#sometimes a relationship is based off of several comedic misunderstandings and committing to the bit

[the-witchhunter]

DP x DC Phantom Punk: We are the Outlaws

Back on my punk Danny AU

So punk is pretty anti-authoritarian, loud, fast, and contains a lot of anger, anger at how the world is. It can also be very compassionate to the downtrodden an those the system fails

You know who else has a lot of anger and compassion?

Jason Todd

Jason Todd, the second Robin, the Red Hood. The man was born to be punk.

Danny just works as a punk. His villains range from the government to a Billionaire to a ghost cop. It makes more sense than not for his experiences to have turned him in that direction, and let's face it one Sam Mason would have helped, even if punk and goth are different

So we have one dead punk boy living in a shitty apartment in Gotham, and we have another dead punk boy moving into a shitty apartment in Gotham

They're neighbors(I'd say roommates for the meme but Jay needs the added privacy)

So now we have two punks with messed up sleep schedules living next door to each other. They clearly vibe, they hang out, go to each other's apartments and Jason practically force feeds Danny a healthy meal that has enough preservatives in it to give Ra's a run for his money

Then Jason got careless

Jason, after accidentally mentioning the outlaws multiple times during a phone call, now has to deal with the fact that Danny thinks it's the band he's in. It's fine, all he has to do is play it cool, roll with it and it'll be no big deal

being unable to shut his mouth, he actually digs himself deeper. Now, Danny doesn't just want to see them play, he wants to join, and Jason has made the mistake of saying he needs to ask the band first, only to call Roy who is a little shit and goes "Yeah he can join our band."

Cut to Jason, Starfire, and a sheepish Roy scrambling to actually be a punk band as they get sucked further and further into committing to the bit

or

Fake Band au, like a fake dating au but with more people and instruments and probably ends in polyamory

#danny phantom #dp x dc #dp x dc crossover #dp x dc prompt #dpxdc #phantom punk #punk au #Phantom Punk AU #red hood and the outlaws #sometimes a relationship is based off of several comedic misunderstandings and committing to the bit #Roy is more and more sheepish he encouraged this #Starfire is amused #Danny is somehow oblivious and is just impressed how much the band is improving #and then gets them a pretty major gig #I just want you to imagine Jason as the shirtless singer in a hardcore punk band #did you picture it? #Now you understand my vision

[paulisweeabootrash]

New Year’s Mini-Review Pack 2019

Another year is over and I want to make the mini-review pack from last year a yearly tradition to announce it.

Sometimes I watch shows that I have something to say about, but I don't feel like writing a real review of them.  Here are the five I want to highlight this year.

Happy New Year, nerds!

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1. Food Wars (2015)

Episodes watched: 7

Platform: Hulu

Souma is in the family diner business, trained by his father on expert renditions of “low-class” foods.  He expects to continue in the family business, and even rescues the diner (via cooking, naturally) from sabotage by a developer trying to pressure his father into selling the building so it can be replaced with high-rise apartments.  But despite that, his father shuts down the restaurant “for a few years” to go abroad and sends Souma to a fancy boarding school for aspiring chefs.  The school is sprawling and eclectic in a way only anime boarding schools can be.  And, like any self-respecting anime boarding school, it naturally has three things: an absolutely nonsensical student government, an extraordinary level of old-school elitism, and most importantly, duels.  Disputes can be settled through challenges of head-to-head Iron Chef-style cooking, with wagers riding on them ranging from "you have to join this club if you lose" to "you're expelled if you lose".  As far as I’ve watched so far, there are a few episodes focused on setting up the premise and main characters and a few focused on these competitions between students.  Although the latter concept can be tedious because I’m not much of a tournament show person, it is nevertheless fun because this show commits to its absurdity.

Classic W/A/S: 6 / 7 / 3

Weeb: Ludicrous school setups!  The main character progressing through a series of duels!  Tentacles!  In-depth descriptions of Japanese food!  It's not the kind of weeb that makes it incomprehensible to those not familiar with the tropes, but it's certainly very Japanese.

Ass: This show has been described to me by several people as "literal food porn", and... yeah.  The cold open scene to the first episode contains... uh... basically tentacle porn.  I'm sorry.  The feelings of characters' pleasure (or revulsion) in food is depicted metaphorically and absolutely over-the-top, often with the pleasure of delicious food being heavily sexualized.  And there's plenty of sexualization of both male and female characters even outside of these scenes, although it never crosses the line into full nudity.

Shit: Very well-drawn!  The food is particularly gorgeous, as you'd expect, but the other imagery is creative, and the melodramatic writing and music are not bad, even fitting for so outlandish and cheesy a concept.

PS: I haven’t actually tried making it... yet... but the gag dish introduced in ep. 1, grilled squid with peanut butter, sounds good to me, despite the negative results you can easily find... and others seem to agree, since the concept predates the show.  Just make a peanut-butter-based-sauce rather than just using peanut butter and it should be fine.

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2. Hinamatsuri (2018)

Episodes watched: 12

Platform: Crunchyroll

Hina, a time-traveling middle-school-aged psychic, arrives in our time, in the apartment of a very confused yakuza operative, Nitta Yoshifumi, who takes her in.  Shenanigans ensue, mostly centering around hilarious misunderstandings and the dubious life lessons Yoshifumi and other mobsters impart.  Mostly, the comedy and story are propelled by Hina and two other girls we meet early on: another time-traveler, Anzu, who is sent to retrieve her, fails, and gets stuck in our time, and Hitomi, whom Hina meets as a classmate when Yoshifumi enrolls Hina in school under the name Nitta Hina (claiming she is his daughter), and who gets intimidated into taking an after-school job as a bartender that she struggles to keep secret. The show's format is two segments per episode focusing on different slice of life-ish stories (though with solid continuity and more ongoing plot than you might expect for that characterization), and is usually comedic but also veers into drama and incredible sweetness.  Hina is deadpan, bad at conversation, and unable to unable to understand the context or motives of what others are saying, in a way that honestly almost makes me think autism(?), but I'm guessing is probably supposed to just be "she was raised in the creepy time travel organization and they didn't train her to socialize".  Anzu is a different outcome of the same deprivation: after not returning Hina to their own time, she moves into a homeless camp and quickly takes in the life lessons of the residents, becoming earnest, helpful, and incredibly resistant to spending money, but completely baffled and amazed at how our world works.  Hitomi, the only "normal" one, is just... the best.  The episode about her first becoming a bartender felt like a backdoor pilot, and if it were I would absolutely watch that spinoff.  The first segment of ep. 10, also starring Hitomi, is the funniest "compounding misunderstandings"-style comedy I've seen in a while... and I'm a big Arrested Development fan, so that means something.

Classic W/A/S: 3 / 2 / 3

Weeb: There are some distinctly Japanese traditions depicted, but most elements of the show could be moved to a different setting and "reskinned" for different cultures' organized crime, foods, shopping options, homeless camps, etc., without sacrificing any of the plot or comedy.  Mostly, its distinctly Japanese features are that it relies on imagery and exaggerations that absolutely scream "comedy anime".

Ass: Sexual humor and references, occasionally, but not going to far. Recurring nudity, but not full and not for fanservice.  Actually, it seems as if they've taken a cue from Terminator and assumed that, for whatever reason, you have to time-travel naked.

Shit: This show is practically made of reaction images.  Although it's not the best animated, it's very consistent, clean, and expressive.  They do well with how they did it.  The show practically demands a second season in its last episode, and I think it could make it all the way down to a score of 2 or even 1 on here if they do so and upgrade the animation a bit.  The characters are distinctly and pleasantly designed and rarely does a scene go by that isn't hilarious not because of some kind of rapid-fire jokes thing but because each segment is set up so well and characters play off each other.  Hina's lack of affect gets a little tiresome, but the other characters are great, and usually get a large chunk of an episode's screentime.

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3. Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?  Arrow of the Orion (2019)

Episodes watched: n.a. — movie

Platform: in theater

Picking up sometime between the first and second seasons of the main series of Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon (or Danmachi for short, derived from the Japanese title), this follows the main cast of Bell Cranel and his ragtag dungeon-crawling party on a new quest. Artemis, Greek goddess of chastity and hunting, is in search, via Hermes, of an adventurer who can wield "the Orion" (a drastically OP spear with the power to kill gods themselves) to destroy Antares, a monster who keeps wiping out adventuring parties and has become a threat to the entire world because [spoiler].  A love... square... ensues between Bell, Hestia, Lili, and Artemis, and other various shenanigans happen that will make much more sense if you've seen the main show and its companion/spinoff, Sword Oratoria. I personally didn't find the affection between Bell and Artemis particularly believable, and I didn't expect the ending to go quite the way it did, but I try not to complain about a story not being the story I wanted it to be.  Watch it if you're already a Danmachi fan or really really like weird takes on classical mythology.  Skip if not.

Classic W/A/S: 3 / 4 / 4

Weeb: Prior knowledge of Danmachi helps immensely, but is not strictly required as there is a and although the show is another "what if we just mix a bunch of mythologies together?" and "what if a real world functioned on RPG logic?" premise, it does occasionally have an idea thrown in that will be foreign to much of the American audience (even if not distinctly Japanese), such as the Buddhist idea of gods themselves being reincarnated (something that also came up in Noragami).

Ass: As the after-credits interview feature says, they wondered whether or not they should keep -sigh- the panty shot.  And they went with "yes".  Also, peeping on women bathing has, unfortunately, become a running joke whenever Hermes appears in Danmachi, so be prepared for that.  Without giving spoilers, though, let me just say I hope not all of the nudity comes off as sexual.

Shit: The monsters are hit-or-miss CGI, sometimes blending with the 2D animation of the rest, sometimes looking so jarring it's actually funny. The 2D art is usually beautiful, though, and as much as I love the show, this is definitely an art upgrade overall.  The plot has a few dumb elements, honestly, or at least not well-enough-developed ones, that make me wonder if it could have worked better as a story arc in the show itself (actually developing a relationship between Artemis and Bell).  The score is a mix of reused tracks from the show plus some new stuff that sounds pretty Jurassic Park-era John Williams to me.  A few subtitle choices are noticeably different from the show, but not consequential to understanding things.  There were a lot of ugly audio glitches, especially early on, but I hope that's a problem with the equipment at the theater I went to and not the editing of the movie.

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4. Supernatural the Animation (2011)

Episodes watched: 1.

Platform: Hulu.

This show follows Sam and Dean Winchester, who -- yup, you're on the right blog, and yup, that's "Supernatural" as in the long-running American live action series.  For those not familiar, the original is a sprawling drama set in basically "our world except all mythologies and folklores are true", and follows the aforementioned Winchester brothers, who hunt monsters in situations that range from their straightforward monster-of-the-week investigations to meta-humor to multi-season story arcs involving multiple trips to Hell itself.  My wife is a huge fan, so I've seen a lot of episodes just incidentally, and enjoyed some of them, but haven't really followed the show.  She assures me, though, that this anime adaptation is loosely based on the first two seasons.  So loosely that at first she thought it was some sort of interquel or sidestory.  The first episode comes off feeling like you're supposed to already be familiar with the main characters -- that they're brothers, that they're monster hunters, why they're looking for their missing father -- because not much actually gets explained.  It’s unremarkable and badly-executed and ugh.

Classic W/A/S: 3 / 1? / 7

Weeb: Although the source material is American (and further back, European and Middle Eastern, given the influence of European folklore traditions and the Abrahamic religions on the choice and depiction of monsters), it's presented in a very Japanese style. This is especially true in reworking the original's horror tendencies -- the blood splatter from offscreen and the writhing, lurching body horror that is the shapeshifter seem much more like what little I've seen of Japanese horror than American.

Ass: I forgot to write anything for this immediately after I watched it and I don't care enough to go back and check but I don't remember anything that would fall under the headings of fanservice or general nudity.

Shit: Variable.  There are occasional moments of bad CG, occasional low-frame-rate weirdness, and disjointed storytelling compared to what I've seen of the original.  The art style is pretty interesting, though, because it's not something you see animated much -- its angular faces and stark shadows remind me of the darker end of American superhero comics.  Although it's certainly not the technically worst show I've reviewed in either story or art, I find it extremely unpleasant and do not want to continue past one episode.  If you feel like doing so, feel free to tell me if it gets any better.

Content: Violence and horror imagery is somehow both less extreme and more successfully unsettling (at least to me) than those in the original live-action show.

#Food Wars #Hinamatsuri #Danmachi #Arrow of the Orion #Supernatural #Supernatural the Animation #weeaboo trash #mini-reviews #happy new year