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The thing is I can't really put that aspect aside and it kind of ruins it for me because I really like every other part of the show. So I can definitely talk about other interesting bits but the most salient part of that show for me is the stylistic dissonance. My bad for exaggerating!

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The thing is I can't really put that aspect aside and it kind of ruins it for me because I really like every other part of the show. So I can definitely talk about other interesting bits but the most salient part of that show for me is the stylistic dissonance. My bad for exaggerating!

 

I understand, and you and Codicier should feel free to speak your respective pieces about dissonant art styles, but it will bum me out a bit if our discussion about Shirobako is mostly about how moe has compromised (if not ruined) another Perfectly Good Anime. There's so much cool stuff going on there, especially the attempt to take a snapshot of the second generation of anime creators as they're beginning to age out of the industry, that I'd hate for us to have an exchange that could be had over an inferior anime with a moe aesthetic that could be argued to have lessened its impact, like Upotte! for example, or really any anime released over the past few years.

 

Also, a little unrelatedly, I found this chart to help N1njaSquirrel remember that the girls in Upotte! are guns:

RAndom+Upotte.jpg

 

Okay, I just found the chart while googling Teekyuu .gifs and wanted to post it somewhere.

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Yeah I feel like putting too fine a point on it destroys the conversation, and I've been kind of afraid of being overly dismissive. Still though.

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Yeah I feel like putting too fine a point on it destroys the conversation, and I've been kind of afraid of being overly dismissive. Still though.

 

Yeah, that's totally valid. You should feel how you want to feel, however that is. I'll stop carping about it.

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Also, a little unrelatedly, I found this chart to help N1njaSquirrel remember that the girls in Upotte! are guns:

RAndom+Upotte.jpg

 

Oh mai gawd they're all so kawaiii! ugyuuu~

 

Not to be confused with Kancolle, where all the girls aren't warships, but the spirits of warships are inside their hearts. Or something.

 

I do enjoy my fair share of moe crap though, so I can't really complain.

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I do enjoy my fair share of moe crap though, so I can't really complain.

 

What I like about Upotte! are the highly specific jokes about technical details of firearm production and operation. The moe and fanservice are moments when I check my phone, until the show gets back to stuff like this:

 

IMG_0085.GIF

 

The creators of Upotte! really love the SG550 and really hate the L85A1, about which I've seen people complain, but I'm fine with it myself, because those are my sympathies exactly. Kantai Collection is gross because who cares about ships and also they have moments like this that are worse than anything even Upotte! has:

 

shimakaze0406.jpg

 

As KarmaBurn writes, "apparently nobody has had the heart to tell Shimakaze that she mistook a shampoo hat for a skirt."

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The main difference between KanColle and Upotte is that the artist for KanColle is a well-known eroge artist, so it's little wonder that they're all so skimpy.

 

I guess my lack of interest in Upotte also comes from my lack of gun knowledge. Probably because I'm British, where there's no firearms? I don't know. I don't think it's that either TBH, as Japan also has a no guns policy. I guess you might also really like Hetalia?

 

On a random side-note, Shimakaze was the 2nd most bought cosplay in Japan, so I guess they're doing something right?

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I guess my lack of interest in Upotte also comes from my lack of gun knowledge. Probably because I'm British, where there's no firearms? I don't know. I don't think it's that either TBH, as Japan also has a no guns policy. I guess you might also really like Hetalia?

 

I actually don't like Hetalia. I like the history jokes, but not the nationalism jokes or the foreign culture jokes, and I feel like the latter two outweigh the former one.

 

First and foremost, what I get out of Upotte! and Girls und Panzer (and what I would probably get out of Kantai Collection and Strike Witches, too) is a lovingly detailed depiction of military hardware in action, but in a way that neither glorifies violence nor celebrates death. Some people get really upset, mostly because they feel as though it's dishonest or even insidious to show weapons of war as the playthings of little girls who never get hurt by them, but I also feel that there's an argument to be made about de-mythologizing guns and tanks into products of human work, imbued with no intent until they are taken up by a person or a government in order to kill, and becoming familiar with them in that way, too. I recall Hideaki Anno saying the same in one of his few English interviews recently and it's pretty much the crux of Horikoshi Jiro's characterization by Miyazaki in The Wind Rises, but I felt this way before I knew about either of those.

 

And I don't know that an appreciation for military hardware is especially cultural. Americans supposedly love it because we're surrounded by it, Japanese and Brits supposedly love it because they're deprived of it. I personally was obsessed with mid-century warplanes in particular and World War II in general for most of elementary school, but fell out of it pretty hard in favor of sci-fi and fantasy once I got too old to stomp around the neighborhood in my grandfather's fatigues. Despite being an avowed liberal and pacifist, I came into my current interest in my late twenties only after almost two decades of playing video games, having gradually found myself with a preference for the aesthetics of certain guns in Counter-Strike and Payday 2. I began to look into them, mostly to see if there were common elements between the ones that I like, because pattern-recognition always intrigues me, and that knowledge led me in turn to media like Upotte! that, for all its many faults, is about weapons as non-ideological things, rather than jerking off to the 1,250 rounds the MAC-10 fires per minute and the amount of death that that represents, which characterizes almost every non-Japanese fan work out there about a military topic. Still, if you don't know or care about firearms at all, it's probably not worth your time to make a distinction there, and I find that totally understandable. Life's too short to defend Upotte! from its detractors, anyway.

 

Sorry for the extended noodling. This'd probably make for a good podcast spotlight, someday in the distant future...

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First and foremost, what I get out of Upotte! and Girls und Panzer (and what I would probably get out of Kantai Collection and Strike Witches, too) is a lovingly detailed depiction of military hardware in action, but in a way that neither glorifies violence nor celebrates death. Some people get really upset, mostly because they feel as though it's dishonest or even insidious to show weapons of war as the playthings of little girls who never get hurt by them, but I also feel that there's an argument to be made about de-mythologizing guns and tanks into products of human work, imbued with no intent until they are taken up by a person or a government in order to kill, and becoming familiar with them in that way, too.

 

Man, that really makes me want to watch these.  I'm fascinated by weapons, but not because of how "cool" they are (ok, maybe a little because of that).  I think they're really interesting mechanical devices and all the nuances intrigue me as an engineer.  A show that doesn't fetishize the hell out of them really appeals to me.

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Don't be fooled. Whilst it doesn't fetishise the guns, it does fetishise the fuck out of the girls. 

 

While that's problematic in its own way, I might be willing to put up with it if it does what Gormongous suggests.

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While that's problematic in its own way, I might be willing to put up with it if it does what Gormongous suggests.

 

If it hasn't yet become clear, I'm weirdly fascinated with Upotte! as a commercial product and as a creative work. Its content is almost preternaturally balanced between 1) softcore porn with junior-high schoolgirls, 2) light gags about junior-high schoolgirls and their lives, and 3) technical gags about and references to the production and operation of automatic firearms. Near the end of the show, the first item on that list gets replaced by 4) highly detailed gunplay between junior-high schoolgirls.

 

I agree with N1njaSquirrel that it's not a good anime by any reasonable rubric, but if you're looking for something that treats firearms as interesting mechanical creations, you'll get maybe a third of what you're looking for in Upotte!. Honestly, Girls und Panzer does a better job with tanks than Upotte! does with guns, in addition to having an actual story with real (albeit moe) characters, but I'm just not as much into tanks as into guns, although I like Girls und Panzer much more overall.

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Oh man, I kinda wanted to join in but then I didn't look here for a bit and you guys already did a thing! Oh well. It might get a bit crowded but I'll try to keep tabs and see if I can join in next time. I like anime and I've been looking for an excuse to watch a bit more and have people tell me what's cool about stuff. Also I'm a big jerk who likes Evangelion too much so if anyone wants to talk about that I'm down. 

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If it hasn't yet become clear, I'm weirdly fascinated with Upotte! as a commercial product and as a creative work. Its content is almost preternaturally balanced between 1) softcore porn with junior-high schoolgirls, 2) light gags about junior-high schoolgirls and their lives, and 3) technical gags about and references to the production and operation of automatic firearms. Near the end of the show, the first item on that list gets replaced by 4) highly detailed gunplay between junior-high schoolgirls.

 

I agree with N1njaSquirrel that it's not a good anime by any reasonable rubric, but if you're looking for something that treats firearms as interesting mechanical creations, you'll get maybe a third of what you're looking for in Upotte!. Honestly, Girls und Panzer does a better job with tanks than Upotte! does with guns, in addition to having an actual story with real (albeit moe) characters, but I'm just not as much into tanks as into guns, although I like Girls und Panzer much more overall.

 

What do you mean by gunplay?  Despite how neat I think guns are and how many FPS's I play, I actually dislike it when people in media get shot, especially if it's unnecessarily violent.

 

Also, I'm kind of bummed my favorite gun, the FN P90, isn't on that chart.  Although they seem to be mostly assault rifles anyway.

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What do you mean by gunplay?  Despite how neat I think guns are and how many FPS's I play, I actually dislike it when people in media get shot, especially if it's unnecessarily violent.

 

By "gunplay," I mean the operation of firearms in combat conditions. Girls/guns shoot other girls/guns in Upotte! but it's rare and avoids any focus on the damage caused by bullets on the human body. The show is much more interested in the stress of prolonged usage of a gun outside the idealized environment of a shooting range. Like I said, a lot of people probably find it gross that the combat bears more resemblance to an Airsoft match than to an actual battle, but I don't think that it's advancing the thesis that guns are harmless toys. It's just focusing on the guns themselves, rather than the humans, who in this case technically aren't even present in the combat.

 

Anyway, it's available for streaming on Crunchyroll, so you can check out the first few episodes if you like. Fair warning, the first one is grosser than the rest combined and dwells excessively on the implications of a human teacher "handling" a girl/gun student, so it's totally fair to get turned off by that.

 

Also I'm a big jerk who likes Evangelion too much so if anyone wants to talk about that I'm down.

 

Cancel everything, we're declaring this the Third Impact podcast.

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Anyway, it's available for streaming on Crunchyroll, so you can check out the first few episodes if you like. Fair warning, the first one is grosser than the rest combined and dwells excessively on the implications of a human teacher "handling" a girl/gun student, so it's totally fair to get turned off by that.

 

I watched the first two minutes or so of the first episode and already got a laugh out of the "stopping power" joke.  I'll give it a shot.

 

Edit: I didn't mean for that to be a pun.

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My new pet hate is people with loud keyboards typing at the same times as they speak...................... :devil:

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My new pet hate is people with loud keyboards typing at the same times as they speak...................... :devil:

 

If it was me, then my bad! I think my keyboard is pretty quiet, but people always seem to complain.

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it might've been me U:

I definitely remember looking something up while talking and then after I did it I was like oops

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If the biggest problem you folks are looking at is a few clacking keyboards, that's pretty good for a first podcast.

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Ok just a progress update, things are going ok but i just haven't had all that much time to edit during the week. Spending this afternoon headphones on, head down, getting it done. 

 

I'm not sure about the other peps who have volunteered to help with audio but this could be a recurring issue (at least initially). I mean sure there a certain amount of stuff that can be done automatically but a lot of the stuff I'm doing today just requires me to listen and then use my judgement to make edits (think about it this way its for every second of audio you probably need to assume 1-3 secs of manual clean up & sometimes more).

 

I think in the long term things will get better as people adjust their Mic settings and just um & er less (and dont fall to the temptation of the devil keyboard)

 

Recording on a sunday has meant that I haven't been able to sit down and give it my full attention till today (since, alot of evenings during the week I either have prior commitments or i'm just tired by the evening)

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Again, I have a fair amount of free time, so I'm willing to help out or take over if you want. Are all of the sound files available? I could take a stab at doing a quick edit and see how it turns out.

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This show will be fine Delerat, but when gorm decides to record the next one and whatever the cast for it is there no harm in him sending the audio to both of us.

 

I'm partly doing this just to fine tune my rusty skills so its not a chore for me by any means it's just wkends are when i have my big blocks of free time.

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