Good catch! I'd been sort-of aware of that change in Plastic Memories, but with slight puzzlement at it not being quite as I recollected, rather than realising that it was actually so. I hadn't picked up on the OP changes in Oregairu, though - I'll check back.

I don't often pay much attention to the details of the OP and ED...

pwhodges wrote: I hadn't picked up on the OP changes in Oregairu, though

Neither did I. I just like Seventhstyle's overcaps of the episodes, and check in there regularly. At some point, I managed to see a link to that article.

Speaking of Oregairu...

Episode 10.

Okay, this was rushed, but it was pretty much expected. There was just too much story to cover. Certain scenes were still well-executed, the one with Iroha on the train brought out connotations that I didn't realize till now were there, even after reading the light novel.

That's the benchmark however, everything else just sort of "serves its purpose". The scene with Yukino on the train suffers, but the point still gets across, and is furthered hammered in during the restaurant scene with her mother. Yukino, is growing to be reliant on Hachiman. Or to put it another way, she's placing expectations upon him.

And as Haruno will expose to 8man later, this is not a good development, because it isn't...




Yukino's mother is also toned down in her role as a quiet, yet suffocating manipulator, which is sad, because she sort of embodies why what Yukino is doing here is so wrong, what kind of person it'll turn her into even if her *expectations* for 8man succeed at some point.

In the LN, this has been her mother's only scene, so she won't show up for the rest of the season.


The monologues for Volume 10 were narrated indiscriminately in the "Scenes for next episode" bit. I wonder then if they'll actually show up, or if that's all we'll get.

Much of what you say about Oregairu is related to your reading of the source material. Obviously the comparison is of interest, but do you feel that going this route is helpful, or would it really be fairer to the anime to view it in isolation?

pwhodges wrote:Much of what you say about Oregairu is related to your reading of the source material. Obviously the comparison is of interest, but do you feel that going this route is helpful, or would it really be fairer to the anime to view it in isolation?

I think if I did that, they're be a bunch of things I'd miss. The anime many times just hints sparsely, if even that, what HachimanLN! observes or another tells him.


When the series is moving along at a normal pace, I'd say it's more than worth watching on its own (and indeed, I watched the whole first season and up to episode 7 of Zoku before I went to the LN), but when it gets put into a corner and does things like this episode, where I swear the exchange between Hachiman and Rumi was on FF, it's clear for me that some *augmentation* was necessary.


... Or was that just your way of telling me you want me to quit spoiling details?


I'll be upfront though, Haruno doesn't say what's wrong with Yukino (the wily minx). What I've listed is just my estimation.

The same to comparisons of Yukino to her Mother. I also don't know at all what Yukino has in store for Hachiman.


The reason I don't know, is because we're running out of story. Volume 11, which comes (2ndish) after the one being depicted now, hasn't been released yet.

If the anime pulls stories from 6.5 to finish off, just like how season 1 pulled from a bonus volume, I'll be as in the dark as anyone.

Alaska Slim wrote:... Or was that just your way of telling me you want me to quit spoiling details?

Not at all! The question was simply what I wrote, and your answer tells me what I'm interested to know. In any case, I am completely open to spoilers for anything, unlike many people here.

But in any case, as I don't read Japanese, I have only the anime to follow...

JoJo's episode 46:
ZA WARULDO


man did they ever improve on the manga in this episode

Final Messenger wrote:JoJo's episode 46:
ZA WARULDO


man did they ever improve on the manga in this episode

Right? I can't think of a single way to make this better. Koyasu's ZA WARUDO towards the end is the best I've ever heard.

pwhodges wrote:But in any case, as I don't read Japanese,

Nor do I, I just found a blog with a translation. I haven't read (all) of 6.5, because they haven't finished it.

Shame, as I get the feeling it has a Kawasaki story (who is really just overlooked in the anime. Not to say her presence is huge to start with, so its perhaps justified).


I have an interest in Kawasaki, as she's the one who mystifies me the most. Not in terms of her character, which seems like some Tsundere sub-type... more like her presence.

Most of the other characters have a carefully laid, interlocking existence with the rest of the cast. Both something upfront, and something hidden. Kawasaki however appears to be just what she is, stand offish, nursing a crush, and devoted to her family. She doesn't really have a relationship to the rest of the cast, other than having said crush, and hate being called "SakiSaki".

Her presence to me then is the one that appears the most anime-ish, she's really just there to be yet another (unknown) love interest for the MC, chip in with her sewing skills when called for... and that's it.

... But is that all she's meant to be?

There are other characters who fit into mold I feel she should occupy. Sagami, despite being in the same class, is pretty much never brought up again after her story. The other boys in Hayamo's clique (Yamato and... the virgin.. seriously, that's how Hachiman refers to him) are just sort of there, never remarked upon.

But Kawasaki keeps getting small nods or mentions, moments all to herself. Mostly it's played for laughs. Sometimes though it feels like there's still something about her that's unresolved.


There isn't a lot of time left, the writer is stating outright that the story is coming to an end, with maybe one or two volumes after 11, so I doubt she'll get another arc.

Most likely, she's just there for the *comedy*, and her unique focus can probably be attributed to the fact that she's a fellow loner, like Hachiman. But given what the writer has delivered on thus far, to the point of intentionally misleading the reader when it suits him, I'm not sure I can be safe in that assumption.

Alaska Slim wrote:Nor do I, I just found a blog with a translation. I haven't read (all) of 6.5, because they haven't finished it.

It hadn't occurred to me that a novel would get a prompt fan translation, given how so many things never get translated at all (Anima, anyone? The second half of the Pupa manga?).

Geneshaft: While it's a bit of a tired truism at this point, Evangelion injected a lot of weirdness into the mecha genre. Its influence was big, but I'm not saying this condescendingly to sneer at the shows that came after it, even though some of the resultant bandwagon products such as Brain Powered obviously fumbled pretty hard. The post-Eva landscape of the late 1990s and early 2000s featured a lot of idiosyncratic and ambitious shows: Gasaraki, Betterman, The Big O, Rahxephon and also Geneshaft, which might actually be one of the least well known of the bunch. Here again the giant robot component feels largely tacked on, and it is strictly secondary to the show's central subject matter of genes and genetic determinism, sprinkled with a hefty dose of references to classic science fiction. Mr. Tines would probably be able to spot much more than what I did, but even I noticed the Ringworld stuff (a major location is straight-up named "Niven base"), uplifted animals and the Clarke-like fixation on Jupiter's moons and specifically Europa.

And the series takes its science fiction seriously. This is a story set in a world where war has seemingly been eradicated by genetic manipulation and artificially tweaking the gender ratio so that women outnumer the oh-so-aggressive men 9:1, but amazingly enough, there's not a whiff of harem horseshit in the air. However, while this commitment to vision over superficial pandering is laudable, the thematic throughline of the story is somewhat muddled, and I suspect it stems largely from the underlying problem that's part and parcel of the setting: how can you create proper human drama if everybody's Spock? (As a side note, I did find it chuckleworthy that the masterminds behind this strictly enforced matriarchy turn out to be essentially a greenery-loving hippie version of Seele who hold their secret cabal meetings in the Hundred Acre Wood.)

I'm sure there are well-written works of science fiction that tackle this problem fantastically. Geneshaft doesn't really try all that much, as the first episode immediately makes it clear that our protagonist Mika and her best friend Sophia are both absurdly hot-blooded in a classic super robot pilot sort of way, when their heartfelt reunion starts with a spontaneous zero-G brawl. In fact, only the extra-Spocky Register characters (essentially meat robot XOs) really act like proper Spocks or Rei clones. The crew's main Register Beatrice goes through the classic and admittedly cliched arc of becoming a real human through love and friendship, and to me that was definitely one of the better-handled parts of the show because she develops into a really cool character and because her development is all-around consistent. Outside of her, the levels of Spock are rather inconsistent. The crew of Bilkis, supposedly representing the best and the brightest of humanity's non-aggressive, genetically purified future, contains so many individuals of questionable psychological soundness that you'd think the show is building towards a non-revelation that the genetic manipulation hasn't really achieved anything and the human condition remains unchanged. And the Bilkis is not some Soyokaze-style dumping ground of defectives either, because Jean comes from the outside and he's such a psychotic little shit that he's basically a Valvrave villain.

However, when it comes time for the show to say its piece about the whole Homo superior thing, it definitely leans more towards Gundam Unicorn than Gundam X, with the main villain basically going full Full Frontal and getting countered by near-utopian optimism, with Mika getting elevated as a sort of double whammy of humanity's awesomeness. Firstly, she's awesome because she's a woman, because the show runs on Tomino logic and considers women to be almost supernatural life-creating miracle beings (also seen recently in Cross Ange); secondly, she's awesome because her color-coded and vaguely defined gene type is innocently white. This creates some inescapably goofy moments in the translation when the series starts aguing for white superiority. And no, the translation can't really use all that many cheats to get around this uncomfortable connection because the color names are spoken out in English. But hey, shit happens with Engrish, and the show does handle some of its thematic aspects very well, and this ties in with how it presents it technology.

Although the mecha parts aren't placed front and center, the robots and spaceships are very interestingly realized, as software is emphasized way over hardware. The Shaft is probably one of the more realistic super robots in anime, as it is an enormous, unwieldy, coolant pipe riddled monstrosity made strictly for zero-G use and plagued with horrendously buggy operating system. In its first sortie it's used as a wire-guided rescue drone, with its systems promptly crashing. I can't imagine a giant robot being made much more realistic than that. Instead of normal upgrade progression, the Shaft improves as a machine as its software bugs are very gradually ironed out during the entire length of the series by a team of butt monkeys. This obviously parallels Mika's growth as a person, but it is also reflects in the villain's motivations: Sergei is disillusioned with humanity because he considers it hopelessly buggy as well, producing apparent defectives like almost the entirety of the named cast, and the debugging of course requires a good old-fashioned genocide by way of a Protoculture relic. It's one of those anime things.

I'm summary, Geneshaft is an intensely flawed but also charmingly ambitious little scifi jaunt. It's worth a watch if you're binging on - to use the ugly term - Eva clones.

I Can't Understand What My Husband Is Saying

So this series is very short but enjoyable, hence i will keep this post short.
Its basically otaku guy and his considerably more normal wife in their daily lives leading up to the birth of their kid and it is ADORABLE, the comedy in the series really works and it doesn't shy away from its sweeter moments when it wants to, and i do love that even though its really short our lead characters are not 1d or anything and they feel fleshed out.

I also like that while it pokes fun at the otaku lifestyle at various points it never really seems like its condemning it and more that its just what it has in the name, a lifestyle.

Basically: this is good and you should watch it, episodes 1-13 are up on youtube anyway.

Also the wife's name is kaoru and yes they do make an eva joke about that.

Rosenakahara wrote:Also the wife's name is kaoru and yes they do make an eva joke about that.

The wiki's contributors are ever vigilant! ;)

Dr. Nick wrote:Geneshaft:

Charmingly written and very interesting, though I think I won't get out more of this show watching it, since you've already described its greatest assets beautifully. Thank you for sharing!

Knights of Sidonia S2 ep 9

I thought for a moment my player had dropped the ball when Nagate failed to finish his line.
That was not a nice thing to do, writers!

... That aside, why was this episode titled "Duty"? Because Izana got called up? It was a pretty minor point overall, no one talked about or complained over the selection itself, no affirming "this is something that I have to do".

If anything, the tension between Nagate and the non-star pilots was a more important theme this episode, as brief as that moment was.

UBW

Those were some strange looking dolphins

Finished watching Tsuritama.

Wen't from slice of life Anime to Deadliest Catch by way of Ponyo really quickly.

Finished watching Panty and Stocking. What a great show, another rousing success by Gainax. I love how crass the show was and the English dub was perfect. My only gripe is that the last 2 episodes had too much actual plot.

Fireball wrote:UBW

Those were some strange looking dolphins

I don't even know what those things were, definitely not dolphins.

Plastic Memories 10: Yuuuuuuuup, this is gonna hurt. And I'm confident it will hurt, and for all the right reasons. Please, please don't disappoint!

Edit: Also, best confession ever.

After several mentions around here, I've been watching Tsuritama - I'm nearly halfway. Quite enjoying the zany humour, which reminds me of Arakawa under the Bridge and also NieA under 7; I prefer it to the first of those, in fact, but not the second. But I do get irritated at Yuki's grotesque "angry" face - it just seems overdone (I have the same trouble in a couple of other series, so it may be just me).