#a long bath and 6 anime episodes later i feel great

[transmascnepetaleijon]

ngl i wasn't ready for the end of wep, kinda fucked up

#dirt.txt #ayyyy guess who ran out of anime to watch #oh also i feel a lot better since the last um. thing. #a long bath and 6 anime episodes later i feel great

[ranma-rewatch]

Episode 13: A Tear in a Girl-Delinquent's Eye? The End of the Martial Arts Rhythmic Gymnastics Challenge!

Welcome back! It’s once again that time for me to watch some more Ranma 1/2, in doing so looking at it with fresh eyes and a different perspective from when I was younger. We’re already up to episode 13, and with it the end of Kodachi Kuno’s introductory arc. I’m guessing this is going to be almost a full episode of fighting, but how good that fighting will be, I don’t recall. But by next paragraph, I’ll have rewatched the episode, and I can talk about it just a bit better. See you then!

That certainly was almost a single fight for the entire episode. Now, unlike the full episode fight against Ryoga, my summary is going to be a lot shorter. There’s a lot fewer moving parts here, and I feel like going blow by bow would be boring.

In general, the idea of the fight is that the combatants lose if they go outside the ring, and they get a foul (though the exact penalty isn’t made clear) if they hit each other directly without using tools or weapons. Besides that, there are no rules. Kodachi and Ranma both have new items thrown to them when they need it, but Kodachi is obviously the one who stretches the rules the most. Most of the fight is her pulling new insane things out of nowhere that Ranma has to work around.

When it comes to actual plot stuff, the first big thing is when Kodachi mouths off again about how much she loves Ranma and can’t wait to date him and stuff. Ranma gets annoyed, and Kodachi interprets this as Ranma loving, well, Ranma too. Kuno jumps into the ring at that (By which I mean Tatewaki Kuno. I know they both have that last name, but when I say ‘Kuno’, assume I just mean him), and demands to know if this is true. Instead of denying it or playing into the idea, Ranma takes a third option and says something that’s technically true, that he and Ranma are one in body and mind, because of destiny.

Of course, the two rich folks immediately interpret that in some serious ways, though exactly what they think that means isn’t spelled out. Do they think Ranma and Ranma bang or something? Anyway, a little after that, Genma shows up looking like a panda in the stands, carrying a kettle of hot water. Whether that’s for him when he decides he’s done being a panda or for Ranma to use after the fight, I don’t know.

The problem is, by this point, Ranma and Kodachi have entered the stage in the fight where they’re using their ribbons to grab stuff from outside the ring and hurl it as each other. Kodachi takes the kettle, and notices immediately how scared Ranma and P-chan are. Oh, yeah, Ryoga is still chained to Ranma, and he does what he can to try and make Ranma lose every so often.

Kodachi uses a pretty clever trick of slicing the kettle in mid-air to soak Ranma and Ryoga, and they change back in mid-air. Luckily for them, Akane saw that coming, and enters back into the gym carrying a fire hose, with water cold enough to turn them back into their cursed forms. It also means Ranma has to swim for dear life to stop from getting knocked out of the ring, but it works.

A bit later on, the show cuts to a group of teenage girls somewhere dark, and we get a nice little break from the fight as they chat amongst themselves. But when it gets back to the fight, Ranma is able to finally knock Kodachi flying, far outside the ring’s boundaries. But all she has to do is whistle, and the ring gets up and moves across the gym so she still lands inside it. Ranma quickly puts together what’s going on, and destroys the floor of the ring, exposing the girls we saw before, who run away.

Now there’s no place to stand except the four corners and the ropes, but Ranma is fine with that, pointing out that he has an advantage in aerial fights. Too bad that he forgot Ryoga is still attached to him, and his rival goes extra far in trying to shake him off. The chain is broken, but Ranma doesn’t have any tools left to fight with. So instead of getting a foul by just getting Kodachi, he kicks the post she’s standing on, sending her sprawling to the ground for a win.

After the match, she tearfully agrees to abandon her ‘present’ love for Ranma Saotome, and everything seems to have worked out great. At least, that is until later, when Ranma and Ryoga are taking a hot bath together. Ranma complains about Ryoga’s attempts to sabotage the fight, which he defends with a reminder that he wants Akane himself. Then he uses cold water to be P-chan just as Akane calls for him, leading to another case of Ranma running into Akane’s room and getting assumed a pervert as he chases Ryoga.

After that, Ranma gets back to back flowers from each Kuno sibling. He sees Tatewaki uncursed, and Kodachi cursed, so each gives the bouquet to deliver to the Ranma that they love. Leaving Ranma holding a bunch of flowers and having to contend with the fact that he now has two Kuno’s to worry about, long-term. Kodachi defends her continued pursuit of Ranma by saying she abandoned her ‘present’ love and developed a new one.

So, what is there to say about that episode? Well, a lot, actually. It didn’t necessarily blow me away, but I do think it was a stronger fight than the last time a whole episode was centered on a battle, since this one doesn't have nearly as many cutaways to unnecessary plot points. There was a short scene of just listening to the announcer describe the fight while we just saw outside the school, which felt a bit chief, but on the other hand I really liked the little bit we got with the gymnasts under the mat. Those minor characters got more definition than they necessarily needed, and it made the coming cheat more fun than the others.

This is also kind of a big first for the series. Namely, it’s the first time Ranma has fought someone who practices a strange, ultra-specific kind of martial art and did so while following all of that school’s rules. Sure, Tatewaki Kuno fights with a wooden sword, but those were all basically street matches, as was Ranma’s fight with Ryoga. But this is an official match, and Ranma obeys all the rules wherein and still wins.

That is something that will be incredibly common from here on out, in manga-adapted stories and anime-original stories. I’ve yet to see it mentioned in-series, and I can’t recall it doing so later on, but it’s generally accepted as canon by fans that this is for a reason. Ranma and Akane’s school, Anything Goes Martial Arts, isn’t called that for no reason. They are supposed to fight other styles, learn from them, and take what’s useful to use themselves. It’s a great way to add more moves to the protagonists’ repertoire, and get them into fights with silly fighters.

This specific fight was...okay. Actually, I feel like I’m a bit of a grump for saying that, it was good. There were some neat moves, lots of back and forth with stuff, it was enjoyable to see. It wasn’t anywhere near what I think this series can do at its best, but it was a good way to end this mini-arc. I do feel like Kodachi, as a character, doesn’t get the same level of badassery even her brother does from the story, and that feels kind of lame. It seems like, in general, Ranma 1/2 saves all the cool stuff for the guys.

To continue what I was talking about with Kodachi last week, I do think it’s really interesting how different she is in each language. It’s a strange case of part-translation and part-acting, but the english version of the character definitely hits different, and not in a good way. It’s actually making me reevaluate her a little, just because the version in the original Japanese is so much better. It feels a lot less like “she’s crazy!” and more “she’s a highly driven and amoral rich girl!”

This was a good episode. I am once again pleasantly surprised by this arc, and it’s raising my hopes that further stories will be better than I recall. As for where to put it in my rankings exactly, I actually think I’ll put it one step above the last single episode of just fighting, and right below that emotional episode about Akane’s feelings for Dr. Tofu. What can I say? I like the feels. That puts the current ranking at:

Episode 7: Enter Ryoga, the Eternal ‘Lost Boy’

Episode 12: A Woman's Love is War! The Martial Arts Rhythmic Gymnastics Challenge!

Episode 9: True Confessions! A Girl's Hair is Her Life!

Episode 2: School is No Place for Horsing Around

Episode 6: Akane's Lost Love... These Things Happen, You Know

Episode 13: A Tear in a Girl-Delinquent's Eye? The End of the Martial Arts Rhythmic Gymnastics Challenge!

Episode 8: School is a Battlefield! Ranma vs. Ryoga

Episode 11: Ranma Meets Love Head-On! Enter the Delinquent Juvenile Gymnast!

Episode 4: Ranma and...Ranma? If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Another

Episode 5: Love Me to the Bone! The Compound Fracture of Akane's Heart

Episode 1: Here’s Ranma

Episode 3: A Sudden Storm of Love

Episode 10: P-P-P-Chan! He's Good For Nothin'

Now, if you’re watching this series on Hulu like I am, you might think the next episode is the first part of the Martial Arts Figure Skating arc. And while, wow, I sure wish it was, that is actually wrong. I don’t know why, but some of the arcs are in the wrong order on Hulu, but I’m watching the series in the actual order. Which means, instead of watching one of my favorite arcs in the series, the next episode is actually “Pelvic Fortune-Telling? Ranma is the No. One Bride in Japan”. My hopes...are not high. See you all...then...I suppose...

#episode 13 #A Tear in a Girl-Delinquent's Eye? The End of the Martial Arts Rhythmic Gymnastics Challenge! #ranma 1/2 #ranma saotome #akane tendo #kodachi kuno #tatewaki kuno #ryoga hibiki #anime analysis #anime rewatch

[steve0discusses]

Yugioh S4 Ep 15: Yami Joins the Bay Area Tribe By Throwing a Riot About Sports on Caltrain

So as you’ve probably guessed because of my lack of posts--I got kinda busy with life stuff and just got hit with this really nasty flu at the same time. Yes, I am in a Coronavirus-affected area but no, I don’t have it and I am not dying (although I did do the right thing and quarantined myself anyway, much like a whole lot of the Bay who are just...working from home. Traffic’s been great.) It’s just that every January/February I tend to fall apart and get the flu so bad I lose my voice for 5 days. This year was 6 days. I just catch the flu a lot, but at least I get my shots so it’s not as bad as it would have been.

So, I took a hell ton of Nyquil and Dayquil and while I’m...functional...I don’t know if any of this make sense. So forgive my rambling. I usually ramble, today I’ll be like...hella rambling. About TRAINS.

So anyway, Lets talk about Yugioh.

Lets board a Californian train!

Yugioh has decided that out of every vehicle they’ve devoted episodes to--they haven’t done trains yet, so it’s train time. Train time...in America...which is not a great place for trains. Like I never really think about it but...people take the freakin Greyhound over trains. Which is wild, guys, the Greyhound is...it’s a state of mind. We ignore trains so much.

It’s just really funny that they left Japan to go to America to ride a train when it’s like...the show takes place...in Japan. The land of wonderful trains. But wtv, they wanted ye Old Western experience.

Anyway, Rebecca really wanted to go on the train with them, but everyone pretty much decided that children were no longer safe on this trip with Yugi and co. The fact that Yugi and co are also children is something I guess we decided to push under the rug. I mean Duke Devlin has a freakin job and a work Visa at 17 so...that’s adult enough, right?

(*in a very Roaring Camp Railroad Commercial voice, and over the dulcet sounds of a banjo* More TRAINS under the cut!)

And then Arthur decided to just really grill it into Yami for some reason.

I think it was mostly to act as a recap but damn, Arthur Hawkins just really seems to hate Yami for killing Yugi. Anyway, lets get a good look at our train.

Surprisingly for this show, they decided not to put us on the Roaring Camp Railroad through the Santa Cruz Mountains, instead, they put us on an actual legit commuter train, and it blew my mind because...it’s the CALTRAIN.

That’s my train! What’s my Caltrain doing in Yugioh!?!?

They even got the paint job right! This is absolutely the Caltrain!

We never update this train. So yes, it still looks like this over 10 years later. It’s very underfunded.

+++THIS IS TRAIN FACTS FEEL FREE TO SKIP TRAIN FACTS+++++

So the Caltrain was originally privately owned tracks--which is how they are really nicely laid out--a private company bought everything/pushed out the old owners before the place got developed. When trains went under, the tracks were purchased by the State and then given to Amtrack to manage. So, Caltrain is strictly property of the State Government but still run by the Federal Government at the same time. Don’t ask me how it works, I don’t know, I just pay my taxes and it goes vroom.

We’ve wanted to extend the Caltrain down to Southern California for a very long time, but because of corruption and a lot of people in politics refusing to expand the Bay out of the fear of maybe dropping our housing prices to reasonable limits, and the fear of making it way too feasible to get more children to Disneyland, the track has stayed roughly the same length for over 40 years.

Overall, It’s less drive time than this duel that takes up this next arc, I’m pretty sure. I’m gonna guess that the duel will be 3 episodes long because c’mon. This is Yugioh. It’s always 3 episodes long, like a Nintendo boss.

Anyway, all these train facts are things that are probably so weird and foreign to places that have ample trains--but in America, we just don’t have a strong train lobby compared to our auto lobby. So, I’m sure that people in Japan making this series thought “Oh they’re on a train--it can just go forever because why wouldn’t it be long? Aren’t all American trains connected?” but uh...it’s a short train. Like we’re talking like a few hours max, and that’s only if they’re starting from Gilroy.

I will say that BART is longer and has multiple tracks, so you would think they’d just take BART instead. But, it goes under the ocean for part of it, and we’ll get to why that would have been a very big problem in this episode later. Also, BART is very gross and no one wants to animate that outside of a horror movie.

But at least they didn’t go way out of left field and take the SF trolley. The Caltrain does actually go pretty fast. It...kind of makes sense. They did actual research into a real thing that we do have.

++++END RANT ABOUT THIS TRAIN AND HOW NONE OF THIS EPISODE MAKES SENSE BUT IT’S YUGIOH SO I WILL IGNORE THAT++++

And youknow...there’s something just so adorable about seeing desert mesas reflected in the window of the Caltrain. It’s just delightful. Because, in reality the entire stretch of the Caltrain is very densely suburban/urban, and the only place where it isn’t surrounded by city is when it’s flanked by the sea.

But yeah, just put mesas on it!

*freakin curtains*

Joey and Tristan hit the “dining car,” which I don’t think is a thing in any form of commuter train. These trains are for trips the length of about 1 extensive Puzzles and Dragons session on your phone, give or take.

(And man, speaking of, the Yugioh PAD collab was so good, guys. Ah man. Been wrecking like every dungeon in multiplayer ever since Bro and I both got a Yugi to put as our leader. He’s basically one of the best leaders in the game right now and I feel like people at PAD were huge Yugioh fans because they were like “what if we made...basically every Yugioh pull into a freakin beast that broke every dungeon in the game?”)

I can’t believe Joey Wheeler went thousands of miles from his homeland and was like “I better drink an American soda” and chose Orange. I mean he might be drinking an Arizona Tea, but I’m pretty sure he thought “ah, Kenan and Kel, right?” and just nabbed the nastiest soda that exists outside of grape.

I feel like I can still taste the orange soda I drank over 20 years ago. It is terrible. It is SO orange. Gross. But at the same time...good? I really don't know with Orange Soda. It’s probably gross.

Meanwhile, Tea decides it’s an appropriate time for Yami to work on his social skills. Now. When he’s visibly grieving after being berated by his Basically-Step-Grandfather and Rebecca.

And then we find out something I’ve never realized before, and it’s that Tea is really bad at social cues. Like maybe even worse than Yami. Like, I dunno how Pharaoh could look more like an angry cat/hedgehog but Tea was not picking up on it.

And y’all I’m not making that up, these are the topics Tea actually came up with for the guy who just saw his best friend die/was very implicit in said murder. Beaches and Bathing Suits.

She got over Yugi being dead like immediately.

Of course, this episode is kind of weird because, much like this show has done so many times already, these guys are still struggling to truly understand that Yugi is two people in one body. Tea sort of comes to this realization as if she...forgot that she has stepped inside his actual head and seen this for herself.

Or maybe it’s denial, but I’m thinking maybe the show did this for the new people coming to the show, to explain a rather complicated thing that took 3 seasons to cement in our minds. But still, it makes Tea seem very forgetful over a guy she should sort of be dating I guess.

Anyway it’s their first real fight. Kind of. I mean it’s hard to tell if anyone on this show is dating, and it’s equally hard to tell if they are fighting, too.

Well, first real fight if you don’t count Zero when Yugi tried to make out with Miho over a card duel, but I think we’re all doing our best to forget that ever happened. Yugi especially.

Or I guess that time she strangled him nearly to death in the nurse’s office when Shadi took over his body. That counts as a fight, right?

Ah. Now we’re on Caltrain.

Don’t take it the wrong way, Caltrain is actually our higher end safe train, compared to our other transit, BART, which will always sit you next to a weirdo, guaranteed. Caltrain--you can take a good nap on Caltrain. BART...you will never feel comfortable enough to take a nap on BART (also because there’s not enough seating room anymore)

But a lot of people who take the train are just freakin WEIRD. I used to take the Caltrain with my older brother (different bro than the bro of this blog, this is my chaotic neutral bro) because we both worked near the same place in downtown SF, and he would always take with him--I kid you not--a 2 liter bottle of Mountain Lightning for a snack.

For those not in the States, Mountain Lightning is the offbrand Walmart version of Mountain Dew. Yes. I know what I said. It seems dumbfounding as Mountain Dew is already an off brand of Sprite--the true lemon/lemon lime--but indeed, like Inception, you can always go deeper, and if there is a soda so bewildering and random, my older brother will be ON IT.

Anyways, my older bro is a train weirdo, so not only does he prefer Mountain Lightning to Mountain Dew, he would take out a 2 liter from his backpack, tilt back his head, and just chug the whole thing straight from the huge ass bottle in front of God and everyone on that train.

He’d polish it off completely on the ride there and the ride back, because my older brother has this weird medical problem where he can’t really feel pain and he has an insane metabolism and never gained weight until he was like 32, so he can just...chug as much soda as he freakin wants. So, at some point of the trip he would have to use the very tiny bathroom, and it would be very urgent, and he’d just scramble over me to get to the aisle and then kind of skip and hop all the way there on the rush hour train that was completely full of people.

Like, most people don’t even know that Caltrain has a bathroom--well now you know, and for several years there, it was just always taken by my brother violently pissing. That was us (well...him). My apologies.

In case your curious, now my bro has hardcore acid reflux, and all he needs to do is stop drinking so much damn soda, but it’s been very hard for him, so he has cut back to “diet soda”. This is still a lot of soda and it still causes acid reflux. His doctor is working on him.

And yes, Diet Mountain Lightning exists. That’s just so many steps removed from Sprite at this point.

Anyways, enough waxing long about train memories, lets get back to the show, because it’s not this season of Yugioh until there’s a problem with the commute.

Unrelated to Pharaoh punching the walls, everyone has “disappeared.”

My bro looked up the Wiki that says there's “no explanation for the missing train passengers” but we all know what that really means on this show, right?

So, how many people fit on Caltrain?

There’s just NO WAY they’re alive anymore, right? Like Yugioh went and killed 756 Bay Area passengers because...it’s a filler season!

I really feel like there’s just no way Seto or Bakura will ever catch up to Darts’ death count at this rate.

After this, we have ourselves this fun train-jumping trope.

Pretty sure it was the superhuman opposing force of Tea jumping from the back train to the front of the train that forced the back to lose all of it’s 100+ mph momentum and immediately come to a full and complete stop.

Not sure how Darts did this thing with the train separating. But he did. Or maybe it was Rex and Weevil? Either way, he somehow managed to do this well enough to strand Joey and Tristan on the other side of the line that now has no engine.

(course I say this like in 1400 AD the Bay wasn’t full of the Ohlone. this place was basically always developed because...the weather’s hella good when it’s not on fire.)

Now if you go East--southern Utah looks like this, and parts of me wonder if maybe the artists thought they were taking the train all the way to Florida. Did the English dub add “we’re taking the train to the airport” because they knew there was no one in their right mind in America who would take a California-Florida train?

I have no other explanation for why the Bay Area looks like this, than to assume that this is an alternate California where there never was a Loma Prieta Earthquake and also one where Seto and Pegasus bought out and destroyed both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Which makes Seto and Pegasus sound like just real true heroes, never paving any sort of way for Mark Zuckerberg to happen and unintentionally (or intentionally who knows) screw up our elections.

Or maybe that was entirely Darts? Maybe it was Darts who’s been eating up the Bay, harvesting nerd souls for the leviathan and knowing that no one will miss these Twitter developers if Twitter never happens in the first place. Especially if he’s just ghosting entire Caltrains willy nilly.

But anyway, fun fact about the Caltrain that the creators of this show didn’t know--the train is a push-pull train, so...It has an engine on both sides of the train. Joey and Tristan...still have an engine. It would have never stopped, even with Tea’s incredible backward momentum.

This is normal train stuff and is something you should always assume about a commuter train that cannot afford the time to reattach the locomotive in order to turn around, but we forget about this in TV shows basically all the time.

However, there are fantasy rules that we give to TV that we sort of don’t extend to other places. We suspend our disbelief for things like this train stopping in a track that would, realistically, have another train passing by in 10 minutes anyway. Things like rogue waves that topple over ocean liners. Or CEOs in Silicon Valley who have ass-length blue hair that is tied with one single hair precarious band.

The point at which we no longer can suspend our disbelief when it comes to TV is SO interesting to me. Because I’m fully willing to let go of the fact that Caltrain is A Push-Pull train because it’s still a fun trope although this can never really happen to you on...almost any train at all anymore. But if this were a movie? People would be losing their freakin MINDS. Look what they did after Star Wars. They lost their entire minds over force-field science that doesn’t even exist.

Like, maybe the people who made this episode really do know that San Jose is the 3rd largest city in California, and that this is a push-pull train, and that there are no mesas anywhere near the ocean of San Fransisco. Maybe they did know that--but they decided to suspend our disbelief by pushing this Wild Wild West fantasy aesthetic SO HARD so it makes it believable although this is just...so wrong. Mostly because...it’s fun TV. Not because it makes any sense, but because I would like to have fun instead of thinking.

Which is also how most romance novels work ps. But Yugioh, although *almost* understanding the key ingredient to how romance actually works, I will assume never figures that out.

I hope.

Also, Rex is here.

Bro would like to bring up that Red Eyes is not a rare card in the real world. So Rex is going out of his way to venge a card that costs...$4.50 at Target. That’s less than a meal at McDonalds. This card may have been in a Happy Meal at McDonalds.

*pictured here, the actual canyons of San Jose*

So something that’s interesting between Yami and Joey is that Yami gives in basically immediately and decides to duel Weevil, who would be very easy to just gently push off of this train. Joey on the other hand, looks down at both of his punching fists and is like “why would I bother?”

Not that it mattered, it’s just interesting that even Joey has more restraint than Yami, who has 0 restraint, apparently, when it comes to dueling cards.

Joey has more restraint that Yami, and Joey is the kid who has tried to punch out Seto Kaiba in nearly every conversation he has ever had with Seto Kaiba over the last 4 seasons.

Also, Tea is just standing on top of this train like it’s a completely normal day outside. Girl has no fear.

Wouldn’t these people be covered in bug guts? Like how are they not getting assaulted by so many flies and birds?

But because she has no decent cards the Oricalchos just kicks her out? I dunno. There’s a lot of weird physics in the next scene.

And she just grabs onto a moving train with her bare hands. I feel like Tea is just so woefully overpowered in this group but for the wrong game. I say this a lot. She’s like their One Punch Man but will never, ever know.

So anyway, that was a long time between updates and now I’m out of sync and behind on everything so...hell knows when the next update will be. Depends on the length of episode I guess? Bro really wants to get to what comes next soon though. He’ll pester me until I do it.

Now I can’t mention Mountain Lightning without sharing with you what you do with 2-4 liters of Mountain Lightning after your brother leaves and then just...doesn’t have enough room for all of his Mountain Lightning AND his baby in his car, so he just leaves it in your house.

It’s called Mountain Dew Cake <-(that is a link) and it’s actually pretty damn good.

I made this once and fed it to a British person and they were like “this is so decadent--what’s in this?” and I uh didn’t know how to respond to that other than “it’s really just Mountain Dew, I’m so sorry” and that was a lie, because it was full of Mountain Lightning.

Anyway, if you just got here, this is a link to read these recaps in order.

#Yugioh #ygo #yu-gi-oh #recap #episode recap #yami #tea gardner #is a boss #Caltrain #commuting #joey wheeler #tristan taylor #weevil underwood #rex raptor #Darts #Rebecca Hawkins #Duke Devlin #Arthur hawkins #Yugioh meets Wild West #it was only a matter of time this is an anime after all #S4 #Ep15

[rhetorical-ink]

Rhetorical Ink Reviews: Yuri on Ice!!!

** SUPERCHARGED SPOILERS BELOW ** 

One of my friends recommended this show a long time back, but I just now got to it. After watching the sub, then the dub, then the dub AGAIN...yeah...it’s time to review it for you all!

It just so happens that I also get to watching this show as Pride Month begins in June. What a coincidence...anywhoo, without further ado, and ten thoughts are NOT enough, here are: 

My Top Twelve Thoughts on Yuri on Ice!!! Season One:

12. I don’t do this a lot for anime, but I actually recommend the Dub. I love the original Japanese, but the dub is just...wonderful. 

Plus, the voice actor for Yuri is PERFECT. Can you believe it’s the same voice actor as both Tendo in the Haikyuu!!, Tokoyami in the My Hero Academia dub, AND Tyrion Callows from RWBY?! The RANGE on Joshua Grelle, y’all!

Bonus, the Russian accents for the VA’s of Viktor and Yurio are ADORABLE.

11. The three main leads are just so three-dimensional. I may have never related to a protagonist more than Yuri Katsuki. Yuri starts out the series having made it to the Grand Prix Skating Finals, only to place last. Down-heartened, he slumps into bad eating habits and lacks any motivation; moving back home after being away for five years as a professional figure skater. 

We’ll talk more about Viktor and “Yurio” below individually, but Yuri is such a empathetic character and you really root for his development and growth as the show goes on and he grows more and more confident as a skater, and a person.

10. Before we dive into our other main protagonists, I want to say that the side characters are fleshed out, too, for what we see of them. Minako, Yuri’s ballet teacher, is a perfect representation of all us fangirls watching the show, and there are the other skaters, which I’ll go into detail about below, too, but I want to focus on Yuri’s childhood friends Takeshi and Yuuko Nishigori in this point. 

When we first meet Yuuko, we get the idea that she was Yurio’s best friend as a kid. There’s this Lily and James Potter moment with Takeshi, as he makes fun of Yurio as kids and comes across as a snot-nosed brat. Just as I think in the first episode that Yurio is about to confess his love to Yuuko, we find  out that she’s actually married to their other childhood friend, Takeshi. And they have a set of triplet daughters, appropriately named Axel, Lutz, and Loop. Ha. 

I do like that later on we actually see Takeshi’s grown up -- he no longer teases Yuri in a mean way; he’s actually a huge supporter of him. I like that we see how these characters have matured and stayed friends. Not to mention the three girls are pretty much a catalyst to the plot of the story. 

9. Okay -- I absolutely LOVE Yuri’s character and relate to him the most -- but how can you NOT LOVE Viktor Nikiforov? 

It would have been easy to make Viktor a pompous, playboy, especially given how successful he’s been as a skater from the start of the story.

But instead, they reveal that Viktor is a sweet, determined, passionate dork who loves his poodle Makkichan and is a fool for figure skating. His constant enthusiasm is infectious and he comes across as a character you just WANT to be friends with. 

The more the show goes on, though, we learn how Viktor is so entrenched on the positive side of the emotional spectrum that he doesn’t handle emotional distress well -- now, THAT I can relate to a lot. When Yuri has a meltdown, Viktor struggles to respond in a way that’s not awkward or insensitive. But, deep down, he just wants the best for those around him, as we see with him motivating his fellow competitors to do their best. He’s also worried about his thinning hairline -- poor guy, being around Viktor’s age, I feel his pain.

8. Despite coming across as a pretentious punk, Yuri Plisetsky from the first episode, we all agree that “Yurio” as he’s nicknamed is actually a giant Piroshki covered in cinnamon? He comes across as constantly irritated, rough, and displeased. But when he’s around his closest friend and grandfather, he shows a softer side to him. He’s definitely an embodiment of a Russian cat. 

I also love that Yurio is impatient to prove his talent, and constantly wants to act more mature than he really is -- WELCOME TO THE MADNESS, ANYONE -- but he is also aware that he’s not going to be that youthful for much longer, and wants to maximize the potential for what he can do in the moment. Should they continue the show into a second season or in the movie, I hope that Yurio growing older is touched on. He makes constant references to Yuri being the age for retirement, and calls Viktor a “geezer” in skating years -- it would be interesting to see Yurio facing the event of aging as a figure skater in the future.

7. We get introduced to the other figure skating competitors, and I have to say that for me, the ones that stand out are Pitchit and Chris, which is funny, since each are friends of our main protagonists Yuri and Viktor. I love that we get their backstories, understand their motivations, and actually see all of their performances. 

Phitchit is just a cinnabun, and I love how supportive he is of Yuri in all he does and just radiates positive energy! And then there’s Chris...ohhh, Chris. I have to admit, one of my friends is actually a LOT like Chris -- maybe that’s why I was drawn to him in the show. His flamboyance is comical, but he also clearly has a good heart. The pool scene with him and Viktor is one of my favorites in the show. 

6. Now, now it’s time for the MEAT of the show. And I’m not talking pork cutlet bowls, y’all. I really had no clue going into this show that it was going to have these three things: First, the humor. 

This show has so much heart and humor -- I found myself laughing so much during this show, mainly with the interactions of our three main leads, but the animation plus the voice acting just NAILS it for me. Viktor being dorky particularly gets me, but Yuri’s reactions are just as golden!

5. Second, and this one is pretty much my jam: The RELATIONSHIPS. Well, specifically, that of Yuri and Viktor. I know I’ve posted this gif in a previous post when I was reacting to Episode 6...but it’s worth re-posting before going further:

I don’t care what gender is involved, if a show has a well-defined and complex relationship, I am ALL IN. Yuri on Ice!!! does not disappoint in this department. 

Yuri starts out as a huge fan of Viktor’s skating, putting him up on a huge pedestal, even naming his dog after him as a kid -- though it’s established Yuri and Viktor are only four years apart in age. 

But, once Viktor starts to coach Yuri, the two come to this mutual understanding of one another and develop this intense bond. I love that Yuri realizes that he does look up to Viktor, but he doesn’t necessarily idolize him -- he actually respects him and knows that Viktor “meets him halfway” when he opens up to him. Viktor, likewise, realizes that Yuri not only isn’t weak, but has incredible potential, and is a kind-hearted person who gives his all and can match Viktor himself in terms of competitive passion towards figure skating, and winning.

There are so many gifs of these two that I can’t post them all, but these two are probably one of my favorite anime couples, now. This idea that alone, you can only go so far, but together, you can be so much stronger! 

Oh, and there’s Yurio -- we get a brief, albeit adorable friendship bloom with him and Otabek Altin from Kazakhstan. Otabek clearly brings out the best in Yurio -- I really hope that we get future development with their relationship, too, since it’s only just started in Episode 10 of 12 in the first season. 

4. Okay, and finally, the STORY and the twists got me in this show! The slow burn of the relationship development between Yuri and Viktor is grand, and you can’t deny the seductive fangirl moment of the forehead touching, or how Viktor is so proud of Yuri that he kisses him in Episode 7, but it’s the plot twists in Episode 10 that just tore the whole show open for me! 

In the episode, Yuri decides to show his appreciation for Viktor (plus give Viktor a birthday/Christmas/”good luck” charm) and gets them matching rings. Of COURSE, we the audience can see the parallels to them being wedding rings. Later, at dinner with the other skaters, Viktor corrects the confused fellow competitors, saying they’re actually “engagement” rings and that he will marry Yuri once he receives a gold medal. 

*Insert the loudest fangirl scream imaginable* 

But then, we discover at dinner that Viktor’s first conversation with Yuri wasn’t actually at the Hatsetsu bath house...it was at the banquet after the Grand Prix where Yuri received last. We find out that Yuri, feeling depressed and down-trodden, got drunk and flirted heavily with Viktor, begging him to come be his coach. Viktor, taken with the whole flirting and proposal, and after seeing how much potential Yuri has with imitating Viktor’s moves in the video the triplet’s posted, decides to come coach him. THAT was why Viktor was so flirty at the start of the show -- he thought that was naturally how Yuri was! Everything at the start of the show that seemed so forward and out of place for Viktor’s character suddenly makes SO much sense after we learn this little tid bit. 

But also, that ending credit scene for Episode 10. Holy guacamole!

3. And then, there was the final in Episode 12! Honestly, I was actually completely fine with Yuri taking silver and Yurio taking gold in the final, even though they were SO close! Yurio establishes that he wants to keep competing against Yuri -- he doesn’t want Yuri to get complacent and just quit after winning this one time and retire. And I love that. I was happy that Yuri got silver, because that means that Yuri’s at least going to skate one more year -- but NOW, with Viktor AND Yurio competing against him, along with the other competitors! It’s such a great way to hype us up for what we hopefully have with another season or the movie. 

2. Okay, just a thought here. I am SO excited to see not only Yuri and Yurio skate again in the next season to come and/or the movie, hopefully, but also VIKTOR skating -- we get previews of it, and they are gorgeous, that I know it’s going to be insane if we have all three competing against one another along with the other competitors. 

However, based on the ending of Episode 12 in the Exhibition Skating event, is there a possibility Yuri on Ice!!! could go into the realm of couples skating. I mean, early on in the season, the Russian coach questions whether Yurio is considering couples skating after getting in a tussle with one of his colleagues. Could we go into this in the future of Yuri on Ice? I mean...the possibilities are pretty endless. It wouldn’t have to just be Viktor and Yuri, either...I MEAN...

1. So, yeah, I pretty much fell in love with this anime. It’s only 12 episodes, but by the end, I just wanted...more! More with these characters, more with their developing relationships, and more gorgeous animation. 

I’m SO excited that a movie is coming out hopefully within the year. If the animation is on par with the “Welcome to the Madness” OVA clip, shown above with Yurio and Otabek, I know that it’s going to be wild. 

Seriously, if you want an anime that has heart, humor, and one of the best anime relationships I’ve seen on screen, give Yuri on Ice!!! a shot, and hopefully, you’ll fall in love with it like I have.

#Yuri on Ice #YOI #Yuri Katsuki #yuri plisetsky #viktor nikiforov #Yuri on Ice!!! #YOI Episode 10 #YOI Episode 6 #YOI Episode 7 #YOI Episode 12 #Couples Skating #Yurio #Victuuri #Victuri #Yuurio x Viktor #Yurio x Viktor #Otabek Altin #Otabek x Yuri #Otayuri #ice adolescence #Rhetorical Ink Reviews #happy pride 🌈 #BRB Fangirling #Top Anime Couples #Yuuko #yuko nishigori #Takeshi nishigori #Nishigori triplets #YOI Chris #yoi phichit

[duhragonball]

Dragon Ball Z Movie 3: Tree of Might

Movie time again.    This time around it’s “Tree of Might”, which premiered on July 7, 1990, between Episodes 54 and 55 of the anime.

I feel like this is one of the more popular movies of the lot, but it’s never been high on my list.   There is a lot to appreciate here, but there’s some things that bug me, and I guess they don’t bug anyone else quite as much.    It’s definitely way better than “World’s Strongest”, so I don’t want to overstate my case here.  

The movie opens with a space probe heading for Planet Earth.    Pretty sure someone making this movie had just watched “The Empire Strikes Back.”

On Earth, Bulma, Krillin, Oolong, and Gohan are on a camping trip.   Okay, so I guess there was at least one other meeting between Gohan and Oolong after Movie 2, and this was it.  I’m curious to see if they ever interact in any later films, or the TV series.  

Honestly, I’m not really sure why Oolong would be involved here.    In the last movie, it made sense, because he was the only one who would drag Gohan out on a Dragon Ball hunt, which drove the whole plot.   Here’s he’s just chilling out with the trio who went to Namek.   He feels like an odd man out. 

I feel like this movie is angling at being an epilogue to the Namek Saga, since it depicts everyone safe and sound on Earth.  It doesn’t fit well with continuity, but the Namek Saga was still in progress when this movie came out, so I can’t blame the writers there.   In any case, the implication is that Bulma, Krillin, and Gohan all got back to Earth, and the first thing they wanted to do together was spend some quality time with Oolong.  

Anyway, Gohan’s mom made him pack a ton of stuff he probably wouldn’t need for a camping trip.

Nearby, that probe lands in the forest and the heat of the impact starts a fire!  Ruh-roh!

Krillin wakes up to the smell of burning everything, and we see all the animals fleeing in terror, including this little dragon.

Krillin tells Gohan to use his ki to put out the flames.   

While they do that, Gohan notices the dragon trapped under a... log?    It looks more like a really long piece of rock, but I don’t know what you’d even call that.    Gohan lifts it up and the dragon moves to safety.

Later, the fire’s out, but the forest is still ruined, and the gang feels sorry for all the homeless animals.   I don’t know, maybe I’m jaded, but I always found it a little cloying how all the animals just stand around at the edge of the forest, looking all sad, like they’re neighbors or whatever.    I don’t know what real deer do in a real forest fire.   Maybe they just die, but I’m pretty sure the ones who don’t just keep running until they find somewhere else to live.   

Then Krillin has a great idea...

Dragon Ball Z!   Wow, this is a great idea, Krillin.   This show kicks ass, but unfortunately they already made it, so it’s not really your idea, you know?

But seriously, Krilln plans to track down the Dragon Balls just so they can wish to have the forest restored.     In lieu of the usual opening credits, we get this montage of the gang collecting the Dragon Balls.    Here’s Gohan flying an aircraft.    I’d ask why they thought this made sense, but they had Gohan fly an aircraft in the last movie, so whoever made Tree of Might can just claim that the precedent was already set.  

Just a thought, but maybe the reason Gohan does all this zany stuff is because Chi-Chi makes him study too much.   By that I mean, she wants him to become a scholar, but for some reason she made him read an entire pilot manual, just in case it ever came up in some entrance exam.    We’ve seen how well Gohan absorbs information, so naturally  he’d finish the book and want to try it out for himself.    Chi-Chi probably made him read a book about lion taming, and then she wonders why Gohan ran off to join the circus.

Here’s a variation on the OP, only with a dinosaur chasing Gohan instead of Bulma.    Gohan ought to be strong enough to kick that dinosaur’s ass, though.

For some reason, Tien and Chiaotzu happen to be jogging by while they’re at it.    Small world, I guess.

And then Gohan shows up with the last ball.  Good thing, too.   The theme song was almost over.

And finally we get the title card.   Granted, these trees in the background don’t look very mighty, but bear with us, we’re getting to that.

DRAGON DRAGON!   ROCK THE DRAGON!   DRAGON!   BALL! Z!

DRAGON DRAGON!   ROCK THE DRAGON!   COME!  COME GET ME!

The sight of Shenron panics that little dragon Gohan saved, and it tries to attack him?   That seems like an unusual response.   Gohan calls him “Haiya Dragon”, so I guess he named him off-screen?   

In the English dub, the dragon was named “Icarus”, which I frankly prefer, because what kind of name is “Haiya Dragon” , anyway?   That’d be like naming your son “Hello Human.”

Shenron flails his tail around, and maybe he was getting ready to slap some sense into Icarus, or maybe he didn’t even notice the guy.   Anyway, Gohan holds Icarus back and makes their wish.

And the forest is saved!   I assume the gang finished their camping trip and went home.    All the animals return to their burrows and trees and bushes or whatever, and the probe robot crawls out of its crater.   Wait, that can’t be good.

The probe sends signals back to a group of aliens.   They confirm the presence of life signs on Earth, although no one can believe it, because they know the Saiyan Kakarot was sent to Earth, and he should have wiped out all of its life a long time ago.  

Okay, but why did they bother sending the probe if they didn’t think there would be anything there worth finding?    Well, anyway, the probe reports that Earthis a suitable environment for the Shinseijuu Tree, which is Japanese for “Divine Essence Tree” Tree.    Um, I think the subtitles goofed a little.   I’m just gonna call it the Tree of Might.   

That reminds me, the actual title of this movie is Chikyū Marugoto Chōkessen, which means “A Super-decisive Battle for Earth.”   It’s also been called “Super Battle In the World”, which sounds pretty dumb.   For some reason, most of the movies have Japanese titles that absolutely refuse to indicate what they’re about.     Literally every DBZ movie could have been called “A Super-decisive Battle for Earth.”    Well, I guess Movie 6 was a battle for New Namek, but Meta-Cooler would have attacked Earth eventually.

Later, we find Goku and Gohan chillaxing in the oil drum they bathe in.    Chi-Chi’s tending the fire that keeps the water hot.    Does Chi-Chi bathe in this thing?  She’d have to, right?    I’m surprised that erotic DBZ  fan artists haven’t jumped all over that concept.    “Oh, now that the fire’s going and I’ve taken off my clothes, I can climb into this oil drum and take a bath!    It’s a good think I live in the middle of nowhere, so no one can see my boobs!”  

But then Icarus shows up and frightens Chi-Chi until Gohan explains who he is.   Chi-Chi immediately takes a dislike to the creature, and I’m with her on this one.   Icarus is a stand-up dude and all, but he looks kind of creepy.   He’s supposed to be cute, but he ends up looking like one of those Precious Moments figurines.

Chi-Chi tells Gohan to take the dragon back where he came from.   Goku tries to stick up for him, but she won’t hear of it.   

Gohan shoves Icarus away, but let’s be real here, he could carry Icarus all the way back to his forest if he really wanted to.

Then Goku leads them both to this cave he fixed up as a hideout for Icarus.   This seems pretty dumb.   Goku tells him not to let Chi-Chi know about this, but how did Chi-Chi find out about Icarus in the first place?   He followed Gohan to the house where she could see him.   

But Icarus is grateful, and he licks Goku.   See, Goku looks way, way cuter than Icarus.    They really tried to hard with Icarus’ design.  

Meanwhile, Yamcha’s cruising around in a car he bought with a 15-year loan, when suddenly he gets blasted out of the sky by...

... one of these assholes, I guess.    If I understand correctly, they blasted a big crater in the ground so they could plant their Tree of Might seed, but I don’t really understand why they couldn’t just use a gardening spade.    

Tell you what, let’s go over these guys names right now.   The big red one in the center is Amond.     The guy on the left is Daiz.   He wears pink leg warmers.  

The alien in the silver armor is Cacao.   I think he’s a cyborg, but who cares?  And the two little purple guys are Rasin and Lakasei.   They’re all wearing Frieza Soldier gear, so does that mean they work for Frieza?   Well, we’ll get to that.

The seed starts growing almost as soon as it hits the soil.   

Meanwhile, the aliens’ mysterious leader notes that this was all made possible by Goku’s failure to destroy the planet’s population as he was supposed to do.

The Tree of Might is huge, to the point where its roots erupt underneath a whole city, which I’m pretty sure is miles away from the forest where it was planted.

In the forest, Icarus watches this enormous tree finish growing, and he knows things are looking bad.

Meanwhile, most of the major Dragon Ball characters have gotten together at Goku’s house.   I’m not sure why.    Also, they didn’t invite Launch, which is kind of bullshit.   

Bulma gives Yamcha shit for buying such an expensive car, and accuses him of trying to impress girls.   So yeah, about the continuity of this movie.     These characters won’t be reunited on Planet Earth until Episode 120 of the TV series.   By the time that happens, Gohan’s a few years older, and Goku’s learned to turn into a Super Saiyan, so this whole movie just doesn’t fit.    Nevertheless, it seems to depict a possible scenario where the good guys managed to return safely from Namek and wish all their dead friends back to life.    In other words, this is the first time Bulma and Yamcha are seen together again since his death in the Saiyans Saga, and what is she doing?    Yeah.

Same, Tien, same.    Chiaotzu’s not gonna let this stop him from enjoying free refreshments though.

Then Icarus shows up at the window, and Goku and Gohan get caught trying to keep him, but they miss the fact that Icarus came back to warn them about the Tree of Might.   Too bad he can’t talk.

Fortunately, King Kai can talk, and he can communicate with Goku telepathically, and he warns him about the Tree of Might.    Well, “warn” might not be the right word.    According to King Kai, the Earth was doomed the moment the tree took root.    It’s basically a parasite on a planetary scale.    As it grows, it sucks the nutrients and life force from the host planet, reducing the whole world to a lifeless desert.

So where does something like the Tree of Might come from?   King Kai says it was originally grown so that the gods could eat its fruit.    That sounds halfway plausible, until you consider that a lot of the “gods” in this franchise aren’t nearly as awe-striking as the Tree of Might.    It’s hard to imagine someone like Kami planting a tree like this, destroying a whole planet just to eat its fruit.    King Kai literally cooks his own meals, and he seems to eat the same stuff as everyone else.     King Yama has a tree in hell that bears fruit reserved specially for him, but it’s not nearly as big as this one.   I could imagine Beerus snacking on fruit from a tree that kills whole planets, but he’ll settle for cup ramen.    More importantly, Beerus and his ilk wouldn’t be introduced to the franchise for another 23 years.

I’m not sure what King Kai is trying to tell Goku.    If it’s too late, why bother telling him about this at all?   Is he trying to suggest that Goku should evacuate the planet? 

Well, King Kai should know better, because Goku stone cold does not give a shit.    As soon as he hears about this crisis, he immediately makes plans to go beat up a tree.   His plan: Let’s all go shoot it with our best hand lasers.   Diagnosis: Awesome.

Then they all put their hands together in a show of solidarity.     It’s time to show that tree who’s boss!    Look at Chiaotzu.    He’s literally lying on top of the table just to reach the others.

Then Gohan tries to join in, because hell yeah.   Gohan can help.   He fires some really good hand lasers, especially for his age.

But his mommy said no, so he’s gotta stay home.    Better luck next time, kid.

Krillin notes that his wish to restore the forest was a total waste, since this stupid Tree of Might wrecked it all over again.     I think the whole point of that forest fire was just to give the characters a reason to use the Dragon Balls early, so that way they wouldn’t be able to wish their way out of this situation.    I’m not sure Shenron could remove a tree this huge, but it’s a moot point now.   The Dragon Balls won’t work again for another year.

So they shoot their finest energy blasts at the base of the tree, and it does nothing.   Krillin suggests another try, but Yamcha points out that if they use too much power they could destroy the Earth instead.

Then these jerks show up.   Okay, so this is one thing that’s always bugged me about this movie.   From here on, much of the action takes place on the Tree of Might itself, so you end up with a lot of indistinct backgrounds which are probably meant to be super-giant tree bark.   It just makes it hard to tell where anyone is in relation to anything else.   What exactly are they sitting on here?   Why does the Tree of Might have all these convenient ledges and horizontal surfaces for people to stand on? 

Yamcha demands vengeance for his dearly departed car.   Uh, yeah...   Whatever gets you in the zone, buddy.

The boys square up for a fight.    You know, I remember watching parts of this movie on Toonami back in 1999, and scenes like this, and Yamcha’s appearancs in the Frieza Saga, were really my first introduction to the character.   What really stood out for me was that he looked almost exactly like Goku.    Kind of like how Flash Thompson was a big fan of Spider-Man, and one time he dressed up as Spidey for a Halloween party, and the real Spider-Man had to trick Green Goblin into thinking that Flash was the real thing.    It just really looks like Yamcha is this jock who decided to dress up like Goku because he loves Goku so much.

Anyway, these two guys do some dumb shit.   I really hate Rasin and Lakasei.    Just... everything about them sucks.   They sound terrible in every dub, they look like inflamed hemorrhoids, and they do absolutely nothing to move the story forward.   

Tien blinds them with the Solar Flare, and that’s about the only effective offense the Z-Figthers manage in this whole movie.

It’s really a shame, because this is one of the few movies that actually bothers to use Yamcha, Tien, an Chiaotzu, and they get jobbed out.   Would it have been so bad to have Yamcha use his Spirit Ball on Cacao and actually hurt him?  Krillin’s Kienzan is one of the more serious techniques in the series, so I might have been cool to actualy see him kill somebody with it.     I’m pretty sure Chiaotzu has never won a fight in Dragon Ball up to this point.    Would it have been so bad to just let him kill Rasin?     But no.  

I always wondered why they included Yamcha, Tien, and Chiaotzu in this particular movie, but now that I’m watching them in sequence with the anime, it makes some sense.    Around this time, the TV series had just revealed that they were training with King Kai in the afterlife, and one could certainly speculate that they would get resurrected later on, and play a role in the final battle with Frieza and/or Vegeta.   I think “Tree of Might” was trying to play along with that idea, except it never actually pays it off.    

Chiaotzu is in trouble for a while, until Gohan suddenly shows up to help.  Turns out Icarus managed to bring him to the forest where the battle was going on, so now he’s here to turn the tide.    Or something.

This attracts the attention of the boss alien, who recognizes Gohan as a Saiyan.

So he goes out to meet the kid, and realizes that he must be Kakarot’s son.   He introduces himself as Turles and...

Yeah, he looks like Goku.  That’s the big twist.  

Only it’s not much of a twist at all.   Turles explains that it’s not even that big a deal that he and Goku look alike, since they’re both “disposable, lower-class warriors.”   According to Turles, low-class Saiyans “only come in a few types.”  

I’ve seen this line interpreted in many different ways.    Some fans have suggested that the Saiyans cloned their low-class warriors.   I think a lot of fans prefer the idea that Turles an Goku might be related somehow.  Bardock and Goten’s close resemblance to Goku seems to support this.    Hell, Gohan looks a lot like Goku if you don’t take the hair into account.  

I think there’s always been a desire to make something more out of Turles than what the movie offers.    The fact that he looks like an evil Goku is easily the most intriguing thing about the character, and this movie does absolutely nothing with it.   Turles himself acts like it doesn’t matter, and Gohan is the only character who even seems to notice.   So why did they bother making him look like Goku in the first place?

I feel like part of the idea here was to explore the idea of what Goku might have been like if he hadn’t hit his head and turned good.  Turles could be a glimpse into what Kakarot might have done as a villain, although he’s so different from the real Goku that it doesn’t seem all that convincing.   They could have made him look like another Saiyan, and it wouldn’t really affect anything.  

Turles’ main personality trait is that he seems to want to recruit Gohan and Goku to his cause, saying that Saiyans should stick together.    I’m not sure if he truly believes that, or if he just thinks that his gang could use a couple more Saiyan lackeys.   He talks up the space pirate life as an endless romp around the universe, taking whatever he wants and enjoying food and drink as he pleases.  Again, I don’t know if that’s a genuine sentiment, or if it’s just his recruitment pitch.

Piccolo shows up and tries to save Gohan, but Turles makes short work of him, and goes back to tormenting the kid.

Turns out he can make one of those fake moon things just like Vegeta.

He forces Gohan to look at it, and then he destroys it as soon as Gohan turns into a giant ape.

He says it’s because he doesn’t want to turn into a giant ape himself, but why wouldn’t he?    Why did he turn Gohan into a giant ape?    He doesn’t need any help to beat the Z-Fighters.   Is he trying to prove a point?  Gohan won’t even remember anything he did in ape form.   Also, shouldn’t the transformation wear off once the fake moon is gone?   Turles accounts for this by saying it’ll stick for a little while, even after the power ball is gone, but that doesn’t sound right.    When Piccolo blew up the moon, Gohan changed back immediately.

For that matter, what good is the fake moon technique if it can be dispersed so easily?    Krillin could have attacked it during the Goku/Vegeta fight instead of trying to cut off Vegeta’s tail.

So now Goku has to fight his own son in giant ape form.    To the movie’s credit, this is a big highlight, because it’s the only DBZ movie to feature a giant ape transformation.    And that’s all well and good, but it seems kind of empty to me because I have no idea why Turles set this up.   Does he want Gohan to kill Goku?   Is that supposed to make Gohan more eager to join him?

The fight ends up in a cavern, which I think turns out to be the same cave Goku used as a home for Icarus.   That, or Icarus just happened to be here.   Either way, just seeing Icarus calms Gohan down.

This is cute and all, but it seems odd that Oozaru Gohan would react so strongly to Icarus when he didn’t even recognize his own father.

Irritated, Turles tries to attack Icarus, which turns Gohan against him.    Turles tries to kill Gohan with a laser donut...

But Goku cuts off Gohan’s tail before it can hit him, and he shrinks back to little kid size just in time to fall through the donut.   I guess it’s lucky that Turles relies on donut-shaped attacks.

Turles then offers to spare Goku if he pledges to join him, but Goku refuses.   He came her to whip a tree’s ass, and if Turles is pro-tree, then he can get wrecked along with it.   

Then all of these creeps show up to fight Goku first.    See, this is dumb.    They not only made a clean sweep of Goku’s teammates, they didn’t even defeat them on screen!   

Here’s a shot of Tien passing out from the hypothetical beating he took from Amond or some other guy.   

Well, at least this sets up a cool scene where Goku has to fight them all by himself, right?   Not really, Goku squashes them all in  matter of seconds.

Meanwhile, Piccolo tries to take on Turles, but he’s just no match for him.

Boom, roasted.

I mean, why couldn’t Yamcha take this guy out?  What was the point of having Yamcha in the movie if Goku was going to beat all the bad guys by himself?

With the rabble cleared away, Goku finally gets down to business.   Turles panics when he sees how strong Goku is, so he runs away...

...and picks a piece of fruit from the Tree of Might.    Why does he stick his tongue out to eat it?   That just looks kind of weird.  

Basically, the fruit of the Tree of Might ramps up a person’s battle power, which allows Turles to overpower Goku with ease.    This is the core concept with Turles, I think.    The challenge with this movie was to invent a new villain who could challenge Goku in the same manner as Vegeta and Frieza.   Well, that’s a tall order, because Frieza was hyped as the strongest guy in the whole universe.    A Saiyan villain would have made sense, except Vegeta was the strongest Saiyan, and the only one left.     To introduce a new Saiyan, you’d have to explain why he’d be strong enough to rival Vegeta or Frieza.

The solution is the Tree of Might.    I can’t find the line now, but there’s a part of the movie where Turles or one of his crew mention that the Tree of Might will make Turles strong enough to defeat Frieza.   It’s pretty clear, then, that he’s a renegade from Frieza’s organization.     They have their old uniforms, but instead of working for Frieza, they just roam the universe looking for places to plant their Tree of Might seeds.    They grow a new tree, eat the fruit, get stronger, and then repeat the process.   Turles started out as a weakling like Goku once was, but he found a way to cheat the system, and now he’s on his way to becoming the strongest in the universe.  

Turles leaves Goku when he refuses to surrender, and then Goku’s friends speak to him telepathically.   I’m not sure when they learned to do that, but whatever.   They beg Goku to get up and try a Spirit Bomb, and Goku finally musters the strength to try it.

While he does that, the Z-Fighters assemble for one last stand against Turles.   I guess this is supposed to buy time for Goku, but I’m not sure he needs it.   Turles isn’t actually doing anything at the moment.  

But it doesn’t work.   The Spirit Bomb relies on borrowng life energy from everything on the planet, and that’s been drained away by the Tree of Might, so Turles thwarts Goku’s attack with ease.    Oh, he also clobbered the Z-Fighters, so they’re down too.  Triumphantly, Turles looks at his fruit crop.    Where exactly is this that he’s standing right now?   

But Goku isn’t beaten yet.    He drags himself back into the fight, and confronts Turles one more time.

See, this time, Goku has a way to make the Spirit Bomb work.   If all of the Earth’s energy is in the Tree of Might...

... then he’ll just draw the energy from the fruit instead of the planet, and make a Spirit Bomb from that.

There’s this tense standoff, and then they both attack each other in a single instant, and Goku’s Spirit Bomb wins out.    I always have trouble remembering how this movie ends, and I think it’s because the climactic moment is so quick.    I’m pretty sure they tried to imitate a gunfight from a western. 

Turles gets consumed by the Spirit Bomb, and it drives him up through the trunk of the Tree of Might.   Really, this makes a lot of sense as a finale.   Turles’ trump card was to eat one piece of fruit from the tree, but Goku drew power from all of the fruit, so naturally his Spirit Bomb would be stronger than anything Turles could handle.   And it’s an elegant solution to the problem posed by the tree.   It was completely invulnerable to Goku’s own power, so he ended up using the Tree of Might’s own energy against itself.

All of this causes the Tree to glow yellow and disintigrate into sparkles of light, which rejuvenate all life on Earth.

So this dying deer is okay again, and presumably so is everything else.

Later, everyone celebrates with another camping trip.    Launch got snubbed again.

Oolong tries to praise Icarus for his role in the battle, but Icarus nearly bites him.

And Piccolo sort of chills out by a waterfall somewhere, and that’s the end of the movie.   

So it’s a pretty decent entry in the movie series, but I find it to be a mixed bag.   The highlights are things that don’t quite get developed enough.   Yeah, you have Turles, Great Ape Gohan, Yamcha, Tien, and Chiaotzu, but for my money, merely having those things in the movie isn’t enough.    It’s what you do with them that counts.    I find it particularly frustrating that the Dragon Ball Wiki has all this lore on Turles’ gang, but none of it ever made it into the movie itself, which is their only appearance.    What’s the point in having a backstory for Daiz if it never comes up anywhere?     His entire character arc was blowing up Yamcha’s car, and then getting decked by Goku. 

Still, if you like Spirit Bombs, this is one of the best Spirit Bomb finishes ever.    And the Tree of Might is a pretty cool idea.   And the visuals are a big step up from World’s Strongest.   

#dragon ball #2019dbliveblog #movie 3 #tree of might #goku #gohan #krillin #yamcha #tien #chaiotzu #piccolo #chi chi #icarus #turles #amond #cacao #rasin #lakasei #daiz #dbmovieliveblog

[getthebutters]

I solved Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD/Seasonal Depression) so you don't have to. 9 easy proven steps

Summer is winding down. Despite the ponderosa, we’ve had some great fun and enjoyed living in a way that felt like it might never happen again. But that means Moody Emo Spooky Libra Sweater Weather Season is right around the corner!

 While I love spooky season, it also signals the start of my annual decline into a depressive episode that lasts until somewhere near the spring equinox. Some people call it seasonal affective disorder (SAD); I call it hell. Though it is torturous to live like a zombie for 6 months a year, I’ve found ways to make my ride down the river Styx a lot more comfortable.

For example, our Fall releases are usually our best of the year because it matters more than any other time of the year. These creations are more than just new stuff to sell, they're a reason for us to take care of ourselves, remain sensual, creative, continue our rituals, and honestly stay alive.

But that’s just one part of this 1100-word article on beating seasonal affective disorder aka SAD aka Seasonal Depression aka the Fall fall. Since I personally deal with this shit, I’ve learned a ton to make this crappy season feel a lot better and I’m as excited as I can be to share them with you all!

  Change your meds

"Treat yourself like a child or wild animal in a zoo. Plan activities or even just new stimulation for yourself. "  -- Jerome

The change in seasons causes a change in brain chemistry. Even if your meds had been working previously, now might be the perfect time to increase your dose, add a helper or take a break. If you’re not on meds, it might be a good idea to think about. Talk to your doctor and see if there’s something you can try.

8 years ago, around my birthday, I started taking anti-depressants for the first time - Wellbutrin 100mg daily. A couple years later, I asked for a switch to something different and she added Zoloft 50mg daily. Which helped me regain my sense of optimism, creativity, and imagination. It’s been a long time; I’m glad to have them back.

 Invest in a 5500k or higher lightbulb

Light therapy has been a great treatment for SAD and major depression for people closer to the poles for a long time. Light boxes are an easy but kind of expensive option – cheap ones start at $50. Whereas you could install an outlet timer and fluorescent bulb over your head to wake you up with a burst of “sunlight” every morning for about $25. You could also spend less than $10 and buy a specialty CFL (compact fluorescent) or a LED equivalent bulb that’ll fit in any standard outlet.

 Keep busy, be useful

Because I like projects and fall on the frugal side, I prefer the DIY options for the tip above. Even if you have the cash for a light box, it’s always a great idea to aid your sense of accomplishment with a series of short projects or a long-term hobby. Although I have found some types of tasks, projects and hobbies work better than others.

For my depression, getting a useful hobby with measurable results has been a life and mind saver. Having something to care for, watching something grow, getting better at something, these things keep me connected to the world and people around me.

 Give yourself a break

My depression feels like nothing, and everything is happening at once. The result is an exhausting mixture of behavior that is at times frantic, tense or eerily still – sometimes all at once. A bitch gets tired from time to time and when that happens, I give myself the time to rest up, even if that means sleeping for 24 hours straight.

Even under ideal brain conditions, rest is necessary. Autumnal depression or SAD has a way of zapping our energy like nothing else. It’s important to know when it’s time to rest. You’re not a failure for needing a nap or some solo Netflix and chill time.

 Get stimulated

Now, I’m not a doctor or an expert on this. So, this is just some personal experience, not advice.

For me, the morning is a crucial time. If I can find a way to just start my mind right when I get out of bed, I can usually rev up to a functional level of energy; if not, I’m fucked. Previously, I fixed that with some not so legally acquired Adderall, but it raised my blood pressure too high. Now I start my day with a cup of coffee or two.

There’s something in the getting up and doing a useful thing plus ingestion of a stimulant that really seems to help me. I also like smoking cigarettes for the same reason. If you don’t like coffee but do like cannabis and tobacco, a spliff with a tobacco and a strong, energizing sativa might be a great option.

Novelty & Enrichment

Treat yourself like a child or wild animal in a zoo. Plan activities or even just new stimulation for yourself. Change up what shows you're watching, what you're wearing, the fragrances of butters you're wearing, the bath bombs you're using, the color of the light in your room, reorganize your space, change what you're eating, and who you’re fucking.

"It’s important to know when it’s time to rest. You’re not a failure for needing a nap or some solo Netflix and chill time. "  -- Jerome

Maybe also trying some new things, even something you might think of as traditional and boring. Something like playing cards, board games, drawing, painting, taking a dance class, bingo, or working out.

 Exercise

Look I understand that you already know this is a fact and if you want it to work out, you'd be working out already. So, this is going to be a very short section. But just know that exercise will make you feel better, moving on.

 Stay away from downers

Whether it’s joy sucking people or intoxicants, it’s important to minimize the things that are zapping your energy and spirit. If you’re a weed smoker, stay away from indicas as they will make you sleepy. If you’re on SSRIs ask your doctor if adding a stimulant to your meds might help. If you’ve got a case of the fake people, say goodbye, goodbye to all the fake people your life.

 Be selfish

Being selfish gets a bad rap. Usually, though, selfishness is actually healthy. We often overexert ourselves trying to be there for everyone. We need to spend more time being there for ourselves. Selflessness and sacrifice are valuable features in martyr, but martyrs die and you’re trying to live. Be a little selfish, sacrifice less of your soul and you’ll have a greater ability to lift yourself, which, funny enough, will still help to lift others.

[cottonsecurityblanket]

So I watched The Ancient Magus Bride ⚠Spoiler Warning⚠

When I saw the ad of this show on Instagram I said in the comments if that girl doesn’t fall in love with the skull man I’m going to be very disappointed. I WAS NOT IN THE SLIGHTEST! I’m gonna talk about this very differently and this might be really long so I’m sorry. So here’s my thoughts on the anime.

I FUCKING LOVE IT! THIS SHOW GIVES ME LIFE! CURSE YOU ANIME MAKING ME WANNA DATE AND/OR FUCK THINGS I SHOULDN’T! Weeaboo cringe aside hot damn this show is good. Now let’s chat.

Firstly the opening. I don’t really pay attention to openings because I’m on my phone but this one made me stop everything and shush my boyfriend. Talk about something that grabs you. The singer’s name is Junna and she’s only 16 years old. The guitar is amazing and the visuals during it are great and those opening lyrics. WOO! It’s something new and fresh. Get away from the rock style music in a anime about step sisters in love (Citrus) or some dude singing high pitched with a great guitar riff and that be the only part I enjoy (Tokyo Ghoul). I love this opening. I listen to it in my free time and it just fucks me up.

WATASHI WA KOKO. Fucks me all the way up.

So in the beginning we see a girl with red hair and green eyes from Japan whose name is Chise (like cheese and say) and she’s selling herself because she wants to feel wanted and almost jumped from a building because she hates how she’s treated like an outcast. The scene then goes to Chise in chains walking through this auditorium like place with other creatures and this is the first indication or how visually amazing this anime is. Behind Chise are like giant wolf creatures and the reflection of the light from aquariums just….this anime is stunning. The animation quality of this show is 16 outta 10. I usually dont like when a serious anime turns chibi for light banter but when this anime does it I have no issue. The design of Chise, the vibrant colors, the lighting, reflection is absolutely gorgeous.

People are bidding on Chise and a man with a red blanket over his face and antlers bids 6 million on her. In this scene she’s sold to people in a…illegal magic auction i assume and Chise is a Sleigh Beggy.

A Sleigh Beggy is a person who has overwhelming amount of magic flowing from them but the amount of magic is so much that their bodies can’t handle it and they die in a year or two which is weird by the way because if Chise has been a Sleigh Beggy all her life and has lived this long you’d think shed be okay to live a little longer but whatever. Plot holes are like pot holes you can ignore them when you know where they are.

Throughout the show it’s implied but never directly said that there have been other Sleigh Beggys but nobody has really seen them in person. This is mostly because of how every new person she meets is shocked and amazed at her.

Back to the auction after a man bids 6M he wins her and we see that hes maybe 6'11 or 7 ft tall and has a wolf skull as a head (yes I looked it up). His name is Elias and they call him the Mage of the Thorn. We see why later in the episode and in episode 7 when Chise gets stabbed by a giant mantis and he looses his shit. Turning into this creature that I wish I could explain.

Immediately after the auction Elias takes her to his house and removes her chains with a touch. The house is adorable and I love it. I couldn’t live in it by myself though. Elias has a maid named Silver but Chise calls her Silkie. She cooks, cleans, and tends to the garden. In episode 15 we learn that Silkie is a Banshee and she fell into a catatonic state after her first family died. This Faire spirit leads her to a new house and he asks why she was there and Silkie says “I want my family.” this is the first time we hear she has a voice. And that she can talk. Being a banshee though I doubt she really could without breaking stuff or warning of death. 

Even in the short lived sentence Silkie is whispering. The Faire dresses her as a Victorian era style maid with a bonnet and wide dress and names her Silver. In the same episode we gets lots of quiet time with her as she sits around an empty house waiting for Elias and Chise to return. When Silkie was first introduced in the show I thought she would be the quiet character that doesn’t have emotions but everyone would love. In the first few episodes when she gives Chise her plate of breakfast she wraps her arms around her shoulders and rests her chin on her head. In the quiet segment with Silkie she shows that she is bored and misses Elias and Chise in the house. When they return Silkie is happy and hugs Chise. I love Silkie as a character. She takes care of both Chise and Elias which is adorable and she has a scene where she stands outside Elias’s bedroom door with a bat and that got a chuckle from me. Hell I rewinded that scene a few times.

After being taken home ,in the first episode, Chise, while in the bath internally monologues, reveals that her mother tried to kill her and her father and brother left her at a young age. She was bullied in school and pushed to the point of almost jumping off of a building then bringing us to the introduction of the anime.

While Chise is in the bath faire sprites come to greet her and call her Robin and say her red hair means she’s got great magic abilities. Later on in the night one of the faire sprites invites her for a walk in the forest to go outside. Turns out it’s a trap to lead Chise into what’s called “The Other Side” which is basically a relm where Faires live in meaning shed be a Faire. Chise choses not too because Elias is the only home and family she knows so she tells them no and then Elias comes to save her and we see his magic for the first time. Aftrr this scene we get to the meat and gravy of what this show is about. Elias says he will train Chise as his apprentice and he wants her to be his bride.

As Im sure you can tell this anime is about magic but unlike the successful Fairy Tail and the failure (in my opinion) that is Black Clover this is something very different and new. There are mages, sorcerers, witches, dragons, faires, centaurs, and demons in this world and we see so many variations and different kinds of each of these things. Even knew kinds of magical creatures that I’ve never seen before. You can truly see the time, effort, and dedication to this show and its absolutely amazing. I wish I could think of another word but this show is just amazing.

The first episode is very good about making you want to watch the next episode so find out more about the characters and story. It’s also very good at not revealing too much but just enough about Elias that not only makes Chise want to know more but also you.

Elias Ainsworth is a creature of some sort but nobody really knows what. He doesn’t know what but he is half fae. The first memories of his existence are of him walking. He can go into the shadows of people and hide in them (something he does with Chise a lot) and also has this weird ability to change his form from something wolf like with a fish tail, to something snake like, and in episode 18 he turns into this mass where he tries to eat Chise because he’s throwing a temper tantrum. Why? Cuz Chise had a friend over. No I’m not joking. 

In episode 3 Chise meets Lindel who is the caretaker of the Land of Dragons and she goes back to him in episode 12 and this is when Lindel explains how he met Elias. Elias unsure of what he is, is very confused. He thinks he used to eat humans which seems like a stretch but sometime in an episode when Chise sleeps in Elias bed with him (the same scene with Chise and the bat) and he’s threatening to eat her. Not a personal kink of mine but I don’t kink shame. In the beginning it seems that Elias just wants to help her but then it turns into Elias learning emotions and more about humans. It’s adorable really but often problematic.

I say problematic because and @redslayvega talked about this in their post about how both Chise and Elias have mental issues. A summary of their post is that Chise is willing to do anything to make anyone happy besides her while Elias is very dependent on her and has separation anxiety. Anytime Chise leaves to do her own thing he pouts and that affects Chise however she does keep doing it. I forget which episode it is, but when Chise hangs out with Alice on Christmas Eve he says she should’ve done it and he doesn’t trust her to go out alone anymore. In episode 21 the dude takes one of Chise’s dear friends to trade places with her when she gets the dragon’s curse. I mean jesus Elias. Chise rocks his jaw and is pissed. I would be too. She gets angry saying that she wanted to think about it with him. He can’t stand the thought of her leaving him. 

Besides that Chise and Elias’s relationship is very adorable and I absolutely love it. It changes from student and teacher to mother and son, to father and daughter, and in reality their just two kids who need to figure out what emotions really are. Chise doing more than Elias. The sound Elias’s skull makes when he rubs it on Chise’s face is a small but awesome detail. There’s a love between them and it’s not the main focus of the show however a very important aspect and also a good way to build character development and make good relationships between people. The two of them are just too cute. In Episode 6 Elias takes Chise to “The Other Side” to heal her and when they meet the Faire King and Queen the two talk about what kind of kids Elias and Chise should have. Then they bet on how many. Chise blushes at the possibility of having kids with Elias and Elias starts to feel things in his stomach. Butterflies. Elias protects Chise as much as he can and Chise helps Elias when he throws fits i.e. the temper tantrum we talked about earlier.

Chise gets a familiar and names him Ruth in episode 7. Ruth is a black dog who is tormented by the death of his master who was run over by a carrige. I think. He doesn’t remember what he is and it isn’t until episode 8 that he remembers and the two bond and he becomes her familiar. When she dies he dies and they are emotionally connected. I think Chise calls him her brother but I can’t remember. In the same episode of 7 and 8 we also meet the main antagonist of this series.

It threw me for a loop when they introduced an actual antagonist . Up until the point it seemed to be episodes of small missions and favors and days of shopping. If that’s all the show was going to be about I would’ve been okay but them throwing in this was amazing. It happens so suddenly too and there’s no preparation.

There’s a sorcerer named Renfred and he and Elias dont seem to be on good terms but have a good enough relationship to work together when needed. He has an apprentice named Alice who is hot in a suit and generally V attractive. In her backstory she was just a kid on the streets doing drugs until Renfred found her. We first meet the two in episode 4 and 5 when there’s a black mass in the land of cats and while Chise wants to destroy it without hurting the cats Alice and Renfred think to destroy everything. Then in episode 7 Alice is trying to kill Ruth (before he became Chise’s familiar) and Chise uses a potion on her that puts people to sleep. Alice wakes up and explains she’s looking for this kid who’s apparently evil and when she says this a giant mantis mean to stab Alice stabs her and then we’re introduced to the villain and main antagonist. 

His name is Joseph (my boyfriend’s name) but it seems his...demonic name is Cartaphillius. He gets mad when you call him that. He is a sorcerer who wants to make a chimera for some reason. He doesn’t even remember why in this scene. I forget who explains this but Joseph is immortal cuz of someone who cursed him and can’t die. The bastard gets his arm ripped off and just says “Oh silly me.” Like dude. Joseph really does have a reason for what he does or a “goal” of his. He goes around doing fuck all just because he can. We see him mostly doing “experiments”. In episode 4 and 5 we found out he’s the reason for the black gelatinous mass in the land of cats and that was a failed experiment. In episode 19 some goons of his (or people he possessed not sure) take dragons and he kills one for some reason. I dont remember if he just wanted to or if he had a reason but he puts the other one on auction THE SAME AUCTION CHISE WAS AT BY THE WAY. 

In that same episode Chise has a dream with Joseph in it and it seems like there’s another form like some sort of demon or monster inside of him. In the dream when they first start talkig he sounds like a sweet but confused kid then he starts to loose it and pins Chise to the ground and his eyes turn hollowed out. That leads me to think maybe he and Chise are connected somehow. It’ll be interesting to see how what his story it. Something tells me however that Joseph really just wants death. He’s been around so long that he just wants to die fucking around until he finally does. If that’s the case Chise will grant him that death because that’s just how her character is.

I absolutely love this anime. It’s visually amazing. The characters have so much depth and story that I just want to see more of. The plot is simple on the surface but it’s so much more. This is a very different and new anime that I’d recommend to anyone. This anime breaks the 13 episode rule so I’m hoping this show just does the entire manga in one go like Twin Star Exorcists did. I absolutely love it to the core. The animation quality is 10/10. The design is amazing. The colors. The textures and backgrounds give me a feeling. There’s a scene where Chise falls into a river and she sees this giant river dragon and it’s absolutely breath taking. The background music gives this ambiance. So much stuff in this anime is perfect and is done right. This is how you do a magic anime. Agree with me on some things or not. This is a good anime. This is a great anime and I love it with every fiber of my being.

16 outta 10. I’m ready to bleed for this bitch. I know this was sloppy and all over the place but understand one thing. I’m ready to bleed for this show.

Next review will be on Citrus (part 3) and the problem child that is Black fucking Clover and I have some choice words. My boyfriend says hi.

#anime review #chise hatori #elias ainsworth #elias x chise #the ancient magus bride #mage #my thoughts #anime #mahoutsukai no yome #honest anime review #the ancient magus bride anime review

[adeslowmoqueen]

<(~_oO°~VvUu*_//❤️\\-  S E R V A M P   A N I M E - //❤️\\_*uUvV~°Oo_~)> do you all remember that day, that day we've all been waiting for... ! waiting for a masterpiece to become an Anime ~~! 5. July ! WAITING FOR THE SERVAMP ANIME FOR YEARS ! 

god aka StrikeTanaka said: ''let there be the 5. July 2016 '' ~~~>// and then the ultimate Servamp Hype began \(*w*)/ !! \\<~~~ WUUUUUUUUUUUUUH ! :M what a great day to be alive, now it's the 5th of July, the very first anniversary for our beloved vampire series ❤️ (9 *w*)9 !!  S E R V A M P heeppiiiii basdeeeey Savanpu Animeee ~ :> ! höhö ~ It really has been an entire year, goddammit, time runs fast as always ;w;) It feels like as if it has been released a few months ago, ahah.. :'D but still, good times, VERY GOOD TIMES...! I know some of you weren't there when the ServampAnime-Countdown started, but it is a fact that every ServampFan was hyped af and a lot of us even didn't do homework or something >v>)b Those last days before the release were intense with creating a lof of countdown-fanarts and screaming all day long. DO IT FOR SERVAMP -! And then when the Anime was actually released we cried happy tears, didn't sleep and probably watched the first episode like 6 times xD ahh jeeeez, VEEERYYY GOOODDDD TIIMEEEESSSS like, it was truly beautiful, almost everyone had holidays so it'll be pure heaven to watch the series >w>)9 ! srsly, couldn't have been a better time ~ At that point tuesday was the official Servamp day ! :D nothing was more in important in life, IT JUST WASN'T. And after having watched every single episode we fans talked about it, spammed pics all over our other acc's, etc ~ For example my weekly SakuyaSpam on Instagram!  I simply posted almost every screenshot of Sakkun possible and wrote a bunch of texts down below =w=)❤️ ( especially enjoyable per episode 3 & 4..!! AHH YISSS ). It was just incredibly amazing to see all those characters in actual bright colors, moving and speaking with those ikemen-voices! dayum all those seiyuus ~ everyone did a great job \\\v\\\) ! SAKUYA'SVOICELIKEGODDAMMITYUTOEARGASM24/7. sadly there wasn't the AliceinArc or the very first Servamp rendez-vous in the restaurant, but ey, it was still enjoyable, ne ? \( >v>)/ Even my father said he didn't really understand what's up in the Anime but he was truly impressed by those character designs/animations ! The alternative ending that people chose for the Anime wasn't bad either, I liked that past of Tsubaki and how everything escalated right at the worldtree tower =v=)b Of course the ending will be faaaaar more different ! so excited what will happen ~~ letthesufferingcome.. ! So if fans are sort of confused about nearly everything, WE HIGHLY RECOMMEND TO READ THE MANGA ~~~ P L E A S E ~~~ ;///;)9 !! the Manga is so much SO MUUUCHH deeper and exciting, just DO ITTTT :M !! D O   I T

alright, that having said it is still to say that the 5th of July is a very special day >w>)9 ! one of the best days in my entire life, ahah <3 mychildshallbeborntherehuehuehue hope you had a lot of fun exisiting on that day too :>! If you entered later in the fandom, then IMAGINE THE LEVEL OF INSANITY WHAT HAPPENED BACK THEN òwó) !! great times ~ gonna read my entire SakuyaSpam when I'm going to bed owo And also remember, thanks to the Anime people got to meet new people an make friends ! It's always great to meet new lovely people ~~ so THX A LOT SERVAMP-ANIME once again ( /*/////*)/!! words cannot even describe how great Servamp is, srsly - AHEM now my drawing, have some Kuro with Kuro and Kuro ! Kuro carrying Kuro reaching for Kuro, bathing in Kuro's kuro-ness and Kuro almost touching Kuro's necklace. Kuro. can you feel his pain? ~  eheheh ~~~ ! last year I drew a Chibi Version of Kuro and his inner self with some water, and now the 'upgraded' version xD // I'll also post a Speedpaint of it on my yt channel! ( if everything goes right ) gotta post it a few days later :D ! // ~ HOPE U LIKE IT \( >w>)/ !!

#oy #you haven't read all of this yet - have you ? #if yesss - bravoooo \(>w>)/ !! #haven't posted such a wall in a while #but it's IMPOOORTAAAANNTTTT #Servamp #Servamp Anime #Anime #Manga #Fanart #Kuro #sleepy Ash #P A I N #sloth #art #1st Servamp Anime anniversary #5 July 2016 #HYPE #this pic took me some hours... dude #water + dat building #ugggghhhhh it's finally done ! #sry for being so laateeee qwq #big Kuro's teeth says 'Ade' hue ~~~ #best signature evaaahhhh

[patronsaintofprincesses]

Hey can you answer all 64 questions for me? Thanks 😘

I’d like to thank @unluckymess for indulging me, and my need to lay myself bare on the internet and talk a bunch, you’re the real MVP, an excellent friend. 😚

1. Do you ever doubt the existence of others than you? Mm yes, in a way. I like to have my bases covered so, I believe that I’m not real, and I believe that I am real but in a simulation and I can believe that I’m not real and still in a simulation and I can believe that no one is real and I can believe that only the simulation is real and I can believe that everything is real and I can believe that simulations aren’t real etc. So, sorta.

2. On a scale of 1-5, how afraid of the dark are you? 3. But I’m not afraid of the dark, I love the dark, it’s the people that misuse the dark that I pity and loathe. The dark is comforting, and natural– I love the dark.

3. The person you would never want to meet? Let’s be honest, Mr. Cheeto-Fingers #notmypresident guy is the most distateful man I’ve had the pleasure of never meeting. I’d like to keep it that way.

4. What is your favorite word? Settlement. Someone asked what my favorite word was in oh 8th grade? and my mind scrambled and said settlement and I stand by that brain scramble lol.

5. If you were a type of tree, what would you be? There’s a Celtic thing that says Hazel and there’s an astrology thing that says Pine mm however, I’d want to be a Peach tree v:

6. When you looked in the mirror this morning what was the first thing you thought? Can I brush my teeth later :“)

7. What shirt are you wearing? A pale pink tee that says “Nevermore” in antique lettering and has a Raven opening it’s beak to caw.

8. What do you label yourself as? THE Boring Princess. San THE Bore. I own my dullness, I enjoy my royal duties in the Boring kingdom.

9. Bright room or dark room? D a r k but with a pink antique garden quilt covered in flowers and blackout/ lace curtains and dark wood furniture and glass end tables and ceramic vases in olive and navy filled with dahlias and white silk flowers.

10. What were you doing at midnight last night? Reading. Messaging @barnsburntdownnow @silver9mm (I adore you ma'am)

11. Favorite age you’ve been so far? 16 was a good age, graduating high school and being District Spelling Champion has been the highlight of my life so far ;)

12. Who told you they loved you last? @unluckymess and I love you as well 😇

13. Your worst enemy? Evita Perón said Time, but I don’t want to plagiarize. I have to say, energy then?

14. What is your current desktop picture? My pup, he’s turning seven on December 11th!

15. Do you like someone? Sure I like a lot of people :) but I’m not attracted? to anyone really, since I’m abstinent until marriage and real commitment-phobic so 😅

16. The last song you listened to? The Most Peculiar Day of Your Life by the Hoosiers. (my third favorite band)

17. You can press a button that will make any one person explode. Who would you blow up? myself, probably

18. Who would you really like to just punch in the face? Also myself le mao.

19. If anyone could be your slave for a day, who would it be and what would they have to do? I’d choose Kim Jong Un and I’d have him sign over the dictatorship of North Korea over to me and get those people some gotdamn internet and H-E-Bs.

20. What is your best physical attribute? (showing said attribute is optional) my eyes are pretty expressive, I’ve been told.

21. If you were the opposite sex for one day, what would you look like and what would you do? I’d probably be really scruffy, with curly hair, tortoiseshell glasses, and be real sweet. I’d go to several bookstores, chew on my pen cap, mope about looking artsy, I’d cry a lot, and probably blog about toxic masculinity. I’d try out the whole masturbation as a guy thing and also the whole prostate thing, and then get drunk at a bar.

22. Do you have a secret talent? If yes, what is it? Nope. Everyone knows everything about me at this point le mao.

23. What is one unique thing you’re afraid of? Getting exactly what I want? Is that unique? Mm dying and the headstone people misspelling my name so my gravesite/cremation urn says Sam Hernandez. Ugh.

24. You can only have one kind of sandwich. Every sandwich ingredient known to humankind is at your disposal. !!! My go-to, is whole grain bread, egg white, spinach, mozzarella, parmesan, green bell pepper, tomato, cucumber, mushroom, and ground black pepper.

25. You just found $100! How are you going to spend it? I’m going to give it to my mum, so she can gas up her car ^^

26. You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere in the world, but you have to leave immediately. Where are you going to go? Australia, to get bitten by the elusive taipan

27. An angel appears out of Heaven and offers you a lifetime supply of the alcoholic beverage of your choice. “Be brand-specific” it says. Man! What are you gonna say about that? Even if you don’t drink booze there’s something you can figure out… so what’s it gonna be? PINA COLADAS. um rum? Uhhhhhhhhhhh premixed Pina coladas???

28. You discover a beautiful island upon which you may build your own society. You make the rules. What is the first rule you put into place? Always be humble and kind.  

29. What is your favorite expletive? Bless Your Heart

30. Your house is on fire, holy shit! You have just enough time to run in there and grab ONE inanimate object. Don’t worry, your loved ones and pets have already made it out safely. So what’s the one thing you’re going to save from that blazing inferno? The smiley face zipper case I keep my photograph print outs in.

31. You can erase any horrible experience from your past. What will it be? Mmm I feel like saying my birth is a bit too gallows, so I’m going to say, agreeing to marry my ex-fiancé.

32. You got kicked out of the country for being a time-traveling heathen who sleeps with celebrities and has super-powers. But check out this cool shit… you can move to anywhere else in the world! Tibet?

33. The Celestial Gates Of Beyond have opened, much to your surprise because you didn’t think such a thing existed. Death appears. As it turns out, Death is actually a pretty cool entity, and happens to be in a fantastic mood. Death offers to return the friend/family-member/person/etc. of your choice to the living world. Who will you bring back? I’m going to ask for a business card à la Fairy Godmother (Shrek 2), be proactive, because when my mother passes, I can bring her back. I told her that she has to outlive me and I meant that.

34. What was your last dream about? Falling

35. Are you a good….[insert anything you’d like here]? My buddy, I’ve never been good at anything in my life. I’m an excellent speller, a reading prodigy, and average in every other aspect.

36. Have you ever been admitted to the hospital? Yes, thrice during manic episodes. Twice for when a dog bit me.

37. Have you ever built a snowman? Nope. I have yet to see snow

38. What is the color of your socks? I’m not wearing socks but I only like grey socks and beige liners

39. What type of music do you like? Alternative/Country/UK Pop/Rock

40. Do you prefer sunrises or sunsets? Sunsets, please and thank you.

41. What is your favorite milkshake flavor? Coconut cream pie, from Sonic (after dark)

42. What football team do you support? (I will answer in terms of American football as well as soccer) TEXAS. T E X A S

43. Do you have any scars? Oh yeah, plenty ^^ on my face, my arms, my foot. I’m kind of clumsy and I don’t mind scars so I never applied the vitamin E.

44. What do you want to be when you graduate? A graduate lol all joking aside, a librarian? A kept girl? A strong, independent bookworm? Something alright.

45. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? I’d like to have been born in the 33rd century. (mm if not possible, then I would like to be indestructible) (if not feasible, then I guess I’d like to have perfect night vision)

46. Are you reliable? No

47. If you could ask your future self one question, what would it be? “What is the most profound thing we have said thus far?”

48. Do you hold grudges? Nope

49. If you could breed two animals together to defy the laws of nature, what new animal would you create? A dragon (uh a scary bone eating bird with a nice, sweet snake)

50. What is the most unusual conversation you’ve ever had? The first time I discussed anything with my conscience? Mm really, any conversation I’ve had with myself has gotten pretty unusual.

51. Are you a good liar? HA maybe over text but irl I begin to giggle and avert my eyes and it’s awful no one let’s me get away with anything

52. How long could you go without talking? I went a whole day once for the GLSEN Day of Silence in April 2012. Maybe I could go longer? Mm I’d like to be mute. That would be interesting.

53. What has been you worst haircut/style? They’ve all been great, particularly the ones I cut by myself from 2008-2012 I don’t know what you are trying to imply c:

54. Have you ever baked your own cake? Is this a euphemism?

55. Can you do any accents other than your own? Sort of an English accent, and sort of an Australian accent. Oh but I have a natural accent when speaking Spanish and a Texas accent pops up with some words in English.

56. What do you like on your toast? Fr e sh avo cado (free Sha vacadoo) obviously (if unavailable, I’ll take honey, cinnamon, butter, sugar, beans, eggs, strawberry jam, peach preserves etc.)

57. What is the last thing you drew a picture of? A lady, for @silver9mm@barnsburntdownnow for LETTER #6

58. What would be you dream car? An Aston Martin is what I liked in 2008—actually my dream car would be an indestructible flying bathosphere that could also teleport and drive itself. I’m waiting, 2020.

59. Do you sing in the shower? Or do anything unusual in the shower? Explain. I do sing, mm well ahem, I don’t like showers I like baths. Sometimes I’ll turn off the lights and bathe in the dark, when I’m feeling overwhelmed or hopeless or I just don’t know who I’m fooling etc. Sometimes I’ll play music and place my phone facedown on the tub, let my head sink beneath the water, and the sound vibrates/echoes throughout and it is so settling. Ahem, sometimes bathing is my me time, where I’ll let my mind wander to something racy, and with the steam fogging up my mind I’ll get helplessly turned on, and just lounge in the hot water fluttering my inner muscles until I either orgasm or cry lol.

60. Do you believe in aliens? Yes. But do aliens believe in me? Lol.

61. Do you often read your horoscope? No but I do like those moodboards/aesthetics/text posts concerning my signs 😇

62. What is your favorite letter of the alphabet? R in middle school, X in high school and now, probably S.

63. Which is cooler: dinosaurs or dragons? Dinosaurs are neat but I’m a Dragon! kinda gal.

64. What do you think about babies? Cute and scary and gross and wonderful and delicate and perfect and miniature and I want none and ten

65. Freebie! Ask anything interesting you can think of. Message me 👻 I’ll answer anything y'all.

If y'all would like to send me any other asks (anonymous or public) I tag them as Ask Thing and I’ll answer literally everything. Thanks y'all!

[ranma-rewatch]

Episode 21: This Ol' Gal's the Leader of the Amazon Tribe!

*checks watch* Oh, hey, it’s time for more Ranma 1/2! Hope things are going well for you, person reading this. I’m...fairly sure I know what’s coming? I just don’t really remember exactly how it happens. Will I like it? Will I not? We’ll have to see, next paragraph, after I’ve seen the episode again.

That was...not what I was expecting? This storyline is both moving much faster and much slower than I remember, if that makes any sense. How? Well, let me recap it a bit first.

The episode starts with someone flying into the city on birds. More specifically, a bunch of small birds supporting a larger bird who doesn’t seem to fly, and the person is riding on that bird. It’s weird. She arrives in a construction zone, an old woman with a walking stick taller than she is, and she says something about looking for her son-in-law. Actually, she says it a lot. A steel girder almost falls on her head, but she hits it with her stick in mid-air, shattering the metal into dust, before running off.

It cut from that to Ryoga attacking Ranma. Why? Well, Ryoga doesn’t really need a reason, but this time he does. Namely, the whole Ranma kissing Akane thing from the last episode. Of course, Ranma was in cat-mode at the time and doesn’t remember it at all, no matter how much Ryoga tells him it’s real. After Ryoga gets splashed with cold water, Ranma is then attacked by Sasuke and Kuno for the same reason, and combined with piglet-form Ryoga’s help, Ranma actually gets kinda beat up in the process.

Heading back to the home, he realizes that Akane’s probably mad if it is true, and we see her in the dojo, but she isn’t really working out the way she usually does when she’s mad. If anything, Akane seems conflicted. Ranma shows up to talk about it with her, and immediately apologizes. Akane asks if he remembers doing it, and he admits he doesn’t. Then, Akane wonders, did it not matter? Would Ranma have kissed anyone, and it just happened to be her?

Not understanding what is going on, Ranma stumbles over answering too long, until Akane starts actually getting riled up, calling him a flirt. That pisses Ranma off, so they get into an argument. There’s also a scene where their dads are playing shogi, and they wonder about that pink cat Shampoo sent them, especially since it’s unlikely she knew about Ranma’s fear of felines.

The answer to that comes as Ranma goes to take a nice, hot bath to clean off after the fights he’s had. The cat jumps in with him, and before he can freak out about his greatest fear being in the room, Shampoo emerges from the bath right where the cat had been, and she’s very naked. Yep, the cat was her that whole time!

In a case of Ultimate Bad Timing, Akane comes to take a bath herself and sees Ranma in the bath with a naked Shampoo. We cut directly from that to Ranma practicing what to tell Akane later. Namely, that he won’t apologize or back down, instead being firm on the fact that it wasn’t what it looked like and he did nothing wrong. And we wonder why Ranma has relationship problems.

Akane appears, and she seems fine...before knocking Ranma into a pond. Not long after the water changes him into his cursed form, the old lady from the beginning appears, and Ranma has a very hard time fighting her. She won’t explain who she is or why she’s fighting him, then disappears. That felt...a bit pointless, honestly.

Later, Shampoo comes by the house again, with food. It seems she has moved to Japan officially, and lives and works at a nearby ramen shop. As everyone’s eating the food, the old woman shows up again, taking a place at the table to eat. It’s revealed that she is Shampoo’s great-grandmother, named Cologne, and she’s there to make sure that Shampoo and Ranma get married. Soun fires back about the engagement Ranma already has to Akane, but Shampoo seems to think she has a good argument for why she should be the one to take Ranma’s hand.

She takes him into the bathroom and uses cold water to turn back into a cat, and it’s revealed exactly what happened. Heading back to China, she was shamed for failing to either kill or marry Ranma, and thus had to train with Cologne. They did that at Jusenkyo, for some reason, and Shampoo fell into the Spring of Drowned Cats. So, apparently the curse is Ranma’s fault, and thus he has to marry her. He rightfully points out that’s utter nonsense, but Cologne doesn’t care.

They fight for a bit, with Cologne showing off one of those moves where it looks like there are a bunch of her but only one is real. Ranma uses food and Cologne’s hunger to figure out the real one, but that doesn’t really matter. She’s a bit impressed by him, but still knows he’s far too inexperienced to ever really stand a chance against her. Then she hits him with her stick, and says something about how he’ll be begging to marry Shampoo in a few days.

Why is that? Well, it seems she did something quite diabolical. She apparently hit a pressure point that has caused Ranma to be incredibly sensitive to water. Even cold water feels boiling hot, but it still activates his curse. To turn back to his preferred form, he’d need to use hot water, but with how sensitive his skin is, hot water would be torture to endure. Thus, he can’t turn back into his uncursed state unless he does exactly what Cologne tells him.

Let me start with the stuff I like about this episode. First off, this is a really interesting way to build a story arc that’s very different from the ones that came before. All the story arcs in season one were pretty typical for anime. Each event led directly to the next, it all felt like single stories that just took multiple episodes to tell.

But if you didn’t know the last episode was part of a story arc, you wouldn’t guess that to be the case. It felt like a single-stand alone episode. And it kind of was. Only two things really carried over: Shampoo the Cat being mailed to them, and Ranma kissing Akane at the end of the episode. In fact, when I saw Ryoga and Ranma fighting, it took me a second to realize what they were talking about, because I didn’t think that event from last episode would be carried over.

I really like how it was done, though. The show made it pretty clear that Akane was feeling some feelings about the whole thing, but Ranma was too caught up in the idea that she’d just be plain angry about it to miss what she was really telling him. She wanted him to tell her that actually it did mean something that in his cat-state, he still sought her out and was affectionate towards her. She didn’t want it to be meaningless. That’s really cute, and the miscommunication there was less annoying than it sometimes is and more adorable. Free relationship tip: learning how to properly communicate to your partner is really important!

The concept of finally introducing a character who is actually a better fighter than Ranma is good. Cologne isn’t Ryoga or Shampoo or Kuno. He can’t just beat her in a cool fight, she’s far more experienced and skilled, something that from here will kind of drive the entire arc. The fact that Shampoo ended up with a cursed form that Ranma finds so terrifying is also interesting. She’s kind of scary to him anyway, this unrelenting force who won’t leave him alone no matter what he does, so making her cursed form that but to the tenth degree is pretty neat.

Last good thing: I really love how nonchalant Kasumi is with Shampoo. Like, to her it’s just like, “Oh, Shampoo! You’re back, that’s lovely, do you want to stay for a meal?” Either Kasumi doesn’t understand the complex romance plot going on, or she does and finds it not reason to stop being a good host.

What didn’t I care for? Well, like I said at the start, it feels like this arc is moving too fast and too slow at the same time. In one episode, this story resolves the Akane/Ranma kiss from last episode, the mystery of the pink cat, introduces a new focal player in the story, and curses Ranma with something he’ll have to fix. That’s a lot to happen, and I was really shocked the pressure point thing happened in this episode too.

But at the same time...I really found my interest waning in the back half of this episode. The Cologne fight just isn’t super gripping, to me anyway, especially when the technique she uses just feels very bland. There’s a good five or so minutes, about a quarter of the runtime of the episode, that I was just bored in.

I also like reintroducing Shampoo, only three episodes after she left, was a bit of a mistake, especially when she’s basically a main character from here on out. I know she was very popular, but even then giving the audience some time away from her let’s them miss her, if that makes any sense.

There was originally going to be a Cologne based Character Spotlight, but then I decided not to because we still haven’t seen a lot from her, and also I’m very tired and my birthday was Monday please stop bullying me

So, yeah, if you couldn’t tell I’m kind of meh on this episode. It’s not bad. It’s not great. I enjoyed the first half quite a bit, but the back half was a little more of a struggle. It was in fact a big enough dip that I’m putting this episode fourth from the bottom, just above the P-Chan introduction episode.

Episode 7: Enter Ryoga, the Eternal ‘Lost Boy’  

Episode 12: A Woman's Love is War! The Martial Arts Rhythmic Gymnastics Challenge!

Episode 15: Enter Shampoo, the Gung-Ho Girl! I Put My Life in Your Hands

Episode 9: True Confessions! A Girl's Hair is Her Life!

Episode 2: School is No Place for Horsing Around

Episode 19: Clash of the Delivery Girls! The Martial Arts Takeout Race

Episode 6: Akane's Lost Love... These Things Happen, You Know

Episode 13: A Tear in a Girl-Delinquent's Eye? The End of the Martial Arts Rhythmic Gymnastics Challenge!

Episode 17: I Love You, Ranma! Please Don’t Say Goodbye

Episode 20: You Really Do Hate Cats!

Episode 16: Shampoo's Revenge! The Shiatsu Technique That Steals Heart and Soul

Episode 8: School is a Battlefield! Ranma vs. Ryoga

Episode 11: Ranma Meets Love Head-On! Enter the Delinquent Juvenile Gymnast!

Episode 4: Ranma and...Ranma? If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Another

Episode 5: Love Me to the Bone! The Compound Fracture of Akane's Heart

Episode 1: Here’s Ranma

Episode 3: A Sudden Storm of Love

Episode 21: This Ol' Gal's the Leader of the Amazon Tribe!

Episode 10: P-P-P-Chan! He's Good For Nothin'

Episode 14: Pelvic Fortune-Telling? Ranma is the No. One Bride in Japan

Episode 18: I Am a Man! Ranma's Going Back to China!?

But hey, maybe things will be different next time? I’m actually pretty sure I’ll like it better, because now we’re really getting into the stuff I can remember. Namely, Ranma is going to be introduced to what will be his signature technique in “Behold! The 'Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire' Technique”. I’ll be there next week, and I hope you will too.

#episode 21 #This Ol' Gal's the Leader of the Amazon Tribe! #ranma 1/2 #ranma saotome #akane tendo #shampoo #cologne #anime analysis #anime rewatch

[recentanimenews]

Crunchyroll Remembers Their Favorite Lupin the 3rd Stories

On April 11, Kazuhiko Kato—better known to his fans by the name Monkey Punch—passed away. Kato created many amazing works in his time, but the best known and most beloved of all was easily Lupin the 3rd. For many of us here at Crunchyroll, it was one of our earliest anime, if not an actual gateway series.

  Today, we here at Crunchyroll News and Features are taking a look back at our favorite films and episodes, as well as what made us love this crazy series. We'd love to hear from the rest of you, too: tell us in the comments what makes you love the Lupin Gang and what story you loved most. If you're new to the series, we hope this encourages you to check out one of the standards of anime.

  Thanks to everyone on the team who took part and shared their memories!

    Paul: The true genius of Lupin III is that the characters are archetypal, and so they can map onto whatever story the writers and directors want to tell, from slapstick nonsense to hard-boiled, noir-style thrillers filled with murder and gratuitous nudity. Lupin, like Batman, means something different to everyone, and there is so much more to the character than simply “red jacket”, “blue jacket”, “green jacket”, etc.

  My first experience with Lupin III was The Castle of Cagliostro, and I've got a lot of time for The Woman Called Fujiko Mine and Jigen's Gravestone, but I'm sure everyone and their cousin has some kind words to spare for those entries, so I'll devote a few phrases to the weirder animated entries: The Fuma Conspiracy, The Mystery of Mamo, and The Legend of the Gold of Babylon.

  Although I own two different DVD releases of The Fuma Conspiracy, I remember almost nothing about the film itself except that it involves Goemon getting engaged, the entire film is basically an extended (and exquisitely animated) chase scene, and the AnimEigo release had to fudge Lupin's name as “Rupan” because of the lawsuit with Maurice Leblanc's estate.

  The Mystery of Mamo has clones, a giant space brain, ridiculous cameos and product placement that got scrubbed from the Geneon release, like 6 different English dubs, and perhaps the single greatest visual rhyme in anime cinema history, which juxtaposes Lupin teasing Fujiko's nipple with world leaders pushing the Big Red Button for a nuclear missile strike.

  The Legend of the Gold of Babylon is so goddamned weird that is makes The Mystery of Mamo seem “two bedroom one bath white picket fence in the suburbs” mundane by comparison. I haven't managed to sit through the entire film in one viewing, but it's co-directed by Seijun Suzuki and it's arguably the most divisive work in the entire Lupin III franchise, so it merits a mention.

  But none of these wild and woolly adventures would exist without the original manga from Kazuhiko Katou, aka “Monkey Punch”, and while straight manga Lupin with no chaser is way too raw for me, it's the primordial essence from which all other interpretations of the characters spring, and the world is a smaller, meaner, and pettier place without Lupin's creator in it.

    Carlos: I’ve always loved the phantom thief genre in any medium. I loved it as a Super Sentai, adored it when Persona 5, and of course, couldn’t get enough of it in the eclectic series of Lupin the 3rd.

  Kazuhiko Katou’s legacy has truly been immortalized in Lupin’s escapades, being one of the earliest examples of the phantom thief trend in Japan and modernizing Arsene Lupin’s adventures for generations of fans to enjoy. The anime world has lost an old time visionary, but he left us with his timeless classic that I’ve loved for so long, and will enjoy for years to come. Whenever I sing “Memory of Smile,” I’ll raise a glass to Monkey Punch.

    Noelle: My first introduction to the series was Castle of Cagliostro, having also grown up on Ghibli, and something about that was just so fun and enjoyable.

  The Detective Conan crossovers are also a bit of lighthearted fun- Lupin exists everywhere!

  All Lupin works embody the phantom thief sub-genre, but instead of being something heavy and ominous, they are free-spirited. Lupin, Jigen, and Goemon all have chips on their shoulders, but that doesn’t stop them from causing trouble and generally having a good time while doing so. Every installment is witty, clever, and I’m always eager to see how the gang will come out on top.

  The truest Lupin installment that greatly stuck with me is of course, The Woman Called Fujiko Mine, which ranks as one of my favorite anime series to this day. It doesn’t focus on Lupin himself but Fujiko, and her adventures of self-discovery and living her own life. This one was a far more serious series, especially compared to the far more carefree Lupin series that I’d been exposed to, but it worked.

  I’d usually watch Lupin whenever I wanted something that I know I’d enjoy, but also makes me feel good. There aren’t many series that manage to do both.

Rest in peace, Monkey Punch.

    Nicole: It’s been hard to reconcile with the fact that Monkey Punch is gone... My first encounter with Lupin came from Castle of Cagliostro, where I immediately fell in love with the Miyazaki directed version of Lupin as a dashing thief and the misfits that followed him around. I remember hearing from a lot of people when I first wanted to expand that “Oh that isn’t really Lupin, that’s a sanitized version of him,” and over the years I kind of find myself disagreeing with that more and more. Lupin is a lot of things to a lot of different people, and I think Monkey Punch really created a unique and amazing set of characters that various directors then worked with and left their mark on. I still find myself rewatching Cagliostro whenever I get a chance, and I find it an amazing ‘first anime’ movie to show to people who have never really seen much anime at all before.

  The Lupin TV series are filled with so many amazing episodes, and when I originally drafted up a top ten list last year, I ended up starting to rewatch the whole thing again. Even though some adaptations of Lupin are a bit better than others, I would say that anyone who likes the idea of a master thief and his madcap capers will find a lot to love almost anywhere in this series, and I hope that maybe in this sad circumstance of Monkey Punch’s passing, people will get curious enough to investigate the series and fall in love with it too.

  Some of my favorite Lupin memories and moments, aside from Cagliostro, have to be those dealing with Zenigata. As much as I love the Lupin crew, there’s just something charming and attractive about Zenigata’s character that always made him so much fun to watch. As I mentioned in my list, there are a lot of interpretations of Zenigata, but I always prefer the hard-boiled, semi-noir detective version of him that episodes like “Until the Full Moon Passes” or “The Woman the Old Man Fell in Love With” depict. I think the reason I always liked Zenigata so much is that he’s really important for Lupin to play off of, and without Zenigata, I don’t think you’d really enjoy Lupin as much as a character! The moments where the two of them really face off, or even work together, are some of the most magical moments in the series overall; on that note, I really recommend curious viewers to check out “The End of Lupin III”, another great pick.

  Finally, I’ve come to appreciate the Miyazaki influence in Lupin more over the years, and realize that without Monkey Punch, we probably wouldn’t have Studio Ghibli today; those who are curious to see where Miyazaki got some of his original directing starts might want to check out his Lupin episodes, and of those, “Farewell, my Beloved Lupin” is amazing (and keen Miyazaki fans might see a lot of similar designs here to later movies!) and of course the amazing Miyazaki take on Fujiko in “Wings of Death: Albatross”! I’m sure there’s so much more I could talk about or recommend, but I’ll just say that Lupin, in all of his incarnations, is worth it, with something for everyone, from various movies and tv shows to spin-offs like the amazing Woman Called Fujiko Mine, I hope that creators will keep honoring the vision and memory of Monkey Punch and deliver us more amazing Lupin content in the future.

    Joseph: Like many people, my first exposure to Lupin as a character was in Miyazaki's Castle of Cagliostro feature, which I still think is his best movie as a director. That characterization of Lupin, I would go on to learn, is just one of many, and I would soon see just how different his origins were when Tokyopop started publishing Monkey Punch’s original Lupin manga in English. Looking back, it's probably not the best representation overall, but it's still interesting to see how the character has evolved since those rough early days.

  The next time I caught him in action was back when Part 2 would air on Adult Swim—*checks paper* almost SIXTEEN YEARS ago?—and I've kept up with him and the rest of the gang irregularly over the years. My favorite thing about the franchise is just how flexible it is in general. While the broad strokes of each character may remain along the same lines depending on the jacket du jour, Lupin offers up a distinct canvas on which artists can apply their own unique sensibilities. I especially appreciate stuff like 2012’s The Woman Called Fujiko Mine, which is about as decadently artsy as Lupin gets.

    Kara: I spent two semesters in my college's anime club my freshman year being generally okay with anime. It was Castle of Cagliostro that got me all the way in. I remember when I finished watching it, I turned to my friend and said, "I'm actually kind of sad there's no more movies with these characters in them." I had no idea how ridiculously wrong I was.

  I loved earlier specials and series, but what I'm loving now is the flexibility the characters have after 50 years. We had The Woman Called Fujiko Mine, which was downright surreal but ultimately rewarding when the other shoe drops. The new movies have been fantastic as they bring in a largely new cast. And for me, Part 5 was some of the most satisfying anime I've ever watched, Lupin or otherwise. It felt so in the spirit of Kato-sensei's original work, while still creating new riffs on it.

  For me, anything Lupin is my go-to on a bad day. I know it's going to be funny, I know the "good guys" (whether or not Zenigata sees it that way) will win the day, and I know there's a lot of heart in every single version. It's hard to believe the gang's creator has passed on, but I'm also glad he got to see his work beloved by the world, and that it will continue strong for new fans.

  Series available on Crunchyroll:

>> Part 1

>> Part 2

>> Part 3

>> Part 4

>> Part 5

-----

Kara Dennison is a writer, editor, and interviewer with bylines at VRV, We Are Cult, Fanbyte, and many more. She is also the co-founder of Altrix Books and co-creator of the OEL light novel series Owl's Flower. Kara blogs at karadennison.com and tweets @RubyCosmos.

  Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!   

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

[funnythingshere0-blog]

On my radar: Isla Fisher's cultural highlights

New Post has been published on https://funnythingshere.xyz/on-my-radar-isla-fishers-cultural-highlights/

On my radar: Isla Fisher's cultural highlights

Born in Oman in 1976 to Scottish parents, Isla Fisher moved to Australia at the age of six. Her acting career began in the Australian soap Home and Away and her films include Wedding Crashers (2005), The Great Gatsby (2013) and Nocturnal Animals (2016). She lives in Los Angeles with her husband Sacha Baron Cohen and their three children. Marge and the Secret Tunnel, her latest children’s book, is published by Piccadilly Press on 17 May.

1. Installation

Alejandro G Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena at LACMA, Los Angeles

Carne y Arena: ‘This piece of art is so important right now.’ Photograph: LACMA

My husband and I just saw this virtual reality installation, and it’s honestly the most incredible experience I think I’ve ever had. It’s a first-hand immersion into the experience of immigrants crossing the US-Mexico border: you hear the sound of the helicopters overhead and you can choose where you go. There’s a breeze in the room and you feel as if you’re really experiencing it. Obviously, it’s so emotional: it’s seven minutes long and I lasted two, and I couldn’t stop crying. This piece of art is so important right now, because I feel like people are finding it so hard to empathise with immigrants.

2. Comedy

Nathan for You (Comedy Central)

Nathan Fielder: hilariously deadpan. Photograph: Comedy Central

This show really cracks me up. It’s an American docu-reality comedy TV series starring comedian Nathan Fielder, and it’s so freaking funny. He’s basically playing [a version of] himself – he’s a business school graduate and consultant, and his aim is to help struggling businesses, but his marketing proposals are so outlandish and he’s really socially awkward, so he says super-inappropriate things. Throughout every episode his confidence is eroded because his ideas fail – obviously, they’re terrible – but he’s just so deadpan.

3. Book

The Last Black Unicorn by Tiffany Haddish

This is the last book I loved. Tiffany Haddish is a standup comedian and actress, and the breakout star of Girls Trip. This is a collection of essays from her life – she grew up in one of the poorest neighbourhoods of Los Angeles and her goal in these essays is either getting a boyfriend, or breaking up with someone, or working in comedy. It feels like she doesn’t try to be funny, but she’s really hilarious. The minute I opened it it felt as if she were in the room.

4. Exhibition

King Tut: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh at California Science Center, Los Angeles

A statuette of the pharaoh on display in King Tut: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh at California Science Center. Photograph: Tara Ziemba/Getty Images

I took the kids here and the whole family was blown away. It’s about this mummy, an 18-year-old pharaoh and his quest for immortality. There’s all the rare artefacts they found inside his tomb: amazing rings and opulent jewellery that they laid alongside his mummified body. It’s such an interesting story – the guy that funded the trip, Lord Carnarvon, died six months later after being bitten by a mosquito. You learn all about the history of the tombs and, without getting morbid, the actual process of mummification is fascinating.

5. Experience

Sound baths

A crystal singing bowl and mallet: ‘Sometimes there’ll be more physical sensations, other times you can have an emotional journey.’ Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

I know this sounds really LA, but they’re amazing. It’s like a meditative, acoustic sound comfort that washes away stress and brings you into a state of relaxation, activating your natural system of self-healing. You go into a dark room, take off your shoes, and you listen to these gongs and crystal singing bowls. Sometimes there’ll be more physical sensations, other times you can have an emotional journey or feel like you’re in a waking dream. I wouldn’t necessarily have sought something like this out – I was taken by my friend Abby – but I left feeling, at the risk of sounding pretentious, realigned.

6. Music

Cardi B

Cardi B on stage at Coachella last month: ‘vulnerable, brazen, very cool’. Photograph: Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Coachella

I saw her play at Guy Oseary’s after-Oscar party. I hadn’t heard of her because, firstly, I’m not big into rap and, secondly, you can’t listen to rap around children. But she performed and was so original – she just really committed. She was wearing a trench coat, and when she started on these biting raps it really pulled you in. She’s got this new album out called Invasion of Privacy, where she’s vulnerable, and brazen, and all of these things. Even though I’m honestly never going to be a huge fan of rap, I think she’s worth checking out. She’s very cool.

[carolrance]

it’s that time again

time for my weekly episodes whingefest

omg i hate it

i actually….

i hate to say this but i think i’m done. i honestly dont’ want to watch any more of this season. nope. i don’t think i can handle it.

like… i don’t think you all understand how much i hate …

merc.

like his presence not only irritates me on the same level as hornet-covered poison oak in my vagina but the mere sight of him gets me right to the cusp of vomitting. no jokes. like there are very few tv characters that i loathe so intensely in the way i absolutely 1000% abhor this one. i literally hate every single thing about him. it’s to the point i don’t even like the actor. i would bathe in a tub of hot lard and diarrhea before even entertaining the idea of what sex with that man would be like.

i think that was part of the reason i enjoyed s4 (and to some degree s3) much more than S1&2–and certainly more than s5. there was very, VERY limited merc in s4. it was glorious. and truth be told, he was still gross and fucking annoying, but because there was so little of him, i could handle it. also since carol was in no danger of being roped into sleeping with him (again) i could breath easy. and really, in all total honesty, the merc scenes in the first half of s4 were quite well done and entertaining. (i’d link to clips but fucking showtime banned me from youtube (and threatened to sue me IIRC) for uploading them. yes. a few 30 second clips of your never-talked about tv programme are what’s hurting ratings. that must be it. ANYWAYYYYY.)

this season has too much merc. it also has too much matt. too much tim. too many MEN IN GENERAL. i think matt leblanc is actually really fucking great in this role but it reaches a point where i don’t want to have every scene be about him. thank god it seems like the tim shit is over. that was a huge mistake sucking up so much screentime over a gag that was done 2 minutes into the premiere episode. but merc is not going away. he’s only becoming more prominent.

and that makes me literally gag and want to die. so i honestly don’t think i can continue to watch this season because based on last night’s episode, i am almost 100% certain that they’re setting carol/merc up as endgame.

and i just

i cannot deal with that

so i’m stopping now before i have to see it. cos once it’s seen, i can’t unsee it. but i can prevent myself from seeing it in the first place. (much like i did with that doreah deleted scene. i honestly did not watch that until like years later…by that time iw as comfortable laughing at how fucking idiotic it all was and just brushed it off as bullshit.)

okay so the thing is this. this episode had carol gushing over how much better she’s feeling cos a) she’s on prozac and b) she’s seeing merc again and it’s “different this time” – that is ALWAYS AND FOREVER A RED FLAG IN ANY RELATIONSHIP. (newsflash: it is never different in the end if the person does fuck all to address their issues.) and beverly (knowing merc is engaged to morning) NOT telling her best friend, and ends with carol being idiotically pregnant. [LIKE I AM SORRY. did she just stop taking the pill? well… i guess she didn’t need to all last year whilst she was with helen but even wlw are on the pill sometimes too. alos USE A FUCKING CONDOM YOU NASTY FUCKS. liek fuck seriously. that merc is literal human garbage and fucks around CONSTANTLY. carol, do you like herpes?? cos fuck. not using a condom is just a fucking stupid ass move for a 40 year old who knows better.]

so here’s how it’s gonna go cos this show NEVER goes the way i want it to go:

carol tells him she’s pregnant with his sweaty potatobaby (disgusting)

she find out he’s engaged and cheating AGAIN (yawn)

it breaks her heart a-fucking-gain (yawn)

merc has some sort of redemption arc after some unnecessarily long and drawn out, totally unfunny and probably offensive “drama” with morning (gross)

the 2 of them probably get some stupid revenge on helen (gross)

carol forgives him and they agree to raise their nasty potatobaby together and live happily ever after (barf)

and then in the final scene he cheats on her again cos ha ha so funny right (not funny)

so yeah. i’m out.

i’m not here for that fucking shit.

if this fucking guy kept her as a secret mistress for FIVE YEARS and never cared, he’s not gonna magically change unless they write him OOC.

like i just completely loathe his mere existence and him being with carol is all sorts of AHS-levels of disturbing and annoying.

but all that aside

this week’s episode was just…

no.

the only thing i liked (other than a few clever one-liners) was that bev hates merc almost as much as i do. that was refreshing. i may have to change my url here to beverlylincoln cos i’m feeling this bitch.

i think my least fav episodes are the bottle episodes that are almost exclusively matt, bev, and sean. (last season it was the hospital episode (which admittedly had the bright shining spot of the pubey scene). this time it’s the ranch one.) i do enjoy those characters and their interactions but there’s a limit on my tolerance and interest. i love the banter (espesh between matt and bev) but it seems bogged down by the whole shitload of NOTHING that happens. the whole wild pig b-plot was so pointless and wasn’t even funny? like….why?

but let’s see what i can be offended about this week? oh. animal cruelty? that’s always a good laugh. i mean… tbh. it wasn’t close to the worst thing this week. it was just… boring? unnecessary? like WHY DID THIS WHOLE EPISODE JUST FEEL LIKE FILLER???? WHY DID THEY HAVE YET ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF A JOKE THAT WASN’T FUNNY (shooting the pig) IN THE FIRST PLACE AND THEY DRAGGED IT OUT WAY TOO LONG?? (is that like the calling card of s5???) everything important that happened here could have been done in 6 minutes with exactly the same impact and minus the shitty unfunny too-long gag.

it’s the 4th episode of the 7-episode FINAL series….and THIS????? is what they give us?

like

no thanks.

you can keep it.

#showtime episodes #carol rance #i hate everything they do to her all the time #(except when she was actually happy for like 2 seconds in s4 with helen) #i fucking hate merc lapidus #why do i end up hating every tv show i once loved by the time it ends???????? #episodes

[thejpfdude-blog]

The Week in Anime (Week of 8/14/17)

Hello friends and welcome to another edition of TWiA! There’s a lot to get through, but first let’s head on over to...

The News Corner

This week didn’t have too much in terms of shocking news. The one thing I do want to highlight that came out this week is:

Violet Evergarden PV2

Mmm that’s good stuff. Not as amazingly animated as the first CM, but that was more or less done for the light novel so I don’t expect the whole show to be that level of quality. And even then the PV had some dang good animation, complete with some more information about the show. From the translation done here, one might think it has a big focus on romance. And that’s what I thought too, that is until I read another comment in the same thread that mentioned light novel spoilers but had a TL;DR stating it’s a coming-of-age story and not a romance. Good to know, otherwise I probably would’ve had the wrong expectations for it.

I’m not gonna lie though, I’m pretty hyped for this show. I’m trying not to be, but ever since the CM came out (which was the first glimpse of the show), my first question was “when?” (which has since turned into “how many days until January?”). I’m excited for the potential pairing between KyoAni animation and a great story considering the light novel won the Grand Prize award in the same yearly award that other light novel-turned-KyoAni shows like Kyoukai no Kanata and Chuunibyou only got Honorable Mentions in. Well, only four months to go. That’s not that long of a wait honestly.

Now before I get onto the rankings and awards, I want to write some blurbs about some shows I recently finished. Now some of these shows aren’t ones I finished within the last week, but I think it’s a good time to talk about them after having them stew in my head for a little. So let me start by talking about a show I might have an article on in the future...

Love Live Sunshine

With season 2 of this coming soon, I was determined to try and finish this show. And I did. So that’s nice.

On a more serious note, Sunshine was a nice sort of spin-off to the main Love Live anime. I think one of the biggest complaints I heard was that it was too similar to the original anime, and I can see that. The whole school-closing storyline was a bit too convenient, though it actually didn’t get resolved by the end of the season, so that’s something to keep an eye out next season. Another thing was the similarities of the leaders of each group, which I strongly agree with. I mean I wasn’t a huge Honoka (Honkers) fan in general, and Chika to me feels sorta like a ripoff of her (hence the reason I call her Ripoff Honkers).

But some of the other stuff wasn’t as bad to me. Like other than Ripoff Honkers (and Dia to an extent) I feel like each character is unique enough to be their own person, rather than be a clone of a previous μ‘s member. Sure there’s some obvious parallels that can be made. Ruby/Hanayo for shyness (which is even eluded to in the anime), Mari/Nozomi for being the memester, etc. But when I think of, say Hanamaru, I don’t think of anybody from μ‘s in particular, but about her zuras and her eating habits. Same schtick for the rest of them (except Ripoff Honkers). If anything, I like Aqours a bit more than μ‘s so far, if only because my favorite character from the Rabu Raibus is in Aqours (though favorite group is still a toss-up as of now).

Story-wise, I liked Sunshine a lot more than the original, if only because there was a minimum of the “power of friendship” stuff that the original had (like the final scene from the last episode of S1). And before episode 10 when the third-years joined the group, I actually liked how the drama didn’t feel too cheesy. Of course, that changed when the third-years joined, but it still wasn’t as cheesy as the original show, which was nice. Add in the fact that the slice-of-life scenes added some nice snark (making it less /r/wholesomememes cult-like happy), and in the end Sunshine > original (at least anime-wise). 6/10 overall, and actually somewhat excited for the next season in 2 months-ish.

Free!

Funny story. Actually not really funny, or a story: I had this on my list for some time, but it wasn’t until I visited my friend last week that we ended up watching the first 6 episodes of this show. And then from there I finished it a few days later, and now we’re here.

This show’s pretty famous for its manservice (fanservice of the male variety), and I’m not gonna deny that. In fact, I’ll confirm it: there were a lot of shots of those muscular sculpted bodies, toned to perfection.

...

Uh yeah. But other than that this show was actually pretty fun to watch. I don’t know how much of that is the fact that there was at least one main girl character in the show, who ended becoming one of my favorite girls and now has a place in my Favorite Characters list on my MAL profile.

But it’s really because in it’s core it’s a sports anime, and not of the shounen type. Like there’s competition and hype sports moments with none of the shounen tropes like explaining every single ilttle thing. It’s actually... like sports with just plain competing, which as a huge sports nut I’m down for. The races were pretty hype, and the drama between the characters wasn’t too out there (though the whole thing between Rin and Haruka seemed very ship-friendly).

So overall, a surprisingly good show, manservice aside. I’ll definitely be watching the second season of this soon (once I settle in to my new place). 7/10 would recommend for swimming shenanigans.

Teekyuu

In my quest to have Nisemonogatari be my 200th entry on MAL, I watched shorts/specials that wouldn’t take too much time to watch. So why not watch the famed 2-minute short known for having faster pace than the Roadrunner? Generally I don’t like fast-paced shows, but I think that this short does a really good job with itself. Content-wise this show is so freaking ridiculous and doesn’t take itself seriously. But it works for the most part, and it’s pretty hilarious. Though it’s technically about a tennis club, I think they only have tennis in like 3 of the episodes, with the others focusing on some other random subject.

If there’s one negative to this, it’s the pace. Because as well as they use it, it’s still super quick, and sometimes an episode goes by and I go “what just happened?” Still, it’s a stupidly fun show: overall 6/10, and definitely will be watching the next 8 seasons (no I’m not joking, the ninth season is airing right now).

Nisemonogatari

So that was an adventure. This was an interesting case study, considering these were the stories that Nisio Isin (the author of the light novel) never intended to be released. As a result this show ended up being probably the most controversial entry in the Monogatari series. And it showed: this version of Monogatari really ramped up on some questionable scenes. Before I get into the infamous scene this show’s known for, let me get into some other stuff I wasn’t really about. First, the bath scene in episode 4. I don’t doubt it was an important scene: in fact it’s probably one of the most important scenes in the whole of Monogatari. But it’s the whole showing a naked 8-year old girl for the majority of the episode thing that made me pretty uncomfortable. It’s funny looking at the comments of the rewatch thread, and people trying to explain why it wasn’t that bad. The most common thing I saw was that it wasn’t sexualized at all, what with Araragi not being pedo like he is with the others and the fact that there wasn’t any zoom-ins of the naughty bits.

Yet the problem I have with that is that at it’s core it’s still... a naked 8-year old for the majority of an anime episode. And I’m not denying what the people in that thread are saying: actually it makes a hella lot of sense. But it’s still a naked 8-year old. I’m not about that life, even with the deeper meaning and all that.

And now that toothbrush scene. That... was a thing. Yep, a thing. Indeed. A. Thing.

Sigh... that was honestly the most uncomfortable I’ve been while watching anime. I’m glad I live alone or else I would have feared a roommate or something coming into my room and seeing me watch that. 

Now before you start telling me “deeper meaning” and all that jazz, I’ll just say this: my least favorite subject was English. The reason? I always had to be on the lookout for some deeper meaning, some symbolism, etc., instead of just enjoying reading. Now with the Monogatari series full of its more deeper themes, symbolism and looking deeper into events is very necessary. But looking past the deeper meaning this scene is a guy brushing his sister’s teeth while she starts getting sexually aroused, almost leading to a kiss in the end. That’s... also not my thing. Big time.

Well, that rant’s out of the way. Not counting the above scenes (as well as some of the other questionable stuff like imouto boob touch), I actually did enjoy this show. Monogatari’s slowly becoming one of my favorite franchises, making what should like a boring dialogue-heavy show fun and interesting. And now that Nisemonogatari’s out of the way I’m excited for what’s arguably the best version of Monogatari, Monogatari 2nd Season (kinda misnamed don’tcha think?). Overall despite above statements still a 7/10 show, with hope for the future.

Now that that’s done let’s move on to the good ol’...

Rankings:

1 (0). New Game!! (9/10) [5/12]

2 (0). Princess Principal (8.5/10) [6/?]

3 (0). Kakegurui (7/10) [6/12]

4 (0). Tsurezure Children (7/10) [6/?]

5 (0). Boku no Hero Academia 2nd Season (7/10) [19/25]

6 (+1). Sakura Quest (5/10) [19/25]

7 (-1). Ballroom e Youkoso (5/10) [6/24]

8 (0). Centaur no Nayami (5/10) [6/12]

9 (0). Isekai Shokudou (4.5/10) [6/?]

10 (0). Nana Maru San Batsu (4/10) [6/12]

Awards

The Tangent Award: Centaur no Nayami

After 6 episodes, I think I have a general idea of why I feel like this show is off. Now, don’t get me wrong, I do like the show. Some of the scenes offer some nice commentary on the small issues that these people face (like the whole toilet thing) that some people may think is pedantic but I think is super interesting. Basically the stuff like the first few episodes of Demi-chan wa Kataritai (with the nice interviews and stuff).

The problem that this show has is that it goes through different scenes that seem jarring in transition. It jumps from one thing to a completely random thing, leaving me wondering how they even got to a certain point in the episode. Though in the end they’re able to show that the disjointed events are somewhat connected, the connection’s as fragile as Troy Tulowitzki (sports fan explanation: a baseball player who’s seemingly always injured, hence he’s called “fragile”). And in the end I continue on, wondering what I just watched for the past 23 or so minutes. I feel like there’s a better way to organize the episode, but I’m not really sure how yet. For now I’ll just continue watching, because despite questionable organization it’s still a mildly entertaining show.

The Not Comfy Award: Kakegurui

Yo but actually what was that episode. Return of masochist queen = return of fear for my life. This show isn’t high on my “comfy show” list, but after this episode it’s sunken even lower.

On a totally unrelated note, I’ve changed my opinion from slightly liking Yumeko to not liking her at all. In fact it’s kinda funny that my opinions of Yumeko and Mary flipped, and now I find Mary to be the better girl (if not best girl of the show). Seeing how she’s not just one of the crazies and actually seems kinda nice is reassuring to say the least (even if the crazy leaks out at times). The return of Suzui was also nice, considering he’s a good dynamic compared to the insane characters in the show. If anything, I’m curious to see how this ends, considering the pace so far and the fact that it’s one cour.

Best Episode of the Week: Princess Principal

After three straight weeks of New Game!!, we finally get a new show for best episode of the week. It was a hard choice, considering this week’s episode of New Game!! was very good. But Princess Principal wins out with a great episode about Dorothy and her life before being a spy.

I won’t go deep into the episode because I want to try to not have too much spoilers in these blurbs. But what I will say is that dang, these girls have good reason for being spies. Also that the end of this episode was pretty sad, especially considering Dorothy’s final line. Princess Principal’s been impressing so far, and I love the disjointed style of storytelling (with case 6 last week and case 18 this week). Next to New Game!!, this show’s been my favorite of the season. I highly recommend it even if you aren’t the biggest fan of CGDCTs or spy stuff.

And that’s all for this week! Thanks for reading! Just a quick announcement/notice: I’ll be busy next week preparing for school and moving into my new place, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I don’t have the time to watch the currently-airing shows. If that does happen I’ll mention which ones I didn’t get to, and if it doesn’t well then it’ll be business as usual. Anyway, thanks again and I’ll see you in the next post!

[funnythingshere0-blog]

On my radar: Isla Fisher's cultural highlights

New Post has been published on http://funnythingshere.xyz/on-my-radar-isla-fishers-cultural-highlights/

On my radar: Isla Fisher's cultural highlights

Born in Oman in 1976 to Scottish parents, Isla Fisher moved to Australia at the age of six. Her acting career began in the Australian soap Home and Away and her films include Wedding Crashers (2005), The Great Gatsby (2013) and Nocturnal Animals (2016). She lives in Los Angeles with her husband Sacha Baron Cohen and their three children. Marge and the Secret Tunnel, her latest children’s book, is published by Piccadilly Press on 17 May.

1. Installation

Alejandro G Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena at LACMA, Los Angeles

Carne y Arena: ‘This piece of art is so important right now.’ Photograph: LACMA

My husband and I just saw this virtual reality installation, and it’s honestly the most incredible experience I think I’ve ever had. It’s a first-hand immersion into the experience of immigrants crossing the US-Mexico border: you hear the sound of the helicopters overhead and you can choose where you go. There’s a breeze in the room and you feel as if you’re really experiencing it. Obviously, it’s so emotional: it’s seven minutes long and I lasted two, and I couldn’t stop crying. This piece of art is so important right now, because I feel like people are finding it so hard to empathise with immigrants.

2. Comedy

Nathan for You (Comedy Central)

Nathan Fielder: hilariously deadpan. Photograph: Comedy Central

This show really cracks me up. It’s an American docu-reality comedy TV series starring comedian Nathan Fielder, and it’s so freaking funny. He’s basically playing [a version of] himself – he’s a business school graduate and consultant, and his aim is to help struggling businesses, but his marketing proposals are so outlandish and he’s really socially awkward, so he says super-inappropriate things. Throughout every episode his confidence is eroded because his ideas fail – obviously, they’re terrible – but he’s just so deadpan.

3. Book

The Last Black Unicorn by Tiffany Haddish

This is the last book I loved. Tiffany Haddish is a standup comedian and actress, and the breakout star of Girls Trip. This is a collection of essays from her life – she grew up in one of the poorest neighbourhoods of Los Angeles and her goal in these essays is either getting a boyfriend, or breaking up with someone, or working in comedy. It feels like she doesn’t try to be funny, but she’s really hilarious. The minute I opened it it felt as if she were in the room.

4. Exhibition

King Tut: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh at California Science Center, Los Angeles

A statuette of the pharaoh on display in King Tut: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh at California Science Center. Photograph: Tara Ziemba/Getty Images

I took the kids here and the whole family was blown away. It’s about this mummy, an 18-year-old pharaoh and his quest for immortality. There’s all the rare artefacts they found inside his tomb: amazing rings and opulent jewellery that they laid alongside his mummified body. It’s such an interesting story – the guy that funded the trip, Lord Carnarvon, died six months later after being bitten by a mosquito. You learn all about the history of the tombs and, without getting morbid, the actual process of mummification is fascinating.

5. Experience

Sound baths

A crystal singing bowl and mallet: ‘Sometimes there’ll be more physical sensations, other times you can have an emotional journey.’ Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

I know this sounds really LA, but they’re amazing. It’s like a meditative, acoustic sound comfort that washes away stress and brings you into a state of relaxation, activating your natural system of self-healing. You go into a dark room, take off your shoes, and you listen to these gongs and crystal singing bowls. Sometimes there’ll be more physical sensations, other times you can have an emotional journey or feel like you’re in a waking dream. I wouldn’t necessarily have sought something like this out – I was taken by my friend Abby – but I left feeling, at the risk of sounding pretentious, realigned.

6. Music

Cardi B

Cardi B on stage at Coachella last month: ‘vulnerable, brazen, very cool’. Photograph: Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Coachella

I saw her play at Guy Oseary’s after-Oscar party. I hadn’t heard of her because, firstly, I’m not big into rap and, secondly, you can’t listen to rap around children. But she performed and was so original – she just really committed. She was wearing a trench coat, and when she started on these biting raps it really pulled you in. She’s got this new album out called Invasion of Privacy, where she’s vulnerable, and brazen, and all of these things. Even though I’m honestly never going to be a huge fan of rap, I think she’s worth checking out. She’s very cool.