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The Caster Chronicles character design ranking (Aqua)

(source)

Remember when I did these? Only one more set left!

Other rankings:

Ignus - Terra - Aes - Silva - Luna

Ema Ashiya Chakoru Senti

I’ve never been a fan of tiny glasses like these, on an anime character they give me a stuck-up know-it-all vibe, but apart from them I like this one quite a lot. The gold embroided train with tassels looks majestic (and without it the character would look much less formidable), and with the militaristic vibe she looks like the reliable senpai who knows her stuff. The see-through heels that appear to have water inside are a nice touch. Hair’s kinda dumb though, I don’t think the carefree half-ponytail fits the otherwise more sophisticated look, and the fact that her hair seems shorter on the other side adds to the careless effect. 9/10.

Mahiru Inuzuka Canal 

Girl you have already outgrown that top, please get a bigger one.

The shoes that have a sailor collar is a fun touch and fits well with a water-themed character and a syringe is a unique weapon. However I find the design of the hat uncute, though with the belt tail it does create a fun sporty vibe for the character. Scarf is a little odd choice here, like otherwise she’s in a bikini top and hot pants so she shouldn’t need more warmth... but it’s a fantasy design so who cares. So overall mostly an alright design I guess but the top is just awful and ruins everything for me. 3/10.

Rui Saotome Deshi Lion 

Now here is the smart quiet character who will absolutely destroy you in a battle if you anger her, but she will be very polite about it. I like the skirt that is actually pants. And there’s stripes on the inside, that is attention to detail! The shirt hem is also fun, with the way it looks like it has pleats. In general I like this design in that it has really basic elements (sailor uniform & lab coat), but there are enough little details to make it interesting. Honeycombs are a bit odd choice here, but at least the shape repeats in her hair accessories and weapon, and gold looks great with the white-blue colour scheme. Weapon is too mecha for my tastes but otherwise a really solid design. 9/10.

Akira Nakaya Saira Treverse

She looks like a magical girl police officer, like I could imagine her as a side character who is first introduced showing up at the end of an episode after the heroes have done their thing and now it’s the authorities’ turn to get involved. Maybe the design is a bit on the busy side but I always love some stripes and sailor collars, and the metallic parts give it a nice official and formal vibe. 7/10

Kotoko Mizusaku Zoi Russel

A nice sporty sea witch design if we ignore the wardrobe malfunction. I like how it gives off this sinister seaweedy octopus vibe without having any actual tentacles or seaweed. Cogs are a bit odd design choice here, like nothing else in the look is steampunk, but at least they aren't too distracting and fit the colour palette. Also the weapon looks really cool. So ultimately I really like the idea of a young and energetic dark sea witch, but the top is just stupid, at least give her a bikini top under it or something. 6/10.

Shizuku Mizumoto Hilde Willow

Again a great weapon, let's start with that. But overall... The cut of the dress is kind of generic, so it's on the little details to make this design interesting. I always like the scalloped edges and jewelry dangling from bead strings is often a good idea as well. But other than that I can't think of much to say; the design is consistent, doesn't look overdesigned or completely forgettable, but I'm not particularly interested in it either. 6/10.

Karen Kashima Karen Urania

Not a fan of the cape thingy, it looks like it’s been starched and in general doesn’t seem like something that’s nice to move around in. Also is it just me or is there something wonky with the perspective? The head ribbon and her boobs just look like they’re at a weird angle for me. And not a fan of the pants either. Weapon is cool and the off-the-shoulder poofy sleeves are cute (though they give a royalty vibe which has nothing to do with the rest of the look), but apart from them I don’t really care for this one. 4/10.

Tomoka Nakamura Broom Spica

I like the fresh cool colour palette even if the design otherwise doesn't appear to have anything to do with ice. But it makes me think of refreshing cool water on a hot summer day so that's already a plus. Otherwise there's not much to say about this one, sailor collars are always nice I guess (and it appears she has two of them), the floral pattern is nice, hair looks cute and soft, and a fun weapon again, but overall not a very memorable look. 5/10.

Hakari Shikimori Lineal

From this angle at least that almost looks more like a belt than a skirt. Apart from that, that is some dedication to collars, in addition to the normal collar she also has a collar on her hat, skirt and shoes. And the green diamond thingy also repeats in many places. What I don't like is that the diamonds look too heavy and bulky on her hair, and also the skirt is too short, but overall... I guess I appreciate how consistent the look is. 8/10.

Kaede Himuro Lady Lupinus

The outfit itself doesn’t interest me at all, but there’s other things to talk about this one. The posture, expression and the droopy hair ribbon gives the impression that she really couldn’t care less. Relatable at times. But what does she measure? The only interesting detail here is the measurement tape theme, and I really want to know more about her powers. Thanks to this one detail I kinda like this design since it makes me think. 6/10.

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Aqua average: 6.3

So Love, Death and Robots...

Ok, like the first 4 were all, in different ways, really pretty good, and there are a couple of other good offerings in the mix, although a lot of the otherwise good ones fumbled the landing a little and left me feeling slightly unsatisfied.

Sonnie’s Edge was a solid opener, not my favourite in the world (and the accents felt really fake if I’m honest - if you say they’re from Newcastle give your characters Geordie accents, you cowards, none of this ‘generic working class Brit’ bollocks), but the twists were good, the characters had some life to them, and while I am a biiit eeehhhhhh about the Rape As Backstory element, it wasn’t egregious and the story was well put together and rattled along at a fair pace. I would have liked a bit more information about where her anger came from, since she shrugs off the idea that it’s from her Traumatic Backstory, but that’s really my only criticism. Animation-wise I’m not the biggest fan of photorealistic scifi animation, and the monster designs are fine but not mindblowing, but it’s doing what it does solidly (although I don’t know why that one character has her tits all the way out in her regular costume, it’s a bit Teenage Boy Scifi but it’s still a cool costume and I like the blacklight effects). The theme for me here is competent - nothing in the story or the animation was stand-out exciting for me but it was all done well, paced well, animated and designed very well, but it all sort of hit a “good but not great” note for me if I’m honest.  4/5 robots 🤖🤖🤖🤖💀

Three Robots was fun and engaging, if a bit superficial - it’s more of a series of stitched-together vignettes than a story, and other than the central characters, the world, and the cat very little connects the scenes, but that’s fine, it’s a worldbuilding exercise and it does what it’s doing pretty well. I really dig the character designs, especially the big blocky triangle robot - I’m a sucker for highly variable robots existing in the same world and I always appreciate effective non-humanoid character design. Also I did really enjoy the closing twist, that gave me a giggle. 4/5 robots 🤖🤖🤖🤖💀 

The Witness was also really good but missing something. I loved the animation and character design, the comic book sound effects were occasionally a little clunky and distracting but the Comicsness of it was really working for me. I liked the story - it telegraphed part of the ending very deliberately but kept you guessing about the details and then pulled a pretty effective twist at the end anyway - and the characters managed to convey a lot of personality without a lot of explanation. There was a pleasing sense of inevitability to it, and while I kind of wanted a bit of explanation I think it was probably the right decision to leave it ambiguous. I did leave it feeling a little unsatisfied in an indefinable way, but looking back I think it would not have been made better by being any more explicit about what it was trying to convey.  4/5 robots 🤖🤖🤖🤖💀 Suits, the one with the redneck mecha pilots, was far and away the tightest and most satisfyingly put together in the whole show for me - I liked the animation style a lot for it, it was funny and emotionally engaging, and while it wasn’t breaking much new ground it was beautifully paced, kept you invested and made you care about the characters, and was probably the only one which I had absolutely no complaints or lingering disappointments at all with. 5/5 robots 🤖🤖🤖🤖🤖 .........aaaaaand then it all went wrong a bit for me because the episodes I genuinely solidly enjoyed got much fewer and further between as the bulk of stories got increasingly adolescent and superficial (I know, I know, it’s called Love, Death and Robots, it was always going to be a bit Teenage Boy, but the first 4 were all solid enough that I was feeling positive about it) Sucker of Souls was...fine. Characterful animation, uptempo pace, good character design (although GOD those ACCENTS, please stop and hire Actually British and Actually Irish voice actors if you’re planning on having British and Irish characters). It just felt completely hollow, though. Like, why do I care about this happening? Most of the characters are reasonably likeable if pretty stock, but the actual protagonist has nothing to him except Gruffly Macho Mercenary #4518B, and the plot is paper-thin and utterly unsatisfying. Monster exists, hubris of man raises monster, monster does something gratuitiously gory (if well-animated), people run away from monster, kill monster with guns and explosions, oh no what a twist we’re still in trouble, cut to black. And there was just nothing added to that, nothing clever or imaginative or unexpected, and the only twist they managed was that their Big Triumphal Moment was totally pointless. I thought they were going somewhere interesting with the cats thing and then it just got dropped and we went back to guns and explosions. I get doing something like this as a character piece but a) the characters just aren’t interesting enough to prop it up and b) the stakes aren’t balanced right for it to work (heh, stakes). It feels like this was just ‘I have a cool character design for Dracula and a couple of setpiece ideas’ and the whole short was just a vehicle for that, but while those things were cool they weren’t cool enough to make half an hour of TV feel worth it. It’s nice to see 2d animation but the animation style is only really ‘fine’ to me. This episode feels like someone really liked Hellboy but is not nearly as good a writer as Mike Mignola. 2/5 robots 🤖🤖💀💀💀 When The Yoghurt Took Over was fun enough. It didn’t have much more to it than ‘it would be funny if yoghurt took over the world’ but sometimes that’s enough. The animation’s cute and the idea is original enough to be funny and indepth enough to keep you engaged - I like a lot of the visual gags, even if they were a bit on the nose, and I enjoyed the vibe of it. It felt like a really odd fit with the rest of the show, though, and I’m not sure what tone the ending was trying to strike. Overall, 3.5/5 robots 🤖🤖🤖💀💀  (imagine I can emoji half a robot) Beyond the Aquila Rift, like Sonnie, is wholly competent and also pretty rote. The twist was telegraphed from a mile off, and imo the episode only manages to fill a full 15 minutes because like 3 of those minutes are just sex scenes without much substance. Again, photorealistic animation isn’t my bag, but even that considered the faces were carefully-textured enough that mid-tier animation made it all feel a bit Bioware and got in the way of me empathising with the characters. The story is an absolute off-the-rack sci-fi classic, and there’s no real twist on it - if I’d never seen this story played out before it might have worked, but I have seen approximately 20000000 versions of it and this just wasn’t bringing anything new. I liked the navigator character, when she was in it, and the design was competent, but it just did nothing for me because it all felt deeply generic and so the episode just dragged on with nothing new or exciting. 2.5/5 robots  🤖🤖💀💀💀 Good Hunting is another one where I liked bits of it but felt like it didn’t really go anywhere with its premise. I like the idea of contrasting traditional fantasy tropes with scifi, and I do like to see steampunk that legitimately grapples with the colonial baggage, but it just felt like it didn’t have much room to grow. The mechanical animation was really pretty - I especially liked the scene with the automatic hare - and the story was solidly paced, plus I do like when stories have a go at recontextualising traditional Seductress Monsters, buuuut to be honest it felt like a bit of a letdown. Where it hit, it hit solidly - I liked the throughline about how she felt like she’d become what he had thought her mother was, and the parallels between his experience of working for the British and her experience of sex work for them - but I think the issue for me is that, while I liked Liang and felt like he was well fleshed out, this felt like it should have been Yan’s story and it just wasn’t, really. Also I’m not very clear on what the point of the robotics work was - symbolically it works on some levels but I don’t know if it actually helps along the core theme, although the more time I spend with the idea the more it’s working for me. Still, I think we could have done with cutting the wuxia-ey scene at the beginning in half to make room for a little more meat at the end. 4/5 robots  🤖🤖🤖🤖💀 Ugly Dave. It’s fine. Nothing to write home about. The gag is pretty clear from the off, and doesn’t really build up into anything other than the obvious, but the animation is nice, the character design is strong and the jokes are adolescent but well-delivered. 3/5 robots  🤖🤖🤖💀💀 Shape-Shifters. I don’t know how this one was because it bored and annoyed me so much that I skipped to the next episode after 5 minutes. Ugh. Yeah. They’re werewolves and their squad is mean to them even though they’re real good at war. I assume that the only reason this isn’t called Dog Soldiers is because there’s already a film called Dog Soldiers about werewolf squaddies which the target audience of this short film, edgy teenage boys with a hardon for modern military propaganda, already like (side note: I didn’t get to the bit where presumably they eventually transform. but I flicked through a few frames on the tracker bar and they looked like incredibly generic wolves). My guess is that probably at the end they a) save their squad despite being discriminated against or b) the more annoying one gets killed by his own side. probably both. idk, I noped out because it was just wanking off the concept of the modern military and our two protagonists were two obnoxiously macho army men talking about how unfair it was that nobody appreciated how GOOD THEY WERE AT KILLING FOR ‘MURICA mission accomplished etc. Oh, and the animation style was another incredibly uninteresting photo-realistic but video-game animated pile of boring. 0/5 robots, too bored to actually watch it  💀💀💀💀💀

However, luckily just as I was getting Very Bored of Shooty Shooty Bang Bang adolescence, there were a succession of really nice character pieces

Helping Hand was a great small-scope short story. A lot of the episodes are really bombastic but Helping Hand is small and contained and character-driven and I liked it quite a bit. The animation is once again photorealistic, but to be honest that works well for me here because the movements are really believable, there’s a good reason to use animation instead of live actors (because it’s a situation where you’d either need a really expensive shooting setup or to mostly animate it anyway), and I think that the personal struggle would have had a lot less impact if the animation was more stylised. It’s a bit gross but beautfiully paced and tense (and the character’s Irish accent isn’t ear-burningly awful this time!) I will also say that of all of them, this character design feels the least male-gazy and the most like an actual person.  4/5 robots 🤖🤖🤖🤖💀 Fish Night was unexpectedly gorgeous! I really don’t rate the animation style of pseudo-cel 3d with heavy lineart, and I was all set to find this episode ugly, but it’s honestly stunning. It feels like some of the best Nobrow comics, I can almost smell litho ink and feel heavy paper. It’s just got such a beautiful artistic sensibility. Storywise it’s a little weak - the characters are solid and the wonder is real but it just doesn’t really go anywhere, and it just sort of ends, it could really have done with a few seconds of closing scene because it felt like it just cut itself off  - and I’m not sure it’s anything meatier than a beautiful piece of visual work, but it’s allowed to be that and it does it stunningly!  4/5 robots 🤖🤖🤖🤖💀 Lucky 13 isn’t really up my alley (although Samira Wiley puts in a great performance and I love her) and it’s another one where I sort of think, you know, why is this an animated piece if you’re just going to mocap everyone and set most of the action in cockpits and in a hangar, but it rattles along well and does what it wants to do, which is to be a solid Hero Pilot And Ship story. I just don’t actually want to be watching military dramas, but at least it’s much, MUCH better executed than Shape-Shifters both in terms of animation and storytelling, the characters are likeable, and the pacing is good.  3/5 robots  🤖🤖🤖💀💀 Zima Blue. LOVE LOVE LOVE this story, brought down only by the fact that I, uh, kind of hate the art style? A lot? It’s a matter of personal taste but that angular, geometric, leggy thing does nothing for me, although the environments are really nice. But the actual story is clever, original and a little bit silly in all the ways I like my scifi to be, plus it explores some interesting themes of consciousness and happiness. And the twist in the tail is really nice and fairly unexpected.  4/5 robots 🤖🤖🤖🤖💀 Blindspot is dull, dull, dull, desperately dull and generic. We’re back on the adolescent Shooty Boom Boom bullshit, with poorly established stakes that never really get resolved, uninteresting and unpleasant characters, and a completely textbook story. The female character is apparently only there to make brain-itchingly bad Sassy Oneliners and have one scene where she shoots some guys, all of the characters have taken their personalities from the 15 Year Old Boy’s Guide To Being A Cool Rude Badass, the character designs are cluttered and not amazing, and there’s nothing original or exciting happening, it’s just a series of different shaped guns. The ending at least has a strong idea of what it’s doing, and almost works, but it’s dragged down by the fact that it relies on me being sad that these characters have got stomped, and I’m afraid that’s a lot to ask with characters as annoying and unpleasant as these. 1/5 robots  🤖💀💀💀💀 Ice Age. It’s a fun little concept. I’m not sure it really goes anywhere much but it’s quirky and very nicely put together, and it gave me a chuckle.  3/5 robots 🤖🤖🤖💀💀 Alternate Histories feels like something I’d see on Newgrounds in 2004, but slightly polished up and expanded on. Ha ha ha Hitler gets killed in various ways, which was definitely hilarious when I was 12. It’s much more interested in coming up with funny ways Hitler might die than it is in exploring any alternate histories that might result, despite the framing device (and also weirdly seems to imply that Nazi victory would be a good thing in one scenario?). I’ve used the word adolescent a lot here but this one isn’t even really adolescent in its sensibilities, it feels aimed at 10-13 year olds. 2/5 robots  🤖 🤖💀💀💀 The Secret War closes out the series in a way that feels consistent with the overall sense I got from Love, Death and Robots, in that it’s solidly made and not particularly original. But I did like it - the animation is stunning (although I stand by imitation not being the point of animation, it is aiming for realism and it does that almost flawlessly) and it’s surprisingly emotionally engaging. It keeps its focus on the experiences of the soldiers as people rather than on the concept, which is for the best as the concept is pretty generic, and it produces something with a bit of genuine emotional weight and stakes. It’s basically the exact same base story as Suits, even down to a lot of elements of the monster design, but set in a very different place with very different core characters, and as both Suits and Secret War are really character pieces, they make two very different but very strong stories out of it. This one is really hammering the GRITTY button as hard as it can, but it pulls it off, and while it still felt very pointed at teenage boy sensibilities it was a genuinely engaging and immersive story. If Soul Sucker desperately wanted to be the Hellboy comics, Secret War solidly evokes the Hellboy films but certainly isn’t just trying to be something other than what it is.  4/5 robots 🤖🤖🤖🤖💀 Overall thoughts - like all anthology shows tend to be, Love, Death and Robots is very hit and miss. A lot of episodes are really, REALLY rooted in a teenage nerd boy idea of coolness, and it doesn’t have much interest in criticising or examining what that means, but when it manages to get away from that a lot of these short films are fantastic. I will say that like a lot else, it’s dominated by both white male writers and white male protagonists and/or Strong Female Characters, and again, the best episodes tended to be ones that broke that pattern. From the title and trailer, I was worried about it being a lot more sexualised and gratuitous than it ended up being (although it definitely had its ehhhhhh moments), and I was honestly pleasantly surprised that of 18 episodes, only 2 featured rape-revenge plotlines, and none (maybe one?) were about Evil Seductresses, because given the title I had Concerns. However, it is still overwhelmingly white character-wise, which is a shame - I counted 2 episodes with Asian protagonists and 2 more with Black protagonists, which is relatively good, but there were probably only about 10 named/centred characters of colour all told. I dunno. I’d recommend taking a punt on it but I have Criticisms of the show overall. The good episodes are REALLY good though and I will definitely be rewatching 2 or 3 of them.