3261

DUDE. There’s a point in Future Diary where a character escapes by shooting smoke torpedoes out from under her dress then jumping onto a motorcycle that wasn’t there until she shot the torpedoes… and she was standing in a flat, open field with no motorcycle-sized hiding places. How does that work, exactly?

Future Diary holds very well to consistency when it comes to the powers of the diaries, even if some of the diary powers are silly (how exactly does the dog diary give out commands!?). The emotions and justifications of the characters are sensible if you start with the assumption that all of the diary holders are damaged in their own way. For example, Yukiteru wants to stay friends with someone who just tried to have him ripped apart by a pack of ravenous dogs! That only makes sense if you accept that Yukiteru is so desperately lonely that he’d forgive attempted murder if it let him keep a friend. It’s still a pretty big stretch. For someone who’s suffered repeated assassination attempts, Yukiteru isn’t very paranoid.

But once you get to the villainous or heroic things the diary-holders do that aren’t directly related to the diary powers, real world logic flies out the window. When did Minene have time to bury those landmines? How exactly did the other guy manage to hypnotize dozens and dozens of cultists without getting caught - even if you accept that it’s the only-in-movies hypnosis where you can brainwash anyone into doing anything? What the fuck are those dogs wearing on their faces? Why does the security room in the hotel apparently have a button for “release poison gas” on the control panel for Yuno to press - I guess now she’s an electrician and wired that up while she was waiting?

Future Diary is a good show, make no mistake, but whenever there’s some hijinks going on that don’t directly involve people looking at their phones and deducing the future, the world operates on suspicious movie logic at best.

3262

Well, in that sense future diary also involves God and becoming God.

But i do think future diary is consistent to its own logic though, accepting that certain characters in the anime have been given supernatural powers by God. Although i agree that the super hypnosis was indeed movie style logic. Maybe the dogs too.

The thing with yuno does not surprise me though. She is quite crafty and VERY obsessed.

3263

It’s the old “just one exception” rule of movie premises. Clark Kent is Superman and can fly through the air, shoot lasers from his eyes, and punch the moon out of orbit. He also successfully disguises his identity from the entire world by wearing a pair of glasses, and nobody notices. Arguably all of these things are equally logical - i.e. not at all - but audiences only complain about the glasses thing.

You have room for one big, logic-defying exception in your premise, and everyone suspends their disbelief for that one thing. “Clark Kent is an alien with superpowers.” Everything else, however, has to follow the rules of the real world. That’s generally what we mean when we compliment a show for tight, logical plotting and a consistent world - everything works like reality, except for the parts that are specifically pointed out as being fantastic.

So I’m OK with “the God of Time and Space has designated 12 people to fight to the death using the power of precognition as sent by mail to their phones!” It’s when the show comes back, looks at its feet sheepishly, and mumbles “andohbytheway there’s a diary that converts spoken Japanese into dog-talk and makes all the dogs obey” that I think they’re trying to pull a fast one. It’s not even really a future diary - the holder never uses it to determine what will happen in the future, just to boss dogs around. It’s like the author ran out of good ideas for actual future stuff and said “Fuck it, here’s an episode of When Dogs Attack, I’ll get back to you with more future diaries later”.

It’s still a good show and I’m still watching. Crazy Yuno is crazy! But it has weaknesses too.

3264

Uhh what?
It’s about internal consistency. Clark Kent being an alien with super powers is ok in my book. There are aliens in that universe, so it’s not logic-defying having one as main character. But it’s not logical that otherwise normal humans which shows a normal intelligence and eyesight can’t see the glasses disguise. Superman having super powers is explained by his alien identity. People being super dumb not recognizing isn’t explained by anything.

You are conflating “logical” with “realistic”. Superman being an alien and having powers is not realistic, but it can be logical. The glasses thing is not logical nor realistic.

Example: You can have a total medieval fantasy universe (not realistic!) but with characters with common sense, with logical motivations, and predictable cause and effect, etc.

3265

Per my bitching upthread about 10bit, I decided to ditch CoreAVC and try a guide for installing the LAV filters. Worked like an absolute charm, no hitching on playback or anything (it seems LAV does some sort of buffering to make this happen, as jumping around during playback it takes several seconds for the video to “catch up”). I also switched away from MPCHC to PotPlayer, and noted a considerable drop in CPU use. Finally, no more waiting/hunting down 8bit reencodes!

3266

So… Bleach. We just finished watching the Soul Society arc with the wife and I’ve heard that the show goes through a long filler arc afterwards. Is there anything worthwhile in the Bount arc that is referred to later on or should we just skip ahead to episode 109-110? What about later filler arcs?

3267

The Bount arc is absolute shit and has no relevance to the series’ timeline. There are later filler arcs as well, but I can’t remember them that well. Maybe someone else knows, I stopped watching after the Hueco Mundo arc.

edit: actually there is one filler arc that interrupts the fight in Hueco Mundo, where they’re magically back in Soul Society and their Zanpakatous take on physical form, then rebel against their masters. You can skip that one, too.

3268

I’m going to fall on the side of Moretsu Pirates (I hope I spelled that right) as being really good. Yes, the director is taking his time telling the story. Yes, they have intentionally sidestepped some of the more standard tropes in anime. I’m enjoying it for a slightly more grounded space opera. One blog I read, of which the author has read the eight novels that the series is based on, mentions that they have dropped pretty much all the romance plot from the first book. Book 1 = Episodes 1-6. It remains to be seen how they split up the rest, but I’m enjoying the adventure. Even better, I can show this to my 6 and 8 year old girls, and I don’t have to explain some of the more… ahem… interesting anime tropes. :)

3269

Episode 5 of Bodacious Space Pirates made the previous 4 worth the wait for me, and episode 6 continues to please.

It really is kind of refreshing to get a protagonist who is very competent, but not magically so to the point where she jumped into the captain’s chair by the end of the first episode.

3270

I burned through episodes 1-5 and really like where it’s going. Everything about the show is meticulous, down to the operation of the ship and even the cyber-attack stuff. Is it weird that I actually enjoyed that they spent nearly all of ep5 figuring out how to subvert the Lightning II? Oddly, I get a Trek vibe from the show, which is a good thing.

3271

Yeah, it is kinda forgotten…

You should check the Mediamarkt or FreeRecordShop, they have some anime dvd/br’s there. Not all of them are very recent though. If you live near Rotterdam, you should definately check FutureZone. They have complete series for sale, all good quality and no bootlegs. I bought the whole Macross series there once. It happened to be on sale those days. :)

3272

For European fans, I should point out that the annual Comics and Games event in Lucca, Italy is just enormous, if you somehow haven’t heard of it. I just happened to be there visiting my sister and her family this year (end of October/beginning of November), and this quaint little walled town of 80,000 increased its daily population to closer to 200,000 to accommodate all the anime and comics fans.

It was really overwhelmingly huge. Imagine 50,000 slowly dehydrating cosplayers standing around in a single open plaza. I didn’t spend any time to speak of attending the thing – just took my niece around briefly to look at some of the trade areas – but there was no way to avoid the crowds. If you’re not around 16-17, and not cosplaying, or if you don’t have experience jostling your way through crowds to cross the street, you may feel a bit out of your element, but the crowds were generally good-natured and well-behaved. Since many were day-trippers, the town emptied out at night to the point it was possible to walk into an osteria and be served in a reasonably timely way.

3273

With Bleach, One Piece, and similar big ticket anime I have had great success with the “And then, ignore the show for 3 years and wait for it to get interesting again” plan.

Basically, life is too short to watch the filler arcs. So don’t.

3274

I just caught this on Netflix. And I watched the whole thing this weekend, all 24 episodes. And given the sexploitation/boy-fantasy ad copy and the way the protagonist was portrayed as a massively-breasted bimbo in the first episode, I was completely unprepared for what I was about to experience.

I expected “dark” themes. I expected sexploitation. And yeah, that stuff was in there, but neither were the point. The real point was that it used all of the characters and the storyline to explore the theme of motherhood – what it is, what it means to be a mother, what it means to have a mother, what motherly love is. It’s about what the sacrifices mothers make, and which kind are the right kind and which are the wrong kind. It’s about our need for our mothers’ affection. And these ideas are not covered superficially, at least as far as the protagonist goes; what’s more, there’s almost no filler here. They could’ve made the series longer, but I don’t know how they could’ve made it shorter. It would’ve benefited from being longer, really.

Some of the (English) voice-acting is good. The daughter’s, in the first few episodes, is atrocious. Some of the editing is jarring. And it’s sometimes a bit too fast-paced, leaving important details unexplored that probably could’ve been fleshed out more, but there just wasn’t enough time in 24 episodes to do it. Technical issues like this make it far from a flawless masterpiece.

But wow, I wasn’t expecting something this good. Scenes that would’ve fallen flat or bored me in a lesser show had me enthralled; it worked because I genuinely cared for the characters. The bad guys had motives. The heroes had flaws. Many characters are on no one’s side but their own. Even the comic relief characters had depth, such as the lecherous old man who secretly desires to be a proper grandfather figure for the heroine’s daughter.

And like all great SF and Fantasy, the unreal aspects are used as a means to see explore real human traits. The witchblade itself becomes something that reveals the character of all, and we get to see the heroine develop and make the choice she has to for her daughter’s sake. At the very end, I was pretty much a basket case, and not for the first time while watching.

tl;dr: Needed tissues at the end, but not for the reason I expected

3275

Space Brothers
Lupin III The woman called Mine Fujiko

The new season has barely started and we already have two good series!

3276

Spring previews are available here & here.

3277

Will be interesting to see how Eureka Seven AO turns out and if can live up to the original series.

Jormungand: a story about a young child soldier working for an arms dealer coming out right as there is a lot of buzz around Kony and his child armies is somewhat amusing in a dark way as well.

3278

Series I will be watching

Space Bros (Uchuu Kyoudai)

Kids on the Slope (Sakamichi no Apollon)

k3Dzd.jpg896×175

Tsuritama

Lupin the Third: The Woman named Fujiko Mine

Jormungand
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/58148/img002ao.jpg

3279

I’m not watching this at the moment, but anyone who hasn’t seen Naoki Urasawa’s MONSTER should watch it on Netflix Streaming.

You might want to put aside some money for therapy bills.

3280

Monster is simply fantastic and worth every minute you’d spend watching its 70+ episodes. Don’t be put off by the length, as it’s truly an impressive experience when all is said and done and I don’t regret a moment of it.