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animebw · 2 years

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Short Reflection: RWBY Ice Queendom

Can we just stop for a moment and appreciate how fucking insane it is that RWBY is an actual anime now?

It’s hard to remember a decade out from its premiere, but when RWBY first arrived on the scene, it was a very weird, very niche property. It was a an amateur passion project from the guys who made the funny Halo webseries, many of whom had little to no experience on a full-fledged original animated series like that. The writing was subpar, the actors were all pretty inexperienced, even the animation was pretty ramshackle outside the incredible fight scenes. But not only did RWBY persist, it grew. It improved on itself every season with better production values and storytelling, accomplishing things that never seemed possible in its early, rudimentary days. And as it grew in quality, it likewise grew in popularity, blossoming from a niche web property into one of the defining series of the modern animation landscape. And after ten years, it’s become so goddamn huge that it’s managed to snag an honest-to-god anime spinoff with some of the biggest names in the business working on it. Really, stop and think about that: Monty Oum’s love letter to anime has become such a huge success that it’s now being worked on by Gen fucking Urobuchi. Okay, yeah, Urobuchi just came up with the story concept, but still. Imagine telling anyone back in 2012 that the guy who wrote Fate/Zero, Madoka Magica, and Psycho-Pass would someday put his hands on RWBY. Wherever Monty is now, I hope he’s proud of how far his baby has come.

And to Ice Queendom’s credit, it starts from a very strong premise: what if we took one of the worst, most half-baked parts of early RWBY- namely, Weiss’ two-episode dalliance with racism- and flesh it so it actually works? The Faunus racism subplot has never been the show’s strongest aspect, something that even its creators have acknowledged. So if you’re gonna do a semi-canonical spinoff, choosing to go back and do that subplot’s initiation over is about as good an idea as I can come up with. The main issue with volume 1′s finale is how rushed the introduction and resolution of Weiss’ racism is. It’s brought up with no build-up, it’s so hilariously over-the-top that it’s impossible to take seriously, and in one of the single stupidest writing decisions I’ve ever seen, she just gets over it off-screen and it’s never brought up again. It’s not the worst RWBY has ever been (*glares menacingly at Jaunedine*), but it’s definitely up there, and it sets the stage for how awkward the whole Faunus plotline is doomed to remain going forward. If you’re gonna flesh out and re-work any part of RWBY, I can’t think of a better option than this.

So after a three-episode recap of volume 1, compressing events for time and sprinkling in new details that will form the basis of its plot, Ice Queendom launches into a good old-fashioned dream invasion arc. Weiss is attacked by a Grimm that traps her in a nightmare, and the rest of her team has to travel into that nightmare to set her free. But it’s easier said than done, because this nightmare preys on its victim’s worst impulses, bringing their darkest fears about themselves to the forefront until they consume them. And that means Dream Weiss isn’t just a passive prisoner of her own dream: she’s the dictator of it. She’s every bit the cold, ruthless authoritarian that her family wants her to be, indifferent to the suffering of her kingdom and closed off from the people she truly cares about. It’s all of Weiss’ worst qualities made manifest, exaggerated and twisted and very much not solved by an off-screen decision. Which is actually helped by that reader’s digest of volume 1 I mentioned: with just a few key details tweaked, it’s made powerfully clear that even after resolving things with Blake, Weiss is nowhere near free from his demons. And if those demons aren’t gonna let her go on their own, then her friends are just gonna have to beat them out of her with the power of friendship. Because if RWBY’s gonna go full anime, it might as well go full goddamn anime.

As a premise, this is everything I could want. Sure, the volume 1 recap isn’t perfect, and it’s far from a perfect way to start things off. It cuts too much out to be welcoming for newcomers, and this show is clearly not aiming to be anyone’s introduction to RWBY. But it also doesn’t really change enough to be interesting to established fans beyond seeing their favorite volume 1 moments realized in classic 2D animation (which, to be clear, is pretty fun on its own; the Nevermore fight is basically unimpeachable). Once Ice Queendom branches into its own story, though, it’s a damn good time. It’s clear how much love the creators of this show have for RWBY, and how well they understand Weiss’ character in particular. Even in the smaller details of the dream, like the different ways Weiss’ family members are portrayed, you can tell the people making this show are as much fans as anyone watching it. And if the only reason for IQ to exist at all was providing a more satisfying conflict and resolution to the Weiss Racism subplot, then I’d say mission accomplished. I won’t spoil how things play out, but while it isn’t perfect, it sticks the landing where it needs to and makes this part of RWBY stronger. That, if nothing else, is cause for celebration.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long before some pretty significant problems start to crop up.

The first, and most obvious, issue is the animation. Shaft’s glory days as a studio are well behind them (cries in Sangatsu season 3 never), and after a mostly solid opening stretch of episodes, the animation really starts coming apart at the seams. So many awkward, unfinished cuts, off-model characters, sloppy in-between frames, and that’s just the obvious stuff I could pick up on with a cursory glance. It does pick up again in the final stretch, but this show was clearly a production nightmare, and I shudder to think how bad things were behind the scenes. But perhaps even more distressing is that even when Ice Queendom looks good, it also looks... well, boring. The character designs somehow have even less personality than the early stiff-faced poser models, colors are clashing all over the place, and there’s just so little imagination put into how to visually depict this dream world. This is the goddamn Monogatari studio setting a story inside an abstract, symbolic mindscape. Why the fuck does so much of it look so flat and basic? Yeah, early RWBY certainly wasn’t a looker, but just take a look at its most recent seasons! RWBY looks incredible now! I’d argue it’s one of the leading pioneers for CG animation, certainly for anime-style CG animation if nothing else. And it’s a shame that an actual veteran anime studio falls so short of what Rooster Teeth has been able to accomplish.

And then there’s the writing. Or rather, the lack thereof. See, all that good stuff I talked about with Ice Queendom fleshing out the Weiss Racism subplot and giving it proper closure? That’s just the first and last few episodes of the dream. There’s a huge dead space right in the middle of this show that I can only describe as plot blocking. A problem arises, the characters solve it, another problem arises, they solve it again, and the pacing practically drags to a standstill through an endless series of obstacles that don’t move the plot forward and only seem to exist to drag out the show’s runtime. It’s glaringly obvious that writer Tow Ubukata didn’t have enough ideas for how to stretch this story across a full cours, so most of its midsection is just spinning its wheels waiting for an excuse to start the actually interesting stuff again. And it doesn’t help that this is also where the animation really starts to fall apart, so for a while you’ve got a plot that’s going nowhere and looking pretty ugly while doing it. Which may have been forgivable if just for the sake of watching our favorite characters spend more time together, but, well...

Look, I feel like this is going to be a controversial take, but I have to say it anyway: Ice Queendom’s dialogue is terrible. The characters talk in the most generic anime aphorisms, there’s so little specificity to how they communicate, everyone feels like they’re Performing Anime Archetypes rather than actually embodying Ruby Rose, Yang Xiao Long, Weiss Schnee, Blake Belladonna, Jaune Arc, and so on. And whatever else you might say about OG RWBY, it has always had excellent dialogue. Even back in the first volume when Monty, Miles and Kerry were still finding their footing, they knew how to make a conversation flow with purpose. This, though? This just feels like fanfiction. Which, I mean, that’s essentially what Ice Queendom is, but it’s that awkward kind of fanfiction that understands how the characters are written but doesn’t really know how to portray their voice, so the dialogue is all weirdly off and impersonal and never quite sounds the way it’s supposed to. And I definitely put this on the writing more than the actors, because I recently watched the English dub trailer and it had all the same problems. Saori Hayami, Lindsay Jones, Yoko Hisaka, Kara Eberle, and all the other voice actors, JP and EN alike, are incredibly talented people, but they just cannot make this dialogue sound right.

You know, it’s funny. When Ice Queendom was first announced, the worst parts of the RWBY hatedom lauded it as Japan “taking custody of RWBY” away from evil Miles and Kerry who “ruined Monty’s vision” (by which they meant adding gay characters and not redeeming the evil male abuser). Finally, they crowed, based Nippon was going to do RWBY the way it was supposed to be done. And yet, not only is Ice Queendom a substantially weaker product than anything OG RWBY has put out in the past several years, it’s flaws are all a direct result of being an anime in the first place. The horrible production schedule leading to melty animation, the plot blocking that exists onto to perpetuate itself, the dialogue that makes the characters come off more like archetypes than characters... these are all problems that anime is very familiar with. They’re certainly problems familiar to anyone who’s kept up with Shaft’s recent output, particularly their horribly mangled Magia Record adaptation. Perhaps there’s a weird irony in that. RWBY may have started out as a love letter to anime, but it’s grown so far from those origins by now that it’s arguably better than most anime on the market. And when someone tries to turn it into anime, it only reveals just how much better off this show is for charting its own course away from the worst parts of the medium it was inspired by.

And yet... yeah, this is still really fucking cool. It’s a testament to how far this cute little indie project has come over the years. RWBY is a juggernaut now, something that’s so big it’s come around to influencing its own influences. And despite its many, many faults, I still came away from Ice Queendom feeling mostly positive (it doesn’t hurt that the last couple episodes really do kick a serious amount of ass). It’s as much a love letter to RWBY as RWBY is to anime, and seeing that mutual appreciation is just too damn inspiring to ignore. I hope this isn’t the last anime spinoff RWBY gets; I hope lots of different Japanese studios and creators get to try their hands at bringing the hidden pockets of Remnant to life. Maybe they could adapt all the tie-in novel I still haven’t read? That could be a really cool way of bringing those stories to life. But I’ll save my wish list for another day. For now, RWBY Ice Queendom was a deeply flawed, but deeply captivating experiment, and I hope it’s an experiment we see repeated- and improved upon- for quite some time to come. And I give it a score of:

5.5/10

And now we wait for volume 9 to drop next year. I swear to god, if this hiatus lasts much longer I’m going to unironically bring yorse back, and nobody wants that.

#anime #the anime binge-watcher #tabw #rwby #rwby ice queendom #rwby: hyousetsu teikoku #rwby: ice queendom #rwby hyousetsu teikoku #summer 2022 anime #rwby sr

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bowtiesnmusicals · 1 year

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Here is my recap of the False Finale (Sectionals) episode of the podcast.

This is the fall finale.

They didn't know if they were coming back when they filmed this episode.

Jenna said this episode is very nostalgic and emotional because they didn't know if they were coming back.

Kevin said when he watched the episode there were scenes he remembered reading for the first time. He couldn't believe they got this far. I felt monumental. He had never done more then one or two episodes of a tv show before Glee.

Brad Falchuk directed this episode.

It was a big deal to them.

This episode aired December 9, 2009.

Empire State of Mind is still the #1 song and Blindside is still #1 movie.

Glee was nominated for Golden Globes.

Jenna was not prepared for the crazy press that came with the nominations for Golden Globes.

This was the beginning of the huge thing that Glee became and it was like being shot out of a cannon.

Glee won 5 awards at the 14rh Annual Satellite Awards. Kristen Chenoweth Won for Best Outstanding Guest Star. Lea won for Best Actress. Jane won for Best Supporting Actress. Matt Morrison won for Best Actor.

TV Guide named them Entertainers of the Year. Matt, Lea, and Cory were on the cover.

Glee Season 1 Volume 1 The Road to Sectionals was released on DVD.

This was the midseason break and Glee did not comeback until April.

The cast was working the whole time. The break they had was a promo break. They had to promote the first 13 episodes. They came back sometime in the late fall to continue filming. They did get a break for Chrismas.

People kept coming up to Kevin while he was ice skating with family. His family got super protective.

Jenna remembers going home and being able to by her family super nice Christmas gifts.

It was weird but also super exciting.

Jenna talked about how a favorite restaurant added a plaque to a table and she got pictures with the owners. It made everything feel real. It was like overnight they had become celebrities.

Now onto the episode.

We get to see Amber doing And I'm Telling You for the first time. Jenna watched it and just cried.

The Fox promo for this episode says "The phenomenon that has made America sing brings you an unforgettable fall finale guarantied to make you cheer!"

Kevin said it felt surreal to be on a show being advertised in such a huge way.

Everything happening at the time was unbelievable and very big.

Jenna said she doesn't think they could ever experience what everyone on the outside experienced at the time.

New Directions go to sectionals.

We have babygate, Will and Terri's marriage problems, and Sue maybe finally getting caught.

They start recapping the episode at this point.

Everyone knows Puck is the baby daddy except Rachel. She gets suspicious when Puck helps Quinn when she slips.

Artie starts the use of trout mouth before the real trouty mouth joins Glee. He says it about Rachel.

Jenna remembers shooting the phone scene and being nervous.

It was one long walk and talk. Squishing three people into the camera frame was hard.

This was a really big moment for Santana and Brittany. Kevin doesn't know if it was anything more then a joke at the time. Santana was like sex is not dating and Brittany was like if it were Santana and I would be dating. Everyone pauses and then the scene carries on. It was so good.

We then get to Emma telling Schue that the wedding has been postponed. Ken is not okay with it.

Rachel is up to no good trying to figure out Quinn's baby daddy.

Schue tells the students Emma is his replacement.

Brittany says she's the one they made me talk to when they found out I was keeping that bird in my locker. There are a lot of bird jokes in this season but also in this whole show.

I am with Kevin how did they not know the setlist by this point?

Kevin and Jenna said they did not ask these questions at the time they filmed this episode.

Mercedes is mad because they have to have a solo ballad and Rachel assumes its hers.

Kevin said one his favorite things the show does is when Mercedes wants to prove she can do something and we see her talking to somebody and its a full band with strings.

This was the famous episode where Matt Rutherford (Dijon Talton) gets his one line, I don't know. It was in response to Mercedes asking what is a balladeer. The cast used the I don't know part for years amongst themselves.

Mercedes is sort of like the clubs defacto leader.

Mercedes does And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going. She was going for it every time they shot it. In the recording studio she almost fainted at the end because it is such a hard number.

The reactions were all real. Chris' tears were real as were everyone's cheers.

Kevin called Amber out for not knowing the runs and covered her face with her hair to hide it.

Rachel decides she should have the solo.

She then decides to tell Finn the truth about Quinn and Puck.

The fight in the choir room was done with stunt doubles.

Kevin made a good point that Puck and Finn didn't seem to get hurt in the fight. No one had bruises or anything.

Finn storms out and says he is done.

Rachel apologizes to Quinn. Quinn asks Rachel to leave. Puck comes in to comfort Quinn. Quinn says nah I'm going to do this on my own.

Kevin said Finn is a big guy but throws weak punches or maybe he just missed a lot.

In the bts that he was excited to go to sectionals because it feels like we have been talking about it for ages.

In real life they were growing as actors, friends, and coworkers. They were becoming a cohesive group and learning these numbers. The glee club was doing the same thing. It was all leading to a real stage in a real theater. In real life they got to Glendale and perform at Alex Theatre.

This was there first big competition. By the time they got to season 3 or 4 it was old hat. In season 1 it was all new and it was huge. There were a lot of audience extras and the judges.

This laid the groundwork for how they shot completions from here on out. You couldn't get too creative. Things needed to be structured.

Brad Buecker, a director, would come in with a big poster board that listed all the shots they needed and mark each one off when they finished it.

Jenna vividly remembers shooting the scene in the lobby room. Kevin was really excited for the next scene in this room where he was ramming himself into the wall.

Kevin thought that scene was hilarious with everyone losing their minds in the background after finding out their setlist had been stolen.

Will confronts Sue. It's such a good scene. Sue say love you like a sister. She also makes fun of Will's hair and marriage.

Matt had a really easy episode. It's mostly phone acting.

Will finds Finn in the locker room and gives him a pep talk. It was a really nice full circle moment from the first episode. Sometimes it sucks to be special.

Sweet sweet Emma confronts the other choir directors. She makes them feel really bad.

Rachel calls a group meeting in the green room. Kevin and Jenna said this scene sucked to film. They were on this one set for hours and it was so hot.

Watching the scene it is great and it is an important scene.

If anyone can do a ballad on the fly it is Rachel. I agree with Kevin that it doesn't sit right that Mercedes had to basically say Rachel was the better singer.

This is a really nice moment with Santana saying she likes being in Glee club. There is a lot of trauma bonding going on in this scene.

Finn shows up and pulls a Mr. Schue. It was really sweet to him come in and save the day. It was also cool to see him not be fine with Quinn and Puck.

Rachel does Don't Rain On My Parade. In one episode we get two the actresses would sing in the original shows they came from. The other was Amber in Dreamgirls.

The next number is You Can't Always Get What You Want. Schue planted the seeds for this song during his pep talk to Finn.

They do Somebody To Love as the last number but don't show it.

They think that dummy extras were used during this competiton. They were definitely used in later competition episodes.

Kevin had a hard time not laughing when they did the scene with Rod Remington.

Kevin was starstruck when they did the scene with Eve.

Ian, Brad, and Ryan used this episode to try to wrap up many of the storylines.

The Emma and Will scene after the wedding that was canceled is a bit weird. Why is she fully glammed up and wearing the dress. Otherwise it was a good scene.

We then go to the scene with Mr. Figgins and Sue. Jenna said she was genuinely worried for Figgins.

Sue says to Figgins that you are about to board the Sue Sylvester express. Destination: Horror.

We don't find out until now that the New Directions won.

This is when they do My Life Would Suck Without You.

Zach and Brooke the choreographers came up with the idea to incorporate all the most iconic numbers or moves from other numbers from the season thus far. It was a nod to those moments for Mr. Schue.

In the last scene Will and Emma weren't supposed to kiss. Brad Falchuk told Matt to kiss Jayma to get an honest reaction from her.

Tartie Takes:

Cringe Moments/Ouchies - JBI saying he was just wanting to get into Rachel's pants. The judges comments on the different choirs.

Worst Dance Move - The callback to some of the weird numbers like Push It during My Life Would Suck Without You.

Best Dance Move - Revisiting all the dance moves in My Life Would Suck Without You

Favorite Song - Don't Rain On My Parade and I Am Telling You

Best Performance by a Prop - the trophy

Best Lines - Sue saying running a high school glee club and finding a hairstyle that doesn't make you look like a lesbian. Also the Sue line about riding on the Sue Sylvester train, destination horror.

Shit We Found on TikTok:

Someone watched Glee so much that the logo is burned into his tv.

Jenna cannot wait to recap Hello.

Now we are on our way to Regionals.

#and that's what you really missed #atwyrm #jenna ushkowitz #keviin mchale #sectionals #glee #podcast

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dcmegriley · 4 years

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Patenting Your Invention - 10 Typical Blunders to Prevent

Here are ten mistakes to avoid that can confirm deadly for new developers.

You think you're prepared to patent your inventions, kick back, and watch your millions roll in? Who knows, you can come to be a success, but I have seen a lot of errors congest the process setting you back creators important time as well as valuable dollars. At my firm, we strive to ensure our suggestions reach we can take them, and throughout the years we've seen numerous errors show up over and over.

1. Patenting too early

If all you have is a loose idea of what you desire, then it's most likely too early to give out up to $12,000 in attorney and also patent declaring costs, as well as the long term patent maintenance costs that'll consider you down. When is the appropriate time to patent? Well, when you're prepared. I'll tackle that soon.

2. Taking your invention to a patent lawyer when you're not prepared

The fewer concerns a patent attorney has to ask, the much less time you'll be on his clock, shoveling away money you do not have. Prevent this upfront with in-depth engineering illustrations, an item sample, as well as an exec recap.

This conserves useful time. A patent draftsman will quickly be able to do his job; as well, the attorney will know what your suggestion is and also how it works. With in-depth design illustrations, showing your work in a blew up sight, you'll additionally have the ability to show the inner functions of your invention to the patent attorney. Maybe there is a certain component entailed that makes your patent a lot more specific. This might require rivals wishing to rip off your item to make a substandard item since they can not obtain that information (that might have or else never been seen if it had not been for real engineering). You can also check InventHelp for more helps

3. Patenting something that can not be made

You might have the finest invention in the globe, but what's the factor if it can not be made. You'll be left with refiling a brand-new patent to reflect the new product, which brings more money and pain you could have prevented.

4. Patenting something that's not valuable at a rating point any individual would certainly pay

Again, understanding how your invention will certainly be made will certainly establish its patentability and also its expense for the consumer. If it sets you back too much to make, after that you'll have a difficult time locating a person to certificate as well as sell it at a profit. This all returns to actual comprehensive drawings of genuine production.

5. Patenting too late

" First you state, 'do not patent too early,' now you're informing me not to patent far too late. When am I meant to obtain a patent?"

So, obtain your ducks in a row. Know what the product is, exactly how it will be made, and so on. As soon as every one of that remains in line, it'll be a lot easier to commit to patenting.

Patenting too late fallen leaves your invention open to ending up being a public domain name. This can occur one year after making a public disclosure. You do not desire it tore off or taken as well as you wouldn't mind getting credit scores and also maybe even making a couple of bucks.

6. Patenting without a working prototype

If the patent lawyer has any type of questions left over from the executive recap and also the design drawings, making use of the product example should close him up and get him to help you (if the product's design interacts well). Bear in mind, you get on the clock with an attorney, and time and money are precious. Surpass the early blunders and also get down to business, so your attorney can help you protect your invention.

Did you know there was a time in our excellent nation's history when developers had to take a functioning prototype to the patent office before they could even consider applying for a patent? Well, today you don't need one, yet it'll make your life less complicated and the procedure goes quicker.

7. I need to have a patent

" Wait, so I've read this much, and also suddenly you're going to tell me I don't need a patent?"

Well, perhaps not right now. Huge companies like Westinghouse and also Sony patent simply regarding everything they come up with because they can. I wonder if there is another device you could use to get some security at an inexpensive rate ... well, what's this at number eight?

8. Ignoring the power of the provisional patent.

Today, more and also more firms desire ingenious products to secure markets and ring in added profits. They're more probable to look at the production with a provisional patent.

In the past, numerous business desired to make certain an inventor had a patent for several reasons. What if you bring in a suggestion their R&D department is already working on in trick. They turn you down and release their product on the market.

Filing the provisional patent application may be all you require while you attempt to accredit your invention or attempt to take it to market separately. Usual misconception developers continue to kick around is that companies aiming to license won't accredit without a patent already in place. Invite to the period of open technology.

They last only one year unless you file a non-provisional patent within that year. Your non-provisional patent will just discount back to the very same homes revealed in the provisional patent. You may also like to get help with invention

9. Declaring countless addendums, when you can have had it right the first time

You patented your item. They're interested, but they will not look any kind of further unless you (insert dramatic pause) change your design. What do you need to do, you need to submit addendums or also new patents as you move along.

Target your market and work hard through the advancement and structure phase to perceive any kind of design or bankability issues. Try as hard as you can to get it right before you patent.

10. "I obtained a patent, currently, I'll simply await my millions"

Somebody can oppose your patent. Somebody can wait up until your item sells on racks as well as take you to court for a patent problem. Creating is a hard world and it takes even more than simply a patent.

I hope this checklist assists you out. At my organization, we believe highly in a procedure armed with the worth of great design, engineering drawings, clear executive recaps, packaging, and, essential, functioning product samples. These elements talk volumes and also make patenting simpler.

#inventions #ideas #patent #InventHelp #success story #prototype #technology #inventors #Crunchbase #innovation

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stevenuniversallyreviews · 4 years

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Episode 141: Your Mother and Mine

”You have it all wrong!”

We already know the story of Rose Quartz. We know she was a rebel who battled for many years against the forces of Pink Diamond. We know that she was “just another quartz soldier, made right here in the dirt” and rose to greatness by rallying fellow Gems to join her cause. We know that she was drawn to Gems that Homeworld shunned, wanting to make sure everyone had a place. We know that she ended the war by shattering Pink Diamond. And we know that after the war, her shield could only save two of her friends. So on paper, an episode that recaps this information is redundant.

But Your Mother and Mind isn’t about Rose Quartz’s history, it’s about her story. And the story is told by a character that can only reach her audience by impersonating the bearer of Pink Diamond’s gem.

Your Mother and Mine is a simple episode made fascinating by its proximity to the truth. It combines all the pieces of Rose’s story that we’ve heard over the course of the series to give us a definitive take on the narrative just in time for it to be undermined. We’re five episodes away from learning that Rose Quartz was Pink Diamond, and the episode after that is about Pearl correcting the version of events we hear right now. Which means that the episode’s major theme of truth versus fiction is something we can’t even comprehend fully without retrospect. Even if you already suspect that Rose is Pink when you watch it for the first time, the fact that it’s not written in stone yet means there’s still a possibility that Garnet’s story is true, and the episode only becomes great when you know for sure that it isn’t.

Garnet is the perfect narrator for the final depiction of Rose as we knew her before A Single Pale Rose. She’s one of the two remaining Crystal Gems that survived the war and isn’t bubbled, and we’ll soon learn that the other is bound to silence, so Garnet is the most capable character to tell this story and believe it. And her introduction in Your Mother and Mine hammers down why she believes it: when she’s excited about a cause that’s close to home, her enthusiasm overwhelms her usual calm. She’s so happy with the idea of misfit Homeworlders escaping oppression that she can’t step back and see that they aren’t handling her praise well until Padparadscha says it outright (for the second time in three episodes, she displays her ability to “predict” the emotions of the recent past on top of the events). And when she really gets going with her story, Garnet shows the exact same level of breathless, blinding glee. It can be hard to look for flaws in something you’re actively rooting for, that you’ve tied your whole identity to, so she doesn’t.

The distortion of truth that defines the episode is established by the Off Colors, who parrot three variants of Homeworld propaganda that mythologize Rose Quartz in the same way Garnet does, albeit for opposite reasons. They can’t even get their own stories straight, adding to the mystery of a figure that Homeworld would do anything to disavow and vilify, but the three main Gems in Steven’s life also have different concepts of Rose. Pearl’s is the most accurate, but she can’t tell anyone. Garnet’s is what she saw with her own three eyes, so she thinks it’s accurate, but she’s missing critical information. And Amethyst only knew Rose from after the war, so like Steven she had to learn about it secondhand.

And so, a question presents itself: what’s the value of a story that isn’t true? In this episode, Garnet’s false narrative galvanizes the Off Colors in the same way it galvanized her for thousands of years. It gives Steven a version of the shattering that paints Rose’s actions as heroic—Lars, whose first huge character moment with Steven involved insulting his “weird mom,” thinks she’s awesome for doing it. Regardless of the facts, it’s a great story, an honest-to-goodness legend presented gorgeously. So how much does it matter that much of it is wrong?

To Steven and Garnet, it matters quite a bit. But to the Off Colors? They need a confidence boost both in their general lives and in a moment of floating in space with a broken engine, and the story of Rose Quartz concretely helps them. That’s the tricky thing about legendary figures: if you model yourself off a literal interpretation of their actions, as Steven and Garnet do, it can only end in disappointment, but if you just view it as a story, it can do a lot of good. Fiction can be a wonderful thing—Steven Universe is itself an untrue story that has made the world a better place—but it gets rougher when the boundaries between fiction and reality are muddled.

While Rebecca Sugar has many times confirmed that the three lead Gems are based off elements of her personality, Steven is based off her brother, and characteristics of other real people are found throughout the show in the way fiction writers often flesh out their casts, Rose Quartz is different. In an early conversation with Hellboy creator Mike Mignola of all people, she was inspired by Babylonian mythology, especially Ishtar, in developing the show’s backstory, and Era 1 Rose Quartz feels more like an ancient goddess of love and war than a grounded human at this point in the show.

So Garnet tells us a creation myth. She introduces the Diamonds as gods, calling them “unique in their flawlessness” without an ounce of sarcasm, but like most ancient mythological gods, they do indeed have flaws: in this case, according to Garnet, Pink’s cruelty and cowardice. From these gods came Gems in their image, and for an untold sweep of time there was stagnation as all went according to plan, until a disrupting hero shifted this status quo to create the world we know today. Rose Quartz went from questioning her god to arguing with her god to warring with her god to destroying and supplanting her god, but because this is a pantheon, her hubris is punished by the other gods. It’s a story that works as well thousands of years ago as it does today.

And befitting that story, we get the most stylized flashback in the series, expanding heavily from the silhouettes of The Answer. Even if nothing else here worked, this would remain a beautiful episode, with simple but effective techniques to marry narration with aesthetic: transitioning from widescreen to fullscreen as Rose’s worldview expands, using stained glass backgrounds to keep the focus on characters instead of environment, and reducing colors in the foreground to make those colors pop. Eyes are out of the picture, a major handicap for showing how characters feel, but seasoned pros Katie Mitroff and Paul Villeco can convey emotion through body language and mouths alone.

Estelle certainly helps. Her commanding voice could make any story enthralling, even as she shifts from the fairy tale of her own origin to the legend of Rose. While she largely uses the same techniques here as in The Answer, the one noticeable change speaks volumes about Pink Diamond. When speaking for Blue, a far more personal foe for Garnet, she continues to narrate in her usual tone, and when speaking for Rose, her voice raises a little but it still sounds like Garnet. But when speaking for Pink, Estelle does something new: for the first and only time in the series, she vocally impersonates another character.

This is the second episode in a row featuring Pink Diamond, and the second in a row where she’s voiced by someone who isn’t Pink Diamond. Stevonnie shows the true version (a child), while Garnet shows the legend (a tyrant). And both halves of the Mindful Education duo are great at it! All Estelle needs is a few lines to shift that British accent into full evil aristocrat mode, and the special attention she gives to this voice highlights just how different this take on Pink is from the tantrum AJ Michalka provided. Even before we know the full truth, something is off about this cruel but newly confident version of Pink.

While the whole story gains new meaning when we hear the truth, the most compelling part in retrospect is Garnet’s stance on Pink Diamond calling for help. On top of providing the stunning header image as we pan from revolutionaries up to their oppressors, it’s this brilliant, awful moment where Garnet gets so close to the truth without grasping it, Blue Zircon style. Yes, Pink summoned other Diamonds to Earth, but it was part of her plan to save the planet: to make a big enough fuss that Homeworld would decide her colony wasn’t worth it. Garnet’s take is in line with the Pink we saw in our last episode, immature and seeking approval from her elders, and focusing on it here highlights how these negative traits could be aimed to help others when we see her real motives in Now We’re Only Falling Apart.

That said, Pink isn’t the only Diamond we see here.

White Diamond is different. She’s the only Diamond who isn’t named until her debut episode, existing only as a suggestion that fills in a massive gap. We’re restricted to her glimpses of her, mere hints of her ominous presence, like a monster in the shadows. The mural on the moon, the distant view of her ship on Homeworld, the actual white diamond that tops the insignia, that’s all we’ve gotten until now.

Here we get three images of her, even if she still goes unmentioned: the first shot of the four Diamonds together, the shot of the remaining three Diamonds after the shattering, and the Corruption. She remains obscured, more an idea than a character, but it’s clearer than ever that she’s the head of the group, and that she’s enormous, even compared to Yellow and Blue. Her absence is as captivating as her presence, as we see more of her than ever but still get the impression that Pink was only able to appeal to the middle sisters. It’s a great hook, a second mystery that overlaps Pink Diamond’s to show the audience that there’s more to this story than we might think, and even when we inevitably unravel Pink’s history, there’s a bigger threat behind the curtain.

The story ends with a brief scene in our regular style, showing that even if everything else was wrong, Rose Quartz did use her shield to save her friends. We return to a downcast ship, but Garnet supplements the power of fiction with the power of truth: that despite all the lies from Homeworld (and the lies from Rose, it turns out), the Crystal Gems and the Off Colors persist. No matter how much authority figures might try to hide it, diversity of lifestyle and identity is everywhere, because queer folks are normal folks. That’s the sort of thing a good story can make clear, especially when society constantly repeats a brutal and bald-faced lie.

And so the Off Colors trilogy of sorts draws to a close, with another call to adventure aboard the Sun Incinerator. But not before Steven and Garnet have a sit-down away from the celebrating crew, and the downside of a good story peeks out. It’s refreshing to see Steven verbalize his theory about Stevonnie’s dream so soon, given the necessary gap between The Trial and Jungle Moon to focus on his immediate concerns, but because Garnet only knows the story instead of the history, she replies with two truths and a lie: that his powers come from empathy, that his differences are something to be celebrated, and that Rose Quartz definitely killed Pink Diamond.

Steven will thus need another push to find the truth, rather than pursuing it on his own. Rose’s story does a lot of good, but it keeps Steven in the dark on his heritage and his inheritance, and makes him doubt the gut that he should be learning to trust by now. Self-doubt is just one of the many issues plaguing him in Steven Universe Future, but it remains a major factor in his identity crisis, and it’s rooted in moments like this: when a loved one who means well repeats a lie that makes him question what he knows in his heart.

The truth can be a dangerous thing, and fiction can comfort and inspire. The truth leads to clarity, and fiction can distort. This isn’t a convenient dichotomy, and Garnet herself will soon be ripped apart by the realization that the story she tells right here was a lie, but she wouldn’t be who she is today without that story, and for better and worse, neither would Steven. I’m not saying it isn’t important to seek the truth, and I’m certainly not saying that this show is telling us that. But I appreciate so much that the value of stories isn’t lost in that message.

We’re the one, we’re the ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!

Without the upcoming reveal, this is just an episode that I like. Great visuals and a well-told story, but still feels like a recap. But that reveal amps up Your Mother and Mine by both justifying the recap itself and by making the actual point of the episode clear. So up it goes!

Top Twenty-Five

Steven and the Stevens

Hit the Diamond

Mirror Gem

Lion 3: Straight to Video

Alone Together

Jungle Moon

Last One Out of Beach City

The Return

Jailbreak

The Answer

Mindful Education

Sworn to the Sword

Rose’s Scabbard

Earthlings

Mr. Greg

Coach Steven

Lars of the Stars

Giant Woman

Beach City Drift

Winter Forecast

Bismuth

Back to the Kindergarten

Steven’s Dream

Kevin Party

When It Rains

Love ‘em

Laser Light Cannon

Bubble Buddies

Tiger Millionaire

Lion 2: The Movie

Rose’s Room

An Indirect Kiss

Ocean Gem

Space Race

Garnet’s Universe

Warp Tour

The Test

Future Vision

On the Run

Maximum Capacity

Marble Madness

Political Power

Full Disclosure

Joy Ride

Keeping It Together

We Need to Talk

Chille Tid

Cry for Help

Keystone Motel

Catch and Release

Back to the Barn

Steven’s Birthday

It Could’ve Been Great

Message Received

Log Date 7 15 2

Same Old World

The New Lars

Monster Reunion

Alone at Sea

Crack the Whip

Beta

Back to the Moon

Kindergarten Kid

Buddy’s Book

Gem Harvest

Three Gems and a Baby

That Will Be All

The New Crystal Gems

Storm in the Room

Room for Ruby

Lion 4: Alternate Ending

Doug Out

The Good Lars

Are You My Dad?

I Am My Mom

Stuck Together

The Trial

Off Colors

Lars’s Head

Gemcation

Raising the Barn

Sadie Killer

Your Mother and Mine

Like ‘em

Gem Glow

Frybo

Arcade Mania

So Many Birthdays

Lars and the Cool Kids

Onion Trade

Steven the Sword Fighter

Beach Party

Monster Buddies

Keep Beach City Weird

Watermelon Steven

The Message

Open Book

Story for Steven

Shirt Club

Love Letters

Reformed

Rising Tides, Crashing Tides

Onion Friend

Historical Friction

Friend Ship

Nightmare Hospital

Too Far

Barn Mates

Steven Floats

Drop Beat Dad

Too Short to Ride

Restaurant Wars

Kiki’s Pizza Delivery Service

Greg the Babysitter

Gem Hunt

Steven vs. Amethyst

Bubbled

Adventures in Light Distortion

Gem Heist

The Zoo

Rocknaldo

Dewey Wins

Enh

Cheeseburger Backpack

Together Breakfast

Cat Fingers

Serious Steven

Steven’s Lion

Joking Victim

Secret Team

Say Uncle

Super Watermelon Island

Gem Drill

Know Your Fusion

Future Boy Zoltron

Tiger Philanthropist

No Thanks!

6. Horror Club 5. Fusion Cuisine 4. House Guest 3. Onion Gang 2. Sadie’s Song 1. Island Adventure

#your mother and mine #steven universe #su #steven universally #review

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x0401x · 5 years

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Hey miss wonderful taste in everything, can you recommend us some of your favorite KyoAni productions?

Sure! I love doing recs and I’m literally taking any sort of positive content related to KyoAni lately because we truly need it at the moment. Long post alert, though. Here goes my top 10:

1. Hyouka

This one will probably be my first choice forever. It’s KyoAni’s most brilliant work so far and easily one of the best animes I’ve ever watched, hands down. It’s also their finest novel-to-anime adaptation in my opinion, and one of the very few animation series that actually turned out better than their source material.

The books are extremely interesting, but they’re also bland. The alterations made to the anime added visual value to it in order to make it more alluring and appealing, turning ordinary situations into rather unique and thought-provoking settings, while managing to never deviate from its novel counterpart. The changes on the characters’ designs were also a very good choice in my opinion, as they fit more into the character archetypes and the impressions they give off.

This one is honestly an example for the whole anime industry and a timeless gem. I’m pretty certain that it was one of the studio’s turning points in terms of animation style. Surely will become a classic in the future.

2. Koe no Katachi

KyoAni’s most well-done movie, as far as I can tell. I’m specially fond of the symbolism of every scene and the effort put on the scenery, which gave an effect of depth to the frames. The studio managed to portray the mangaka’s art style while staying true to its own trademark traits as well.

Animation quality and sound design aside, it’s also loyal enough to the manga. There were cuts in order to fit the story into the time limit, but KyoAni made up for the gaps with later released specials. The movie is also considerably less dramatic than the original, yet I’m certain that the alterations in that regard were made so that the transition between the phases of the story wouldn’t feel rushed. Albeit in a much more uplifting way, it nevertheless managed to transmit the characters’ essence and emotions.

What caught my attention the most in this movie was the soundtrack, though. There was a lot of care in its production, and it was clearly made to be gentle and almost imperceptible, with glitch-like repetitions here and there, as if it means to put the viewers in the shoes of the deaf heroine. It certainly did its job well.

3. Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu!

First anime from KyoAni I’ve ever watched, aside from the Inuyasha movies. Easily one of their funniest series, if not the actual funniest. It has a very special place in my heart. I dropped Amagi Brilliant Park on the first episode, but I’d cry internally every time I saw Bonta-kun in it. The nostalgia is strong, kids.

It’s got excellent animation for the year it was made, and I dare say it’s more decently animated than many current animes. The pacing is dynamic and the jokes vary from over-the-top to smart and witty in a smooth way. I also give this one kudos for not relying nearly as much on fanservice as more recent titles.

For the people who didn’t watch the first Full Metal Panic, I suggest doing so before trying this one out. Anyone who enjoys the two should also watch the second season, Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid, which comes right after Fumoffu and was also animated by KyoAni.

4. Clannad

This one I deem as the best out of KyoAni’s most notorious classics. I also recommend the other titles related to this one, such as Clannad: Another Story.

Much like Hyouka, it’s a masterpiece in every aspect. It has a very non-cliché and unconveninent plot that deals with delicate themes in a sensible way and tears your heart apart at the same time. Frankly exemplary to the drama genre and exceptional as a visual novel adaptation.

5. Free!

The franchise became lackluster after the first director left, but the first two seasons were fun enough in their own right. Unlike most novel-to-anime adaptations, Free! started with original content through creating a future for the main story, which was turned into the not-so-distant past in the anime. This is unusual enough, but it worked out well as the anime maintained itself as loyal as possible to the first book and never went off the rails with the plot. The main characters’ personalities did suffer many alterations, yet it’s obvious that they meant to make the two more charismatic and likeable. As far as fan responses went, it worked.

I find very interesting that the creators were aware the story took itself too seriously at times, and they made this clear by compensating the heavy melancholy with heavy comedy. They also compensated the overdramatic atmosphere of the first season by picking up the pace and getting a little more serious in the second season. Everything was intentional and designed to be a hit amongst women, which I think had served the purpose until the first movie came out.

To be honest, I’m not fond of the exaggerated fanservice, but it gets easy to ignore it after a while if you only pay attention to the storyline. I don’t consider myself a fan of Free!, and I actually took very long to start liking it. I only did get into it at the last scene of episode 8, back when the first season was still airing. It was only by this time that I could see the true value of the series, so I recommend anyone who tries it out to go at least that far with it. I know it might be a lot of work, but in my honest opinion, it’s worth the trouble.

I deem the High Speed! novel awe-inspiring because of its nostalgic tone and the awfully realistic depiction of childhood crises. The most serious situations of it are a little out of reality, but the rest is absurdly relatable in levels that I myself don’t know how to put into words. Yet I also appreciate Free! for its strong tone of encouragement. It feels like the creators are trying to cheer up the viewers.

6. Kyoukai no Kanata

It starts becoming a mess from episode 4 onward, yet the beginning was quite promising. This one relies heavily on fanservice, often makes use of nonsensical tropes for the sake of comedy and sometimes goes overboard with the jokes. However, it doesn’t fail to deliver emotional value and the action is pretty neat. Anyone who hasn’t read the novel will definitely be able to enjoy it as a standalone.

I don’t think I need to mention it, but the animation is stellar. I in particular love the blurry movement effects of when the characters draw their weapons and the geometrical spectrums in the colorful power barriers. I also recommend the OVA, as well as the second movie I’ll be Here, although the latter is 100% original content. It was actually cute and fun to watch. The first movie is merely one huge recap.

7. Hibike! Euphonium

Truly dazzling take on slice-of-life. It’s healing and heartrending at the same time. The way that characters are portrayed allows the viewers to feel their passion and dedication without it occasionally feeling unrealistic. Everyone has their own problems, but none of them are taken out of proportion. Miscommunication happens, just not in a frustrating shoujo manga way.

The soundtrack and scenery are breathtaking, yet the forte of the animation in this one was the huge amount of detail put into the eyes and hair. Everyone’s hairdos are remarkably glossy without ever looking weird, and I especially like how their eyes all glinter in different colors.

The author published another volume of the novel after the anime, saying it had inspired her to write more, and it’s no wonder. I also recommend season two and the OVA. The first two movies are just recaps and the third was to me a disappointment, so I leave those to people’s own discretion.

8. Tamako Market

Rather odd but nice story. It blends iyashikei elements with a peculiar plot and actually manages to do that in a cute way. All of the characters are likeable and the visuals do a good job in transmitting what they have to transmit in a very relaxing manner.

This show caught me off-guard by how unproblematic it was. It has trans, gay and dark-skinned characters, but none of them is ever used for fanservice or jokes and their respective circumstances are portrayed as 100% normal, which is sadly still rare in anime even nowadays. The romance is pretty not-dramatic and filled to the brim with fluff, and I very much like that the main guy treats his female love rival as a serious threat.

I recommend the specials and the movie as well. Especially the movie, which is basically the same as direct sugar injestion and gave me diabetes.

9. Munto

Also has a special place in my heart. Cheesy but good, actually. I’d be lying if I said there aren’t some surprises in it, though, but I’ll refrain from giving too much info on the story itself.

It was firstly an OVA, but then got adapted into three movies. The animation was done finely enough, but there’s a drastic change in style from the first to the second half, though I myself didn’t really mind it. The characters are all well-stablished and the plot is consistent. There’s a present quality of feminist shades in it and the relationships are very endearing.

10. Nichijou

Not really one of my favorites but certainly one that I recommend for people who are in need of a laugh. It’s got some pretty creative and iconic humor. Its imaginative retakes on routinely affairs manage to transform the most trivial real-life situations into Oscar-worthy wit. It also gets nonsensical every so often, but this fits within the show’s own narrative.

It has a very unique animation that sometimes mixes different styles of art, which only makes every scene a hundred times funnier for being so soft and adorable. It varies from hyperrealistic to surrealistic at the speed of light and sometimes even becomes abstract as hell. It’s full of notes on Japanese culture, not only about daily life but also about media, which adds up to the fun.

#kyoani #kyoto animation #hyouka #free!#koe no katachi #full metal panic #nichijou #hibike euphonium #tamako market #clannad #kyoukai no kanata #munto #i could totally do more of these!

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faneliacosplay · 5 years

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Top 10 of 2018

C2018 was a year is this nicest way I can sum it up. My precious fur-baby passed away after fighting a horrible illness and is in a happier place, my health went crazy (still is as of writing), and I finally broke free from an abusive toxic person who had been controlling me for a huge chunk of my life. Despite the bad things that happened, I want to focus on the good things of 2018. One of things I began doing in January of 2018 was at the end of every week, I would write down all of the good things that happened to me, be it sewing, watched a good movie, spending time with a friend, etc. So without further ado, here’s my Top 10 of 2018! (I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S ALREADY MARCH!!)

1. The Ancient Magus’ Bride

- I’ve been a lifelong fan of Beauty and the Beast-like stories ever since I watched the classic Disney film. The manga kept popping up in my recommendations for the majority of 2017 and I remember seeing a poster at my local theater for a premiere showing of the first 3 episodes of the then-upcoming anime (I have since regretted not going to this showing). I finally caved and bought the first two volumes of the manga and literally went back to the store two days later and bought the next 2 volumes. I’ve always been a very picky person with my romance be it movie, novel, anime, manga, etc., but this quickly became one of my favorites with it’s excellent world-building, relationships, and don’t even get me started on how gorgeous the animation is! If you want an excellent Beauty & the Beast adaptation, you won’t be disappointed. (I am unashamed of crying happy tears in public while watching the final episode)

2. Satoshi Kon’s Filmography

- My New Year’s resolution was to watch all of the late Satoshi Kon’s works, starting with his debut film Perfect Blue. I had wanted to watch this film for several years, and it did not disappoint. (I kept spamming for people to go and see it when it got a theatrical re-release in Fall 2018) Next was Kon’s final project Paprika, which I watched about 3 times in May and many times over 2018 and still notice something new every time I watch it. Finally, I watched *the* film that I have wanted to watch for many, many years (since 2004 to be exact): Millennium Actress. I was not prepared for how moving this film would be with its themes of the past vs. present, how an ordinary encounter can lead to something so much more, and lastly: love transcends time. If you could only watch one of Satoshi Kon’s works, please choose to watch Millennium Actress. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to watch Kon’s other two works, but I aim to in 2019 (along with reading his works)

3. Slayers

- I watched some of Slayers back in middle school and in summer 2016, but never took off with it until in 2018. I knew I would like this funny series about the adventures of a fiery sorceress, dumb as a stump swordsman, optimistic hero-in-training, and an overly-serious chimera, but I had no idea it would become one of my top 10 favorite anime series! I haven’t laughed so much with an anime in a while, and I greatly appreciated it since my fur-baby passed away and this was one of the last anime we watched together. There’s just something about 90s fantasy anime that’s just so appealing. I will throw in that while I love the tv series, the films are worth watching too, with The Motion Picture being my favorite. If you need something to cheer you up, I highly recommend Slayers!

4. Venom

- Confession: I did not have high hopes for this movie. I was the only one among my friends who was uninterested in this film whenever we would watch the trailers/promos/etc. Eventually after this movie came out, my friends and best friend convinced me to see it. My sociology buddy told me “This movie wasn’t marketed right! Go see it!!” and another told me “This is the best action rom-com of 2018.” The next day my family asked me if I wanted to see it and Bohemian Rhapsody (also an excellent film) and I said “Sure!” This film has since spawned never-ending jokes between me and my best friend. (I ended up making her a Venom scarf for Christmas!) If you’re trying to get someone to see this film, don’t show them the trailers depicting it as a dark, gritty, action thriller, show them the home video trailer depicting it as a rom-com because that’s exactly what it is. I still can’t believe that a movie about a human falling in love with a man-eating gooey alien is real.

5. The Shape of Water

- “2017 will be remembered as the year men screwed up so badly, women started dating fish.”- Jimmy Kimmel, 2018 Oscars. I’m beginning to see a pattern for stories of humans falling in love with monsters. My mom and I wanted to see this film after the trailer dropped in summer 2017 and were disappointed when the film didn’t play here. However, sometime in February 2018, this film played in our town for one weekend, so we dashed to the theater. I don’t even know where to start with how beautiful this film is and since several people I know still haven’t watched it I’ll just state this: Please watch this film. It earned the 4 Oscars it won. (It earned all 10 it was nominated for!)

6. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse

- I almost didn’t see this film. 2018 was a pretty hectic year for me and I didn’t really keep up with films/entertainment news, so I saw no trailers for this film (except for a really short tv ad). All I knew was what my best friend had said: “Brianna, let’s go see Spider-verse. In 3D.” (y’all, 2018 was the year of listening to my best friend) It was so nice not only to see a different Spider-Man, a diverse cast, a well-curated soundtrack, and a completely new style of animation that makes you feel as though you’re reading/watching a comic book??? Sign me up! I’m so happy this film won the Oscar!!

7. Macross Frontier Movies

- I’ve fallen deep into the Macross hole in the past year or two and have no plans of crawling out. The 2008 series Macross Frontier was my first and favorite entry in the series so far. I knew that there were two recap/alternate retelling films made, so when I was free one day I watched them and I was really surprised that I enjoyed them more than the tv series!? I haven’t really mentioned this, but my big problem with the tv series of Frontier was it’s ending being not too good. I don’t want to ruin it since Macross (particularly made after 2001) is a bit unknown in the USA, but I will say that if you want to get into this franchise, start with the Frontier movies or with the iconic Macross: Do you remember love? film. The music is just as good as the tv series, same with the costumes, and the writing is much better! The performance of Northern Cross at the climax of The Wings of Goodbye was really moving. Not “Do you remember love?” moving, but pretty close.

8. Sailor Moon Theatrical Double-Feature

- Everyone who knows me knows that I’ve loved Sailor Moon for pretty much all of my life (ever since the 3rd & 4th seasons aired on Toonami back in the day!) A holiday tradition for me was to watch the 2nd theatrical every Christmas Eve, unfortunately my two VHS tapes finally gave out in 2016. Thanks to Viz Media, this past summer saw theatrical re-releases of all 3 Sailor Moon films. Shockingly, my local theater was showing the films subbed so my mom and I bought our tickets right away. It was so surreal seeing these films that I grew up with on the big screen, and I know non-Sailor Moon fans won’t get this, but hearing/watching the whole “Moon Revenge” sequence in the theater was so intense. This part never got to me as a kid for some weird reason and I had no idea I was crying until my mom pointed it out at the end of the film. With the 2nd film, seeing Luna transform into a human was emotionally moving as always, just 10 times more since it was on the big screen with that nice surround sound system. That night when I got home, I didn’t get any sleep since I still couldn’t believe that this happened. The now 20+ years old Sailor Moon movies got released for the first time in USA theaters. This is an experience I’m going to remember for the rest of my life.

9. Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card Arc

- I was so excited when a sequel to Cardcaptor Sakura was announced. Like Sailor Moon, I watched this series as the heavily-edited Cardcaptors on Toonami. When I got older and learned that there was more anime out there besides the ones I saw on TV, I went back and watched Cardcaptor Sakura to get the whole, magical story and even read the manga, which I believe is the greatest children’s manga ever made. I loved every single moment of the new series and felt as though I were watching another episode of the classic series. The only thing that felt different was that the animation is no longer hand-drawn. (it’s still good) When you reboot or make a sequel to a series be it tv, film, or book, sometimes it’ll miss the charm that made it so enjoyable in the first place. Clear Card thankfully still carries the charm its predecessor had.

10. Little Witch Academia

- I had started this anime around holiday 2017 but didn’t finish it until early 2018. This was one of the most optimistic series I’d ever had the pleasure of watching. I don’t want to compare the two, but the inspirational message that Kiki’s Delivery Service gave me when I was 10, was the exact inspirational message you will find in Little Witch Academia. (and that I needed to hear as a 20-year-old) I was starting to get a bit depressed and losing confidence in myself with my science grades getting lower no matter what I tried, as well as other things in my personal life. After dropping Science, I had a long wait between classes, so I decided to start watching Little Witch Academia again. Seeing our protagonist Akko trying her best at flying a broom and failing was me with my science grades, but her determination to get her broom just a few centimeters off the ground was so inspiring to watch. After this I watched the other Studio Trigger works I had yet to see, and while they’re all good in their own way, none of them have left the imprint LWA left on me. Sometimes when I get frustrated or lack confidence in myself, I tell myself Shiny Chariot’s words of wisdom that motivated Akko throughout the series: “Never forget your beautiful dreams. Believing is your magic!!”

#2018 #2018 in review #The Ancient Magus Bride #millennium actress #satoshi kon #slayers anime #lina inverse #venom #the shape of water #into the spider verse #macross frontier #sailor moon #cardcaptor sakura clear card #clear card arc #little witch academia #brianna talks #slayers

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rukangle · 4 years

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RWBY Tuesday: RWBY White Trailer Retrospective - Insufferable Firecracker

RWBY Tuesday: RWBY White Trailer Retrospective

FEATURED ~ INSUFFERABLE FIRECRACKER

Last week I kicked off my RWBY Retrospective series with the RWBY Red Trailer. For a brief recap, when the RWBY Red Trailer first released, I wasn’t exactly a huge fan of what I saw. My love of RWBY didn’t come until I saw the release of the RWBY White Trailer and the introduction of Weiss Schnee.

The trailer opens slowly, a quote flashes across the screen. Then a spotlight shows overhead, the garbled mutterings of an announcer calls her name. The audience cheers as a white haired woman takes the stage. Her face is elegant, but there’s a slender scar blemishing her skin over one eye. She’s dressed in white, with a splash of red, and a hint of black. Her expression stays serious in front of the crowd. The soft fluttering of of a piano begins to play as the crowed cheers.

By this point in the trailer, less than 30 seconds into it, I had already found myself captivated by Weiss Schnee as a character. Where the RWBY Red Trailer failed to instantly grab my attention, the RWBY White Trailer had captured me from the very beginning.

Weiss looks out to the crowd, takes a breath and closes her eyes. Then the song begins in earnest. Unlike Ruby’s song that was merely playing as a music backdrop, this time Weiss is performing her personal story for the world to see. Her song, known as “Mirror Mirror” is a testament that Jeff Williams and Casey Lee Williams really know how to make a soundtrack shine.

This song is probably one of the saddest in the original soundtrack for the first RWBY volume. As the song plays, Weiss is shown to be singing it, although, her actual voice actress didn’t do the vocals. The woman singing is Casey Lee Williams.

This trailer turns into a flashback as Weiss continues to sing, her eyes still closed. The camera pans lower and the stage fades to black. A reflection of Weiss glows from the dark abyss as she stands atop it, a perfect reflection.

It is now implied that anything beyond this is a flashback of a memory Weiss has. Her eyes open, and kneeling in front of her is a gigantic armored knight. It bows to her in reverence, as if she were its queen. Then, it stands to its full height, grasping its sword as the tempo of the music changes.

No longer just a soft piano melody, string instruments and percussion are added into the mix. The soft classical music taking on new urgency as Weiss faces down her opponent. Swords clash as Weiss faces down this armored giant, deftly avoiding his blade.

Her combat is almost like a dancer’s grace as she continues flitting around the arena floor like a ballerina. She uses her sword with frontal swings and forward jabs just like a fencer. Weiss relies on a mix of skill, dust, and a series of glyphs to the knight and gain the upper hand.

This isn’t enough to stop the knight from countering every attack she lands on him. Finally he swats her aside like a paper doll. She lands on the ground looking disheartened and defeated.

Then the scene faces to black and Weiss is on stage again. Slowly she opens her eyes. Operatic vocals fill the air as the moon overhead appears from behind dark clouds.

Her eyes close again, and her memory continues.

The knight is still ready for more, and Weiss lifts herself up from the ground. There’s blood on her face, and determination in her eyes.

Weiss won’t let herself be put down from a little thing like a head injury. Instead she prepares herself for another clashing of blades. She’s smarter this time, going on the defensive and waiting for the right moment to take him down.

The song changes tempo again. This time, it’s not haunting, it’s empowering. She prepares her weapon, adjusting her stance, and strikes. A flurry of red and blue dust shimmers with every attack. A wave of ice spiking up from the ground as she returns the armored knight’s attack tenfold, effectively disarming him.

Then it’s time for her final attack. She readies her glyphs and the dust inside her sword. Trapping the the knight she sends herself flying into the air, slicing a pinpoint attack into the knight. This turns him into dust.

Sparkles of dust fall from the stage as she finishes her song. The blood on her face fades away. She opens her eyes and looks around as if trying to remember where she is. The crowd cheers for her.

Weiss looks out toward the audience and she offers her final bow. Her reflection is still there, a perfect mirror image. The curtains close, and the trailer ends.

The RWBY White Trailer is character building at its finest. A lot of fans claim that Weiss is one of the most interesting characters in the series, at least, on her own merits. I wholeheartedly agree. In this trailer we’re given far more depth to her character than we ever saw in the RWBY Red Trailer.

At the end, I feel like I know more about Weiss than I ever did about Ruby. The thing is, Ruby’s trailer focuses more on factual information. For Weiss, her trailer is entirely emotional. The fight was on her point of view, and the song lyrics reflect that.

The song stands in a league of it’s own, the animation is top-notch, and the fight is captivating from start to finish. All in all, this trailer is my absolute favorite one in the early volumes.

However, I wouldn’t actually say it’s the best trailer we received. No, that credit goes to the RWBY Black Trailer, featuring Blake Belladonna. Join me next Tuesday as I cover Blake’s trailer. You don’t want to miss it.

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https://insufferablefirecrackersinsufferablesworld.wordpress.com/2019/11/26/rwby-tuesday-rwby-white-trailer-retrospective/

#rwby #rwby fanfiction #rwby liveblog #ruby rose #weiss schnee #Blake Belladonna #yang xiao long #patron #twitter #blog #gamer #Rooster Teeth #rwbyart

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itsclydebitches · 5 years

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RWBY Recaps: Vol. 5 "True Colors"

This is a re-posting from October 4th, 2018 in an effort to get all my recaps fully on tumblr. Thanks!

Guess who’s back, back again

Clyde is back, tell a friend

How long will my focus and work ethic last? Who knows, but with Volume 6 on the horizon and a fantastic new poster out, I’m feeling like it’s time to dive back into RWBY Recaps. Never too late to guiltily dust off an old project, right?

Right.

We’re back in Volume 5. Yes, I did a bit of Volume 1—extreme illusions of grandeur and productivity there—but we should really round out 5 before 6 comes knocking on the 27th. I’ve got almost a month. Let’s see how well I do, starting with “True Colors.”

We open on an image of Qrow and Ozpin together, notably Ozpin given the prim posture and ever-present coffee mug. Qrow makes the comment that things “aren’t looking good” and really? No shit, bird boy. We’ve gone from “Oh no, Ruby is having trouble becoming a leader!” to “Oh no… Weiss is trying to overcome a racist upbringing…?” and are now firmly in the territory of “OH NO a bunch of our faves are dead and Ozpin is forced to possess a child??” Things haven’t looked good for a while.

Ozpin is ever the optimist though. He points out that yeah, things are bad, but they could also be worse. “Humanity is a resilient force” he says, which oddly enough, sounds a lot like the kind of thing someone not a part of Humanity would say. Jury’s still out on whether Oz was the lowly farmer unfairly cursed by the gods, or a god himself justly punished for some sort of hubris… or something else entirely. It just strikes me as significant that he often distances himself from others in not just actions but speech as well. Could be a glimpse into his true nature, aka someone literally not human. Could also just be the result of spending thousands of years reincarnating while everyone else around you suffers and dies. That’ll make anyone feel subhuman…

Qrow challenges Oz’s happy-go-lucky attitude, reminding us that a huge number of pro huntsmen have been murdered and Salem couldn’t have achieved that on her own. She’s had help—and plenty of it. But Ozpin stands firm that it “doesn’t take a great number of people to cause harm” and there are “far more people in this world willing to prevent it.”

Enter our protagonist.

Subtle!

Ruby is adorable, as always, hesitantly approaching the two of them and awkwardly accepting the invitation to chat. It’s a striking difference in how she acts when it’s just her and Qrow, which is expected. Ozpin remains a much more distant authority figure and now he’s inhabiting the body of a boy her own age. I’d be a little unsure about how to act around him too.

Ruby finally asks what we’ve been worried about since the beginning of this Volume: if Cinder defeated Oz then does that mean Salem now has the Beacon relic? Luckily, no. Oz says he made finding the Beacon relic “a bit more challenging than at the other schools.” So Ruby asks the second question that’s been on our minds…

Ozpin: “No, my cane is not a relic.”

Ruby: “I have no more questions :)”

Okay now wait. I'm calling bullshit lol. That cane is 100% a relic. I mean could I be wrong? Absolutely. But it’s way more fun to be confident so I’m calling Ozpin out on this. For a number of reasons:

1. He’s absolutely the kind of guy to do what no one else expects. “The cane is so obvious!” Yeah, which means everyone will be looking for the relic elsewhere, hidden away like the Haven relic. Who the hell would have it out in the open? Ozpin. He would. Expect the unexpected.

2. He’s alsothe kind of guy who might lie to someone about it. Ozpin has been playing this game a long time and he’s not above a few smiles and carefully placed words if he thinks it’ll keep things on track. The Haven relic is the one currently in danger—no reason to announce the Beacon relic’s location and shift the team’s focus just because a former student asks him for the truth. It’s too dangerous and Ozpin is very adept at, as he says, playing things close to the chest. And I don’t blame him. That’s how you keep humanity alive.

3. The scene doesn’t show us Qrow at all who is a lot less adept at lying, to say nothing of the fact that—if he knows about the relic—he wouldn’t feel good lying specifically to Ruby.

4. Ozpin’s previous comment about how this relic is a “bit more challenging” seems significant. That is, why ONLY make the Beacon relic so difficult to find? All the relics are important so why not give them all the same precautions? Well, the answer is simple if your precaution is something you can only do for one of them: keep the relic with you.

5. Qrow, arguably Ozpin’s closest friend (husband-friend), was entrusted with getting the cane back to him and it’s used as the introduction between Oscar and Qrow. Seems like a pretty damn important object.

6. We’ve seen this cane fend off crazy powerful attacks and it never takes any damage. Granted, all the weapons in RWBY are pretty hearty, but Ozpin’s cane seems particularly indestructible. Almost like there’s something similar to magic surrounding it.

7. We’ve still got those gears. That cane transforms into something…

8. The fact that Ozpin immediately homes in on Ruby’s question, quickly counters it, and then tells her to leave (go gather the others). He’s in charge of the conversation here.

9. The fact that the scene suddenly turns light-hearted and humorous. We’re meant to shrug this moment off and not think too hard about it. Well, too late now.

Granted, Oz has a good explanation here. He states firmly that the cane is indeed precious, though only to him, and that it still “has a few tricks up its sleeve.” Nothing he says counters what we already know, yet it doesn’t reveal any of his cane’s secrets either. We’re still in the dark. So until we’re not I remain suspicious about his claim that it’s totally definitely absolutely not a relic.

(The headmaster doth protest too much.)

(Edit Feb. 2019: I was so wrong, folks!!)

But we’re moving on. Qrow gets a call from Lionheart asking them to meet up with him to discuss potentially going on the offensive against the bandits. Ruby is ecstatic and runs off. Ozpin? Not so much. He and Qrow both comment on how strange it is that Lionheart has suddenly changed his tune and the addition of some creepy music all but beats us over the head with, “It’s a trap!!” This time when Qrow says that things aren’t looking good Ozpin’s only response is, “I know.” So much for the pep talk.

We cut to Lionheart himself, having just finished up that call, and as we pull back who should we find but Raven. She makes blunt what we already know, “I never expected that you would be the one with the guts to betray Oz” while we get a nice crane shot so that we can see Raven circling him, standing while he’s seated—a predator stalking prey.

Though of course it’s not actually courage driving their actions here. It’s cowardice. At least Lionheart is willing to admit it. He says straight out that he’s terrified of Salem and doesn’t think anyone can beat her, so why not join the winning side? Raven, meanwhile, is still firmly in denial. “I’m not scared,” she says. “I’m smart.” Please, girl. You’ve spent your whole life running and you don’t know how to stop now. “Man up,” Raven continues (god that’s a terrible phrase). “You did what you needed to do to survive. There’s no shame in that,” which is where we see the divide between their morals and everyone else surrounding Team RWBY. They’re scared, but they fight despite their fear because they know it’s necessary to help both others and themselves. Raven is only out for herself and her selfish actions hurt family (Qrow), children (Yang), friends (her tribe), and allies (Ozpin) in the process.

“Who are you trying to convince?” Lionheart asks her. It's great seeing a villain who knows exactly where the line is even as they can’t help but cross it. RIP the complex ones.

We move back to Menagerie where Ilia and the others are still leading the attack on Blake’s family. Kali if BAMF here, snatching up a tray as both defense and weapon when her gun runs out of ammo. We get to see her clocking Yuma before we catch up with Blake and Ilia—and I enjoy the contrast in colors between these two scenes, from full blown battle (cold) to friends-turned-enemies (warm):

Ilia spouts the same arguments as Raven: she doesn’t have a choice about her actions. Violence is the only way to survive. Despite the rhetoric Blake is willing to let her go, but Ilia has other plans. The fight, while not spectacular, does showcase the clear parallels between them—both in their arguments and the use of long/short range weaponry. When asked why she doesn’t leave Blake responds that she runs away too much. Beyond the obvious theme from our title—everyone showing their “True Colors”—the focus of this episode is quite obviously who’s willing to fight for others and who’s only out for themselves; who’s able to distinguish between when a literal fight is necessary and when another avenue can be taken. We see time and time again that Team RWBY is leagues ahead of others in terms of that kind of maturity.

From a world building perspective I appreciate Ilia’s use of her camouflaging skills. It’s rare that we see the Faunus actually using their animal abilities (beyond Sun swinging around on his tail) and that’s definitely a useful one in battle… though it's undermined somewhat by having a weapon that lights up with electricity. Gotta think that one through…

And then Blake sETS THE HOUSE ON FIRE? Damn, girl! This isn’t even a real battle—at least not between the two of them. Ilia says two seconds later that Blake isn’t taking this seriously, neither of them truly wants to kill the other, so is burning down your house really the best option here? I always knew Blake was secretly the most dramatic of the bunch.

(That’s a lie. I'm sorry. The most dramatic is clearly Weiss, but she’d be proud of Blake’s ridiculously over-the-top strategy here, I’m sure.)

Blake manages to pin Ilia and keeps trying to talk her down. It works. Sort of. Ilia starts to cry as she admits that she doesn’t know what else to do, but at that moment Ghira comes crashing through the wall with another fight at his heels. (This family is rich enough that they don't care about the property damage.) And then we get this,

This is a sharp reminder that though Blake and Ilia might be fighting more with words than fists, the same can’t be said for her parents. They are, notably, in very real danger. The fight picks back up with Ilia clearly torn now between her loyalties. She defends herself though when Sun joins the fray, pausing only when Blake begs the two of them to stop. However, their fighting has already cracked the pillar holding up the second story and Ilia gets caught underneath. Surprisingly, she’s saved by Ghira (which tells us more about his character than all his bickering with Sun ever could) and there’s a nifty bit of teamwork used to get him out—Sun’s copies hold up the balcony; Blake uses her weapon to pull her dad to safety. The brother (Fennec) who tries to attack him from behind is justifiably crushed under the rubble.

Kali is safe and joins the gang. The fight is basically over, but Corsac attacks out of pure grief and rage, allowing Ilia to stun him from behind. Now I’ve got a lot of feelings about Ilia, most of which boil down to just plain not liking her. I already explained in depth my issues with her being the (so far) sole queer character on the show and this is now compounded with her supposed “redemption.” There are problems inherent in making the (again, only) queer character an antagonist, but there are more problems in making them an antagonist and then refusing to stand by that. Rooster Teeth had her as a complex villain and then the moment she was revealed to have feelings for Blake it’s, “Never mind! She’s good now!” in the span of half an episode.

And how does this redemption occur? Ilia attacks Blake and goes after Blake’s parents. She continues to attack them after being given numerous chances to walk away. She turns on her allies… only after the fight is won. If Ilia were a different kind of character her stunning Corsac could have easily been seen as a survival strategy rather than a true change of heart. They’re now outnumbered four to two, so—like Lionheart—why not quickly join the winning side? I honestly wish Ilia was out to double cross Blake if only because that would be consistent with her loyalties up until now. It would make sense.

In the grand scheme of things though these are minor points. What strikes me as far more significant is 1. that Ilia and her allies could have killed Kali and Ghira. I admit that she wasn’t fighting Blake full out, but the purpose of this attack was to assassinate her parents and the fight did lead to at least one death. That’s not just something you bounce back from. Maybe I’m an asshole, but I couldn’t wave that away as a “bad decision” like Blake does. They could have died. And 2. the most important of all, we’ve yet to see any true change in her thinking or ideology! Ilia joins the gang because she lost and she's left standing around awkwardly with Blake—the girl she’s in love with. Would Ilia have second-guessed her actions if they'd succeeded in their mission? I doubt it. In the aftermath of failure she's contrite, but Ilia was pretty damn adamant about killing humans---and the Belladonnas---just a few minutes ago. If her redemption is based on circumstance and her one-sided crush… that’s not a redemption I can get behind.

But it’s what we’re rushed into. Blake gives a rousing speech about how no, they can’t just use humans as a scapegoat for this attack. They can’t allow figureheads like Adam to speak for them. She says that they’re all “looking for simple answers to a very complex problem” and that despite it not being what they want to hear, she doesn’t know how to just “make hate go away.” That’s a huge development from the girl who went to Mountain Glenn and said passionately that she was going to change the world, but without any concrete ideas as to how to do that. Now Blake can admit her own ignorance and knows at the very least what not to do. They’re not going to change the world through violence like this—they won’t change it for the better, anyway.

I’m with her through all that, up until Blake agrees to take Ilia to Haven. The guard yells out, “You’re just going to forgive her? After all she’s done?” and Blake says only, “Yes.” You know what that is? It’s a simple answer to a very complex problem. It’s painted as admirable on her part—Ghira says she’s learned the lesson of how powerful forgiveness can be—but I think this is RWBY’s fairy-tale simplicity shining through and it doesn’t fit with the heavy material we've been tackling the last few volumes. There’s a big difference between forgiving someone and making sure that they face consequences for their actions. There’s a difference between forgiving them and thinking practically about whether you can or should trust them with your safety and the safety of others. Hell, forgiveness usually takes more than five minutes and often times doesn’t happen at all! Ilia has done none of the work to justify Blake’s forgiveness and though having forgiveness handed to you might read as a beautiful ideal, it doesn’t work well in the gritty, complicated, racially loaded storyline that Rooster Teeth keeps trying to pull off. It feels cheap in the face of all that Blake suffered through this volume, especially when they turn Ilia’s actions into a literal joke. She stabbed Sun? No big deal! He pinched her and now they’re even! How much of a joke would this be if Ghira had suddenly collapsed from his own wound? Or Kali hadn't casually rejoining them entirely unharmed? Maybe I’m more bitter than I thought, but Ilia’s redemption feels like an unintended smack in the face.

The townspeople buy into the happy picture though and we get a chorus of them agreeing to join Blake in the fight to defend Haven. Plans are made to arm, train, and transport the people of Menagerie in two weeks time. Getting civilians into fighting shape that quickly might be a challenge, but at least Blake knows a ship captain who owes her a favor.

And that’s where we end this episode—forging a path for the future. Stay tuned for the next episode “The More the Merrier” as we count down to the Volume 6 premiere!

Other Details of Note

In that opening shot we have what looks like a pretty generic print on the wall—who doesn’t like sunsets?—except that it also shows a crescent moon without the broken pieces. Artist’s interpretation? Time before the moon’s demise? Animator’s forgetting about it while drawing the random painting that viewers are only going to see for about two seconds? You decide!

I really appreciate that Ozpin praises Ruby for being the first to realize the potential implications of the Beacon relic. She’s praised for her skill with Crescent Rose and for being one of the youngest to attend Beacon, but it’s rare that people comment on Ruby’s intellect. She’s smart as hell with one of the more strategic minds of the group—that’s partly why she makes such a good leader. It’s good to see someone, particularly her headmaster, acknowledging that.

After Qrow gets the call from Lionheart he immediately reaches for his flask… despite still having a steaming drink beside him. Apparently working with this guy was tough even before they knew he was loyal to Salem.

Edit Feb. 2019: Lionheart says that “I’ve done things Ozpin will never forgive” and that’s one hell of a loaded line after hearing Ozpin’s thoughts on Lionheart in Volume 6.

“Sorry, Dad” Blake says right before she burns down their library. Somehow I don't think 'sorry' cuts it in this situation...

#rwby #mymetas #RWBY Recaps

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runningwhilenotdying · 6 years

Photo

So! This is quite late but I’ve been crazy busy with school and I knew typing all this out would be A Task. This race was about 10,000 times harder than I thought it would be. I thought that I respected the marathon distance going in but it turned out I absolutely did not. My time was quite a bit slower than I was expecting even though I didn’t have an exact goal in mind and my splits were ridiculously positive (pic 7). I’m honestly not disappointed at all though. The marathon is a mean, tough race but I’m even meaner and tougher and that is absolutely something to celebrate. Full race recap under the cut because it’s almost as long as the marathon itself.

- The day before the marathon was pretty much ideal actually. Did my 3 km shakeout run in the morning, made pancakes, lounged around my house, and picked up my bib. My super old family friend/honorary sister was in town to run the half and my mom was running the 5k, so we all went out for delicious pasta the night before along with my boyfriend and my friend’s mom.

- I slept AWFULLY the night before. I lay awake for ages, then slept in short little bursts that probably added up to like 3 hours overall. My cat also woke me up at 5 by biting my feet and I almost tossed him out the window.

- Woke up for real at 6:15, miraculously not tired and not particularly nervous either. I had a bagel with PB and a cup of coffee, put on a huge pile of throwaway clothes over my race outfit, and took an Uber to the start

- I was paranoid about road closures so I gave myself a ton of extra time, but we ended up not having any trouble at all. That meant I got to the start just over an hour early, which was a big problem considering the temperature was a degree or so above freezing

- I waited for my friend to show up, walking around in aimless circles to keep warm. She showed up about 20 minutes early, we took some nice pictures in our 5000 layers, and got into our corrals right around when the gun went off for the elite corral

- This is a FAST race, so my corral was pretty far back and it took about 15 minutes from there to actually cross the line. I was planning on throwing away my fleece, hat, and two pairs of mittens at the start but I ended up keeping them on. I got rid of the mittens and fleece by kilometre 4 and kept the hat until around kilometre 24

- By the time I started, my feet were completely frozen. I spent the first few kilometres wiggling my toes trying to get the feeling back, but I was basically running on ice blocks until the 5k mark

- Other than that though, I felt awesome for the beginning of the race. The energy of the crowd and the other racers were infectious. I was checking my watch every kilometre, and my splits were a bit faster than planned but I didn’t worry too much about reigning it in. I’d been having a bunch of random pains all down my right side all through taper, but I wasn’t feeling anything

- I decided not to count down kilometres or even think about the overall distance until 10k, and I actually did a pretty good job of that. I started having a dull pain in my right hip around 8 km, but other than that I was feeling awesome and determined to enjoy the race for as long as I could

- Between 10k and the halfway mark, things gradually got a bit harder, but I generally still felt in control. My breathing was still good and I was sticking to my schedule for taking energy blocks. But my hip was still nagging and my left hip flexor had joined in as well. The pain was super mild, but I was anxious about it getting worse and that started affecting my mental game in general

- The last time I felt genuinely good was probably around 19 km, right before the half-marathoners split off. We went past a huge cheering station where they were blasting Abba and giving high fives. I was so psyched I actually sang along to most of the chorus of Mamma Mia as I ran past

- Once the half-marathoners split off it got quiet fast. Less than one third of the racers were doing the marathon, so suddenly there were a lot fewer runners and barely any spectators. I was starting to feel sick and my hips were still hurting and I was grappling with the idea of running the complete distance I’d already ran again

- This is where it started getting hard. I’d brought headphones to listen to music, but I wanted to put off using them until I absolutely NEEDED a power-up, so I was pretty much alone with my thoughts until I gave in at 28 km. At this point finishing seemed completely unfathomable and I was starting to wonder what the hell I was doing this for

- The race basically just got harder from here. I was feeling sicker and I started putting off my scheduled energy blocks. I was supposed to take a Gu at 24 km, but I couldn’t even imagine putting it in my stomach. I don’t remember when I started worrying about DNFing again, but it was probably around this point. 28ish km to 32 km was probably the hardest part of the race mentally

- When I finally hit the 32 km mark, things turned around a bit. 32 km was the point last year where I slammed headlong into the wall and dropped out because I couldn’t walk in a straight line or carry a train of thought. So when I got here this time, I realized that even though I felt like absolute shit, I was doing 100 times better than last year. This is when I realized that I probably actually was going to finish

- Even though my mental state improved a tiny bit, my physical state was getting worse and worse. Starting at 32 km, I let myself walk the first minute of every kilometre. This 100% saved me mentally because it gave me something to look forward to every kilometre. It also let me stretch my hips out a bit, which definitely helped physically

- Even with the walking breaks, I was in the absolute worst pain of my life for the last 8 km or so. The only thing stopping me from walking the rest of the way was my desire to be finished the fucking marathon as soon as possible. I wasn’t checking my pace anymore, but I was probably down to around 6:30/km not counting the walking breaks

- Every 900ish metre stretch between walking breaks felt impossible and never-ending, and once I was walking, starting up again after 1 minute was the worst kind of mental challenge. The last few kilometres are pretty hazy in my memory, but I distinctly remember thinking “am I actually going to DNF with less than 2 km to go? IDK. Maybe”

- Finally, finally, I hit 41 km and took my last walking break. That was when I remembered that the total distance was 42.2 km, not just 42. It sounds ridiculous, but the thought of that extra 200 metres was almost more than I could bear as I finished my last walking break

- Every step of that last 1(.2) kilometre was a fight. I was checking my watch every half block and counting down the individual metres. With 600ish metres to go, I saw my mom cheering on the sidelines and almost broke down. She started trying to run with me down the sidewalk, but I discovered later that I’d somehow averaged 4:59/km for the last 800 metres of the race, so she couldn’t keep up with me

- I started seeing signs counting down the last 400 metres and finally accepted that I was definitely going to finish. I took out my headphones to hear the crowd for the last moments, and heard the announcer call my name as I came up on the finish line

- Stepping across the line was the most overwhelming moment of my life. I’d felt so awful for so long, but I’d fought through it. The fact that I DNFed last year and left feeling like such a failure made it even more powerful. As soon as I crossed the line I started full-on weeping, hand over my mouth, sobbing at full volume. Some of it was pain, but most of it was pride and astonishment

- My friend and her mom started calling my name and I walked over to them. Opened my mouth to say hi to them and instead threw up twice directly at their feet, so I guess I can really have no doubt in my mind that I gave the race everything I had

Anyway, this is by far the longest tumblr post I’ve ever written and I’m sure no one’s still reading, so I’ll wrap it up. Four days later, I’m still walking on air over this. My right knee and hip still hurt like a bitch, but I’m happy, and proud, and I ran a FREAKING MARATHON

#runblr #rcoctober2018 #2018runclub #race recap #marathon #fitblr

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murasaki-murasame · 5 years

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:re episode 16 continued to be Really Really Good [tm] so here I am, still talking about this anime, lmao :)

At this point I’m also basically using these posts as a way to talk about my feelings toward the manga, so, well, keep that in mind while reading.

Thoughts under the cut, and spoiler warning for the entire :re manga.

Hoo boy there sure is a lot to talk about in this episode! I wasn’t entirely sure how they were going to manage to adapt up to the end of this arc in one episode, but they managed to do it, and I think they did it incredibly well. There were some very obvious cuts, but I think they were mostly for the better.

It probably pissed some people off, but I honestly liked how they only really showed bits and pieces of how Touka’s crew got out of Cochlea. The anime really wasn’t missing out on much there, aside from more fight scenes. And I think the slideshow-y way they presented it actually managed to keep the comedic timing of Hirako’s resignation better than if they handled the scene more normally, so that was nice. Overall it just wasn’t a very important scene and I’m glad that the anime has it’s priorities straight.

I think I mentioned this in my last post but I wasn’t sure about it at the time, but at this point it definitely looks like the anime is completely cutting out the plot point of Koma and Irimi coming back into the story because uuuuuh apparently they didn’t actually die at the end of the first series? I guess??? I’m really relieved the anime cut that whole thing out, since it was so, so pointless in the manga. It only really served as shallow fanservice to people who wanted the Anteiku gang to get back together. For years now people have complained about how much Ishida likes ‘bringing characters back to life’, and those two were one of the most bizarre examples of that. And given that those two did literally nothing of value in the manga even after coming back, we’re really not going to notice their absence at all in the anime. [Maybe this will also mean we won’t get that incredibly awkward last-minute bit of exposition about the concept of zombie quinques]

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the way that Eto died without having one last chat to Kaneki, but to be honest in the manga it always felt a bit awkward that he just sorta willingly left her to die.

I’m also really not sure yet how I feel about the way they handled the scene of Marude assassinating Yoshitoki. I wish they could have included the bits of dialogue that explain how Marude received info from Hide that lead him to finally believing that the Washuu clan are ghouls, but oh well. It doesn’t really change things too much, especially since we know Hide’s still alive in the anime, and we even saw him getting onto the boat Marude was on at the start of the last episode.

And then of course we get to the biggest cut this episode made, and probably the one that’ll be most controversial to people. The way they they cut out about 95% of the stuff that went down between Mutsuki and Torso. I think it’s really gonna piss a lot of people off, but you know what? I loved it. I feel like the anime scriptwriter actually gives a shit about Mutsuki as a character and is handling him with infinitely more respect and subtlety than Ishida ever did in the manga. We’ll have to see how the anime handles him over the next few episodes to definitively see once and for all if they’re going to avoid the worst of what the manga does with him, but I’m pretty confident at this point that they’re completely changing course.

For the sake of any anime-only people who might for whatever be reading this, and also just to remind people that read the manga of what exactly went down and why I never liked it, I’m just gonna recap what happened with them in the manga a bit, so I can talk in more depth about it.

The stuff the anime showed with Torso abducting Mutsuki and taking him off to a cave on Rushima was fairly 1:1 with the manga, but after that, we got some scenes sprinkled throughout the arc where we saw what happened with them after that, which mostly involved Torso cutting off Mutsuki’s arms and legs, sticking him in a dress, and in general obsessively treating him as a replacement for a girl that Torso apparently knew as a kid that he had a crush on. The manga had a whole chapter-long flashback showing his childhood, and how he lived in poverty with an abusive father, but there was a girl he liked, who one day got killed by his father, which just worsened Torso’s existing mental issues and lead to him eventually becoming a serial killer, starting with killing his father. And after that he’s been obsessed with chasing after specific kinds of women to try and basically fill the void left by his childhood crush, but his lack of empathy and general contempt for his victims in practice lead to him developing a habit of dismembering them until they’re just a torso that won’t ever leave him. There’s a bonus page in the manga, I think in volume four of :re, which is some kind of a journal entry written by him where he spells out his various mental issues and why he’s obsessed with torsos and whatnot.

As a fun fact: that’s also the only time thus far that the official translation of the series has ever used she/her pronouns toward Mutsuki. In the journal entry written by a dude who also waxes philosophically about his own lack of empathy and how he only views people as their physical bodies and nothing else. And while I’m at it, even after Urie finds out about Mutsuki’s biological sex in the auction arc, he still keeps referring to him with he/him pronouns, even in his internal thoughts, and Mutsuki’s character description at the start of nearly every volume of the official release of :re includes the sentence ‘Assigned female at birth, he decided to transition after undergoing the Quinx procedure’. Just in case anyone needed a reminder that Mutsuki is indeed trans.

Anyway, back to what I was saying, we also got some scenes in the Rushima arc in the manga with Mutsuki becoming increasingly resigned and despondent about his situation, and we eventually get some flashbacks to his childhood, where we find out that he also had an abusive family that he also ended up murdering at one point. Then he told the CCG that a ghoul killed them all, and that’s how he joined the CCG.

To be blunt, I think the way Ishida originally handled all of this in the manga was pretty awful, especially now that we know exactly where it was all heading. He tried way too hard to try and make Torso look sympathetic with his sob-story flashback, and on the flip side, he really tried way too hard to make it into one big contrived twist about Mutsuki ‘secretly being a huge murderous psycho this whole time’ or whatever. I think at the same time there was also a flashback to the auction arc that, for the first time in the manga, made it clear that he ate some dead investigators to heal his wounds [which the anime made immediately clear as soon as it happened], and I think Ishida tried to spin that as part of the twist of him having been a psycho the whole time, or something like that. It was dumb. Oh, and also, there was some pretty graphic descriptions of how Mutsuki mutilated Torso’s corpse, involving some genital mutilation, which apparently Ishida decided to just make into a running thing with him, since in the manga Mutsuki was the one that fought Takizawa and injured Akira and whatnot before the other Qs arrived on the scene, and he also decided to just randomly mutilate Takizawa’s genitals during their fight. Somehow this isn’t even the end of the list of things I’m mad about with how the manga handled Mutsuki :) This is pretty much just the START of the bullshit :) I cannot reiterate enough how happy I am that the anime seems to be nipping this all in the bud and avoiding the gross [and frankly transphobic] shit entirely.

That’s pretty much the gist of it, but it’s also worth noting that the note things end on with Mutsuki in this arc is very distinctly different between the manga and the anime. In the manga, the Qs don’t find out about what happened between him and Torso at all, and they don’t realize that there’s anything wrong until the next arc. But in the anime, Urie finds Mutsuki in the cave, surrounded by Torso’s various body parts. I really really like this change, and the fact that the anime decided to end this part of this arc with Urie comforting him is really what cements my hope that they’re going to entirely avoid the really awful stuff that goes on in the next arc, which only really happened because Mutsuki’s mental health and overall stability just went careening off a cliff because none of the Qs knew there was anything up with him. So I hope the fact that we’re already seeing Urie comforting Mutsuki over this makes me hope that won’t be how it plays out here. It actually reminds me a fair bit of the really clumsy way the manga tried to have Mutsuki reconcile with the Qs in the final arc. It works WAY better here.

I really think the way they handled Urie finding Mutsuki was really beautiful and touching, especially after the earlier stuff with Urie frantically trying to figure out what had happened to him, and talking about wanting to go home with him. It was just a really nice, sweet way to handle it, and I think it gives Mutsuki far more respect and dignity than the manga did. Similarly to how the anime portrayed him eating some dead investigators as something sad but necessary without trying to cast any moral blame on him for it, that’s how this episode felt too, with how they framed Mutsuki killing Torso. Instead of it being an overblown ‘oooh he’s actually EVIL and PSYCHOTIC and MURDEROUS oooh how spoopy’, we just see the aftermath of it, and Mutsuki is just portrayed as the sad, abused victim he truly is, who just deserves sympathy and comfort for what he’s had to go through. I also got a real sense of smug vindication about how the anime didn’t even bother doing anything with Torso, and they didn’t even come close to trying to give him a tragic backstory to make us feel bad for him. They just killed him off-screen. I really love that. Sure it’d probably seem anti-climactic, especially to anime-only people, but it’s so much better than what the alternative would have been. Torso deserves to go out like the shitty nobody he is.

As for the aforementioned fight scene with the Qs against Takizawa, I really liked how that was done. A lot of it was definitely because, in the manga, this was really one of the starting points of us seeing where Ishida was taking Mutsuki, and how he was trying really really hard to frame him as being antagonistic. Urie accidentally hurting Akira, and Akira herself talking about how she’s aware that trying to protect a ghoul is a serious crime, works a lot better than Mutsuki being the one to attack her, and him telling Akira about what the crime she’s committing is, and making it clear that he’d act against her if she becomes a ghoul sympathizer.

They also handled the stuff with Amon pretty nicely. I still feel like his entire role in :re has always been one big question mark for me and basically everyone else in the fandom, but I’ve at least always liked his line from this scene about the importance of always thinking about whether or not you’re doing the right thing.

I’m also really warming up to how the anime is just showing the new three Qs members in action before any proper, dedicated introductions. It works pretty nicely, in my mind.

I still wish they could have actually been a bit less faithful with how they adapted the stuff with Kanou, and added some stuff to it, but oh well. I at least got a bit of a kick out of the stuff with Roma.

As I mentioned, they really cut down on the remaining stuff they had with the Cochlea arc, but I quite liked how they handled everything with Arima’s death. For one thing, it was nice to see them make the Garden feel a bit more tangible and ‘real’, in a sense, than the manga did. I always had a tough time visualizing it in my head while reading the manga since we only saw bits and pieces of it. I also liked how they associated the field of white flowers with it, but I can’t remember if that was already in the manga. It might have just been more clear in the anime since it’s in colour.

I imagine some people are gonna be REAL mad that they cut out the whole dramatic arc-ending scene of Kaneki killing some CCG people while monologuing about how he’s now the new One-Eyed King, but I liked it. I like how the anime really committed to ending this episode on a bittersweet note. I’ve also always thought that the whole ‘re’ pun with that scene in the manga was always a bit more dumb than other people think it was.

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about how the anime didn’t outright show the flashbacks to Arima meeting Eto and deciding to start working with her, but they at least make it clear enough that that’s what happened. At the very least, adding in some bombshells like that probably would have made the pacing of this episode feel a lot more wonky.

And with that, we’re now going to get into the Goat arc! This is gonna be where things get interesting. I think it’s probably going to be about five episodes long, but it’s also four volumes long in the manga, so we’ll see how it goes. The main thing is that there’s a WHOLE lot of stuff in this arc that can easily be cut to save time.

It’s honestly hard to tell for the most part how exactly they’re gonna handle this arc, but at the very least, as I’ve said, it’s very clear that they’re going to remove or at least heavily change/condense the stuff that goes down with Mutsuki, which would save a fair bit of time. This would also presumably affect the final arc, and remove a good few chapters of content from that as well.

My memory on the exact details of this arc are kinda fuzzy since I haven’t gone back to read it ever since I first read it as it came out, but going by the preview stuff for the next episode, it also looks like they might be cutting out the really awkward mini-arc from the manga where Kaneki and co had to go raid one of Kanou’s labs to get medicine for Akira and then they find Amon there and fight him and then take him back to their base. I honestly still have NO goddamn clue what the fuck Amon was doing there. It looks like in the anime he’s just going to casually show up and be part of Goat almost immediately, which feels much more natural.

It also looks like we’re getting the whole sequence where Touka gets Akira and Hinami to reconcile their differences and make amends with each other. I’ve always thought that scene was a bit awkward, but I get what Ishida was going for with it, and I respect it. So I’m happy with the anime keeping it. At the very least, I think it does a nice job of fleshing out Touka a little bit more, which is always nice, and it’s a very necessary part of Akira’s development.

I wonder if the next episode will also include her and Amon hooking up, or if that’ll happen later in the arc. I honestly don’t remember when exactly in the manga it happened, so I’m just guessing.

I was kinda hoping that they’d at least slightly change up the formation of Goat, since the way Ishida portrayed Kaneki at the start of this arc was really weird, and didn’t last long. Hopefully it’ll feel a bit less awkward in the anime.

Since we’re getting closer and closer to the moment of truth on this one, I suppose I should reiterate at least some of my feelings about Touka and Kaneki’s relationship, and how it might be handled in the anime. I have a LOT of feelings about it, but I’ll save some of it for later. [fake edit: ok I ended up talking more about this than I intended, but whatever, lol]

Just to get right to the point, I still think it’s entirely possible that they just won’t get together at all in the anime. I’m not exactly betting on it, but still. It still just sticks out to me a lot that they’ve made a lot of subtle changes to their scenes together in the anime thus far that build up to paint a very different image of their relationship.

One of the big things is how the insert song they made for the cafe scene in episode 2 of :re season 1 is pretty explicitly about Touka remembering her crush on Kaneki, and coming to terms with the need for her to let go of it and move on with her life. I mean, it literally ends with ‘Although I’ve found you, I know this meeting will not last. I have to let go. Continue finding your own way, though I will miss you. It’s time to wake from this dream’, after how the chorus and whatnot is her talking about how she’d dreamed that one day he’d be with her again like nothing ever happened and he never left her. The song is pretty clearly all about her accepting that things aren’t just going to magically go back to how they used to be between them, and that she needs to move on with her life, and let him move on with his. It’s not definitive proof of anything, but it’d make it pretty awkward all on it’s own if they do actually just, y’know, hook up in the anime as if he never left her in the first place. [Remember when I mentioned before how the manga brought Koma and Irimi back to really awkwardly force this feeling of the Anteiku gang getting back together like nothing ever happened? Yeah].

It’s also worth noting that even after that, the anime cut out and changed some minor things. For example, they removed a scene where Touka talks to Tsukiyama about the whole Kaneki situation, and she said that she thinks the :re cafe can be a place for him to return to if he gets his memories back. They also changed up the scene where Uta visited her cafe a bit by having Kaneki also visit at the same time. Which, ironically, means that the anime has him and Touka meeting face to face at least marginally more often than they did in the manga, but I think that scene actually served to further hammer in the idea that they’ve moved on from each other. Touka continued treating him like any other customer, and her line to Uta about how she’s ‘going to keep doing what she’s already decided on’ certainly gains a different sort of tone when taken along with the various things the anime has cut or added or changed, that I just talked about. It comes across more like a reminder to the audience that she’s committed to moving on from him.

And on the flip side, Kaneki didn’t really react to her at all in that scene, from what I remember, and in fact seemed to just be preoccupied with his lingering nostalgia about Anteiku in general, which was shown really nicely in the [also anime-original] scene of him having a bit of a flashback to Yoshimura and Anteiku itself. It’s also worth noting that because of this whole change, they removed the stuff with how, in the manga, Kaneki was at home while Uta visited Touka, and he was actually wondering to himself if Touka might be out on a date with someone. So it’s certainly interesting that they replaced one of the more blatant ‘he has a crush on her’ scenes with him outright visiting her cafe and not having any real reaction to seeing her again, and caring more about Anteiku in general.

It’s also worth pointing out that, even if they kept the little exchange between them earlier in the Cochlea arc 1:1 with the manga, it comes across even more as a sign of how awkward and stiff their relationship it than it already did in the manga. It’s always stood out to me a lot, even in the manga, that meeting Touka again face to face and her talking to him did absolutely nothing to sway him from his whole suicidal plan, whereas him just having a chat with a hallucination of Hide caused him to break down into tears and completely reevaluate how he values his own life. I just wanna point that out, lol.

So I’m honestly not sure how the anime will handle things with them. In general, I think the pacing of their relationship would be even more rushed than it was in the manga, at least if they keep all of their big moments. Having all of the stuff that happened with them in the manga take place over like one or two episodes of the anime would be, uh . . . really awkward, to say the least. But it’d also obviously disappoint everyone if they cut a lot of it out.

It’s also hard to tell exactly how they’d even execute some parts of it, particularly since the main reason they ended up having sex in the manga was because of the whole deal with Mutsuki attacking them and burning down the cafe, but since it looks like that sort of thing probably won’t happen in the anime at this point with how they’re handling him, I dunno how they’d set it up.

But to be completely honest, if they can at least keep handling Mutsuki well, I would actually be largely OK with the anime still having Kaneki and Touka hook up. I’ll probably talk in more depth about it later, but a big reason why I disliked it so much in the manga was just because it happened at the exact same time that Ishida decided to throw Mutsuki under a thousand buses in a row, and it was just miserable to sit through.

So yeah that’s around about it for this episode. I’m cautiously optimistic to see how they handle the rest of the season. At the very least, it looks like the next episode will be much more relaxed and slow and character-focused than the last few, so that’ll be nice.

#murasaki rambles #tokyo ghoul #tokyo ghoul :re #the anime scripwriter to Ishida: 'Mutsuki is my child now and you can't hurt him anymore'#who would have thought that I'd keep having so much to say about this anime

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Money Heist: How Season 5 Changed the Series Forever

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This Money Heist article contains MAJOR spoilers for Season 5.

The long-awaited final season of Netflix’s most popular foreign language series Money Heist blew up everything we though we knew about the show. Every fan has been eagerly waiting to see Gandia (José Manuel Poga) get his just desserts for his cold-blooded killing of Nairobi (Alba Flores) last season. Season 4 ended with the gang chanting “For Nairobi!” at the end, a rallying cry for revenge. But the price of Gandia’s death was way too high. It cost the life of the show’s leading character, Tokyo (Úrsula Corberó), taking Money Heist in a completely new, much darker direction.

Tokyo’s Death

Tokyo’s death is one of the most daring character kills ever seen on television. It’s even more of a showstopper than the death of Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) in Game of Thrones. The Mother of Dragons died towards the end of the series and wasn’t nearly as central a character as Tokyo. Money Heist still has another finale volume of episodes to go.

Although Money Heist is an ensemble cast, Tokyo has always been the focal point. Corberó gets the first credit in the show’s intro. More importantly, Tokyo has been the narrator throughout the entire series. We’ve watched both heists through her eyes. Corberó’s sultry voice has guided us through the chaotic absurd plot twists and the edge of our seats cliffhangers that make Money Heist so addictive.

As a character, Tokyo’s charisma is spellbinding. She’s the ultimate bad girl: smart, sexy, empowered, and tough with attitude to spare. Tokyo has been the eye of the storm and the most watchable character of the show. Even the intro theme song, “My Life Is Going On” performed by Cecilia Krull, is inspired by Tokyo. Corberó brought to life one of Money Heist’s most unforgettable characters and her death is pivotal.

Money Heist Season 4 Recap: For Nairobi!

By Gene Ching

Money Heist Season 5: What to Expect

By Gene Ching

Tokyo is an international breakout role for Corberó. Corberó has been acting in Spanish productions for nearly two decades. Since 2002, she has appeared in over a dozen Spanish television series. In 2007 she started working in Spanish films, as well as doing some voice work in the Hollywood animated features like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, The Secret Life of Pets, and The Emoiji Movie. However, those roles didn’t give her the global exposure that Corberó deserves. Recently, in 2021, she grabbed some spotlight as the Baroness in the feature film Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins, stealing every scene she was in. But Tokyo is Corberó’s defining role to date. And Season 5 is so much about her.

Money Heist set us up for the kill by spending an inordinate amount of Season 5 revealing Tokyo’s tragic backstory. In flashbacks, we meet René (Miguel Ángel Silvestre), Tokyo’s first partner in crime. We learn how she found her true love in him, and then lost him when he was shot down before her eyes in a failed bank heist. We understand how that loss hardened her heart, making her into what she is in the series. It’s a brilliantly poignant storytelling device, one that makes us adore Tokyo even more as we marvel at her complexity. Plus it gives Corberó full range to show off her fierce acting chops.

When her new boyfriend Rio (Miguel Herrán) desperately struggles to rescue her, and she knows he will fail, she tells him “But now is the first day of your next life. You’ve gotta live a lot of lives, my love.” Now knowing how she lost her love, and how that fed into her aloofness about her romance with Rio, it’s one of those gratuitously heartrending scenes that Money Heist delivers with such unapologetic style, twisting that knife at the devastating loss of one of the show’s most beloved characters.

Tokyo’s final seductive wink at Gandia when she reveals that she’s pulled all the pins on the grenades strapped across her chest is just so Tokyo. She goes out with a bang, a huge self-sacrificing bang that takes out the gang’s biggest threat. And in classic Tokyo style, she goes out on her terms. Money Heist has delivered so many death scenes now, each more moving than that last. We can only wonder what the finale season will bring, keeping our tissue box at the ready.

How Will Money Heist End?

Season 5 was just Volume 1 of the final installment. Volume 2 is the real finale, the final five episodes, due in December. But how can Money Heist go on without Tokyo? Will Tokyo continue to guide us, narrating posthumously like Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) in American Beauty? Will Tokyo return via a ridiculous Disney death? Maybe this is all a bad dream, a hallucination, or some deviation in the multiverse. The latter seems very unlikely, even for Money Heist.

Many characters have died in the show already, most never to return. In the wake of Nairobi’s death last season, Flores reprised the role for Season 5 in one small cameo. It’s a sweet intimate scene, a foreshadowing flashback where she discusses what happens after death with Tokyo. However, despite all the impassioned chanting of “For Nairobi!” at the end of Season 4, Nairobi remains very dead.

Berlin (Pedro Alonso) remains the only character that has “survived” his death in Money Heist. At the end of the first heist in Season 2, Berlin sacrificed himself so the gang could escape just like Tokyo (he had a terminal illness anyway, akin to Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince). Nevertheless, Berlin has been a reoccurring character throughout the second heist in flashbacks.

In Season 5, there was a separate story arc devoted to Berlin and a new character, his son Rafael (Patrick Criado). That’s an entirely separate past heist where Berlin shows his son the ropes of thievery. It’s a dangling arc, which has nothing to do with the rest of the events in Season 5, so we can only assume that Rafael will come into play in the final five episodes.

How Season 5 Changes the Money Heist Game

Season 5 can be characterized into three main intertwining story arcs: Tokyo’s backstory, Rafael’s indoctrination into a life of crime, and the battle at the Bank of Spain. The tone of Season 5 is different than the previous seasons. This is all out war. The Spanish Army launches a full out military attack, sending in the special operative Sagasta (José Manuel Seda) and his black ops squad after the gang. It’s full of firefights, grenades and even a flamethrower. This season is by far the most violent.

If someone were to just watch Season 5, it is a poor example of the series overall. Money Heist has been building tension for four seasons and Season 5 is the explosion. With the Professor (Álvaro Morte) chined up at gunpoint by Inspector Sierra (Najwa Nimri), his chess-like tactics aren’t in play and the gang only manages one significant win against their adversaries. Season 5 is more about the gun fights, explosions, and loss. Everything blows up.

Conspicuously absent is the show’s revolutionary anthem “Bella Ciao.” The soulful WWII anti-fascist ballad gained renewed international airplay due to Money Heist, encapsulating the show’s attitude of resistance. The song has been echoing throughout the show, a reminder of the gang’s defiant struggle. However, Season 5 descends into all-out war. Whatever values the gang might have had going into the heist have fallen away and now it’s strictly about survival.

The Epilogue – Money Heist: From Tokyo to Berlin

After Netflix turned La Casa de Papel, the original cancelled Spanish TV show, into the international juggernaut that is Money Heist, they released a documentary Money Heist: The Phenomenon. This doc explained the show’s meteoric rise as a global influencer and symbol of resistance around the globe, as well as revealed plenty of ‘making of’ content, along with cast interviews. It went deep into the filming of the death of Nairobi, including Flores’ tearful reaction to leaving her beloved character behind.

Money Heist: From Tokyo to Berlin capitalizes on a similar device, opening with behind-the-scenes footage of the death of Tokyo. It’s a much-needed salve for heartbroken fans who’ve just watched Tokyo’s death scene, picking up right where the season finale left off. The documentary begins with the filming of Tokyo’s death as the set crew announcement is overheard “Let’s say goodbye to Úrsula” sealing Tokyo’s fate. Then it cuts to Corberó’s signature narration where she says: “Yup, I just died.”

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It’s nearly impossible to imagine Money Heist without Tokyo. She is such a central role. But Money Heist has conquered the impossible so many times before. Jesús Colmenar, the producer of Money Heist promises us one thing about the show’s future “We get this complete vision of everything and this is not the end of the bank robbery, but the end of Money Heist, which is quite a huge thing.” Money Heist Season 5 Volume 2, the final episodes of the series, comes to Netflix on December 3rd.

The post Money Heist: How Season 5 Changed the Series Forever appeared first on Den of Geek.

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eagleargent · 3 years

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20210617

Ugh. Silver has proven me wrong in dramatic fashion (for now). A one-day drop of 6.5% on the most volume in 4.5 months, through all the significant overlaps of the last two months, that stopped out my long position, means I am obligated to write up a new post analyzing just where this leaves us.

(To answer the question from my last post: yes, bulls WERE foiled yet again by that grey resistance zone. The top was 28.445, or half a cent within the upper limit of the zone as I had drawn it. Sheesh.)

First off, the Ichimoku picture. Looking at SLV, it’s clear that in the space of a week we have gone from “all signs bullish” to “mostly bearish”. Price has dropped well below both the base and conversion lines, the conversion line is below the baseline, and the lagging span is suddenly much closer to being on the bottom than on top. The cloud itself is still bullish, but for how much longer?

And now let us try to figure out just what is going on with this wave structure since last August. The daily chart of /SI (silver futures) follows:

(It’s possible that what I have marked as “I” at 29.915 could actually be ((3)), with the 21.81 low then being ((4)) and the run to 30.35 being some kind of weird ending diagonal for ((5)) of I. But as you can see, the look isn’t right for a diagonal -- it breaks the rules regarding successive subwaves in the same direction getting consistently shorter or longer, as the up waves get longer but the down waves get shorter. It’s almost too bad, since it would make everything since the 30.35 high make much more sense as a straightforward A-B, if it didn’t break the rules.)

Let’s first get out of the way what the shape since the “I” high is not: namely, a triangle. Why not? Because at least four waves of any triangle must be zigzags or zigzag combinations, but ((B)) is a flat up and the would-be ((C)) is a diagonal down. It would look very much like a triangle if not for that point.

With the rally from 23.74 to 28.90 no longer looking impulsive after today’s crash broke some important overlaps, the white “II?” is very much in doubt; as I’ve noted on the chart, below 23.74 kills it entirely. If the rally to 28.90 is in fact an impulse, the subwaves are irrelevant at this point. It could also be corrective but still part of a leading diagonal ((1)) up.

But if wave II is not yet complete, then the only wave count I can see that’s consistent with everything else is in cyan, with the diagonal down to 23.74 being (A) of ((C/Y)) of II, and the rally to 28.90 being (B). Since magenta ((B)) retraced over 90% of ((A)), it fits the rules for a flat, which would make ((C)) an impulsive decline, but that really doesn’t look right given how long the would-be (1)-(2) waves took to complete. The only good possibility left is that the current decline is (C) of a zigzag ((Y)) of II.

I’m not in love with this interpretation, but it’s the only one I can think of that makes sense given all the evidence. Back above 28.90 would obviously KO it. But what about a downside target? You obviously expect it to get to 23.74 and probably lower than that, but beyond that it could go as low as 12 without technically invalidating the “I” count, which is a scary thought. Realistically though, anything below about 15.55 and we would need to call the big picture into question.

(Edit: there’s actually another possibility, that the diagonal to 23.74 was a C-wave instead of an A-wave, the culmination of a flat ((A/W)) of II. See case 5 below. If that one’s the actual count, then I’m in for a very frustrating next few months.)

Now, we zoom in to the 4-hour chart:

The grey support zone I’ve drawn in is 25.65 - 25.90, established between April 19 and April 29. Note that the 61.8% retrace of the rally to 28.90 falls nicely into this established zone. The decline tagged this zone today, and considering both that and what looks like a short-term oversold position, some sort of bounce would not surprise me here (before, in all likelihood, renewed lows).

But when we try to analyze the waves, it’s just as confusing as the big picture, if not more so. What IS the larger decline from 28.90?

We know for sure that it can’t be a triangle, because it’s neither expanding nor contracting (would-be waves C/E end beyond A/C, but D ends short of B).

And it’s not a bearish nest of 1s and 2s, because the declines from 28.90 and 28.71 are clearly in three waves each, not five.

And it’s not a flat, because the rally to 28.71 didn’t retrace at least 90% of the preceding decline -- it only got 88%. (And again, even if that rule was satisfied, the three-wave look of the selloff from 28.71 to 27.09 casts real doubt on the larger C-wave being motive, which is what you need for the end of a flat. Unless it’s an ending expanding diagonal...?)

It could technically be a diagonal (orange count), but it has a completely wrong look for it given how far wave 5 has now gone (plus, again, subwaves 1-3 and 2-4 didn’t show a clear diverging or converging trend).

So that leaves the grey count I’ve marked on the chart, which indicates a triple three corrective combination. I’ve never notated such a wave before, and in fact I had forgotten they existed before reviewing all the rules and coming to this conclusion, but it’s the only thing I can find that makes sense.

Note that the corrective nature of the smaller declines from 28.90 and 28.71 is not consistent with the entire move from 28.90 being the start of (C) of a zigzag ((Y)), which was the cyan count on the daily chart, or (3) of ((C)) of a flat II. What it IS consistent with is the 28.90 high being just A/W of (B) up, with the selloff then being B/X and C/Y still to come and probably exceeding 28.44 -- but not 30.35 (the beginning of the diagonal down that’s causing all the trouble).

To attempt to recap the possibilities:

Wave II did indeed end at 23.74, and 28.90 is ((1)) of III, so the current decline is ((2)) and probably almost over. The continuation would then be that monster ((3)) directly, which would clear 30.35 and invalidate cases 3-4. Below 24.68 casts serious doubt on this, and below 23.74 invalidates it.

Wave II ended at 23.74, but 28.90 is corrective and only 1 of a diagonal ((1)) of III. This would see three more zigzags up and down before a deeper correction, followed by a huge ((3)) that would clear 30.35 and invalidate cases 3-4. Same criteria as the previous possibility.

Wave II is still underway, and the action since 28.90 is a flat (despite technically breaking the 90% retrace rule), with C (since 28.71) likely an expanding ending diagonal. Over 28.71, before at least one more new low, torpedoes this one.

Wave II is ongoing, and the action since 28.90 is a triple three (possibly already complete) for B/X of (B) of ((C)). In this case, we could have ((C)) as an impulse down, or more likely, we could have ((Y)) as a zigzag; in either case, we would almost certainly see a new low near 23.74, possibly much lower, which would also invalidate cases 1-2. This case is more resilient: above 29.03 for serious doubt (due to the zigzag retrace guidelines), and 30.35 to kill it.

Same as cases 3-4, but 23.74 was only a flat ((A/W)) of II, with the diagonal down being (C) of it. This would call for a third wave up co complete ((B/X)), followed by a big ((C/Y)) down finally ending wave II. The infuriating thing about this one is that even a break over 30.35 would not invalidate it (though over 32.26 would cast serious doubt due to the flat guidelines). However, that’s contingent on such a break coming on only three waves; if instead it looks impulsive, then we’re probably in case 1 instead.

With so many open possibilities, what is to be done?

I’m just going to say that I’ve penciled in a short-term resistance zone of 27.15 - 27.33 for the dead cat bounce after today’s crash, though given said crash’s impressive speed and volume, I’m certainly not about to go long unless I see a short-term motive rally. Beyond that, we’ll just have to see what happens. But for now, my eyes and brain hurt.

#SLV #silver #Elliott Wave Theory #ichimoku #big weekly update #20210617

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kbox-in-the-box · 6 years

Text

Austin Kingsley: Star Prodigy — Episode 1, “Saving Alexandria,” Part 5

Sept. 8, 1987.

The first day of school.

“Your dad seems like a really great guy,” Mitzi Klingfeld smiled sadly, as she dabbed discreetly at her mascara-lined eyes with a tissue from the office desk Austin Kingsley had unearthed and proceeded to partly stock up for her at the Bookhouse.

“Both my parents were good people,” Austin agreed briskly, as he loaded the desk with both heavy bound volumes, complete with clasp locks, and string-tied loose-leaf binders, so overstuffed and barely organized their pages threatened to spill out.

“It's okay to cry, you know,” Mitzi sniffled and chuckled all at once, with a mix of gentle chiding and encouragement. “I didn't even know the guy, and I've been bawling my eyes out over here.”

“You actually sound like my father right now,” Austin sighed, offering her a tired smile of his own. “He used to tell me the same thing. And I absolutely agree; there is no shame whatsoever in shedding tears, if it helps heal your hurts. The problem is, it doesn't do anything for me.”

Mitzi blinked with disbelief. “So, you're telling me you've never cried?”

“I didn't say that,” Austin rushed to correct her. “What I am trying to say … is that I haven't cried since my mother died, when I was 13 years old.”

Mitzi gaped at this admission. “But … I mean … what happened?” was all she could think to ask.

“She was conducting covert scientific research of some kind,” Austin threw himself into unfastening the supple leather covers, and spreading open the wrinkled handwritten pages, “right here in the Bookhouse. It was dangerous enough that she didn't even tell my father, probably because she knew he'd plead with her to stop, for safety's sake alone. And … there was an explosion. A pretty big one. You can still see some stray scorch marks, on exposed sections of the concrete.”

Mitzi squeezed his shoulder. “I'm sorry.”

Austin squinted quizzically at her. “Why? It wasn't your fault.” He shook his head, as if to clear it. “Anyway, I must have cried for something like three days after she died, but once I finally got to the point where my body literally could not sustain the physical effort of crying any longer, I realized that my mother was still just as dead, and I still felt just as badly about that fact.”

“So, you really haven't cried, in all the years since?” Mitzi fixed him with a pitying gaze.

Austin's brow furrowed in confusion at her reaction. “If it doesn't bring back who or what I've lost, and it doesn't even make me feel better, then please tell me, what exactly is the point of the exercise?”

Mitzi's jaw dropped, but she nonetheless managed to hold herself back from passionately hashing out the issue on the spot. “To be continued,” she instead declared firmly, shutting her eyes tight as she pinched the bridge of her nose. “Moving on to more productive topics, you and your dad called it the Star Point Portal. Does that mean that he got, like … whoosh, transported into outer space?”

“To another planet, you mean?” Austin checked, before shrugging and settling on a grudging nod, as he pored over the sea of text laid out before him. “That's my leading theory, albeit mostly by default. He made a handful of scattered notations about what he termed an 'Otherworld,' in quotation marks, possibly named Thel … or Quadris, or Aurica, or Eldebran … maybe even Aetheria,” he pointed to different pages for each one, “but even those are ambiguous about whether it's simply another world, or possibly even in a different dimension —”

“How are you not able to narrow down your search any further than that?” Mitzi's exasperation at last overwhelmed her patience. “With all these books in front of you —”

“In case you hadn't noticed, we left the realm of legitimate archaeology behind a while ago,” Austin countered, with a measure of peevishness to match her own. “We're now squarely within the realm of myths and legends. Any remotely credible accounts concerning the Star Point Portal simply state, straight out, that it cannot, does not and should not exist.” His shoulders slumped. “Besides, my father's notes don't tell me anything he didn't already tell me himself. There's speculation that the Star Point Portal enables not only interstellar travel, but could also allow entry into alternate timelines, perhaps even parallel universes.”

“The ancient Egyptians couldn't have built something that sophisticated, could they?” Mitzi guessed.

“The ancient Egyptians were perfectly capable of building the pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Giza all on their own, without any extraterrestrial intervention,” Austin assessed, “and indeed, I'd suggest that's precisely why they were contacted, but no, something as advanced as the Star Point Portal was well beyond their grasp.”

Mitzi wheeled the nearest whiteboard next to the desk, flipped it over to its blank side, and started scribbling notes of her own on it with a dry-erase marker. “So, this Star Point Portal … beams your dad up to 'Otherworld,' maybe?” she collected her thoughts, more for her benefit than his, as the words she wrote mirrored those she muttered aloud. “Another planet, or different dimension … question mark?”

“What is this, that you're doing here?” Austin wondered, echoing her earlier question to him.

Mitzi rolled her eyes, without slowing her cursive loops. “You're so much like my daughter, it kills me. You're both geniuses, but neither one of you has got common sense enough to keep all those details straight in your heads by diagramming them out. At least she has the excuse of still being a kid.”

As Mitzi's felt-tip pen squeaked out the words, “Star Point Portal built by … WHO?”, Austin took up an eraser pad and a magic marker of his own, to replace the word “WHO?” with “Ancient Astronauts.”

“Aliens?” Mitzi asked aloud, as she wrote the word at the end of the whiteboard sentence, complete with question mark.

Austin recapped his pen, and raised his hands in helpless resignation. “Again, that'd be my best-guess hypothesis, but … my father always referred to them as Ancient Astronauts, and regardless of whomever or whatever they were, I tend to agree with my father, that they were drawn to Earth by the intelligence that the ancient Egyptians demonstrated, through the peerless precision of their architecture.”

“Okay, so, the Ancient Astronauts built the Star Point Portal, which they left behind with the ancient Egyptians,” Mitzi summed up, drawing an arrow from “Ancient Astronauts” to “Ancient Egyptians” on the whiteboard, “and when you and your dad dug it back up last month, the Star Point Portal zapped your dad into … parts unknown,” she circled a trio of question marks, reading “???” on the board.

“That's … about the size of it, yes,” Austin ran his hands through his hair, until his fingers interlaced at the back of his neck.

After Mitzi had replaced her own marker on the whiteboard tray, she stopped short, struck by a sudden thought. “Oh my God,” she gasped, her hands rushing up to her mouth, “you had to come back home without your dad, and then try to explain to everyone what had happened. You couldn't tell anyone the truth, because nobody would have believed a sci-fi story like that —”

“And even the least discerning ones among them could easily tell that the explanations I was supplying were far from the truth,” Austin flashed a rueful smirk. “I'm not an especially gifted liar, so my obvious dissembling, about my suspiciously missing father, gave the Van Dorens all the justification they needed, to argue that the Athenæum would be in better hands with their family steering its course.”

Austin wandered back to the desk, planted his hands on the desktop, and stared down wearily at the piles of pages that covered its surface. “Five pyramid-shaped segments, which come together to form the five-pointed star at the heart of the Star Point Portal,” he repeated his father's words, before pushing himself away from the desk. “I've tried opening the Ouroboros on my own, hooking myself up to it, like I was jump-starting a car battery, but without that key … even with me and my father working together, it took us forever to find the hidden entrance to the Hall of Records beneath the Sphinx. The window of the Harmonic Convergence had nearly closed by the time I finally located the Ouroboros.”

Mitzi snorted mirthlessly. “And here I thought the Harmonic Convergence was just another Woodstock, for New Age gurus to wave their cleansing crystals over each other.”

“My parents tried to explain Woodstock to me,” Austin rubbed his bleary eyes, “but I suspect it's the sort of historic event that only makes sense if you've lived through it.”

“Oh, honey, you're so young,” Mitzi couldn't resist giggling. “Speaking as someone who was actually old enough to have lived through it, it never made any sense to me, then or now.”

Austin cocked his head curiously to one side. “How old are you?”

Mitzi slapped his shoulder, hard. “RUDE! You don't ask a lady her age! How would you like it if I asked you YOUR age?”

“I'm 24,” Austin responded by reflex.

“Yeah, well, I'm thirty-niii — I mean, what I meant to say was, I'm … almost 30, so I'm, like … 29?” Mitzi ventured tentatively, after her initial series of stumbles.

Austin narrowed his eyes skeptically. “Hm. That'd make you the same age as Nora, then. Funny; you seem younger than her.”

“Oh, really?” Mitzi resisted the impulse to preen, biting her lower lip to keep from beaming openly, even as her attempt at pursing her lips broke into a huge, goofy grin that spread all across her face.

“Are you okay?” Austin asked, out of what sounded like equal amounts of clinically scientific curiosity and earnest concern for her welfare. “You appear to be … blushing —”

“No, yeah, sorry,” Mitzi cleared her throat and inhaled sharply, straightening herself up and crossing her arms over her broad chest in mild embarrassment. “So, what I'm hearing is, you're gonna have to hunt down all five of these ancient artifact thingamajigs, and that's gonna take some time.” Here, she adopted the same professional tone to which she'd been subjected by so many workplace motivational speakers. “So, in the meantime, as long as you're gonna be spending all that time searching anyway, why not make that time work for you?”

Now Austin was finally, fully lost. “I … am not sure that I follow.”

Mitzi slid her smaller hand into his gentle grip, and led him out onto an open space on the concrete floor. “Austin, you can literally spin planets out of pennies,” she laughed, raising his arm so she could twirl in place while still holding his hand. She then grabbed both his hands, and tugged him closer to her. “Have you even bothered to try and figure out how many other powers you might have?”

Austin's expression grew more confident, as he was able to return to more comfortably familiar footing. “Actually, I've been using an updated version of my father's old Quest Tracker computer, to keep track of all the abilities I seem to have manifested so far,” he pointed to the large upright metal ring, taking the lead in their dance by tugging Mitzi with him, while he took a few steps toward the assembly, until he was near enough to scoop up the Ouroboros from the floor.

Mitzi tested the granular texture of the carved stone relic with her fingertips, jerking her hand away when its neon yellow light trails pulsed in response. “So, when this whatsit opened, during the Harmonic Convergence, it basically bathed you in, like, cosmic rays?”

“That's about as accurate an explanation as any I've been able to come up with,” Austin admitted, with a self-effacing grin. “You're not a half-bad scientist, Mitzi Klingfeld.”

“You really do mean that, don't you?” Mitzi brushed his floppy bangs back from his eyes, momentarily taken aback by the sincerity of his compliment. “It's not just a line, or a come-on.”

Austin winced apologetically. “I recognize those are probably idiomatic phrases, but … I can't parse their meanings from the context provided.”

Mitzi patted Austin's cheek. “Never mind. It doesn't matter. What does matter, Mister Kingsley,” she took hold of his wrist, and lifted his arm to bring the Ouroboros to eye-level between them, “is what you learned about your powers, through your mad science experiments. So spill.”

Austin took a deep breath. “In simplest terms, it appears my exposure to the extraterrestrial energies released by the Star Point Portal … has altered my relationships with matter and energy,” he struggled to summarize his findings, as Mitzi spotted the pattern behind his fidgety habit of tapping each of his fingertips, twice in a row, against the flat of his thumb, in a repeating sequence. “It's … difficult to get much more specific than that, except to point out how the potential applications of such powers are obviously profound, even if my current capacity to tap into those powers seems severely limited. Because unfortunately, this,” here, he briefly waved the Ouroboros, the wrist-twisting gesture reminding Mitzi of a tambourine player, “didn't come with an instruction manual.”

“But even if you didn't have bona fide superpowers, which you do, you've got some seriously super skills and gifts, that you could already be using to do good,” Mitzi began to list them, ticking them off on her fingers, one by one. “You're brilliant, you're rich … I mean, even after the hostile takeover of your family's company, I'm guessing you're still loaded, yeah?”

“I have an inheritance that's independent of the Athenæum,” Austin confirmed. “I have absolutely no idea what its financial value amounts to, but my parents assured me it would pay for the Bookhouse's rent, utilities and any future permutation of telecommunications fees into perpetuity.”

“In other words, you're so rich, you can actually afford to not even know how much money you do have,” Mitzi marveled, her tone wavering between scorn and admiration. “Plus, you're mourning the loss of your parents, and you've got an honest-to-God secret lair. You're basically Bruce Wayne, before he picked out a costume and a cool car.”

Austin hesitated to reveal even more of his ignorance to Mitzi, but his next question was unavoidable. “Who is Bruce Wayne?”

Mitzi clutched her temples, to fend off the stress headache she felt coming on. “Okay. Let's try this instead; if you had the power to do anything you wanted — and after you used that power to bring back your dad, because of course, that's a given, I totally get that — what would you do?”

“Well, for a start, I wouldn't waste that level of power on a task that I'll be able to accomplish without it,” Austin scoffed. “My father trusted me to track down and reassemble the pieces of the key to the Star Point Portal. It'll happen. As you said, I just have to put in the work in the meantime.” He paused, and a dawning realization crept across his face. “But if I could travel back in time … I could use those powers for saving Alexandria.”

Mitzi caressed his cheek. “Oh, honey … was Alexandria your mom?”

“What? No,” Austin unwittingly disregarded her empathy. “The Royal Library of Alexandria, founded probably not long after the start of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt, circa 3rd Century B.C.”

The way Mitzi set her jaw would have been recognized by any of her exes as a warning sign. “So, what you're telling me is, if you could do anything you wanted, you would use that power … to bring back a library?”

“Not just A library,” Austin enthused, “THE library. The library against which all other libraries in history have been judged. For more than two centuries, about the same age that the United States of America is now, the Library of Alexandria served as a repository for all the knowledge in the world, that had been recorded at that time. To this day, we're still relearning discoveries that were already made millennia ago, and then lost when the library was destroyed by the fires of Roman armies. If those insights could have been preserved and carried forward, human civilization could have had a two-thousand-year head start on where we are now.”

“And what about where we are now?” Mitzi shot back. “What about the real world, outside this warehouse, the way it is right now? You and your dad spent so much time digging in the dirt, it's like all you know how to do without him is just … bury yourself in the past.”

“That's not what this is,” Austin denied, as he set the Ouroboros down delicately among the aged pages on the desk, causing them to crinkle like autumn leaves. “You're acting like I've lived my whole life in the Bookhouse, when I've been traveling around the world with my parents since before I could even walk.”

On a shelf next to the desk, Austin spied a child-sized globe that seemed familiar to him. Even before he fetched it, and ran his fingers over the multitude of red pins stuck into its soft cork surface, Mitzi had gathered that each pin marked a spot where he'd stopped on his travels. “I was 9 years old when I climbed up the side of the Great Pyramid of Giza. I've bedded down in the Sahara desert with roaming Bedouins, and foraged for food alongside otherwise isolated tribes in the Amazon rainforest. I've long since lost track of how many languages I've learned, and how many different cultures I've encountered firsthand.”

“And in all that time, you never saw something that you thought needed fixing?” Mitzi pleaded.

“It's too complex!” Austin threw his hands in the air. “The more I learn — about the world, about other people — the less I understand. I'm not qualified to diagnose what ails modern human civilization.”

Mitzi stroked his forehead soothingly, as she prized the globe from his grasp, to place it on the desk. “Austin, you don't have to solve all the world's problems at once, you know. It's not like I'd have the first clue how to tackle the big picture, so … let's start small. How about helping out the city?”

“Why this city in particular?” Austin inquired, more intrigued than dismissive of her suggestion.

“Why not?” Mitzi swept her arms out expansively. “It's where we both rest our heads at night, isn't it? Besides, there are people out there who are homeless, and hungry. And if you live in the big city, you're always at risk, of getting robbed, or shot, or worse. Imagine what could happen, if this city had its own superhero?”

“I have to tell you, I don't think I know a single thing about this city,” Austin freely confessed, feeling steadily less embarrassed by the gaps in his knowledge, and instead, increasingly eager to delve into new discoveries.

“Well, I may not be the highfalutin academic that you are, Mister Kingsley,” Mitzi's lips curled into a mischievous smirk, “but there was one subject in school I always excelled at, that I think you could learn some lessons from.”

“Which is?”

“Field trips.”

#Austin Kingsley: Star Prodigy #Austin Kingsley #Star Prodigy #Mitzi Klingfeld #Charlemagne Kingsley #Hypatia Germain Kingsley #Nora Van Doren #Beatrix Klingfeld #Bookhouse #Athenæum #Q-T #Quest Tracker #Ancient Astronauts #Star Point Portal #Ouroboros #Harmonic Convergence #Saving Alexandria

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forexcrypt-blog · 4 years

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ProphetFX (Prophet Enterprise Limited), TradehuntFX, FrontLineFX are scammers - here is the irrefutable evidence

If the article wasn't enough - this is. Truth always finds a way and here it is. This is irrefutable evidence on how they are gaming myfxbook, false advertising, lying and committing serious fraud. These are not allegations/accusations - this is sold fact. All of this information has been copied, saved and stored offline away from harm, away from me and for the authorities to view/use. I know that Prophetfx will delete this and any record/evidence as soon as this post goes up. You will have read in the main article that I have a great deal of experience in MT4 and using Myfxbook. Well I knew that Myfxbook is a notoriously poor product. I knew that Metatrader 4 can be gamed - either via the MT4 broker server scam or by people using demo accounts. In this case ProphetFX are using a real account. Edward Elford had locked down the account so the only data I had to use was the Trade Summary. It wasn't enough data.

ProphetFX Myfxbook - https://www.myfxbook.com/members/Edward4x/prophet-fx/3173819 This took some extra investigation to work out how and what ProphetFX are doing. Luckily, in their stupidity - they left one of their accounts open. Here I am able to show you what and how ProphetFX are false advertising, lying & committing serious fraud. If you look at the TradeHuntFX Website Myfxbook page - look what you see...

https://www.tradehuntfxmentorship.com/tradecopier-autotrading/ This is from the https://www.tradehuntfxmentorship.com/tradecopier-autotrading/ page What is the ‘TradeCopier’? The TradeCopier facility is an empirically proven and exhaustively tested system that mirrors Forex trading activity from our master account and places trades onto your account. This enables consistent and incremental account growth to all connected clients. How does it work? The system carefully analyses market movement and volumes within any given pair we are trading. If price moves against us in one direction, the system will begin a process to ‘hedge’ itself out of that trade and close with a profit. The exact system methodology is of course confidential, but the full results from the TradeCopier past activity are available for scrutiny. How much profit can I expect each month or average over a year? Our month on month target growth is circa 15%-20%, some months may be less, and others more. Forex accounts do not grow by an identical amount each month but our past results do demonstrate consistent growth over a rolling period, which is our core aim. All TradeCopier clients see the exact same % increase, no matter if you have a £1,000 account, or £100,000. How much does it cost? There is a small monthly fixed charge and then a profits based % commission charge. However for THFX members we have removed the charge and the commission charge is reduced to 30%. Non members are charged £10 a month with a 45% commission charge. Billing is completed at the end of each calendar month. You then have 7 days in which to settle your bill. Failure to settle your account will result in it being disconnected. How much can I lose? The maximum drawdown that has been recorded is 7.8%, but this does not mean that higher drawdown will not happen, this is not something to be concerned by. This is just how the system operates, in fact it soon recovered after this. The market is very unpredictable at times, we have carried out extensive amounts of back testing and have never lost an account to drawdown/market conditions. Please refer to our full risk disclaimer. When can I withdraw the profits? You are able to withdraw at any stage you wish, however there are times when it is not advisable to withdraw such as when there are live trades open. All we ask is that if you wish to withdraw it’s always best to speak to Edward first. Please ensure you are able to make the due commissions payment based on the profits so far. Otherwise you will be disconnected. Who can handle my funds? Funds are held in your own IC markets account and only you are able to with withdrawn or move them. We will never ask for your Broker account log in details ever. We only need your MT4 trading account details so that we can link your account to the TradeCopier master account. Individual trading account log in credentials give us ZERO access to your personal funds. What about a large unexpected market movement? Our exposed risk is so small that even during large moves we are not reaching high DD. 300 pips the otherway and we are around 7% DD, so it’s totally within out risk settings to be able to deal with a 500 pip spike or market crash. ok what about the actual underlying myfxbook page.... Well it is here https://www.myfxbook.com/members/Benllay/tradehuntfx/3329055

TradehuntFX Myfxbook - https://www.myfxbook.com/members/Benllay/tradehuntfx/3329055 What do you notice? It is the VERY SAME red line and yellow line (we are told its an EA, the yellow line confirms its the very same underlying data) - but what is the glaring difference? - That huge line up on the ProphetFX chart. What could it be I wonder? Well again, the very helpful idiots of TradeHuntFX have left Myfxbook fully open. Look what I can do...

If I change the Custom Analysis start date then I can make huge gains in Myfxbook Ok, but what is that huge line up on the Myfxbook graph though? Well lets have a look at the underlying data on the TradeHuntFX for that date from Myfxbook....

This is the underlying data from TradeHuntFX Myfxbook (remember the very same "EA" that ProphetFX is)... Oh Fuck guys and gals what is that????? That is them gaming MyFxbook results. They are withdrawing and depositing to game the Growth graph. Note aspects of Myfxbook are locked down on both ProphetFX and TradehuntFX so you cannot actually see what is going on? Well as above - they TradehuntFX Myfxbook has elements left open. We can see in the excel sheet data that they are withdrawing and depositing to show huge gains. In the case of Edward Elfords ProphetFX Myfxbook you can see this is how he has created a massive 426% gain from September 16th 2019 - September 20th 2019. This is done by ramping up winning trades then withdrawing money from the account so it looks like you have had a massive win - clever huh? Yes, except when you are selling off the back of this. This is fraud. Pure and simple. It gets worse because we have already seen in the literature from ProphetFX, TradeHuntFX & FrontlineFX that this is risk averse and no major drawdown - so what do you also see in the data? HUGE DRAWDOWN. ACCOUNT BUSTING HUGE DRAWDOWN.

Look at the state of this. It was so bad they had to fund the account.

Trade was so bad and went into drawdown so deep they had to fund the account. So there you go - Drawdown was so bad they had to fund the account. Yet another dimension to the level of fraud committed by ProphetFX, TradeHuntFX & FrontlineFX. So to recap; 1. The Myfxbook graph is lies by gaming the growth graph and use of it as sales material is false advertising & committing fraud. 2. Hiding true trading results is false advertising & committing fraud. This lot thought they were untouchable - their stupidity has exposed them for who they really are - fraudsters. Read the full article

#EdwardElford #frontlinefx #JackAlexanderHARWOOD #myfxbook #PROPHETENTERPRISELTD #prophetfx #scam #scammers

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