but Nihilego with proper support showed a real potential at our early days of metagame. I could make it to the tournament (MSS Q1, wow Russia got midseasons...) and somehow won it. It’s like WHATTT how could i... but still. This thing lit something inside me and I decided to give that season a chance.

this is a very bad and old drawing of my mss q1 team xd sorry

January brought the first meta shift, and I started struggling with the team I had. I accidentally joined a random coversation on twitter and then I texted PephanVGC something like hey, did you remember we wanted to talk about teams. And he was very nice to me right from the start, he helped me out with the team and then we started to chat about everything. About friends, life, our past, loneliness and other troubles, and I thought I’ve found a real soulmate. We started to chat every day, but some days ago we were complete strangers to each other. This is so great.

Pephan shared a team with me I instantly fell in love with. It was Winter, so yeah Hail was cool to use, and that was the warmest winter I have :3 though Arcanines already were everywhere, and I removed Life Orb from his Koko to make it Electrium Z Koko AND IT BECAME MY MASCOT FOR THE WHOLE SEASON (i thought so before specs has come to mind...) Also I played the same team with Pephan at Melbourne Challenge, and I got paired with him on r2... I lost in a close set and got broken so much, but he still helped me a lot with that and taught me how to treat losses less painfully. I love Pephan.

February IC poster with @Elveman yeah we had fun once

Then I built an AFK team too but with fucked item choices (firium arcanine just why), but I also had Scarf Porygon-Z and it was amazing to use.

I brought Hail team to St Peter (yeah I travelled to St Petersburg) and Moscow PCs, got 1st and 2nd, AFK PZ team - to MSS Q2 AND I WON AGAIN. I was wondering why my enemies rivals didn’t visit our events, but ok, it was not my problem. Especially when our 2016 nats champion became my main enemy.

This was my season flow. I traveled, I played, I was studying at university and it was my graduation year, I had a job and tried to combine it with studying and pokemon, sometimes it affected my results. I was invited to represent Pokemon at Hinode 2017, the huge annual Japanese event in Moscow, with my main rival, famous russian pokemon community moderator and some TCG guys. It was definitely a nice experience. I got money from that just because I told people how amazing pokemon is, I teached them how to battle and showed that there’s much more than Pokemon Go. Yes, I don’t like Go. All pokemon players don’t like Go here.

b-but they’re so young!!! pic from Hinode.

Well, I thought season should have something else besides MSS and PCs, and hell yes, 8 Russian Special Events at 8 different cities were announced in May. Moar travelling! We(my rival, me and our tcg frens) decided to go to St Peter (again), Perm, Astrakhan and Ufa. Someone decided to go to all 8 SE because he wanted to.

The big-big drama started at our community but I don’t wanna share it here.

I graduated, traveled and played, and since my rival missed 2 Specials due to his own graduation and some other issues, my invite made a bit more real. Wait. THE DREAM OF MAKING WORLDS BECAME REAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But I still needed to put a lot ot work into it. Top 1 vgc gets paid invite, I was 1st, but tcg guy with a good amount of vgc points was second (because he always played vgc after tcg at special events). I thought he will play TCG after all and he won’t interfere with my road to worlds, but I found out that he is going to the city we’re all decided not to go, to grind some tcg AND vgc points. I got angry as a rival and made an impulsive decision to go to Irkutsk Special before Moscow Special. And I went. And got some important points. And pretty locked up my invite. But I said to myself that I shouldn’t sсream it out loud and dance in the shower before the official ceremony in the end of the season. I still had Moscow event.

Huh. Our system this year allowed travelling, and 8 Special Events were held in June and July. Because I had the will and money to travel, because I got a job and combined it with studying at university and somehow haven’t lost it, I visited 6 Special Events. People started to shittalk me. I am wallet warrior, I am noob, I am not worlds caliber, I bought an invite and so on. I even partly agree. At that point winning russian events isn’t close to winning or doing well at EU/US events. Not every SE at regions gave us a strong competition. I am deadly far from WolfeyNails/Markus/etc level. But even with that, should I leave my spot and act like a fucking noble idiot? ‘Oh I am bad and not worlds caliber, guess I should give up now’. Yes. Definitely. Absolutely. It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? I have a game I love, a desire to travel, a job and money for that, so why not. If you don’t play and try, you can never ‘get good’. Sitting on a sofa and thinking ‘oh I will never be good enough so I better don’t play’ is a shitty mindset as well. And then twitter drama about ‘free worlds not being elitist’ happened, I’ve become so sick of that.

Moscow Special. The long-awaited end of the season. Really long-awaited because I felt like every day had 48 hours. I didn’t have special plans for Moscow. I didn’t want win it out as hell, I just wanted everything to end. And it ended.

the event

party after d1

i remember how to draw

the main scene

turn your main enemies to judges lol

#lifegoals

Despite tons of personal shit happened to me this season, apparently I found myself a better person. i don’t know if this is growing up, I am already 21 and difference between 19 and 21 doesn’t seem too big, though my mind and attitude to some things have noticeably changed.

Got rid of fake elitism, as it was in my early days of competitive and my -most famous year- (2015). I can’t even imagine now but then I thought that competitive is the BEST part we can have about pokemon, and everyone else who likes casual playing or anime are absolute losers and can never be as cool as us. Your dream is completing dex? Breeding a shiny? You love some anime characters and wanna watch fuckin dummies’ anime forever? Uh, dream of becoming a xXxWORLDCHAMPIONxXx just disparages your shitty life goals. I laughed at people i don’t know in person and who didn’t do anything bad to me.

I don’t know what changed my mind in particular. It’s like I just woke up with thoughts “why should I do this”. I saw that people who are not only about competitive can have and reach their own pokemon dreams, they’re valuable too. They can travel not only for competitive. For love to the franchise all of us are fond of. I am sorry for being an asshole :)

Got some skills of loving myself. Yup, y’all might know it was a big problem. Tl,dr: I haven’t a reason to. My only ray of light was being successful enough in vgc and when I wasn’t it became a catastrophe. Bad runs at IC, losses at regionals stages, bad BS sessions? Oh god, i am so shitty, i hate myself - and it was the softest thing I said. It was a mix of hatred and sadness and absolutely wasn’t a great thing to feel. It cost me a real depression in 2016 - though I didn’t even play that season, it hit me hard. I let it happen, I let myself think and treat the game that way. Now it is slightly better, and it also feels so new. It’s like WOAH you actually may not hate yourself for a loss? In 2015 I had my Nats spot already reserved, but every mediocre regionals stage run made me feel terrible. This season I was fighting for the Worlds (Worlds > Rus Nats) right from the start with no ‘safe options’, I was losing too, but I could cope with that. Though losing is always sad. The difference is in being frustrated and hating yourself for days or week and being frustrated and hating yourself for an evening, and then you’re saying something like enough, it won’t make me better, learning and practice will make me better, so let’s play tomorrow. Pephan helped me out a lot with this. Tons of love to Pephan.

Well, also I reached a dream. When I was 17, I watched 2013 Worlds with excitement, though I understood nothing because I was an OU child. New format? Big event? That was very unfamiliar but holy crap so breathtaking! Two guys were fighting for the honourable title with some beautiful teams and strategies, I felt their drive even when I was so far away. That blew my mind. I told myself that I want to visit Pokemon World Championships too. The long way of getting better started in 2013 and will never end. I won Russian VGC 2014 big event and got closer to my dream. I qualified to Russian National Championships in 2015 and almost made my dream real, finishing 2nd. I got broken and gave up because sometimes it was too hard to keep up. I remembered how I sang lyrics from “Wavin Flag”: ‘when I get older, I will be stronger’. The dream wasn’t dead. And I tried again. And I did it. The most trivial thing I can say now is do not give up and fight for your dreams, but this is really true!

Every Trainer has a choice To listen to that voice inside. I know the battle may be long, Winners may have come and gone I will carry on! Yeah, this dream will last forever, And this dream will never die, We will rise to meet the challenge every time. (Advanced Challenge) Yeah, this dream keeps us together, This shows that you and I Will be the best that the world's ever seen, Cause we always will follow this dream!

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Nothing can be perfect in one second. I still have issues with rivalry and with the community, though I wonder how we will do in 2018.

Thanks for reading and, finally I can say it, see you at Worlds!

Shout-outs to: PurpurVGC, Loui, PephanVGC, Elveman, Sergey, Annet Ilvers, unhealthy rivalry and Havkai for making this season amazing.

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xtremedespair3d · 6 years

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Anime Spring 2018 Final Impressions + Plans for Summer

It’s been a long time since I made the last post on every anime I watched on winter, or posting anything on Tumblr in general, it’s time to come back to talk about what anime I’ve watched this spring season and what I’m going to watch this summer.

WARNING: This list may contain spoilers.

Spring 2018

Golden Kamuy: I’ve looked this one this entire season, even though I may not know much, after watching a few episodes, I was definitely impressed, but there are a few people who are disappointed with how the anime turned out, I kind of understand that, but at the same time it leaves me a sour taste in my mouth.

I’m happy season 2 got announced for October, definitely looking forward for more.

High School DXD Hero: I’ve always been skeptical about this season just by the new art style alone, even if it’s by the same studio that made the Citrus anime, but it seems like Passione pulled it off.

Not only the art is rather nice, as I stated, it looks to be faithful to the light novels, they retconned the Juggernaut Drive moment from Born from episode 0, it took me by surprise and learning that the rest of Born was anime original ruined my life and everything I’ve seen has changed.

Steins;Gate 0: Not a lot to add, but it’s definitely one of the strongest series I’ve seen this season so far.

Tokyo Ghoul:re: As someone who hasn’t read the Tokyo Ghoul:re manga, I’d say this one was decent. I saw this ComicBook post where fans were disappointed by the season finale, but hey, there’s season 2 coming in October.

(Man, what’s with these shows having season 2 in Fall?)

My Hero Academia season 3: It’s lower in my list because, while MHA is really good, I read the manga and I pretty much know everything that happens, even if I forget what happened since it’s been ages since I read the chapters the anime adapts, at least they refresh my memory.

Lupin the 3rd Part 5: This one is good, my only problem is that every few episodes with storylines end, there are those extra episodes that take place in previous jackets, like red jacket and pink jacket Lupin, I can’t help but think those are filler. It’s probably my first time I’ve been mad to filler.

Persona 5: The Animation: Totally did not expect the problems P5A has at all, from animation quality, like terrible fight scenes, to pacing issues, like everything is happening so fast and A-1 decided to rush the 100 hour plot into a 25 episode series. At least it looks better than Persona 4: The Animation.

Given by the episode count I mentioned, I’m looking forward to the surprise teased by the director, I hope I see a lot of people lose their shit like Darling in the Franxx (Heh, A-1), I kind of have the guilty pleassure to see people suffer in this case.

Caligula: This one I really was looking forward to hate. The animation was decent and all but all I can think of is the story, I really don’t like the world at all and I probably don’t care for any of the characters, especially Ritsu.

At the end of episode 10, Ritsu left Mobius and came back to reality alone while all of his friends are left behind, by that point, for some reason I thought “I officially hate Ritsu for that!”, but the more I waited, the less I considered that idea and decided to drop it.

By episode 11, it’s where things are getting worse: The Ritsu we were seeing all along wasn’t even Shikishima Ritsu, it’s a dude called Tachibana Shingo...

...and this dude right here IS THE REAL SHIKISHIMA RITSU!

LIKE... WHAT?!

I thought Mobius Ritsu was Shingo who took Ritsu’s name but it’s actually the real Ritsu who took Shingo’s likeness. Why? Why would he do that? It’s not even explained. (Not sure if the game does)

I wanted to drop around episode 8 but I was 4 episodes left to finish watching this trash, and the more I saw it, I felt interested to know what was going on in the story.

I cared less about everything that happened in this show. It’s not offensively bad as 18if, but seriously, the world of Caligula sucks.

The only highlight of the series I’d give credits for are the post-credits teasers by Pop Team Epic creator, Okawa bkub.

Winter 2018 ongoing

Darling in the Franxx: Darling in the Franxx has grown to be the most divisive series to date, mainly from the “Bitchigo” controversy ever since.

While I definitely enjoy the series and I feel defensive about it, I can’t help but think that this is Trigger (and A-1)’s most controversial anime they’ve produced to have such fan outrage. Speaking of which, I don’t think it’s even being animated by Trigger anymore, it’s probably only A-1 alone along with Trigger animators and they just slapped the Trigger name on the credits. (I’m probably exaggerating), and Darling in the Franxx is not even on Trigger’s website!

If this is another one of Trigger’s big flops (The second one being Kiznaiver which WatchMojo called it “disappointing” which made me pissed so bad considering that I loved Kiznaiver, fucking thanks for the trauma, you cunts. (Don’t ask)), then Trigger, as storytellers, have become one-hit wonders, and that one hit is Kill La Kill. (Speaking of which, it’s getting a video game... developed by the people who made Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time, which turned out hot garbage, RIP)

As of the writing of this post, the series hasn’t ended yet, so we’re still gonna have to wait how the ending will turn out.

Toji no Miko: This one was alright, for some reason I expected the second cour to be somewhat time-wasting and trying to figure out the story because I was satisfied with the end of the first cour, but this one was decent.

Even if the anime series ended, while the mobage is currently on existence, I’ll never stop making Kancolle x Touken Ranbu jokes, at least the series had its own identity to make up for it.

Grancrest Senki: This one I was the least hopeful to watch, though not as trash as Caligula per se, but it’s just generic fantasy with some political drama, and ridiculously violent (Which there’s nothing wrong with it but the amount of gore is really something from a fantasy anime).

There were a couple of good moments but overall, it was meh.

Cardcaptor Sakura Clear Card: I’m a little surprised that Cardcaptor Sakura Clear Card ended with 22 episodes as opposed to 24 or 25 episodes, overall, I enjoyed the series, hopefully we won’t wait for a long time for another season.

Plans for Summer

Attack on Titan season 3: Reminder that we didn’t have to wait for another 4 years for another Attack on Titan season.

Angels of Death: This one has the potential to be one of the better anime adaptations of an RPG Maker game, unlike Ao Oni which failed spectacularly, considered that the Angels of Death anime is being made by JC Staff.

As of the writing of this video, it’s now confirmed that the total of episodes was 16 episodes, 12 of the regular series, and 4 OVA.

Overlord III: It’s still hard to believe that Overlord II was a winter show and this new season is a summer show, considering that I normally would expect shows having two seasons between winter and fall (Such as Shinmai Maou no Testament (2015) and Bubuki Buranki (2016).)

Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs: All I can think of is the titular character, Yuuna, is cute, and hot springs, what’s not to like?

Fate/Extra: Last Encore Illustrais Geocentrism: It still feels weird that Last Encore ended with 10 episodes, but at least there’s going to be more, but it’s going to be a two hour special, in two separate episodes. I thought I’ve seen sources that it was going to be episodes 11-13, I’ve seen a lot of sources and they confuse the heck out of me.

(Finally, a good line-up to watch)

BONUS: FLCL Progressive: Technically, FLCL Progressive came out on June 2nd on Adult Swim/Toonami, unlike the majority of the shows are all July shows.

FLCL Progressive and Alternative have quite the unique releases.

I was so baffled that many of the people I talk with were skeptical about FLCL Progressive, there were even stories of the original creator not wanting to make a sequel in the first place, I never gave a crap and ignored to what they said and just moved on to watch it.

After the first episode, it seems like the reactions were mostly positive (Maybe because a lot of people must be more newcomers than a few veteran FLCL fans), though the one thing that cringed me out was the part where Haruko (disguised as a teacher) made everyone watch porn.

Also, my bigger problem with watching FLCL Progressive (and Alternative) is that I have to watch them English dubbed and the subs got delayed until November (yes, that long; I’m not an English dubbed person, okay?).

Speaking of problems, as I mentioned that it was English dubbed, the parts where the characters say Japanese phrases is absolutely cringey as fuck, and with episode 4, at the beginning of the episode, Hidomi made a Jacksepticeye reference by saying “TOP OF THE MORNING!” and that triggered me so bad.

Speaking of Hidomi Hibajiri, she’s like my only highlight of this entire season, she’s such a cutie.

Like the original FLCL, Progressive and Alternative (I keep counting that one a lot, but, since it’s released on September, it still falls into Summer, I guess?) have 6 episodes, so as of the writing of this post, which ironically it’s almost 2 AM and it’s saturday, so new episode tonight, there’s at least going to be one more episode to end, and Alternative, while the first episode was released as a surprise release on April Fools, the rest of the episodes will be on September.

I wanted to add Tensai Bakabon to the list but now my interest to watch has turned off and I prefer Osomatsu-san over this one (This and Osomatsu-kun are made by Fujio Akatsuka and they’re being animated by Pierrot).

I hope you enjoyed my list of everything I saw this spring (while tryhard reviewing them in the process) and what I plan to watch this summer.

Twitter: @HKomaeda

#anime

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deltaengineering · 6 years

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Summer Anime 2018 Part 1: Nurupo

I feel bad for calling last season weak now, since that turned out okay, what with Megalobox, Hinamatsuri and Rokuhoudou (the best show you didn’t watch). Maybe this is a lesson to not be so negative, but all the positivity in the world can’t make this season look good. To balance it out, I’ll be bringing along some hot opinions from people getting paid to see the bright side this time.

P.S. Part 2 is here.

Island

What: A very Frontwing version of When They Cry, apparently. Awesome McCooldude wakes up on an island full of pliant girls and/or dark secrets.

✅ looks alright

❌ story is tryhard mystery nonsense based on convenient amnesia, very unlikely to deliver

❌❌ an absolutely terrible cast of generic VN characters, enjoy your common route hijinks with them

❌❌ Frontwing being Frontwing, please see picture.

ANN sez: “This episode accomplishes the two things that it absolutely must for the series to have a chance of succeeding: it makes the main trio of girls endearing enough and layers on some intriguing mysteries.”

Hanebad!

What: Some girls take badminton very seriously. Somewhere between genocide and extinction level event seriously.

✅ well animated and directed

✅ there appears to be more to the characters than nothing at all, so the overbearing presence of the drama llama might actually pay off

❌ has a tendency to wallow in ostentatious KyoAni-style presentational kitsch

❌ speaking of which, making the cast of Euphonium look like a bunch of carefree slackers by comparison is not a good thing

ANN sez: “From the lush colors of their school's flowers to the alienating saturation and long shots of their gym hallways, every mood HANEBADO strives for is captured perfectly through its visual storytelling, and solidified through fundamentally sturdy dialogue and plotting.”

Senjuushi

What: Touken Ranbu with firearms.

❌ This is a cute boys doing cute things anime set against a backdrop of global thermonuclear war and combining the ultra seriousness of ufotable TR with the slice of life tone of Doga Kobo TR makes for a very, let’s say, “uneven” experience.

❌ Unsurprisingly, it has the production values of neither of the above and looks like crap instead.

❌❌ The localized title is “The Thousand Musketeers” and given the reckless pace in which it introduces pointless characters, it might actually hit that number in 12 episodes.

❌❌ Mobile game character designs must be stopped, for fuck’s sake

ANN sez: “The story itself has some promise, especially if you're a fan of antique guns.“

Shichisei no Subaru

What: VRMMO light novel garbage about MMO newtypes.

❌ High tier light novel tropes like “u die in the game u die 4 real”, grade schooler magical girlfriends and demigod abilities

❌ Yes, the characters start as grade schoolers and then there’s a timeskip where they become high schoolers. They don’t change at all, which is either cutting commentary on arrested development or an indication of how good this show’s writing is.

❌ Ideas like permadeath in an MMO and giving good players a stake in the game company are hilariously stupid even by this genre’s standards.

❌ You’ve seen this exact cast of characters before, likely in better shows.

❌❌ There’s really no single egregiously bad aspect, but the stank of mediocrity is so overwhelming as to deserve a double minus all of its own.

ANN sez: “This episode banks heavily on the appeal of its mysteries, but those mysteries actually are pretty appealing, and I ultimately respect this episode's choice to introduce so much of its world and characters before getting to the real conceit.”

Banana Fish

What: A well regarded classic manga about New York’s seedy gang underbelly of drugs and violence. And BL.

✅ ✅ Looks good. Like actually, legitimately good. Animation, character design, directing, this show is quality.

❌ Updating the setting to contemporary times seems like a not so great idea since everything about this is deeply steeped in the mid-80s gang violence and drugs panic, no matter how many smartphones get used.

♎ The pacing is ultra fast. While I will admit that I’ll take that over a snoozefest (especially in a seasonal rundown), if this wants to be a legitimate high tier anime it needs to let the atmosphere breathe more. 24 episodes isn’t much for a 19-volume manga.

❌ I’ve praised MAPPA for promising first episodes before, and then I got the likes of Yuri on Ice and Virgin Soul out of it. This is not an anime original so it will be harder to fuck up, but life finds a way - especially given the need for condensing the story as noted above.

❌ Ultimately, just being a classy production with proven writing isn’t the be-all-end-all; quality aside, I still have to like what it does, and I’m not sure what amounts to a homoerotic 80s crime B-thriller is exactly in my wheelhouse.

✅ What else are you gonna watch this season?

ANN sez: “The one negative I can foresee is that one character is portrayed as a fairly stereotypical gay sexual predator, and this story pitches itself consistently as a seedier exploration of its boys' love subject matter, so it's reasonable to expect these kinds of details going forward.”

Yume Oukoku to Nemureru 100-nin no Ouji-sama

What: Girls get their wish-fulfilment isekai nonsense too, it’s just a pretty pointless definition when you can just say “basic otome harem” instead. But sure, nondescript girl wakes up in fantasy dream universe where she has a magical trait that makes a large number of princes desire her. Call it what you like.

♎ Successfully avoids the most obnoxious otome harem and isekai tropes, but that just makes it even more bland

❌ lots of exposition about an universe that is hardly complicated and transparently an excuse anyway

❌ Main character is agreeable but exceptionally boring

❌ The princes are all generically princely and very little else

❌❌ combine that with sluggish pacing and this might be the most boring show so far, which is not an easy feat

ANN sez: “There were also some neat details here and there that I particularly appreciated, like the fact that our heroine is actually a working adult, as well as the idea that rather than being “trapped in a new world” she's in truth been returned to her home.”

Back Street Girls

What: A trio of yakuza thugs get a forced sex change because their boss wants to be an idol producer. It’s funny, laugh.

❌ This is not the warm, fuzzy trans acceptance anime you’ve been looking for, to put it mildly. I am not easily offended, but it would have to be pretty darn good to outrun this premise. Yeah, about that...

❌❌ runs its one joke (idols are not supposed to be thugs, like, at all!) into the ground before it exceeds a 3-minute short runtime; is actually 24 minutes long anyway. Hope you really like that joke.

❌❌ the execution of said joke is the pits of anime comedy, nothing but reaction faces and shouting

❌❌ production values are basically non-existent, at most you can say that they took the time to color in those manga panels

❌ learning that Chiaki Kon is directing this pile is just sad, put THAT in your auteur pipe and smoke it.

ANN sez: Nothing, since western licensors mysteriously chose to skip this one. Really a shame because I was looking forward to the outrage.

Isekai Maou to Shoukan Shoujo no Dorei Majutsu

What: It has “Isekai” and “Maou” in the title so what do you fucking think. What it doesn’t tell you is that it’s also about an MMO, for the full LN shitter nuclear triad.

❌❌ It’s about a loser otaku who gets trapped in his MMO wherein he has the mostest hax, complete with complementary slave pettan catgirl and slave oppai elf

❌❌ This is meant to be funny because he’s too much of a dweeb to put his penis where his mouth is.

❌ Technically better executed than Death March or Isekai Smartphone, so it gets one single minus for effort.

ANN sez: “The idea that Takuma is so insecure about talking to other people that he can only comfortably speak in the voice of his demon lord character is ingenious in a dramatic sense and endearing in a personal one, while Takuma's clear understanding of his personal failings makes him far more sympathetic than the genre's usual snarky protagonists.”

Satsuriku no Tenshi

What: Early teen girl checks herself into Silent Hill General Hospital for grief counselling.

✅ Atmosphere works reasonably well; it’s creepy where it needs to be, which is everywhere and all the time.

❌ The girl is a nonfactor blob and the tough guy she gets paired up with is an annoying chuuni edgelord (it is called 𝔄𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔩𝔰 𝔬𝔣 𝔇𝔢𝔞𝔱𝔥 after all), which is not promising for the long run

❌ So obviously based on a run-of-the-mill spoopy RPGmaker freeware game you can practically see the floor tiles.

❌❌ 24 solid minutes of Getting Cornered By A Rape Metaphor quickly goes from unsettling to incredibly tedious.

❌❌ There’s really nowhere for this to go, given how unoriginal everything is; at best it’s going to be “it was all a dream”, at worst “everyone was dead all along, please feel sad now”.

ANN sez: “The design of the facility is one of those fanciful every-level-is-a-different-setting worlds, but the artistic effort strongly pushes the creepiness factor with a design aesthetic that suggests age, decay, and neglect.“

Harukana Receive

What: Girls play beach volleyball in scenic Okinawa, some light sports drama seems to be on the horizon.

✅ Looks just good enough

✅ Girls are just cute and likeable enough

❌ the sports aspect is weak; maybe I’m just spoiled on Emiya-san’s incredible beach volleyball scene right now, but even when not compared to a top tier studio ostentatiously flaunting the budget of their fucking cooking short the match here isn’t very compelling.

♎ where Hanebad has a bad case of the cereals, this may have the opposite problem of being too cotton candy to be worth it

✅ “good enough” is not a ringing endorsement, but counts for something when being just okay will net you a third or possibly second place of the season.

ANN sez: “This is, of course, all just conjecture right now. ”

Chio-chan no Tsuugakuro

What: We took Nichijou and replaced the surrealism with video game references and the production values with donkey dung. Let’s see if delta notices!

❌❌ Production values are not optional when you want to be Nichijou; it being astoundingly over the top and imbued with impeccable timing is a (or even the) main part of Nichijou’s appeal. Without them you’re left with basic reactionface manzai over awkward situations, the king of comedy.

❌❌ Suffice it to say, this show is 100% trying to be funny, while also 100% not succeeding at being funny.

❌Asscreed is a more original tentpole to rotate your first episode around than the usual Dragon Quest, but not by much.

♎ neurotic nerd main character that is little more than a bundle of social anxieties will be #relatable to anime professionals, observe:

ANN sez: “Chio's overthinking in this situation is both hilarious and painfully true-to-life, with her furious strategizing coming across as both absurd and very familiar to anyone who's not comfortable in conversation.”

Planet With

Wat: Appears to be a tokusatsu/crypto-mecha show aimed at the younger set, with the gimmick being that our protagonist is (initially?) on the side of the villains(?).

✅ Pretty wacky, actually. It definitely doesn’t neatly fit in your square notions of what an anime is, man (unless you’ve watched FLCL).

❌ It seems very uncertain whether the wackiness is in service of anything. It might be To Be Heroine, or it might just be Heybot with fewer fart jokes.

♎ Furthermore, it wants to be intriguing and sort of is, but merely being intriguing is not that hard - you just make no sense and hope for the best. This has the not making sense part down, do you feel lucky?

❌ tries to build up characters by immediately going for the sad flashbacks, which I never like, especially if the rest of the show is eIDLIVE-level nonsense.

❌ Looks mostly fiiiiiine, but is also full of subpar CG

ANN sez: “So if the heroes are fighting against someone who just wants peace, then what does that make them? And more importantly, if they find out that the bears aren't evil, will they stop?”

Hataraku Saibou

What: A cutesy educational comedy about the workings of a human body.

✅ Well made, characters are cute, topic is interesting.

❌ Educational aspect can get in the way; I’m not suddenly giving heavy exposition a pass just because it’s trying to teach me something, especially if it’s things I basically already know.

♎ Will have to show if it can keep coming up with good scenarios. The lung infection in episode 1 was alright and so will probably be the skin cut in the preview, but beyond that I’m not sure what’s left for red and white blood cells to do. I’m not expecting a show with this tone to tackle things like retroviruses, if you know what I mean.

♎ An actual storyline seems like too much to expect, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but not a positive either.

✅ Doesn’t rock my socks off but is an easily watchable show with a fine idea and high production values, which again is hard to say no to right now.

ANN sez: “But since it culminates in one of my favorite scenes from the manga, visualizing sneezing as shooting a torpedo out your nose, I can forgive the random gendering of cells.”

Ongaku Shoujo

What: DEEN are getting in on the idol mobile game anime biz too.

✅ The main character’s gimmick is that apart from being A Honk, she can’t sing for shit; this is moderately funny.

❌ It might have counted for more if that hadn’t come out seconds before the episode ended. Even if it isn’t a momentous twist, it was more of a point of interest than the incredibly bland leadup to it had.

❌ Yeah, “Ongaku Shoujo” is an entirely indicative name of how generic this show is: Music + girls, indeed. I assume “Idols” was taken.

❌ I’m still not sure what the ideal cast size of a show like this is, but 12 idols is Idolmaster turf and as such too many. They have personalities? I think?

❌ a very small handful of cuts aside, woeful production quality; I know picking on DEEN is 2ez but this is not their finest work. Animation snobs can feel proud that there’s no CG dancing here, for the rest of us it’s an object lesson on why CG is the lesser of two evils.

✅ Tumbling SR cards in the ED (which is probably actually the OP) made me laugh; this show can’t even afford URs.

❌❌ Overall, just another idol show. Large cast plus presence of a P-san marks it as Im@s-type – but if you're in the market for an Idolmaster clone with bad looks, I would recommend Wake Up Girls instead because that’s at least pretty real at points.

ANN sez: They’re out for the weekend, ask again later. I suspect it’s nothing funny.

#anime #impressions #summer2018 #banana fish #island #senjuushi #hanebad #shichisei no subaru #yume oukoku to nemureru 100 nin no ouji sama #Isekai Maou to Shoukan Shoujo no Dorei Majutsu #back street girls #satsuriko no tenshi #harukana receive #chio-chan no tsuugakuro #planet with #hataraku saibou #ongaku shoujo

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